Below, you’ll see the cover of this week’s TIME magazine.

I’m sure everyone pictured on the cover are decent, hardworking folks who only want the best for themselves and their families.

But they are NOT Americans, unless they mean they are Central Americans or South Americans.

They are not undocumented workers. They are not economic refugees.

They are criminal aliens who have no respect for American law.

The cover, of course, is TIME’s response to Our Dear Leader’s proclamation that effectively offers amnesty to a million or more illegals who were brought here as children. It is a slap in the face to every young American and to every young person who is here legally. With the economy still swirling around the toilet, Obama just effectively told young Americans and legal immigrants, “Sucks to be you, but my political future is far more important than your economic or social stability. You’ll just have to get used to all the criminal invaders driving down wages and taking jobs that should have been yours.”

Honestly, I do feel badly for the young illegals. They were burdened with parents who put them in a terrible position by bringing them illegally to a place they should not be. But my feelings do not change the facts.

Criminal invaders calling themselves Americans is an insult to every immigrant who waited their turn and came here legally, my father included.

If  TIME is willing to accept that those people on the cover are Americans, *Just not legally, then surely they’ll support me in my contention that I’m a retired billionaire, *Just not legally, and cut me a check to make it true.

Hey, if the scam works for them, why can’t it work for me?

So…what are you, *Just not legally?

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Why does the left want to silence Rush Limbaugh?

Rush Limbaugh

Is Rush exposing truths that Media Matters and NOW don’t want you to hear?

Do they believe they are the only ones who should have a voice in American culture and politics?

What, exactly, are they afraid of? Their own irrelevancy?

And why isn’t media at all levels barbecuing them for attempting to force him off the air? After all, if NBC or The New York Times or any media outlet happens to take a position the left doesn’t like, they could be next.

I suppose we should not be surprised at this new left-wing campaign to censor speech they don’t like. It’s the way they have always done things. Just try to advance certain conservative arguments on many college campuses, for example, and you’ll find yourself accused of hate speech, or worse.

If Media Matters and NOW and the rest of the loony left really want to smack down Limbaugh, they should do so with facts, on the air. Start and support their own radio shows, maybe even their own nationwide network where they can present their case and make their arguments and…oh, right. Air America. Nobody listened. Didn’t they file for bankruptcy a couple of years ago?

Hmmm…liberal talk radio goes bankrupt…Limbaugh makes millions every year…now I  get it.

They’re jealous.

How sad.

Why do you think the left is going after Rush Limbaugh?

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19th century humorist Mark Twain helped popularize the now, oft heard observation, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

In 21st century America, we’ve come to expect the first two from our “leaders” to the point where if they open their mouths, we expect a lie or a damned lie, as if they are simply incapable of telling the truth about anything. The one refreshing exception to that rule has always been Congressman Ron Paul. But today, I want to focus on the third lie — statistics.

I was always very good at math, so it was not much of a surprise to me to find, as I matured and began paying attention to life, that it was not just politicians who use statistics to lie or to obfuscate the truth. Drug companies, for example, do it all the time and news outlets willingly help them.

It works like this. Drug Company runs tests on a new drug. The results are in and reports and press releases written indicate, truthfully, a 50% reduction in the death rate from whatever it is the drug is supposed to treat. Wow! Think of the lives saved and it only costs $10,000 a year per person treated!

But if you look behind the curtain, at the actual numbers, you discover that the death rate from the condition was 2 per 100,000 people per year. A 50% reduction means that if we treat 100,000 people with the condition, one less will die. 100,000 people will have to take a drug, and suffer whatever side effects accompany it, at a cost of one billion dollars to save that one life.

Do you think that is a good way to spend a billion health care dollars?

Statistics are also a favorite of those in government who are bound by law to issue reports. Take the “unemployment” statistics. Our Dear Leader and his henchmen have been touting the “good news” that the Unemployment Rate has fallen to 8.3%. But what does that mean?

It means that the number of Americans who are actively looking for work stands at 8.3%. But if you’ve given up looking for work, you are no longer considered unemployed and so you are not counted. Neat trick, eh? Of course, they have to report the number who have given up, too, but that’s easy to bury in a 448-page report, like the one issued by the White House yesterday, that most mainstream reporters and news writers will never read.

White House economic report hides sharp drop in number of working Americans

White House officials are trying to downplay the growing political damage caused by a shrinking federal statistic: the percentage of working-age Americans who actually have jobs.

The increasingly visible statistic shows that roughly 11 million working-age Americans are being excluded from the nation’s formal tally of 13.75 million unemployed Americans.

A security guard allows groups of people waiting in long lines into the unemployment office on Summit Ave. in Jersey City in November 2009. Two-plus years later, are the lines any shorter?

Today’s 2012 Economic Report of the President attempts to bury the statistic in a 448-page blizzard of statistics, jargon and reassuring comparisons. “In the last 23 months, businesses have created 3.7 million jobs,” says the upbeat report, released at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Democrats are touting downward ticks of the formal unemployment rate to 8.3 percent, but Republicans are making an increased effort to highlight the painfully low employment participation rate.

A new chart produced by the Republican Study Committee shows the downward jumps of that job-participation rate, even after President Barack Obama deployed his trillion-dollar stimulus in February 2009, and after Obama declared the summer of 2010 a “Recovery Summer.”

Click Here to read the rest of the story.

So what is the real rate of unemployment, the “out of work” rate? Let’s do some math.

13.75 million unemployed + 11 million ‘given ups’ = 24.75 million out of work.

A quick ratio will give us the out-of-work rate.

8.3% unemployed / 13.75 million = X% not working / 24.75 million

Do the math and solve for X and we find that 14.94% of Americans are out of work. No wonder the White House doesn’t want Americans to know that number. Nearly one out of every six American workers isn’t working! Some say the number could be even higher.

And all that is despite the trillions of dollars that have been wasted on “stimulus” programs many of us said from the beginning would not work any better for Obama than it did for Franklin Roosevelt or for Japan last century.

If the math didn’t make your eyes glaze over and you’re still reading, please share with your Obot friends the real numbers, the numbers The Smartest President Ever^® doesn’t want them to know about.

So, did you already know the truth about the out-of-work rate?

How many folks do you know who have given up looking?

And what do you think we, as a nation, can do to make a real difference and get folks back to work at meaningful, private sector jobs?

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Comments welcome.
Which are your favorites?
Enjoy!

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The following was one of the “Surprising insights from the social sciences” that appeared in The Boston Globe’s Uncommon Knowledge section yesterday.

Conservative disgust, liberal delight

One of the holy grails of social science is to explain the emotion behind different political beliefs. In a new study, researchers at the University of Nebraska found that conservatives exhibited stronger physiological reactions to, and were quicker to look at and then looked longer at, disagreeable images (e.g., spider on a man’s face, open wound with maggots in it, crowd fighting with a man, politician of the opposite party), whereas liberals exhibited stronger reactions to agreeable images (e.g., happy child, bowl of fruit, cute rabbit, politician of the same party). In other words, conservatives are easily appalled; liberals are easily enchanted.

Dodd, M. et al., “The Political Left Rolls with the Good and the Political Right Confronts the Bad: Connecting Physiology and Cognition to Preferences,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences (March 5, 2012).

When you finished reading that short piece, did you come away with the feeling it was meant to convey something like conservatives bad, liberals good? I did.

The conclusion — conservatives are easily appalled; liberals are easily enchanted — is quite correct, but I think there is more to the story than that simple summation. The title of the study — The Political Left Rolls with the Good and the Political Right Confronts the Bad — makes that clear.

What I take from the little information provided in the piece, and the study title, is that conservatives are more willing to face the realities of life, with all the unpleasantness, and want to do something to solve the problems while liberals are unwilling to face anything that contradicts or belies their idealistic fantasy of what life should be like and prefer to do only that which makes themselves, and others, feel good regardless of whether or not it solves the problem or makes it worse.

Too bad liberals are not easily enchanted by reality as well as bunnies and fruit. Perhaps if they were, we could  stop applying Band-Aids to the nation’s problems and start implementing real solutions.

What’s your take on this?

Do you think the author’s summation is correct? Are conservatives easily appalled while liberals are easily enchanted?

Do you think my conclusion about it all is on target or off-base?

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Congratulations to this week’s Comment Contest winner — Gloria Meyer.

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Why are so many liberals and Democrats so vehemently opposed to states requiring government issued photo identification, like a driver’s license, in order to vote?

A still from the video below.

They claim it would present too much of a burden for minority citizens and would discourage them from voting. And they are correct!

Of course, they don’t mean minorities who are poor or black or brown. No, they mean the minority of voters who are dead, for requiring a dead person to show an ID when he or she shows up at the polls to vote would surely be an almost insurmountable burden.

What? Dead people can’t vote? I beg to differ. Dead people have been voting for generations.

Watch this video from conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas, shot during this week’s primary election in New Hampshire, a state that does not require photo identification to vote.

The video runs for ten minutes, but you’ll get the idea pretty quickly.

If you watched the whole thing, you saw a couple of guys repeatedly asking if someone’s name was on the voter list and being handed ballots. Even when they offered to get ID, the poll workers told them it wasn’t necessary.

Those guys could have voted many times in that election. They did not, of course, using the excuse they wanted to show their ID that was in their car to leave the polling place. But if they had been trying to game the system, they could have done so repeatedly.

I most enjoyed the poll worker at the end who was explaining how the state scours death notices and removes the dead from the voter rolls, though he does qualify his declarations.

Because of the video, the New Hampshire Attorney General has launched a probe according to this story from the Manchester Union Leader.

In the news article, Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas and  Nashua City Clerk Paul Bergeron are quoted as calling for the arrest of “people who pull stunts like this.” One has to wonder why they are not thankful someone exposed the Mount Washington-sized hole in their election procedures. One might also wonder if dead people had been voting in past elections in their towns. And for whom.

I’ve looked at this from every angle I can think of and the only reason I can come up with for opposing photo identification to vote is voter fraud — other people voting in place of the dead and invalid.

What did you think of the video and the news story?

Should the investigators be arrested?

And what does it mean to you that only Democrats seem to be opposed to requiring photo IDs to vote?

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I am not a Mitt Romney supporter, but when he got into trouble for saying “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” a sentence that was taken out of context, I found myself agreeing with his sentiment. I knew what I wanted to say in support of his statement and began looking for examples to use. Almost immediately, I found an excellent column on the subject by Ann Coulter, which saved me the work of looking up examples since she did such a fine job, so thanks Ann!

Who wouldn’t enjoy firing these people?

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney got into trouble for saying, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” To comprehend why the political class reacted as if Romney had just praised Hitler, you must understand that his critics live in a world in which no one can ever be fired — a world known as “the government.”

Ann Coulter defends Mitt Romney in her current column.

(And a tip for you Washington types: Just because a person became rich without working for government doesn’t mean he is “Wall Street.” A venture capital firm in Boston that tries to rescue businesses headed for bankruptcy, for example, is not “Wall Street.”)

Romney’s statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. (By the way, arrows to the heart are not covered by Obamacare.)

Talking about insurance providers, he said:

I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.

Obamacare, you will recall, will be administered by the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will operate under the same self-paced, self-evaluated work rules that have made government offices the envy of efficiency specialists everywhere.

And no one will be able to fire them — unless they’re caught doing something truly vile and criminal, such as stealing from patients in nursing homes.

Oops, I take that back: Government employees who rob the elderly also can’t be fired.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that, after a spate of burglaries at a veterans’ hospital in California several years ago, authorities set up video cameras to catch the perpetrators. In short order, nurse’s aide Linda Riccitelli was videotaped sneaking into the room of 93-year-old Raymond Germain as he slept, sticking her hand into his dresser drawer and stealing the bait money that had been left there.

Riccitelli was fired and a burglary prosecution initiated. A few years later, the California Personnel Board rescinded her firing and awarded her three years’ back pay. The board dismissed the videotape of Riccitelli stealing the money as “circumstantial.” (The criminal prosecution was also dropped after Germain died.)

But surely we’ll be able to fire a government employee who commits a physical assault on a mentally disturbed patient? No, wrong again.

Click Here to read the rest of the column.

Romneycare has been a disaster for Massachusetts. To cover My wife and I, our annual premium jumped from $8812.08 in 2006, the year R0mneycare was enacted,  to $13,231.68 in 2007 and it’s been skyrocketing ever since. Had we not stepped down many levels of coverage over the years from the excellent, affordable plan we had before Romneycare, our annual premium would be near $30,000!

Despite all that, I did have the option of “firing” Blue Cross and moving to other insurance companies to save money. Of course, the coverage would have been worse and premiums not much less, but we do have the choice. But even that choice won’t exist once Obamacare kicks in.

Government at all levels has grown far too large and far too powerful. It’s our own fault, of course, since the collective “we” kept giving power to people who promised to give us stuff for free and keep it up forever. But eventually, pipe-dreams end and we wake up. Some of us have been awake for decades, some for years, and some are just beginning to open their eyes. But far too many continue to snore away, believing the warm blanket of government will cover them forever.

Coulter’s column helps belie that fantasy. Of course, the people who most need to read it will not.

What do you think of Romney’s statement?

What do you think of Coulter’s column?

Do you like having the option to fire people?

Or do you think we’d all be better off with no choices?

And if you could fire up to ten people in government at any level, who would get the boot?

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I found this editorial cartoon in my morning paper, today.

The author, Tom Toles, is a cheerleader for the left, so it’s no surprise he would pen a propaganda piece that attempts to blame Republicans for delaying or preventing the passage of so much legislation last year. But there are a couple of things wrong with this ‘toon and his assumptions.

First, and most obvious to those of us who are not blinded by ideology, is his assumption that it was those on the right who were to blame because they would not agree to what the left wanted. But can’t the left be equally blamed for not agreeing to what those on the right wanted? After all, politics is a two-way street, except in the minds of ideologues.

Toles and his ilk start from the position that whatever the left proposes is good for America and her people. To that fantasy, I’d ask how all those trillions in stimulus money our children and grandchildren will have to pay back have done so far? Or aren’t we supposed to peek behind that particular curtain?

The second, and perhaps more important wrong-headed assumption Toles makes is that doing something is better than doing nothing. If the aforementioned stimulus debacle taught us anything, it is that government meddling in the marketplace only makes the good bad and the bad worse. Some of us already knew that, having looked back at the previous century, when Roosevelt’s ‘stimulus’ meddling turned an economic downturn into the Great Depression. On the other hand, reducing government involvement in the the economy, as Reagan did in the ’80s, started an unprecedented period of prosperity in America.

What I find most funny about Toles’ cartoon is the text at the bottom right: Tricking voters is not nothing.

You’re right, Tom. Tricking voters is not nothing. It’s what your sad offering attempts to do and it’s contemptible. Perhaps one day, you’ll realize that, step off the Obot Express, and apologize to your readers.

What do you folks think about this?

Am I off-base here? Is Toles implication that Republicans are to blame for the state of the nation correct?

And if you met him on the street, what would you like to say to him?

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It’s really not his fault.

The weak Presidency, the floundering economy with its trillions wasted, the international diplomacy faux pas, the socialist agenda, the Keystone Cops-like Justice Department, all of it. We really can’t blame him for any of it.

After all, we, the American people (and perhaps a few illegals and dead folks here and there) chose to elect a hope and a dream, an image, a soundbite, a man with no experience doing or managing anything, a man whose world-view had been repeatedly discredited over the past century, a man who wasn’t the incessantly-media-vilified George Bush.

That’s why none of it is his fault.

Sending Barack Obama to the White House was like taking a mildly precocious five-year-old out of kindergarten and putting him in graduate school. Failure was inevitable.

Sure, he was cute, and the time was long past for a “person of color” at the top, but if white America really needed the racial cathartic, why didn’t we elect someone like Condoleezza Rice, someone overflowing with knowledge,  experience, and guts? Oh, right, she was of the party for which the media at the time was not pimping.

And it’s true he could have resigned once he got there and realized how far in he was over his head. But really, who’d want to give up all that cool stuff — private jets, Camp David, lots of golf and vacations all around the world. And resigning would have left us with Joe “hey guy in the wheelchair, stand up and take a bow” Biden. Just think what he would have done to our international standing.

Do we really want four more years of this...

So here we are, three years later, our national debt at a number inconceivable to most people, our national identity in shambles, our standing in the world vacillating between bully and joke, our rights and freedoms being eroded at an ever accelerating pace, but none of it seems to matter much to most of us. We’re too busy. There’s work and the house and the kids. Facebook to update and the Kardashians to watch. Who has time to think about boring stuff like politics and freedom?

Who knows, maybe we got it out of our system in 2008, maybe it taught us a lesson. The mid-terms in 2010, thanks in large part to the Tea Party Movement, sent some tremors through Washington, but nowhere near enough. It’s still mostly business as usual there.

...or will we choose a return to prosperity and freedom?

In 2012, the American people will write the future of America for the next generation or two or three or more. We’ll get to choose between following Europe into socialism and bankruptcy at the hands of ideologues (Obama), following Europe into socialism and bankruptcy at the hands of international business (pick a Republican except Ron Paul) or we can choose a different path, one that leads back to prosperity and freedom (Ron Paul and Tea Party supported candidates).

Will it actually happen, that last choice? It’s entirely up to us, to me and to you and your relatives, friends, and neighbors.

In 2012, we’ll get to choose how our children and grandchildren for generations will live. We get to choose between freedom and something less.

I really hope we choose wisely.

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Is it me, or has the Obama campaign moved from fishy to scary to downright menacing?

Some of you may recall “fishy@whitehouse.gov,” the Obama cabal’s first attempt to get Americans to spy on their neighbors and friends by encouraging them to “report” anti-Obama email and websites.

Then they decided to go after folks who publicly criticize or say unkind things about Our Dear Leader with their #AttackWatch on Twitter campaign.

Now, The Smartest President Ever^® and his water-carriers want you to help them re-educate all the nasty Republicans and, presumably, other wrong-thinking folks who oppose him by sending him their email addresses.

Obama Campaign Collecting GOP Emails

The Obama presidential campaign is launching an effort to collect Republican email addresses by inviting its supporters to submit information about their Republican associates to the Obama 2012 website.

The effort could help the Obama campaign build a database that would enable it to target Republican voters during the general election campaign. But, more perniciously, it could also become part of an Democratic effort to influence Republican primary voters to select a candidate Democrats think Obama could most easily defeat.

The Democratic National Committee last month released a video that seemed designed to damage Mitt Romney, the GOP candidate feared most by the Obama campaign.

The Obama information collection effort is cast under the mischievous guise of asking Obama supporters to “have a little fun at the expense of a Republican in your life” by signing them up to get an email from the Obama campaign ribbing them for having “inspired” the Obama supporter to donate.

The result, however, is that the Obama campaign gets a new trove of Republican email addresses that it could never have collected through voluntary submissions.

Click Here to read the rest of the story.

Has there ever before been an American President with the unmitigated effrontery to do anything like this? Even Richard Nixon, with his famous “Enemies List” would not have dreamed of asking Americans to rat out their neighbors the way Obama and his henchmen have been doing, and getting away with, thanks to their lapdogs in the media.

Isn’t this “report your neighbor” stuff the kind of thing that used to happen in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and may still happen today in places like North Korea?

Is this really the kind of government, and the kinds of people running it, that America wants?

Is it what you want?

***

On the lighter side, a friend sent me the link to this video.

I have to admit, I thought it funny even as I cringed at what some parents would put their kids through for a joke. You’ll know the ones I mean.

Enjoy.

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