Monday, May 25, 2015

A LIBERAL PARADISE DOES EXIST !!!!

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QUOTE OF THE DECADELiberal paradise would be a place where everybody has guaranteed
employment, free comprehensive healthcare, free education, free food, free
housing, free clothing, free utilities, and only law enforcement has guns.
And believe it or not, such a place does indeed already exist: It's
called Prison."


Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff's Office

Sunday, May 24, 2015

PROFILING MUSLIMS IS WRONG, OR SO THEY TELL ME !!!!!

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Isis fighters




The liberal mantra is:  Profiling is not just wrong . . . it is an affront to civilization .  

  
Tell me again:  Why is profiling wrong?  
  
 
A Short List of the Ones You May Have Heard About:    

The Shoe Bomber was a Muslim
The Beltway Snipers were Muslims
The Fort Hood Shooter was a Muslim
The Underwear Bomber was a Muslim
The U.S.S. Cole Bombers were Muslims
The Madrid Train Bombers were Muslims
The Bali Nightclub Bombers were Muslims
The London Subway Bombers were Muslims 

The Moscow Theatre Attackers were Muslims
The Boston Marathon Bombers were Muslims
The Pan-Am flight #93 Bombers were Muslims
The Air France Entebbe Hijackers were Muslims
The Iranian Embassy Takeover, was by Muslims
The Beirut U.S. Embassy bombers were Muslims
The Libyan U.S. Embassy Attack was by Musiims ...
The Buenos Aires Suicide Bombers were Muslims
The Israeli Olympic Team Attackers were Muslims
The Kenyan U.S, Embassy Bombers were Muslims
The Saudi, Khobar Towers Bombers were Muslims
The Beirut Marine Barracks bombers were Muslims
The Besian Russian School Attackers were Muslims
The first World Trade Center Bombers were Muslims
The Bombay & Mumbai India Attackers were Muslims
The Achille Lauro Cruise Ship Hijackers were Muslims
The September 11th 2001 Airline Hijackers were Muslims
Also, Consider:    
  
Buddhists living with Hindus = No Problem
Hindus living with Christians = No Problem
Hindus living with Jews = No Problem
Christians living with Shintos = No Problem
Shintos living with Confucians = No Problem
Confusians living with Baha'is = No Problem
Baha'is living with Jews = No Problem
Jews living with Atheists = No Problem
Atheists living with Buddhists = No Problem
Buddhists living with Sikhs = No Problem
Sikhs living with Hindus = No Problem
Hindus living with Baha'is = No Problem
Baha'is living with Christians = No Problem
Christians living with Jews = No Problem
Jews living with Buddhists = No Problem
Buddhists living with Shintos = No Problem

Shintos living with Atheists = No Problem
Atheists living with Confucians = No Problem
Confusians living with Hindus = No Problem
   

However: 

Muslims living with Hindus = Problem
Muslims living with Buddhists = Problem
Muslims living with Christians = Problem
Muslims living with Jews = Problem
Muslims living with Sikhs = Problem
Muslims living with Baha'is = Problem
Muslims living with Shintos = Problem
Muslims living with Atheists = Problem 
 

MUSLIMS LIVING WITH MUSLIMS = BIG PROBLEM
Thus, This Naturally Leads To: 

They’re not happy in Gaza
They're not happy in Egypt
They're not happy in Libya
They're not happy in Morocco
They're not happy in Iran
They're not happy in Iraq
They're not happy in Yemen
They're not happy in Afghanistan
They're not happy in Pakistan
They're not happy in Syria
They're not happy in Lebanon

They're not happy in Nigeria
They're not happy in Kenya
They're not happy in Sudan 

   
So -  Where Are Muslims Happy? 
 
They're happy in Australia
They're happy in England
They're happy in Belgium
They're happy in France
They're happy in Italy
They're happy in Germany
They're happy in Sweden
They're happy in the USA & Canada
They're happy in Norway & India 
   

They're happy in almost every country that is Not Islamic. And who do they blame? Not Islam... Not their leadership... Not themselves... THEY BLAME THE COUNTRIES THEY ARE HAPPY IN. They want to change the countries they're happy in, to be like the countries they came from where they were unhappy and eventually got hammered. 
Islamic Jihad: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
ISIS: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Al-Qaeda: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Taliban: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Hamas: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Hezbollah: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Boko Haram: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Al-Nusra: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Abu Sayyaf: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Al-Badr: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Muslim Brotherhood: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Lashkar-e-Taiba: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Palestine Liberation Front: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Ansaru: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Jemaah Islamiyah: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION
Abdullah Azzam Brigades: AN ISLAMIC TERROR ORGANIZATION 
 
 
   Aha!  Stupid me.  These are the facts . . . so . . . please tell me again about the evils of profiling.  I am certain that I will understand . . . eventually 

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A CONSERVATIVE ???

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Reason Roundtable: Is Reform Conservatism a Friend or Foe of Limited Government?

Advocates and critics debate the merits of a more populist approach to right-of-center politics.



In this Roundtable:
Shikha Dalmia: Introduction: Is Reform Conservatism Friend or Foe of Limited Government?
Yuval Levin: Liberty Needs the Strong Families and Communities that Reformocons Emphasize
Ben Domenech: Reform Conservatism: Lofty Vision, Crass Politics
Jason Kuznicki: Reformocons Ignore that Government is the Main Threat to Families and Communities
Nick Gillespie: Reform Conservatism: More Conservatism, Less Reform
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Introduction:
Ideas have consequences and a recent idea that is already generating major consequences in the political world is "reform conservatism." It is barely out of the womb and it is spawning serious policy proposals such as the Rubio-Lee tax reform bill (that I've written about here and here). Conceived by some of the nation's most prominent conservatives, reform conservatism is an ambitious undertaking that seeks to simultaneously advance an array of electoral, political, and social aims.
Its primary electoral aim is to apply the lesson of Mitt Romney's 2012 "shellacking" to help the GOP once again become the majority party. And as far as it's concerned, that lesson is not that the GOP needs first and foremost to stop the stampede of Hispanic and other minority voters to the Democratic Party as conventional analyses suggest. It is that the GOP has to stop coming across as the rich guy's party that is in the pay of corporations and out of touch with the great American middle class, which is being itself "shellacked" by the forces of globalization. The GOP's central problem is to craft a pro-middle class agenda. And this requires a major rebranding of the party with an unabashedly populist message on fiscal/tax, economic, and social policy.
Reformocons'—as the adherents of this movement like to be called—main political goal is to wrest control of the welfare state from liberals and recast it to advance conservative values and constituencies. This, they say, requires not railing against the welfare state—as Republicans have been prone to doing—but reforming it from the inside.
And their fundamental social objective is to strengthen families and communities whose decline, they believe, is America's number one problem. Every healthy society needs intact families and functioning communities—or what reformocons call "mediating institutions"—especially one that wants to stay free rather than degenerate into despotism or anarchy.
But the question for libertarians, of course, is whether these three goals can be accomplished while staying true to America's core commitment to limited government?
Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs and the father of reform conservatism, whose edited volume Room to Grow offers something of a manifesto and policy blueprint for reformocons, takes up that question in his opening essay for this Reason Roundtable. While describing and defending the basic philosophical assumptions underpinning reform conservatism, he answers with a resounding "yes."
Reform conservatism, he notes, is about moving the welfare-state model to the market-oriented model (or mediating-institutions model). "At the very least, this would involve moving the government away from large managerial roles toward far smaller facilitating ones. But, wherever possible, it would also involve devolving power and resources to the mediating institutions of society," he notes.
But the responders to Levin don't quite see it that way.
Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist and a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, notes that while Levin's philosophical case for reform conservatism is "inspirational," its "poll-tested policy bullet points" are less so.  It seems to succumb to some of conservatives' most "anti-intellectual...persistent (and often left-wing) fictions about the threats of economic freedom and creative destruction," he points out, all of which will inevitably nurture distrust towards markets.
Jason Kuznicki, editor of Cato Unbound, wholeheartedly agrees with Levin that civil society or "mediating institutions" need to be strengthened (because they are both an alternative to and bulwark against an overweening government). But, he believes, that reformocons are attacking the wrong end of the problem. How? By ignoring that these "institutions of our society have been under sustained attack for many years now, and the attacker has been the federal government itself."
And Reason.com's Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie notes that while there are significant places where the reformocon policy agenda overlaps with a libertarian world-view, there are stark philosophical differences between the two. "In important ways, the reformocon agenda strikes me as right-wing social engineering achieved via the tax code rather than traditional edict."
Check out this stimulating discussion.
Shikha Dalmia

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Liberty Needs the Strong Families and Communities that Reformocons Emphasize
by Yuval Levin
All those concerned about limited government—conservatives and libertarians—have watched in dismay as the Obama administration has expanded the size, scope, cost, and role of the federal government. They have fought this expansion tooth-and-nail and, since the congressional elections of 2010, have at least managed to restrain it some.
Yuval Levin. Photo by National AffairsYuval Levin. Photo by National AffairsBut pure oppositionalism can do little more than restrain the advance of Big Government. It can hardly hope to reverse it, or to advance a different vision of American life, because it lets the Left define the terms of debate and makes the Right forget what it seeks to champion and defend. To achieve enduring reforms, the Right must reconnect with the core principles and assumptions that inform our understanding of politics and apply those to the challenges of our time.
Over the past decade or so, a loose collection of scholars, policy analysts, writers, and politicians has gradually taken shape to do just that. What generally unites its members (myself included), who have come to be called "reform conservatives," is not a specific policy agenda but a general disposition.
That disposition, at least as I think of it, begins from the conservative view of man and society. Conservatives tend to see the human person as an incorrigible mass of contradictions: a fallen and imperfect being created in a divine image, a creature possessed of fundamental dignity and inalienable rights but always prone to excess and sin and ever in need of self-restraint and moral formation. This view gives conservatives high standards but low expectations of human affairs and makes us wary of utopianism.
It also leaves us more impressed with successful human institutions than we are outraged at failed ones, and therefore makes us protective of our inheritance and eager to build on the longstanding institutions of our society to improve things. We believe, with Edmund Burke and F.A. Hayek, that these institutions embody more knowledge than we can readily perceive and more wisdom than any collection of technical experts, however capable, is ever likely to have.
This anthropology informs our sociology. The conservative vision of society is moved by a low opinion of the capacity of individuals to address complex problems even as it is informed by a high regard for the rights and freedoms of those individuals. So it seeks social arrangements that counterbalance human ignorance and vice while respecting human liberty and dignity. And it finds these in the mediating institutions of a free society—families, communities, civic and religious groups, markets, and more—that stand between the individual and the state.
This regard for mediating institutions is reinforced by our sense of the limits of human knowledge and power. Because we think the human person is something of a mess, and because we think societies and their members flourish through mediating institutions, we are very skeptical of claims of rational control and technocratic management. Large social problems are too complicated to be amenable to centralized, wholesale, technical solutions and instead require decentralized, bottom-up, incremental ones. Societies evolve and improve and solve practical problems not by consolidated jerks of authority from above but by diffuse trial and error from below. Allowing society's institutions and members the freedom for such efforts is more likely to make society smarter than allowing technical experts to manage large systems.
When a society is allowed to become smarter through such institutions, it usually does so in a particular way: by allowing people to try different approaches to meeting the needs of their fellows, allowing the people who have those needs to choose among the options they are offered, and allowing those choices to matter so that successes are retained and failures go away. These three steps—experimentation, evaluation, and evolution—offer a kind of general recipe for addressing complex social problems while respecting human liberty and acknowledging the limits of human knowledge and power.
The liberal welfare state tries to address large problems without allowing for any of these steps. Administrative centralization and regulatory prescription prevent open experimentation with different ways of providing services, the recipients of services don't decide what is working and failing, and (thanks to interest-group politics and cronyism) failures rarely go away.
Genuinely competitive markets are ideally suited to following these steps. They offer powerful incentives to try new ways of doing things, the people directly affected decide which ways they like best—and those that they don't like are left behind. That is why conservatives often reach for the language of markets in public policy—if not necessarily always for actual markets. To the extent possible, they try to replicate in public policy the three-step incremental learning process that allows society to improve by learning from experience.
What has come to be called the conservative reform agenda in recent years largely involves different ways of moving from the welfare-state model to the market-oriented model (or mediating-institutions model) in different arenas of public policy—from K-12 and higher education to health care, entitlement reform, welfare, and more. At the very least, this would involve moving the government away from large managerial roles toward far smaller facilitating ones. But, wherever possible, it would also involve devolving power and resources to the mediating institutions of society.
This would not only reduce the size and scope of government, it would also improve its ability to help society address the challenges it faces, curb opportunities for cronyism and self-dealing, and give people more reasons to play active roles in their communities. Such "reform conservatism" would begin from where we are, but it would seek to change the basic organizing principle of public policy at the federal level, and so to set in motion a vast transformation of the government's role that would, over time, both restrain the government's reach and help restore a proper understanding of its aims and limits in our constitutional system.
These are not all new ideas, of course. Indeed, they are applications of very longstanding principles and insights. They are new only in that they answer to changing circumstances—but that difference matters.
Consider tax policy. The next supply-side tax reform should, like past ones, be geared to better supporting growth, lowering rates, providing broad-based tax relief, and reducing distortions in the government's treatment of differently situated people. In today's environment, some reform-minded conservatives think this should mean focusing on the business tax code more than conservatives did before taxes on business investment became such conspicuous barriers to growth and competitiveness, emphasizing individual marginal-rate reductions less than we did when rates were much higher, delivering more relief through payroll-tax cuts than we did before payroll taxes became the main sources of most Americans' tax burdens, and building on past efforts to address the distorting mistreatment of parents in our tax and entitlement systems. So they have floated proposals that combine aggressive pro-growth business tax reforms with a simplified individual code that offers lower income-tax rates and an expanded child credit or significant payroll-tax cut.
I'm certain that those who have been termed reform conservatives don't all agree on the fine details of any proposal. But we do tend to think that conservatism needs to be more than a brake on liberalism, and that by applying the conservative vision of man and society to the challenges America now confronts, the Right can offer the public a platform that is simultaneously more conservative and more broadly appealing than its agenda has generally been of late.
Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs.

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Reform Conservatism: Lofty Vision, Crass Politics
by Ben Domenech
As the 21st Century conservatism's most industrious public intellectual and the leading voice for reform conservatism, Yuval Levin has presented a thoughtful and philosophically consistent essay underpinning the disparate ideas that have come to be regarded as the "reform conservative" agenda. He attempts a challenging feat: to offer a coherent and an inspirational case for what are effectively a series of dry public policy white papers. But when you set Levin's deep understanding of conservatism alongside the modern poll-tested policy bullet points of reform conservatism, the weakness of the reformocon agenda become readily apparent. Levin's lofty governing philosophy is at odds with the incongruent grab bag of policies that reformocons offer.
Ben Domenech. Photo by The FederalistBen Domenech. Photo by The FederalistConservatism today encompasses a mix of ideological strains and political motives. One of its most prominent intellectual strains is classical liberalism, which holds that free people, endowed with the rights of life and liberty, exchanging property within a free market, are the best directors of their fate.
This is an inclusive message, facilitating the hopes and dreams of every man and woman of every race and creed. It understands that humanity is fallible, public institutions led by people are given to error, and therefore, the force of government ought to be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary. This strain has allowed libertarians who believe in limited government and individual freedom to work together with conservatives despite the many philosophical differences between them.
But the political program that has been emerging in the Republican Party in recent years does not resemble this. Instead, it sadly amounts to little more than identity politics for white folks. It is a crass and often anti-intellectual trend that is wedded to persistent (and often left-wing) fictions about the threat of economic freedom and creative destruction. But it remains a powerful force within the American right and arises in electoral politics as regularly as stomach acid from too much red meat. From it are born many pernicious beliefs: One, government must act to subdue the impulses of free individuals, even if there is no clear or direct harm to others. Two, government bureaucrats, instead of the market, ought to determine how many people from which countries and in what careers ought to be allowed to live and work in America. Three, the global free enterprise system, driven by technology and trade, is a destructive economic force that rewards the haves and punishes the have-nots, and must be tamed through mandates, tariffs, and subsidies. And four, broad-based social engineering is needed to counter government and market failures and to sustain an idealized version of American society (think Leave it to Beaver but where a mustachioed Ward works in a steel mill in perpetuity).
Reform conservatism, in my view, is an attempt to find a new way for the classical liberal ideas and the "identity politics" of conservatism to live together in a political coalition. "Reformocon" is a vague term—it is still not clearly defined for me. There are many ideas that comprise the reformocon agenda, some fine and some not. Among the fine ideas from a limited government standpoint are: a general opposition to cronyism, support for rolling back regulatory requirements, and support for eliminating some energy subsidies. But the objections to cronyism and energy subsidies do not, apparently, extend to ethanol. Among the not-so-fine proposals that dabble in identity politics are: perpetually extending unemployment benefits; restricting legal immigration; enhancing transportation spending; offering wage, relocation and child-related subsidies; suspicion—or outright denigration—of growth-maximizing tax agendas; and fear of robots taking jobs.
Why is reform conservatism such a grab bag of "good" and "bad" ideas? Because it understands the central political problem of the GOP—that Mitt Romney's loss brought to the fore—is the huge chasm between the economic agenda/priorities of the party and those of the middle and working class.
As political analysis goes, this is largely accurate. Even before Mitt Romney's dig at the 47 percent non-income-tax paying Americans, he was already a difficult man to relate to. He was a poor advocate for what free enterprise had to offer all Americans, and his policy proposals often flew in the face of sound fiscal conservatism.
But here's the interesting thing: the reason why the cohort of no-income-tax-paying "takers" has expanded to 47 percent is the creation and expansion of the child tax credit, a Republican brainchild. It was created in the 1990s by the Republican-controlled Congress as a way to lighten the load on working families and reward those who bear children. But then social conservatives prodded George W. Bush to more than double the credit. The Tax Foundation found that between 2000 and 2004, this expanded child credit accounted for an increase in non-income-tax-paying taxpayers by 10.5 million, a 32-percent jump. The reformocons now want to double down on this approach, as their enthusiasm for the tripling of child tax credit in the Rubio-Lee tax reform proposal shows.
The fiscal effects of this massive child tax credit have attracted the most consternation, but there are other objectionable aspects too that Levin's essay unwittingly highlights. Levin notes that reformocons are open to both "an expanded child credit and significant payroll-tax cut" as if these approaches were fungible. But there is a vast difference between the two: The payroll-tax cut lets all working Americans, regardless of their family structure, keep more of their own money, truly empowering individuals and private institutions, and along the way, helping families as well. The child tax credit, on the other hand, takes everyone's money, and returns some people's money, but only if those people engage in certain government-sanctioned behavior. The animating principle behind this brand of social engineering seems to be: "if there are to be takers, let them look like us."
This is a marked break from classical liberal ideas which have optimistic faith in individuals, civil society, and markets, and seek to lower the burden of government's cost for all working Americans, regardless whether they live and behave in ways some conservatives prefer.
Levin's essay is infused with this tension. In the first half, we see expressions of common ground with those who believe in limited government: man is fallible and private institutions and markets are best. But in the second half, the policy approaches favor more activist government—which is run by man and inherently non-market—"to help society address the challenges it faces... and give people more reasons to play active roles in their communities." These two views cannot be reconciled, and no amount of "market-oriented" language—in reform conservatism as in Romneycare and Obamacare—can address government's inherent and fundamental flaws.
The GOP might need to win elections, but the need of America's soul at this moment is not for the better use of the knobs and levers of government power. It is for a reassertion of classical liberal ideas and free enterprise to spur rapid growth, without which frayed communities cannot be strengthened. Reformocons must avoid making the same error Levin ascribes to the forces of oppositional conservatism: "[Letting] the Left define the terms of debate and make the Right forget what it seeks to champion and defend."
Benjamin Domenech is publisher of The Federalist and a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute.

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Reformocons Ignore that Government is the Main Threat to Families and Communities
by Jason Kuznicki
Yuval Levin begins his essay with the following sentence:
All those concerned about limited government—conservatives and libertarians—have watched in dismay as the Obama administration has expanded the size, scope, cost, and role of the federal government.
We have. But the aside—conservatives and libertarians—quietly makes a claim that might need closer attention: Conservatives, Levin included, believe in limited government, just like libertarians.
Jason Kuznicki. Photo by The Cato InstituteJason Kuznicki. Photo by The Cato InstituteNow, I am sure that Levin does believe in limited government; I am sure that many other conservatives do too. But I suspect that many on the left side of the aisle would also sign up for Levin's aside: They too believe in limited government. They just disagree on the limits, and, by their lights, Obama is doing great.
The problems with the parenthetical are therefore two: First, we don't necessarily agree on what limited government looks like. And second, we may doubt that the reformocons will be able to limit government effectively.
What exactly is Levin's definition of limited government? Can we infer it from the proposals he makes and/or links?
School choice is a pretty good limited-government idea. Now, to a libertarian, a robust voucher system may only be good by comparison to what we have right now, and a fully private education system may be the first-best solution. But still, I'm happy to see school choice get a thumbs-up. It does limit government, a bit.
Libertarians are certainly no fans of Obamacare. Untethering healthcare from the tax system as proposed by James C. Capretta and Robert E. Moffit, whose Obamacare reform proposal Levin touts as the kind of welfare reform that reformocons would seek to limit government, would also be a step in the right direction. But other parts of the Capretta-Moffit proposal I'm not sure I understand: How would we pay for "[moving] lower-income people out of the limited sphere of Medicaid options and into the same private health-insurance markets in which their fellow citizens purchase coverage"? A fully refundable tax credit might be better than Medicaid, though I'm not entirely sure of that because, over a period of time, the left would no doubt try and achieve its redistributive goals by demanding an expansion of the tax credit. I also have to wonder whether, if the sort of political capital needed to do it is ever on hand—shouldn't we try something still more ambitious?
Levin's definition of limited government might not be quite the same as ours, but it's in the ballpark. He is also right to praise the mediating institutions of civil society. I agree that we need them, and we need them to be healthy. In a freer world, they will do much of the work now done by the state.
But I can't help but think that something is lost, and not won, when our mediating institutions are paid for by the state. Even if they are not administered by technocrats, it is unimaginable that no strings would be attached if the government were funding them. And even if strings might or might not be in evidence right now, in our legislative system, they are only a compromise away. It's a danger that reform conservatism will repeatedly face if and when its ideas gain political traction.
And there is a still more important problem with Levin's effort to improve our "mediating institutions" by tinkering with the tax code and rejiggering the welfare state. It's that the mediating institutions of our society have been under sustained attack for many years now, and the attacker has been the federal government itself.
Consider the War on Drugs, a government program that effectively separates young men—especially young black men—from their families, communities, schools, and churches—and connects them permanently to a life of crime. The prison population has fallen from its all-time high of 2.4 million in 2008, but 2.26 million is still entirely too many, either by comparison to other nations or by our own falling crime rate. These individuals might otherwise be in school or employed, married, active in civic life, or otherwise doing something of value. But going to prison—or even just having had a past misdemeanor—makes them permanently less employable; and being less employable makes them more likely to go back to prison. If that weren't enough, education is harder to get, too. The damage that the Drug War—and a substandard education system, both government endeavors—have done to black communities, or the kind of "mediating institutions" that Levin is talking about, is incalculable.
These policies make it all too easy for young people to find themselves cut off from civil society. When they are, they may have few options but to turn to the state. Yes, it would be good for state programs to be efficient and intelligently administered. But it would be even better if these programs were less needed in the first place.
I would also suggest lessening our involvement in foreign conflicts. How much civil society could we buy with $1.7 trillion? What might all those talented veterans have done here at home—if they were not out fighting in wars of choice? And what must an atmosphere of constant surveillance and mistrust be doing to our civil society? If the War on Drugs were off the table, then here would seem a promising path to strengthening our civil society as well. It would incentivize and make possible stronger, more stable families, better employment prospects, and closer communal ties of all sorts.
Any conservative—reform or otherwise—seriously interested in strengthening "mediating institutions" while limiting government ought to at least begin by stopping the government's existing assaults on them. Yet one finds not a word about that in Levin's essay or the broader reformocon agenda.
Jason Kuznicki is editor of Cato Unbound.

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Reform Conservatism: More Conservatism, Less Reform
by Nick Gillespie
"Today's challenges won't be met by yesterday's solutions," announces the introduction to Room to Grow, the "reform conservativism" manifesto published last summer by Yuval Levin and other reformocons. But despite such a forward-facing stance and Levin's engaging and inclusive tones in his opening essay, "reform conservatism" represents not a bold new governing philosophy for the 21st century, but an attempt to hang on to a model of the modern welfare state that is both fiscally and morally headed for bankruptcy
Nick Gillespie. Photo by ReasonNick Gillespie. Photo by ReasonMany "reformocons" worked for George W. Bush and identify completely with the Republican Party, which has done as much in the 21st century as Barack Obama and the Democrats to expand "the size, scope, cost, and role of the federal government." I don't say this to be snide or stand-offish but rather to call attention to the ease with which reformocons glide from the principled to the partisan and back again—never mind that the Patriot Act, Medicare Part D, reckless domestic and foreign spending, Sarbanes-Oxley, TARP, and more implicate conservative Republicans. The suggestion that Team Blue is uniquely destructive of limited government values is not especially convincing.
While there are significant places where the reformocon policy agenda overlaps with a libertarian world-view, there are stark philosophical differences between the two that need to be kept in clear view. Reformocons, as Levin notes, are a diverse bunch and don't agree on everything. Still, it is interesting how many of those who call themselves reformocons work at or are allied with institutions and groups working tirelessly to maintain the national security state, push an interventionist foreign policy, and restrict immigration.
Libertarians are interested in reducing the size, scope, and spending of government in all aspects of human and social activity. This is less about money and more about the proper role of government in dictating individual choices and lives. Where libertarians are generally agnostic about choices they aren't paying for, reform conservatives—like all conservatives—are much more comfortable with pushing particular outcomes when it comes to things like maintaining, say, a particular family structure or what intoxicant you use.
In important ways, the reformocon agenda strikes me as right-wing social engineering achieved via the tax code rather than traditional edict. Consider Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee's "The Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Plan." A product of reformocon influence, it doesn't simply "combine aggressive pro-growth business tax reforms with a simplified individual code that offers lower income-tax rates and an expanded child credit or significant payroll-tax cut," as Levin recommends. It would also, as American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis, himself a reformocon, admits "lose something like $4 trillion in federal tax revenue over a decade, maybe half that if you apply 'dynamic scoring.'" One reason is the universal $2,500 child tax credit that doesn't phase out with rising income. Yet, Pethokoukis raves that "Lee and Rubio might have cooked up the first great tax cut plan of the 2000s."
In recent years, reformocons have offered up various rationales for yoking pro-growth tax policy with expanding the child tax credit. These two things have no necessary connection, after all, except that both are desired by the reformocons. Reformocons justify expanding the child tax credit by insisting how incredibly expensive it is these days to raise kids. Parents, don't you understand, deserve a tax break now because they are producing the next generation of taxpayers. Why such payments should be doled out via tax expenditures rather than straight-up transfer payments isn't clear,  though it's worth noting that low-income parents wouldn't get cash back once the credit reduces their tax bill (including payroll taxes) to zero. That's odd if the credit is supposed to cover the future contributions of your offsprings—and offset the current expenses of raising a kid. Perhaps kids born to poor parents don't cost as much? Or won't earn as much when they grow up?
Sometimes, reformocons link the need for a bigger child tax credit to an apparent need for goosing fertility rates among "middle-class" Americans (Room to Grow defines the category as those "who do not consider themselves rich or poor."). Robert Stein, a contributor to the volume, argues that old-age entitlements have lowered fertility rates to below-replacement levels throughout the developed world. The more comfortable people expect the government to make them in retirement, this argument runs, the fewer kids they have.
Let's leave aside the issue of whether governments can radically increase fertility rates over the long haul (the answer is no, whether in Stalin-era Soviet Union or  contemporary Singapore). Let me instead simply suggest that throwing money at middle- and upper-income taxpayers because they have children is unlikely to, as Levin argues, "set in motion a vast transformation of the government's role that would, over time, both restrain the government's reach and help restore a proper understanding of its aims and limits in our constitutional system." More likely, it will create a new beachhead from which the government will nudge or manage individuals' lives without reducing any of the existing interferences. But one thing is for sure: Massively expanding the child tax credit would allow Republican politicians to buy votes with other people's money.
Also, the timing of this plan is particularly off-putting. We live in a moment when the fiscal unsustainability of the broadly defined social welfare state is becoming undeniable. There is a major discussion underway for the need to reform entitlement spending wholesale. This is the moment when advocates of limited government should be promulgating an end to the massive transfer of money from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and rich. Instead, reform conservatives are proposing to effectively fund the status quo for a few more decades and push ultimately unachievable outcomes just because they find them desirable or politically advantageous in the current moment
Rather than seeking to extend the life of entitlements borne out of the Great Depression and hiding transfers to well-off Americans in the tax code, we should be having a forthright discussion about what sort of social safety net we want to provide to those incapable of caring for themselves. If the government wasn't responsible for us all, it would certainly be less costly and possibly more effective in helping those needing help.
Buried somewhere in my house is my birth announcement from the tail end of the baby boom era. It features a drawing of a newborn upon whose diaper is stamped "Another Tax Deduction." That was then. Now that baby boomers are retiring en masse and overwhelming the entitlement system, reform conservatives would stamp a different message on our children's diapers: "Another Future Taxpayer."
In doubling down on that which it should be dismantling, reform conservatism parallels that great patron saint both of conservatism and Republicanism, Ronald Reagan, who worked hard as hell to preserve the very programs he had once admonished. In the early and mid-1960s, Reagan attacked Medicare (not yet enacted) as socialized medicine better suited to the Soviet Union than America. In the speech he gave endorsing Barry Goldwater in 1964, Reagan groused thus about Social Security, then barely 30 years old: "Can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen to do better on his own?...We are against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program." Fast forward just a few decades, and President Reagan fought tooth and nail to protect Medicare via payroll tax increases. He had come around on Social Security, too, calling its preservation "the highest priority of my administration."
None of this should surprise anybody—the essential function of all forms of conservatism, whether Reaganite or reformocon, is to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop," as Bill Buckley, the founder of National Review, the magazine that employs several prominent reformocons, put it in the 1955.  But it shouldn't really inspire anybody, either. Not in the 21st Century.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason.com and reason.tv.
     




Sunday, May 17, 2015

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT FOR PROVEN HEINOUS CRIMES AGAINST THE STATE IS MORALLY CORRECT

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Twelve Massachusetts jurors returned a verdict of death for jihadist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who together with his brother perpetrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.




DZHOKHAR TSARNAEV'S life is a meager compensation for the murder of Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, and Sean Collier. But it is the highest price he can be made to pay under our system of justice, and a jury of his peers has unanimously recommended that he pay it.
From the outset, the death penalty was the sentence most Americans believed Tsarnaev should receive, assuming he was guilty of the grisly Boston Marathon bombing. Long before the case went to trial, all doubt of his guilt had vanished. Not even his lawyers tried to suggest otherwise. On the trial's opening day, defense attorney Judy Clarke bluntly acknowledged: "It was him."
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What all these weeks in the federal courthouse in South Boston established was not that Tsarnaev is a murderer and a terrorist — that we knew. What was made brutally clear is that he feels no remorse for the blood he shed and the pain he caused. Witness after witness described, in heartbreaking and agonizing testimony, what Tsarnaev's bombs had wrought. The jury saw and heard it all, and drew the logical conclusion: The heartbreak and agony were the whole point.
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Like Timothy McVeigh, like the 9/11 hijackers, like the bombers of Pan Am Flight 103, like the Fort Hood shooter, Tsarnaev and his brother set out to slaughter as many victims as possible, and to do so with a maximum of cruelty and horror. Under federal law, the death penalty is meant to be reserved for the worst of the worst. Tsarnaev placed a nail-filled pressure-cooker bomb a few inches behind an 8-year-old boy, and sauntered off to buy a quart of milk after the child was blown to pieces. If such a murderer doesn't qualify as worst of the worst, no one does.
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Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's life is a meager compensation for the murders of Krystle Campbell, Sean Collier, Lingzi Lu, and Martin Richard, but it is the highest price our system of justice allows.
Opponents of capital punishment strenuously faulted the Justice Department for seeking the death penalty. They argued that the bombing was a terrorist attack aimed at Massachusetts, which has rejected the death penalty as a matter of policy. But it was Americans that Tsarnaev determined to terrorize and kill. The message he scrawled in the boat where he was found expressed hatred for America.
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It would have been a dereliction of the government's duty had it shied away from prosecuting him to the full extent of the law.
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Copley Square was repaired long ago; there is no sign of the blood and gore and rubble of that awful day in 2013. But the destruction Tsarnaev caused will last a lifetime — in shattered families that will never be made whole, in physical wounds that will never fully heal, in emotional trauma that will never be shaken off. Above all, in the death of innocents who will never again smile, or dream, or love.
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Human justice is imperfect. But in returning a verdict of death for the Boston Marathon bomber, 12 Massachusetts jurors have come as close as they could.
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

Friday, May 15, 2015

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC'S STEALTH SUPPORTER OF THE CLINTONS

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ALL TOO HUMAN:

George Stephanopoulos is a very nice person. He is, of all the Clinton loyalists, perhaps the least aggressive and obnoxious in his defenses of the team. It is easy to like him and he has time for young people and those who are not famous, which is an aspect that is underappreciated in famous people. 

But this should not blind us to the fact that he is, and was, and remains a Democratic staffer at heart, he is a Clinton loyalist through and through. When he carries that water he carries it right, which is why he should never have been a Republican debate moderator at all and he should not be one in the future. Luca Brasi owed less to the Godfather than Stephanopoulos owes the Clintons, and when it comes time to send someone to the fishes – as he attempted to do with Peter Schweizer the other day – Stephanopoulos is happy to oblige.


It's one thing to work in politics before moving into a career in media. It's another thing to be presented as a neutral arbiter in a presidential context even as you're giving money to what was essentially a non-profit slush fund for a former and future candidate for president. If you wanted to be fair and balanced about it, you’d have a conservative riding on alongside George Stephanopoulos to balance his liberal opinions with a different perspective. 

But that’s not what the networks do – they allow him to present his agenda-driven questions every week to his guests without any competing voice. There’s nothing wrong with working in politics before you work in media. The problem is that unlike many other staffers-turned-anchors, Stephanopoulos may still be doing politics, not just doing media. It’s just human instinct – you go with what you know, and who you know. Asking Stephanopoulos to remove his Clinton jersey is like asking Tim Russert to root for the Dallas Cowboys.


Jack Shafer weighs in. http://vlt.tc/1xbf  “Most politicians cross over to media with the understanding that they will continue their partisan ways. But others, such as Stephanopoulos, Sawyer and Russert agree implicitly and explicitly to leave that baggage behind. In shelling out 75,000 dollars to the politically identified Clinton Foundation, Stephanopoulos has betrayed that compact, torched the journalism-cred he has acquired in the past two decades, and obviously forgotten the lessons in political savvy he learned as a member of Bill Clinton’s inner circle. He knew going into ABC News that his reporting and his personal actions would be extra scrutinized for bias. 

I find it implausible that he did not understand in 2012, 2013 and 2014 (the years he gave the Clinton Foundation cash), that his contributions would be an issue with his employers and his viewers once discovered—even if they were just sitting there buried on a website for anyone to stumble upon.” Could this have all been taken care of with a line from Stephanopoulos disclosing this before talking about the Foundation? Maybe he never thought it would be controversial, but I just don’t see how.


As for Stephanopoulos’s debate recusal, Ted Cruz says he shouldn’t moderate any 2016 debates, not just the GOP ones. http://vlt.tc/1xac  I’m not sure about that. Stephanopoulos is smart and good on TV. What’s more important is his role – perhaps not as moderator, but as left of center questioner, paired with someone from the right? We know he’s for the Clintons. We’ve always known it. But reiterating it in this fashion – putting his money behind them – is the sort of thing that neutral arbiters just don’t do if they want to retain the aura of unbiased coverage.

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Monday, May 11, 2015

EGALITE' - THAT GLORIOUS PARADISE WHERE NO ONE IS UNFAIRLY DISADVANTAGED BECAUSE EVERYONE IS EQUALLY MISERABLE !!!

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4 More Ways to Raise Egalitarian Children

Don’t stop at ending bedtime stories. Deprive your children even further, for everyone’s benefit.
Hans Fiene
By


THE FEDERALIST

Some may define egalitarianism as “belief in the equality of all people, especially in political, social, or economic life,” but a more precise definition for the contemporary parlance would be “belief that every person should have equal access to every opportunity in every circumstance imaginable.” To provide such a society for our children, to build them a shining egalitarian city on a level playing field, one major progress-impeding super villain needs defeating.
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Even more so than the misogynistic Christian church or the anti-gay GOP, the chief enemy of egalitarianism is nature. Historic Christianity only makes it hard for women to be pastors, but nature makes it hard for women to be soldiers, firefighters, lumberjacks, and anything else that requires masculine levels of upper body strength. Republicans may pass laws letting bakers deny service for gay weddings, but nature imposes laws denying two pairs of ovaries the power to procreate. But the greatest way that nature breeds inequality is by filling us with the desire to love the children that have resulted from our breeding.

Loving Your Children Hurts Others

Not all parents are equally adept at loving their children, as anyone who’s ever observed a crowded McDonald’s play place knows. And when those with superior nurturing skills unleash them on their offspring, the results are horrific, producing children with higher levels of happiness, education, and achievement than their contemporaries. One might argue that the solution to this problem is to encourage bad parents to work harder at loving their children, but such a heartless, radical notion can’t be taken any more seriously than the suggestion that a woman who can’t pass a physical fitness test should increase her bench-press regimen like other women have done instead of putting people at risk. Rather, the best way to achieve an egalitarian society is for those who can shoot the highest to quit showing off and start aiming lower.
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When those with superior nurturing skills unleash them on their offspring, the results are horrific, producing children with higher levels of happiness, education, and achievement.
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“Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?” This is the titular question posed in a recent article published by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation, where philosopher Adam Swift comments that parents who read to their children at night might want to consider the long-term effects. After noting that “the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,” Swift goes on to suggest, “I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.”
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Although he should be commended from bringing awareness to the dangers of reading Roald Dahl to your children when the neighbors are watching “Monday Night Raw” with theirs, Swift must also be criticized for stopping short of demanding that parents dumb down family time for the sake of the greater good. To build a truly egalitarian society, this is precisely what we must do. In fact, we must go even further. In addition to impeding the intellectual development of advantaged children to level the playing field, here are four more things parents must do to crush the prejudice of nature and raise truly egalitarian children.

1. Stop Bathing Your Children

In a fair and just society, all people should be free to enter any relationship they desire without interference from the state. It therefore follows that, in an equally fair and just society, those same people should be free to enter any relationship they desire without interference from the person they’re trying to enter a relationship with.
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Sadly, history is littered with countless examples of women who have refused the romantic advances of certain men simply because they smelled like cigarettes and cat urine. If we’re going to combat the societal blight of malodorous men being denied equal opportunities for mating, we must begin leveling the playing field now by keeping our kids out of the tub, as such well-intentioned bathing culturally conditions our children to believe that it’s “bad” to “smell” like animal waste.

2. Stop Giving Them Fruits and Vegetables

Since an individual’s eating habits are established at an early age, it’s of paramount importance that those who would feed their sons and daughters healthy foods recognize they are unfairly disadvantaging the children of parents who believe a balanced breakfast consists of a couple Slim Jims and an Oreo McFlurry.
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Just as it’s not fair for intellectually advanced parents to pass their values onto their children, it’s also not fair for the nutritiously minded to give their offspring a better shot at not dying of heart disease than those kids whose parents curse Michelle Obama’s love of kale while pouring gravy on their Cocoa Puffs. So start substituting rib tips for apple slices in Junior’s lunch. It’s the least you can do to balance the societal scales.

3. Stop Teaching Your Children Manners

Of all the people you’ve known who were late for a job interview, or were arrogant, angry, or vulgar during it, how many of them were passed over in favor of someone who showed up on time and exhibited the virtues of humility, kindness, and decency? Should we really continue giving people a leg up in society simply because, by random chance, they were born to parents who taught them to carry themselves with dignity and to treat other people with respect?
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As socialist governments throughout the world have proven with great success, you can quickly eliminate poverty by taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. But manners aren’t so easily redistributed, so the only way to correct society’s refusal to give equal job opportunities to the boorish is for all of the gainfully employed to start peppering our resumes with a few more coffee stains and curse words.

4. Stop Raising Them

If Billy’s parents are more loving than Joey’s, we should acknowledge that Billy has an unfair advantage over Joey. But if Joey’s parents are more existent than Suzie’s, we should also acknowledge that Joey has some non-orphan privilege to check. Just as we should be willing to die of smoke inhalation to prevent a lady firefighter from feeling bad about not being able to carry us on her back, we should also be willing to abandon our children in order to make kids who have already been abandoned feel less socially ostracized.
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Granted, there’s a good chance that a nation full of parentless children will quickly become a hellish wasteland of sorrow and brutality that would give the zombies on “The Walking Dead” nightmares. But the important thing is that our lives would all be equally abominable, and achieving such equality would certainly make it worthwhile to duck out of the hospital right after the umbilical cord was cut.
Male-only clergy rosters and religious freedom bills are certainly enemies of equality that must be destroyed. But the sins of the Church and the bigotry of the GOP pale in comparison to the greater threat that comes from a natural world that inexplicably gives women smaller biceps than men, callously refuses to let gay couples procreate, and, above all, perpetuates unfairness by making children smarter just because their parents read them “Go Dog Go” instead of Jerry Springer transcripts. However, if we all commit to keeping our children dumb, smelly, unhealthy, untactful, and emotionally shattered, nature won’t be able to stop us from creating that glorious egalitarian paradise where no one is unfairly disadvantaged because everyone is equally miserable.
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Hans Fiene is a Lutheran pastor in Illinois and the creator of Lutheran Satire, a series of comical videos intended to teach the Lutheran faith.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY OUR COUNTRY IS IN SUCH BIG TROUBLE, READ THIS !!!

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Added The Most Reverend Rene Henry Gracida. Press backspace to remove.








Could the people running our country really be this stupid?




   

 
A DC airport ticket agent offers some examples of
'why' our country is in trouble:
 
 
 
1. I had a New
HampshireCongresswoman (Carol
Shea-Porter) ask for an aisle seat so that her hair
wouldn't get messed up by being near the window. (On an
airplane!)
 
 
 
2. I got a call from a
KansasCongressman's (Moore)
staffer (HowardBauleke), who wanted to go
to Capetown. I started to explain the
length of the flight and the passport information, and
then he interrupted me with, ''I'm not trying to make
you look stupid, but Capetown is in Massachusetts
....''
 
 
 
Without trying to make him
look stupid, I calmly explained, ''Cape Cod is in Massachusetts ,
Capetown is in Africa ''
 
his response -- click.
 
 
 
3. A senior
Vermont Congressman (Bernie Sanders)
called, furious about a Florida package we did. I asked what was
wrong with the vacation in Orlando . He said he was
expecting an ocean-view room. I tried to
explain that's not possible, since Orlando is in the
middle of the state.
 
He replied, 'don' t lie to me, I looked
on the map and Florida is a very thin state!'' (OMG)
 
 
 
4. I got a call from a
lawmaker's wife (LandraReid) who asked, ''Is it possible to see England from
Canada ?''
 
I said, ''No.''
 
She said, ''But they look so close on the map.''
(OMG, again!)
 
 
 
5. An aide for a cabinet
member(JanetNapolitano) once called and
asked if he could rent a car in Dallas . I pulled up
the reservation and noticed he had only a 1-hour
layover in Dallas . When I asked him why
he wanted to rent a car, he said, ''I heard Dallas was
a big airport, and we will need a car to drive between gates to save
time.'' (Aghhhh)
 
 
 
6. An Illinois
Congresswoman (JanSchakowsky) called last week. She needed to know how it
was possible that her flight from Detroit left at 8:30
a.m., and got to Chicago at 8:33
a.m.
 
 
 
I explained that Michigan was
an hour ahead of Illinois , but she couldn't understand
the concept of time zones. Finally, I told her the plane went fast,
and she bought that.
 
 
 
7. A New York
lawmaker, (JerroldNadler)
called and asked, ''Do airlines put your physical description on
your bag so they know whose luggage belongs to whom?'' I said, 'No,
why do you ask?'
 
He replied, ''Well, when I checked in with the
airline, they put a tag on my luggage that said (FAT), and
I' m overweight. I think that's very rude!''
 
After putting him on hold for a minute, while I
looked into it. (I was dying laughing). I came back and explained
the city code for Fresno , Ca. is (FAT -
Fresno Air Terminal), and the airline was just putting
a destination tag on his luggage.
 
 
 
8. A Senator John
Kerry aide (LindsayRoss)
called to inquire about a trip package to Hawaii .
After going over all the cost info, she asked, ''Would
it be cheaper to fly to California and then take the train to
Hawaii ?''
 
 
9. I just got off the phone with a freshman Congressman, Bobby Bright from Ala who asked, ''How do I know which plane to get on?''   I asked him what exactly he meant, to which he replied, ''I was told my flight number is 823, but none of these planes have that number on them.''       10. Senator DianneFeinstein called and said, ''I need to fly to Pepsi-Cola , Florida . Do I have to get on one of those little computer planes?''   I asked if she meant fly to Pensacola , FL on a commuter plane.   She said, ''Yeah, whatever, smarty!''       11. Mary Landrieu, La. Senator called and had a question about the documents she needed in order to fly to China . After a lengthy discussion about passports, I reminded her that she needed a visa. 'Oh, no I don't. I've been to Chinamany times and never had to have one of those.''   I double checked and sure enough, her stay required a visa. When I told her this she said, ''Look, I've been to China four times and every time they have accepted my American Express!''       12. A New Jersey Congressman (John Adler) called to make reservations, ''I want to go from Chicago to Rhino, New York .''   I was at a loss for words. Finally, I said, ''Are you sure that's the name of the town?''   'Yes, what flights do you have?'' replied the man.   After some searching, I came back with, ''I' m sorry, sir, I've looked up every airport code in the country and can' t find a rhino anywhere."   ''The man retorted, ''Oh, don' t be silly! Everyone knows where it is. Check your map!''   So I scoured a map of the state of New York and finally offered, ''You don' t mean Buffalo , do you?''   The reply? ''Whatever! I knew it was a big animal.''       Now you know why the Government is in the shape that it's in!         Could anyone be this DUMB?   YES, THEY WALK AMONG US, ARE IN POLITICS, AND THEY CONTINUE TO BREED..  



QUESTION:  COULD THE PEOPLE RUNNING OUR COUNTRY REALLY BE THIS STUPID?




THE ANSWER IS A BIG RESOUNDING "YES" THEY ARE STUPID AND THAT IS PART OF THE REASON WHY THE COUNTRY IS IN SUCH BIG TROUBLE.  THE OTHER REASON IS BECAUSE THE VOTERS ARE STUPID AND ELECT THESE PEOPLE !!!!!!!!