Benghazi

Hi my name is Don and I guess you could call me a redneck. I live in Nevada in a rural area where we live by a code of common sense. No one could survive long in the high desert without using common sense. With that said here are a few common sense items I’d like your opinion on.

Why should we care about Benghazi? Libya is a mess at this time. There are armed militia’s running around and in control of neighborhoods, not States just different blocks. Can you imagine Los Angeles with armed gangs controlling neighborhoods? Whoops wrong choice of cities, L.A. does have armed gangs controlling different areas of the city. Let’s get back to Libya, just like in Afghanistan during the Russian incursion we armed the rebels with sophisticated weapons, anti tank guns, anti aircraft missiles and so on. When the Russians left we didn’t pay attention to Afghanistan and the rebels became the Taliban who in turn allowed the little group known as Al-Qaida to build training camps for the destruction of the western world. You all remember September 11, 2001. Well in the battle to free Libya from Kaddafi’s hold we did the same thing, we armed the rebels and now have little control over what they do. Gee this is starting to sound like Syria, scary isn’t it? We never seem to learn from our mistakes in the Middle East, did we really just give Egypt F-16 fighters?

Getting back to Libya; it is imperative that we keep an eye on these armed militia’s to make sure we don’t create another Afghanistan. We need a strong hand in the area that can mentally combat these lawless groups out of fear of reprisal. What did we do when we needed a General Patton, we appointed a woman to the job of ambassador to Libya. Now let me ask you this, how much do the radical Muslims of the world respect women? She may be a wonderful choice for England, Ireland or Scotland but Libya? Am I mistaking or are women the people they stone to death for having the audacity to get raped, are these the people who are kept from an education and forced to live their lives in a Burka behind a thick veil? Are these the people that are not allowed to speak to a man unless he is a relative? Isn’t this just another great foreign affairs blunder. So now we have Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Syria very well armed in a state of anarchy and hating Americans, I’ll bet Israel is loving this especially the F-16’s flying over Egypt. The same Egypt that is now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Are you confused yet?

If you look at a map of the world Israel is surrounded by Muslin nations who have vowed to wipe her off the face of the planet. She is the size of a medium size lake here in the United States yet Israel with one move can muster more fear in the Arab world than we can, only because she doesn’t threaten, she reacts. The Arabs understand consequences and we are only as good as our reputation and lately our reputation among nations of the world isn’t so great. The attitude of cut and run we have shown for the last decade or so shows that the American people don’t have the stomach for war and the Arab world knows it. Why should we send our kids to war and then not finish what we went off to do. How many Americans have died for nothing because we have become a nation of appeasement rather than the Super Power of old. We have many who say we should keep our nose out of the world affairs rather than lead. Why when we have had the power to control the destiny of world, we cannot even control the price of oil.

Getting back to Benghazi; We cannot afford to turn away from the problems of the Middle East and hide under the table. It’s in our best interest is to stay firm on our commitments of self protection. One way we can do this is by reducing the amount of oil imported from these areas there-by reducing the income being funneled to those who threaten us. We see what appeasement has done in North Korea. Their military is equipped with Nukes and now rockets with the ability to hit our soil. In decades past the C.I.A. would just do a covert hit on a subject and that would be the end of it. Congress took away that power years ago and now only the President with the use of drones has that ability but only for smalltime terrorists. With so many failures in foreign policy over the years it’s hard to stay on topic. Our goal should be first and foremost the protection of our citizens and our way of life. To do either we have to maintain our right to the title of Super Power, just a few years ago we were the one and only Super Power left standing now we are in a race with China to see who will control the world monetary fund. As China builds its military to Super Power status we are reducing ours to that of the European nations, and do you think Russia is idly standing by? God help us.

That’s just my thoughts, what are yours?

Debt or Deficit it's all bad

Hi my name is Don and I guess you could call me a redneck. I live in Nevada in a rural area where we live by a code of common sense. No one could survive long in the high desert without using common sense. With that said here are a few common sense items I’d like your opinion on.

Simple math for my simple mind.  We all have heard about the national debt and the national deficit, what is the difference between them?  First of all the deficit is the difference between the amount of money we are spending compared to the amount of revenue we have coming in.  A good personal example is: if you have a net monthly income of $1,000.  And you have rent of $500 a car payment of $350 and a grocery bill of $350 you have a deficit of $200 per month.  The only way you get by is to put the groceries on a credit card and go in deeper debt each month.  Now you have to add the amount of the payment on the credit card and the interest you are paying, this will increase your deficit each month.  To figure the debt that you owe you would have to take into account the deficit from the previous years and add it to the amount you are spending today.  The government has been doing this for years and has amassed a debt of $17,000,000,000,000. that’s trillion.  If we had to pay this today it would mean that every person including babies would have to pay over $55,700  each.  This is figured at the level of people in America today at 305,000,000 souls.   When you figure out that only a very small percentage of the citizens pay the biggest portion of taxes that it will require to pay this debt down, it becomes an impossible task.  The easiest way to improve is to increase revenue through increased taxable income via less unemployment.  This happens when you make it easier for business to increase revenue by reducing the amount of regulation and tax burden.  This creates more jobs and increases the amount of revenue the government takes in, a point both Kennedy and Reagan proved during their administrations.  We are not doing this, this administration believes that if we just increase the taxes on those who create jobs it will take care of itself.  WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.  All this is doing is slowing our economic recovery.  Right now businesses are trying to figure out how they are going to maintain the level of employment they have at present, not how they are going to increase jobs.  The regulations in Obama-care alone are making companies consider moving some of their people to part time positions.  

I was told the other day by email that the reason people are not making more comments on this blog is that they don’t want their identity noted.  This is easy to get around, you can type your comment at the end of each article and then choose anonymous if you want, all that it will require is that you type the code in the box provided and hit publish.  I would appreciate just a first name and city added to your comments.  Every day our readership has increased and it would be nice to know what your thoughts are.

That’s my thoughts, what are yours?

What have we done?

Hi my name is Don and I guess you could call me a redneck. I live in Nevada in a rural area where we live by a code of common sense. No one could survive long in the high desert without using common sense. With that said here are a few common sense items I’d like your opinion on.

A friend of mine reminded me of a novel I read years ago and how fitting it is in today’s environment.  The book was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in which she created Galt’s Gulch.  In the book it was a fictional place in the United States where the rich just closed their business’s and walked away to get away from overregulation and punishing taxes, in real time it is called Cafayate  (Google it) an upscale place in Argentina.  You would be surprised at the number of middle class and wealthy Americans who are expatriating every day and taking their life savings and families with them.  Others are heading to Uruguay, Panama, Singapore and Norway, this exodus has been brought on by the unrelenting effort of this government to punish success and profit in this country.  The amount of regulation being produced daily is staggering for small business, just in Obama Care itself there are now 20,000 pages of regulation and more coming.  Not one of our elected officials produced these regulations they come from an overzealous office of paid regulators in our government whose job it is to make sure they have job security.  What small to medium business person can keep up with these changes?  I want to personally thank all you Legislators and the Supreme Court who voted for Obama Care without knowing what it would do to our industry.  Just like Pelosi said, why study the bill we have to vote it in to see what’s in it.  Well you did and now we have to live in this nightmare.  As companies reduce their labor force to part time (32 hours) in order to survive this malaise maybe you can lend a hand to help us get by. 

When I grew up in Seattle it was a beautiful place to live and raise children.  We didn’t have a lot of crime and our government was unobtrusive, just there to protect and serve.  Taxes weren’t a subject of concern in fact we had Tax Tokens which were valued at somewhere around a quarter of a cent.  Not all residential streets were paved but people who lived on those streets survived and lived happily.  In the late sixties after building and taxing themselves to death many from California found refuge in the great northwest and set out to cover it with concrete and asphalt just like home, now they have one of the highest sales taxes in the country.  In the beginning if you were to ask one of the transplants why they came to Washington their answer would have been to get away from high taxes, ironic isn’t it?  The beauty of liberalism is that it takes a generation to feel the pain; I wonder what our kids are going to be feeling in a few years?

I try not to be a downer, but if we don’t get a handle on this debt and deficit our kids are going inherit whole different country than we inherited.  We were entrusted with a great America handed over by even greater Americans who fought and died to give freedom a chance, how proud can we be of what we’ve done with that trust?

That’s my opinion, what’s yours?