American Values vs Middle East Refugees

Recently some have questioned what exactly are American values. . American values are based in our founding documents; there is probably not an American that at one time has not said "this is a free country". We are also a country of indivual rights; that all men are created equal (endowed with rights that can not be taken away by a government). We are a country of laws, not men and of course what has been coined the Protestant work ethic; in our free country self generated hard work, discipline, frugality and delayed gratification is the key to success and godliness. Like any moral code we often fall short, but as long as we strive toward such lofty goals, we will continue to get closer.

The vast majority of those coming from middle east countries are not immigrants; they are refugees, with no desire to assimilate into American jurisprudence . When the Syrian and Libyan refugees (most are military aged men that don't want to be forced into service with ISIS) are questioned, about a quarter back the mission of ISIS and over 95% prefer Sharia law over the American Criminal Justice system. Many of these refugees, when they settle in non-Muslim countries want to live in segregated communities ruled by Sharia law, and while other countries are welcome to do what they want, this is not possible in America, as it is in direct contradiction to the Constitution and our system of Criminal Justice. Further. "these seven nations were not chosen at random. They were all singled out as exceptional security risks in the Terrorist Prevention Act of 2015 and its 2016 extension. In fact, President Trump’s order does not even name the seven countries. It merely refers to the sections of U.S. Code that were changed by the Terrorist Prevention Act". The fact is there is a reason these countries were named as provocateurs of terrorism and just becasue they have not yet murdered anyone in the US yet, does not mean the terrorists from these countries have not wreaked havoc and murdered in other countries. And while some have questioned the nature of the roll out of President Trumps "extreme vetting", US intelligence, ICE and Homeland Security have said that this type vetting has been too long over due.

Speaking of Criminal Justice, there is nothing that President Trump has done that is in any way illegal. It was Obama that continually talked with contempt about the Constitutional restrictions of the Executive Branch, including the separation of powers. The reason President Trump can so easily strike down the legacy of Obama is becasue he never used the rule of law to create his policies, rather he attempted to rule by fiat with Executive Actions; and what was created by Presidential decree, can just as easily be revoked by Presidential decree. As a matter of fact, much of what President Trump has done is to demand by EA that currently laws be enforced, rather than be ignored as was done by Obama's EA. Yet you have Democrats that will insist that any policy they don't like must be illegal, and even more absurd, that the enforcement of current law is unconstitutional; you just can't make stuff like this up! No one would believe such things would occur in the real world (until it does).

Hobby Lobby and the Scripted Lies of the Left

Well it's apparent the misinformation and lies were scripted before the Hobby Lobby case was decided. Starting with Sandra Fluke and followed by the main stream press, the line is

Sandra Fluke @SandraFluke

Supreme Court rules that bosses can deny employees coverage of birth control. #HobbyLobby #NotMyBossBusiness

The truth is something entirely different so one has to ask as I read on the internet, is Sandra Fluke clueless or lying. I also see that Ms Fluke is running for the California State Senate; well she seems to have past the test of telling a bald face lie to vilify those who's world view differ from her world view.

Here is a typical letter where it reader has to wonder if the writer is a lying or clueless. From the Santa Cruz Sentinel;


Court ruling just lines pockets of corporations
July 4 is "Independence Day". July 11 is "World Population Day". There are over 7 billion people on Earth. Our species is facing drought, extreme weather, ocean acidification and extinctions, because we have over bred. The Hobby Lobby ruling by misogynist judges, on June 30 just annexed all "USDA" fertile female wombs for corporate profits. Stabilizing our human population requires that all females on Earth have access to birth control.
Future generations ought to know what it's like to live on a healthy planet, but at the rate human population is exploding we'll be passing on a dead future. Birth control pills are listing online from $37 to $162 per month if purchased without insurance. The Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling just made all fertile female wombs in the USA into a cash register for corporate profits. Rescind Citizen's United now and remove justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito from the Supreme Court Bench.
— Connie Troupe, Aptos
and my response, 

Apparently someone has been drinking the Sandra Fluke koolaid. Let see if I can set the record straight; Hobby Lobby never protested paying for women's contraceptives (defined as inhibiting ovulation and fertilization); if Hobby Lobby has always agreed to pay for contraceptive birth control pills, why check the internet for retail prices? What Hobby Lobby didn't want to pay for are 4 out of the 24 FDA approved birth control pills or devices (refereed to as "emergency contraception"; which as I explained is a misnomer) that work by blocking a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus; ie aborting a fertilized egg after contraception. Also, the ruling was so narrow that even if it had blocked the use of all birth control by other "closely held corporations", it would have no real effect on availability of employer paid for birth control; so the apparatus needed to reduce the useless eaters of the world is safe. Hobby Lobby actually won the case based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), championed by the Democrats and signed into law by Clinton in 1993; it was written to allow American Indians to smoke Peyote. There is a simple solution for the pro abortion alarmists and the Hobby Lobby case; all that needs be done is Obama change the law (something he was already done many times already), to allow these handful of closely held corporations to be treated like the non-profits already exempted under the Religious Employer Exemption (REE). In these cases a third-party administrator (TPA) pays for the birth control exempted by non-profit religious organizations.

I am also curious how it came to be that quality healthcare is defined by birth control and any company wanting an exemption is immediately tagged misogynic. It should be noted that over half the adult population of the US define themselves as pro-life, believing that life begins at conception. Rather than being misogynic, the pro-life crowd belief that an optional abortion is no different than the after-birth abortions championed by medical ethicist and population alarmists. The real issue here seems to be left's refusal to acknowledge that those that take a pro-life stand believe in every fiber of their being that an abortion is killing a fully alive baby. Instead, it has been my observations that when the left plays the racist or misogynic card, it's the sound of someone with nothing intelligent to say on the subject..

The Democrats Problem with Obama's New Deal

What is  becoming more and more difficult is the Democrat left differentiating Obama's policies and Bush (43's) legacy. There is practically no Bush policy that candidate Obama ran against, that he has not now embraced (with the exception of an official policy allowing toture).  The liberal bloggers that blame conservatives for the concentration of wealth, and the middle class losing ground seem to have forgotten that it is now year 5 of President Obama's policies. Even the liberal Mother Jones has to question what happened to the Obama promises From Guantanamo to Limitless War, Obama's Failure to Live Up to His Own Five Commandments

Below is a portion of a post from a liberal blogger (WS) that is almost comical in it's hubris that they are not describing their own President.
(WS)  Modern conservatives have much in common with Fascism, they are for a strong military police type state where everyone is monitored and controlled as well as concentrating power and wealth at the top. Republicans championed the Patriot Act and are responsible for reducing many of Americans personal freedoms. Income disparity is a direct result of conservatives deregulating the financial markets and weakening unions.*

As far as fascism, very few understood what candidate Obama meant when he called for a “civilian national security force being just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded as the U.S. military"; we now know it was his intention to expand Homeland Security as a federal police force. While Bush may have championed the Patriot act, the vote in 2001 and the subsequent reauthorizations under President Obama; the Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and the Patriot Sunsets Extension Act of 2011 all received bipartisan approval with a majority of both parties. Then you have President Obama signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens and self derived power allowing his killing of an American citizen overseas, who are deemed terrorist without due process along with non-American citizens (he says has a list where he personally gives a gladiatorial contest thumbs down when the drone has the victim in it's sight ; and now the lawyer that wrote the law brief saying it is legal to kill American citizen terrorists has been nominated by Obama to a federal appellate court. You may remember how Obama castigated Bush and the Iraq war for invading a country and overthrowing it's leadership when the country did not constitute a national security threat, yet now Obama has been part and parcel of the overthrow of Libya, Egypt and the attempted overthrow of Syria; all three not approaching anything close to a national security threat and are now more unstable and dangerous than before.

*(continued) Make no mistake about it as discontent grows there will be a correction just as there was after the great depression which ushered in several decades of progressive power including the New Deal policies that benefit working people to this day.

Is this really the correction the Democrats are championing? Do you really think that President Obama is offering the American people anything that reeks of a new Deal? FDR put people to work, Obama has lowered unemployment by discouraged workers dropping out of  the labor force; FDR built and re-build the national infrastructure; the Obama Stimulus couldn't find any shovel ready jobs (which Obama later admitted never existed to begin with). And while the President wants universal healthcare, all that has happened is millions of cancelled heathcare policies and new policies that have less coverage and are more expensive. And then there is promise about keeping your  health-plan and /or doctor if you like both or either;  funny, I don't remember FDR lying to the American people when he was championing the New Deal.

The Truth will Stop Liberalism

There is a truism that says if you want to make a conservative mad, tell a lie; if you want to make liberal mad; tell the truth. We are now seeing this truism play out, and in this case it's the truth about the lies that are fundamental to liberalism. "You can keep your plan if you like it." Nine words that has stopped President Obama and liberalism in it's tracks. It is well known that most Americans did not like President Obama's policies, but the left leaning main street media was so overboard in it's villainization of the Bush administration, that the people voted for hope and change. And even though the President proceeded to go back on practically every promise he made, he was somehow insulated from theses policies and the American people by in large still trusted Obama. Liberals exist on misplaced trust, so when the average Americans personally felt the pain and experienced the loss of their own health Insurance, and it became clear Obama and the Democrats in Congress had knowingly lied about ObamaCare, they finally realized they had been scammed. And with trust gone, the hubris of liberalism is laid bare for all to see.

The Abuse of Presidental Power

 Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. President Obama's Dragnet; another truism is the bigger government grows the more corrupt it will become.

Recent conservatives have likened the Democrat's  use of the IRS to attack conservatives and the general loss of privacy due to warrantless wiretaps, detaining people,  reading people's emails and now the large scale monitoring of phone calls to a Banana Republic in the way way the leadership is using government agencies that are mandated to be apolitical, to attack it's political enemies. Added to this is the socialist the concept of the Infallibility of Government, meaning demanding a blind belief of all information and explanations by the government and the suppression of any anti-government rhetoric in the name of stability and national security; in other words it is illegal to speak up against the government and it's policies, because the government must  necessarily be always right to rule.

Is the US becoming a Banana Republic? The first clue should have been President Obama's inability to follow through with any promises made by candidate Obama. Candidate Obama's  platform wanted to protect whistleblowers and empower them as “watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance.” President Obama now engages in  self-serving leaks, and aggressive prosecution of the whistleblowers, which he determines are harmful to his administration (the Obama Administration also leads the Bush Administration 2 to 1 in turning down FIOA (Freedom of Information Act) requests; this political screening has also cropped in the IRS and who gets tax exempt status; since the Supreme Court decision on Corporate personhood  Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010),  President Obama (after personally chastising the Supreme Court during his State of the Union address) and Democrats in congress have directed the IRS to scrutinize the tax free status requests of  conservative groups.* Then there was the pending Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) extension vote; "Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies." FISA also contained the "warrantless wiretaps, detaining people, and  reading people's emails, which Obama promised, "Under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants". Obama signed the FISA extension unchanged.

 * "...Max Baucus, Chairman of the Finance Committee, is leading the investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups but he is one of the Democrats who insisted they be scrutinized in the first place. He wrote a letter to then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman dated September 28, 2010 urging the IRS to investigative nonprofit conservative groups during the Tea Party-dominated 2010 midterm elections...In February 2012, Sen. Chuck Schumer D-N.Y., together with Sens. Al Franken, D-Minn., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Sheldon Whitehouse. D-R.I., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Tom Udall D-N.M.wrote a letter to the IRS Commissioner asking for an investigation of all these “social welfare organizations. Democrats Told IRS To Scrutinize Conservative Groups

In the final analysis it seems President Obama is telling us to judge him by what he promises, not by what he does. A Banana Republic? no. The Road to Serfdom? yes (and a must read!)

2nd Amendment for Muskets?

The following is a couple of responses to the Santa Cruz Sentinel blog on Gun Control. The first addressed the belief by some that our founding fathers would have drawn the line at muskets.  

When the Second Amendment was crafted, our Founding Fathers had no idea how guns would evolve over the next two centuries. They were under the belief that Americans should have the right to bear muskets! Not automatic weapons. The Obama administration should keep that in mind as they decide new guidelines on what guns Americans should legally be able to possess. William Wright, Santa Cruz

William Wright, yours is an opinion that usually comes from ignorance of the Constitution. Believe it or not the founding fathers believed that every American was in charge of his own life; and to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, if it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg..it is of no concern. The only time Americans were expected to come together was as an armed militia when "the security of a free state" was in jeopardy. Therefore "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," by the state, as it may be the the state itself that is threatening the existence of the free state; our forefathers did not trust government. The type of weapon was to be a contemporary military grade weapon; as a matter of fact the idea that one militia member with an assault weapon could be more deadly than a platoon with muskets would have been welcome when we were fighting the British; they had already learned that couple regiments of rifleman could destroy three or four regiments of Tories with muskets; the rifle was pretty much the assault weapon of the day.. However firearm innovation did not stop with rifles.100 years later the Henry rifle, "gave a single man the firepower of a dozen marksmen armed with muzzle-loading muskets." There is little doubt that a 150 year old Henry rifle would give a modern semi-automatic assault weapon a run for it's money. So no William, our Founding Fathers did not write the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution under the belief that Americans should have the right to bear muskets. Our Founding Fathers wrote the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution under the belief that the Americans citizen should be able to repel an army to preserve the Constitution itself using whatever contemporary firearm that would be available at the time to accomplish that goal.

The second was a response from a very inarticulate liberal, with their typical emotional response, but he did hit on some points the "holier than thou" liberal tend to bring up..The writer, Jack Hoff (apparently his name and self description) was responding to a Mike Marketello who wrote, "I'll take it slow and in steps so you can follow along. Yes, we do have police, and we do have a great 911 system. It is your contention that nobody needs a gun, the correct response being not to protect yourself from violence, but to dial 911 and wait for the police to show up and protect you?  Well Jack, we have police, we have 911, give it your best shot and explain to the folks here why we still have crime? I mean we have the cops and 911, nobody need be a victim it's 2013, so why do you suppose people choose to be a victim of crime instead of just dialing 911.
The forum excitedly waits your reply, it should be a good laugh."

Heh Mike, that is why we have 911 and a police dept. Get a grip pal, this is 2013 not 1774!
Gun owners==kooks!

Mike Marketello: 99% of gun owners are so called "hunters". Can't wait to play "dress up" in camo clothing, get together with a bunch of their drinkin' "BUDDIES", and go out and destroy a living animal. Let's not forget the high power scope so the animal can be shot from 200 yards away! I'd rather spend the weekend with my girlfriend.....however, I'm a straight male.
All hunters are cowards! I learned karate and earned my black belt over 30 years ago.
A real man can defend himself without a gun. P***ies are gun owners!
Get off you lazy asses and take a self defense class.
Oh, and I love how hunters carry their "weapons" on the gun rack in their rear pick-em-up
window! Like I'm a real man because I have rifles in my truck window. Jack Hoff

 Jack Hoff, you sound like a typical liberal, if the facts don't fit your world view, just make them up as you go along; 99% of gun owners are hunters? really? The reality of course is your world view is shared by very few, but your right to share them came at the barrel of a gun. Perhaps you've haven't noticed but we live in dangerous times. I am a retired Police Officer and I can tell you that 99% of the time we arrive after the fact and help clean up. Having a firearm simply gives you one more option,"If you have a gun you can decide if it's necessary to use it; if you don't have a gun that is not a decision you will be able to make." Also there has never been any correlation between gun ownership and violent crime (Britain has more violent crime per capita than the US). Yes, the US has a much higher murder rate, but subtract the gang members killing each other and suicides, the number drops considerably (these are two areas where the killings and death would still occur with or without firearms). Oh, and carrying firearms in the back window of a pickup is to be lawful; when transporting a firearm it must be unloaded and either somewhere beyond reach (ie a trunk) or in full view and most gun owners don't want their firearms rattling about in the beds or their truck. BTW, I think you parents named you right.

The Seasonal-ship of Liberal Civility

The following was printed in the Santa Cruz Sentential on 1.22.2011. What I was astounded by was the wanton hate speech included and the willingness to use the tragedy of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shooting by the writer; this after all the press and the Presidents plea to stop "the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness...” Why is it the Democrats only concern themselves with vitriol when the Republicans are doing well? All one has to do is remember back 10 short years and the hate and violent death vitriol the left used against George Bush and Sarah Palin. Apparently any discussion of giving it a rest, at least until we bury our dead is falling on liberal deaf ears.

Get a handle on guns

After seeing the picture of a bald-headed Jared Loughner, my first impression was "he's crazy like a fox." More finger pointing, no, just getting at the truth of what led Jared Loughner on his shooting spree of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others. Things were out of focus in the initial stages of the shooting, but if you dig a little and piece all together, it's right in front of you in black and white. Jared Loughner was an echo chamber with a fascination for the tenets of extremist right-wing groups. Loughner had an anti-government ideology that was constantly being reinforced by the anti-government voices of the Tea Party, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and "Momma Grizzly" Sarah Palin. It was easy for him to act out his fantasies and murderous rage in the toxic stew of Arizona. And it was easy for him to buy a Glock 19, with inordinate killing power; the rest is history. Americans have short attention spans, preferring not to remember wanton killings now being witnessed regularly. Thus, we are re-living them over and over again, and will continue to do so until we get a handle on guns and the people who misuse them.

Ron Lowe, Santa Cruz

Please note my reply was not intended in any way to make light of the horror and heart break that occurred as a result of shootings in Tucson. This reply is designed solely to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the likes of Ron Lowe and a mind so closed to civility and truthfulness, that his only reality appear to be partisanship.

My reply, Okay Ron Lowe, you got us. Yes, Jared Loughner is a member of the Teaparty, deep under cover of course. His plan was to act like an anarchist and then assassinate a political figure (like that’s never happened before) and blame it on the left (crazy like a fox). But Ron I gots to know, what was our mistake? How did you catch on? Even his friends pegged him as an apolitical dope smoking mental case slipping slowly into his paranoid delusions. But as you said it was “right in front of you in black and white.” Loughner was obviously a closet Constitutionalists, as everyone knows there is no difference between the limited government our founding fathers envisioned and wrote into the Constitution and Loughner’s anti-government ideology that is based on the writings of Marx and Hitler. And we would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you and those kids!