Fifty Years Down The Drain?

131211-Free Gas

This morning I read a supposed true story about the ACA clause that enables the White House to set up gas stations to dispense free gas to those too poor to get to a doctor because they had no gas. This afternoon, I fact checked the article and it is false. It didn’t keep me from drawing a cartoon to depict my opinion about  the matter.

All day I kept asking myself, why would our beloved president want to give free gas to poor people? If they are poor would they even own a car? Would they take an empty milk jug to get gas and then come home to look for someone who would take them to a doctor for a free gallon? None of it made sense. Because of how I feel about Obama and his administration, I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. He has done stupid things before, why not this? It falls into the free phone category, i.e. poor people need a phone  to call 911. I believe he would deliberately destroy fifty years of Civil Rights progress just to start another redistribution scheme.

Anyway, SNOPES declares this story false, but I am not buying that it isn’t inside the thousands of pages of the Un-Affordable Care Act we so dearly refer to as Obama Care. The joke is on me.

“You Own This”

When I began this blog my intended goal was to preach the benefits of human potential, or the power of positive thinking. I still preach allot but not much on positive thinking. In fact, I find myself struggling to stay positive in a transformative government. You see, I don’t want the country transformed. What I see coming is something everyone will hate, even the notorious millennium generation. They are just too young and idyllic to understand now.

I received an e-mail from my young son living in Texas. He isn’t so young anymore, but he is my baby. Mike, it turns out, is a better writer and a better motivator than his dad will ever dream of being.  Mike has three kids, all are gems.(This is where I preach about how great my grand kids are. I do so only because they are). Mike’s three kids are all swimmers. I mean swimmers who get up at 5:00 am to go to the pool to workout before school, and then they go to the pool after school to work out, They spend their weekends at swim meets, they live for swimming, academics, and music. I spoke to Mike last week and he told me that he was taking his daughter Abbey to a swim meet at Texas A&M. His wife Lisa was taking Danny to a swim meet closer to home.

This morning I told myself that I will have to call and get details of how they did. As I sat waiting for Peg’s foot to soak after a surgery I found his e-mail. I read it and tears of joy streamed down my face. Here is Mike’s account of  Abbey’s swim meet at Texas A&M last Saturday.

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1650 meters.  

5413.39 feet.
Just over 1 mile.
For swimmers, the 1650 is the ultimate endurance and conditioning race….66 laps.
 
 
Your grand daughter Abbey competed in her first 1650 meter free style event this weekend at Texas A&M University Champions Swim Meet.  Her coach told her that she would experience several emotions during this race: pain, anguish, quitting, crying, asking “why am I doing this?”  He also told her that she would experience physical signs, burning legs, burning arms, burning lungs, thumbing heart.  He was telling her what she didn’t want to hear, the truth.  I was lucky enough to be on deck timing for this event for Abbey.  I know better than to interrupt per pre-swim ritual and concentration, so I sat there watching her psych herself up for the pain.  Before getting on the block, she looked at me, and I told her: “You own this”.  She proceeded to get on the block, and prepare for the start.
 
The horn sounded, and she was off.  She looked very strong, and very consistent with her breathing.  Every 4 strokes of her arms, I’d see her head turn and come up for air.  Her split times were very consistent, almost to the tenth of a second.  She looked like a finely tuned engine in the water.  After 20 laps, she was still keeping her splits.  Her breathing pattern was not as consistent, sometimes going four strokes, sometimes 2, sometimes 3.  It’s obvious the burn had started.  
 
After 40 laps, her splits were amazingly consistent with the start of the race.  Her breathing was not as in synch, but she looked strong.  After 60 laps, her pace was still on.  By this point, I think I was feeling more emotions than she was.  She had told me she had 2 goals for this race, the first, to finish, the second, to finish in under 20 minutes.  As the last few laps were counted, down, she still maintained her initial pace.  
 
After the 66th lap, she came in strong, touched the wall, and I hit the button on the stop watch.  I looked down to see Abbey needed any help getting out of the pool.  She stayed in the water for a moment, so I gazed down at the stop watch.  She finished the race in 18:53:33!!!  That is an AA time for this event.  My mouth dropped open. I looked up and saw her drying off.  She wanted to see the time, so I showed it to her.  She looked at me and smiled, then went off to get her post-race talk with Coach Trent.  
 
I asked her if she had gone through those waves of emotions like her coach mentioned, and she said “not really”.  Then she told me “it wasn’t that bad”.
 
Here is a picture of the facility at Texas A&M, as well as her “reloading” on a nice big chocolate brownie after lunch.  You can still see how red she is in the picture.  This was at least 30 minutes after the event.  She actually went back into the warm down pool and swam a bit to cool down after the 1650!!
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One Nation Under Obama

The Adoration of the Golden Calf'

This is an excellent essay on how Obama is replacing God with government.  It is the Progressive-Communist way.

Obama Wants You To Thank His God – Government
November 26, 2013
By Don Feder          
http://www.grasstopsusa.com/df112713.html

Obama keeps trying to rewrite American history. The latest was cutting the words “that this nation under God,” out of the Gettysburg Address, when he read the document in a PBS special.

On November 19, 1863 (in a speech that every schoolboy in the land once memorized by heart), Abraham Lincoln said we should “highly resolve… that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” In the expurgated (Obamaburg) version, Lincoln’s words became “that this nation (under no one in particular) shall have a new birth of freedom.”

This has been a consistent pattern throughout his presidency.

In 2010 and 2013, the president edited the Declaration of Independence by omitting the reference to “their Creator.” Thus, Jefferson’s “That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” became “That each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights.” When? Where? By whom? The answers might be found in “Dreams of My Marxist, Kenyan Father.”
In 2011, Obama left God out of his Thanksgiving message entirely. On other occasions, God became a bit player with a walk-on part – with “the community” or “those who work in soup kitchens and homeless shelters” in the lead role.

At the University of Indonesia in Jakarta in 2010, Obama told students that our national motto is “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one.). In reality, it’s “In God We Trust.” If the president recited the National Anthem, the last stanza would become, “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto in unum is our trust.”

In a 2009 press conference in Ankara, Turkey, our national turkey claimed, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” In June, 2007, the future president told CBS: “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation – at least, not just.” He went on to explain that America is also “a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Hindu nation and a Buddhist nation.” Why not also Zoroastrian nation, a Baha’i nation and a Wiccan nation?

How many Buddhists were delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787? None – though 51 out of the 55 were members of Christian churches. Did the Mayflower Compact mention the Koran? And the Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers and pioneers who pushed their way west were inspired by what – the Bhagavad Gita? If you visit the U.S. cemetery in Normandy, see if you can spot a Muslim crescent.

In his Ankara speech, Obama also said Americans “will convey our deep appreciation to the Islamic faith… which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world – including in my own country.” (The president’s Islamophilia compliments his Christophobia.) The greatest impact Islam had on America was in Midtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001.

Both Obama’s administration and his party are implacably hostile to the faith of our fathers. The Democrats have gone from the party of FDR (whose D-Day prayer asked God to give our soldiers “steadfastness in their faith”) to the party of multicultural pagans and anti-Christian bigots.

A majority of delegates to the 2012 Democratic National Convention tried to drop a passing reference to God from their platform. Sensing a political disaster looming just 10 weeks before the election, Obama ordered his minions to backtrack.

The United States Air Force Academy recently removed God from the cadets’ honor pledge. (Wonder whose idea that was?) The FBI has formed a partnership with the stridently anti-Christian Southern Poverty Law Center, which considers “Christian fundamentalists” as much a threat to our way of life as al-Qaeda.

The Pentagon (under Obama, that little engine of diversity that knows no rest) tried to ban the distribution of Bibles at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and prayers that mention Jesus at Arlington National Cemetery, but reversed course after a Congressional outcry. Overall, it’s no exaggeration to speak of a search and destroy mission against manifestations of faith in the military.

From the repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell to support for same-sex marriage to ObamaCare (which would compel religious employers to violate their conscience or the law, by providing contraceptives and abortion services to workers), it’s a far-reaching assault on the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Like the Golden Calf the Children of Israel made while Moses was receiving the law at Sinai, Obama is making a new God for the masses to worship – big government, the Golden Calf state. “Praise Washington from whence all blessings flow. Praise it all peons here below.”

The president’s policies are designed to maximize dependency – government as the source of all blessings.

Under Obama, the food-stamp rolls increased by 33% (to 44.7 million – a record one in seven Americans). The number now receiving Social Security disability payments reached 11 million. (Costs increased from $56 billion in 2000 to $144 billion in 2013.) And total federal spending rose from an average of 21% of GDP under George W. Bush to an average of 24% under Obama.

At the same time, the National Debt grew by more than 70%; the number of working-age Americans with full-time jobs fell from 60.6 million to 58.7 million; the average duration of unemployment increased from 19.8 weeks to 36.6 weeks; median household income declined by $4,000; and 76% of Americans now live from paycheck to paycheck. The State giveth and the State taketh away.

Obama’s God is the God of dependency, the God of redistributionism, and the God who rewards sloth and punishes success. From Caracas to Havana to Pyongyang to Sacramento, it is the God that failed miserably.

ObamaCare won’t just increase health-care costs astronomically and lead to a serious shortage of doctors, but will literally give government the power of God over its citizens. Soon it will determine who qualifies for what treatments, what new technologies and medicines will be developed and which will be left to languish.

Then will come rationing and death panels by another name. That’s the real goal of Obamacare – not cost reduction, not health care for the uninsured, but the power of life and death. Obama’s is a God who demands blood sacrifices.

The creed of Obama-ism is distilled in the president 2011 Thanksgiving message: “As we gather in our communities and in our homes, around the table or near the hearth, we give thanks to each other and to God for the many kindnesses and comforts that grace our lives. Let us pause to recount the simple gifts that sustain us, and resolve to pay them forward in the year to come.” Pay them forward how – with more government programs, greater subsidies and higher taxes?

“Our communities” take precedence over our homes as the focus of our lives. We “give thanks to each other,” first and foremost, and to God almost as an afterthought.

In his 2012 you-didn’t-build-it tirade, Obama wasn’t just bashing the rich (urging Congress to raise taxes on those who earn over $250,000 annually) and telling businessmen that their success came from the collective, so he had a right to plunder them (droll coming from a man who never spent a day of his life in the productive sector), but denying the role of the God of the Bible in the affairs of men.

“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own,” the high priest of spread-the-wealth-around intoned.

“If you were successful, somebody along the way gave you some help.” (Not God but government.) “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in the roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Successful businessmen were mystified. Did “somebody” else risk every penny they had in a new venture? Did somebody else put in 70-hour weeks nurturing a new business like a newborn child? And, by the way, businessmen (the source of most federal revenue) built those roads and bridges with their tax dollars, and paid for the fraud and waste along with construction costs.

But Obama’s rant was as much theological as ideological. Where does God fit in Obama’s worldview? Christians and Jews understand that He plays a crucial part in our lives. If we’re successful, we should thank God.

No, says Obama. Thank your brothers and sisters (the collective) – and me, the voice of divinity on earth. Thank the government that built the roads and bridges and the Internet (with your tax dollars).

Marx called religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” How different is this, really, from Obama’s 2008 bitter-clinger comment, when (thinking he was speaking off the record) he observed that when people in small towns fall on hard times, “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them… as a way to explain (make sense of) their frustrations.”

Every totalitarian movement from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks to the National Socialists saw religion as competition for the loyalty of the people and an obstacle to their agenda. That’s why they invested so heavily in anti-religion campaigns.

Obama is more subtle – telling us that God has little, if anything, to do with our lives, but any success we achieve we owe to the collective.

Politicians and bureaucrats only think they have God-like powers. God created sunsets, meadows strewn with wildflowers, snow-covered peaks and children’s laughter. Governments create wars that never end, depressions, recessions and downturns, the US Postal Service and ObamaCare.

God makes miracles. When they stray from their proper, limited, functions, governments make manure. Obama sells it by the steaming truckload.

Holland Where Healthcare Is Free For Everyone

English: Oktoberfest, Munich, GFDL, from Ukrai...

English: Oktoberfest, Munich, GFDL, from Ukrainian Wikipedia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Something happened today that has been playing on my mind since ten this morning. Peg and I were running errands and one of them was to drop off some documents with my financial advisor Joe. We stopped at the post office to buy stamps, and to post a document by Priority Mail. Joe’s office is just around the corner from the P.O. so I drove there to save a stamp and drop the asset inventory he asked for. I was looking for a parking space when a man stepped out from his car, it was Joe. I rolled down the window and handed him my package. What’s this he asked? It is the information you asked for. “How was your trip to Oktoberfest,” I asked?

“Eighteen days of hell,”  he answered.

“How so,” I asked?

“I had walking pneumonia the whole time, fever, and all.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I  stayed in Holland with a friend who took me to the local urgent care facility.”

“Free health care, how did it work?”

“They told me to put five tablespoons of sugar into some warm water and to drink it.”

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“Nope.”

“You came home with pneumonia and had it treated right?”

“Yes, and now I feel fine, but the trip was a total disaster.”

We wished each other a Happy Thanksgiving and he went to work; Peg and I continued our run of errands.

What has bothered me all day is the treatment he got in Europe, the fabulous continent, where health care is free for everyone.  Our Hope and Change President who is transforming us into Europe is on a path to treat us all with sugar-water, and to charge us a huge premium to do it.  I hope I can sleep tonight.

A Golfer Falls Down

Golfer falls down.

A woman was playing golf when she took a
big swing and fell.
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 The party waiting behind her was a group from the U.S. Senate that included Harry Reid.
Reid quickly stepped forward and helped her to her feet.  She thanked him and started to leave, when he said,
“I’m Harry Reid and I hope you’ll vote for me in the next Federal Election”.
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She laughed and quickly said,
“I fell on my ass, not my fuckin head!”