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Information for people contemplating
a career in emergency medicine and
other medical specialties

By Kevin Pezzi, MD

 

1. A new reason to choose a career in medicine
2. What the #@&*% is wrong with our country? After years of searching for an answer, Kevin The Doctor knows exactly what is causing our decline. The answer will surprise you.
3. A doctor with experience looking into people looks into Barack Obama

A long introduction to the most important topic that I've ever written about:

Do you have sound judgment and enough intelligence to be a doctor or other professional? Here's a pop quiz to determine if you have what it takes:

While shopping in a store, you see an elderly woman collapse. Two men, John and George, rush to assist her. They find that she is unresponsive, not breathing, and has no pulse, so they begin CPR. Three other people, Barney, Chris, and Nancy, begin kicking John and George, and otherwise doing their best to hinder the code. "She's fine," they insist. "Stop the code."

However, it's obvious that this blue patient isn't OK.

Seconds later, two paramedics arrive along with a police officer. The paramedics continue the code while the cop sorts though what happened. A bystander, Katie, claims that John and George caused her to collapse, while Barney, Chris, and Nancy were just trying to be helpful. Katie implores the officer to arrest John and George while recommending that Barney, Chris, and Nancy receive a public service award for their actions.

The police officer notices you and asks for your opinion, because he's seen you working in the ER and respects your opinion. What do you tell him?

(a) Katie is correct.
(b) Katie either deliberately distorted the truth, or isn't tuned into reality.

wondering

You won't get any questions this easy in medical school, or even sixth grade for that matter, because the answer is obviously (b). So why did I ask it? To illustrate how absurd it is that half of the people in the United States have a similarly distorted perception of reality. That assertion may seem preposterous now, but you'll likely agree with me by the end of this page. This misperception is inflicting a staggering cost upon US citizens, so everyone—not just doctors—needs to understand it. As I slowly reveal it, like peeling layers off an onion, some of this will be familiar to you, but some will be shocking. At some point in this discussion, you will figuratively slap your head and exclaim, "This is it! I finally understand what the #@&*% is wrong with our country!"

Reading this topic will not only increase your chances of having a great career, but a great life—or any life, as you'll later see. If you become a doctor, somewhere along the line you will learn that intelligence evolved because of its adaptive value. Simply put, people who are smarter are more likely to make better decisions and prosper in school, business, and life. However, even smart people sometimes succumb to the mind's Achilles' heel: its tendency to let emotions overrule rational thought. Consequently, some of what people know, or think they know, is flat-out wrong. Those biases and preconceptions are so prevalent, and so damaging, that a perfect storm of stupidity is metaphorically casting a dark cloud above our heads that will linger for many decades. I will help you find one of the few remaining areas of sunshine, explain what created this disaster, and touch upon some solutions. I must warn you, though: you may love what you're about to read, or you may hate it. If I precipitate the latter emotion, bear in mind that I will discuss one of the subjects that elicits emotional reaction, not objective thought. If you find yourself getting mad, it's because some of the facts I present don't mesh with your preconceptions. I challenge you to rise above your Achilles' heel and reevaluate the validity of what you think you know. Times are tough and bound to get much tougher. The need to correctly interpret reality and intelligently make decisions just became much more important to your career and your life, regardless of what you do for a living. Ignore this advice at your peril. If you think smoking, speeding, overeating, or unsafe sex are hazardous to your health, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Incidentally, if you read all of this topic, more than half of you will emerge from it somewhat smarter. Many people are begging me to reveal more of my secrets that propelled me from sixth-grade dunce to a doctor who graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school. Here's one: By correcting one of your misconceptions, you not only learn the truth but give yourself the opportunity to analyze what mental errors led you to previously believe something that isn't true. Intelligence is essentially a set of rules for processing information. Amend those rules and you'll emerge with a higher IQ. In this purposely wide-ranging discussion, I will pass along something that is one of the greatest insights ever. The minute I read it, I knew that it wasn't just philosophically profound, but essentially a way to peer into the future. Everyone, from paperboy to President, needs to learn that lesson.

Medical careers just became considerably more appealing. I'll explain why in a minute, but I'll preface that discussion by explaining why a career in medicine was once something that I advised against.

In some of my web sites and books, I discussed many of the drawbacks to careers in medicine. It was important to mention those disadvantages because anyone who glosses over them wasn't doing you a favor. Few things in life are wholly positive or negative; most have associated pros and cons. Most authors overemphasize the plusses of medicine while minimizing its negative aspects. I believe that it is unconscionable to sugarcoat anything in this way. People should be apprised of the plusses and minuses and left to make their own informed decisions. However, it's tough to make an intelligent choice when you hear only half of the story. More about that later.

Emergency medicine, in particular, has some extraordinary pros, but also some alarming drawbacks. One minute, you might have a gorgeous woman thrust a note into your hand expressing gratitude for what you did for her in the ER, giving you her phone number and the world's biggest green light. The next minute, you might be dealing with a family so kooky and out of control that before the night is over, the Mom is in jail and an ER worker is in a cast.

Incidentally, both of those examples are true. You can read about them by downloading my free e-books (none of which contain any viruses, spyware, or adware). The first example is found in Love & Lust in the ER (it's on page 138 of the 4th edition; if you have another edition, search for Kari’s grandmother). If you'd rather read just that one story, it is online here. The latter story is in True Emergency Room Stories (it's on page 104 of the 4th edition; if you have another edition, search for a family so bizarre).

So why are medical careers now much more attractive? At the time of this writing, the United States is teetering on the edge of a recession. Some financially savvy people, including some mainstream economists, have warned that we may plunge into a depression, especially if Barack Obama is elected President and he implements his grand plans for changing America. Whenever the economy turns sour, medical careers become more attractive because most of them are recession-proof. Healthcare is a need, not a want. People may want a large home, second SUV, boat, or vacation, but they don't need any of that. However, if a child is seizing and turning blue, his parents need a doctor. In short, you'll always have a job. That's a plus at any time, but it is especially important in these tumultuous times—and if you think it's bad now, just wait! It's going to be a nightmare. Why am I convinced this is true, despite the fact that I am usually optimistic?

To whet your appetite for the
long discussion that follows,
read this summary.

The recent stock market plunge and Washington's reaction to it manifested that our government doesn't really know what it's doing, fumbling like a first-year medical student trying to control the bleeding as a patient with a gunshot wound to the chest is hemorrhaging to death. Most upper echelon federal politicians are not nearly as intelligent as they should be. Unfortunately, their effective brainpower is further diluted when they purposely twist the truth to suit their partisan ends, such as when the Democrats succeeded in duping the public by laying most of the blame for the Fannie Mae collapse on Republicans when it should have been obvious to everyone who studied this issue that this financial disaster was rooted in an incredibly stupid idea spawned by Democrats: Let's pressure banks into giving mortgages to people who can't afford homes, then close our eyes, cross our fingers, and hope for the best when those folks default on their loans. Brilliant!

Winston Churchill is reputed to have said something such as, "Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." Another variation of this quote (there weren't many tape recorders in those days!) is, "If you aren't a liberal by the time you're 20, you don't have a heart. If you aren't a conservative by the time you're 40, you don't have a brain."

If you have a brain, you'll realize that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and anyone who falls for her malarkey is functionally anencephalic or tuned into too much music, not reality. On the October 18, 2008 Mike Huckabee television show, an intelligent woman from Canada posed a great question: Why do so many Americans blame Republicans for the mortgage disaster when Democrats obviously caused it? Governor Huckabee responded that Presidents generally get the blame when things go wrong because Americans view the President as the symbol of US government. It's much easier to point to him than to sort out what 535 members of Congress did. While it is indeed easier, it shows an appalling lack of fairness and suggests that many Americans are too intellectually lazy to spend a minute researching this issue. The mainstream media isn't doing their job, so if you don't want to fall hook, line, and sinker for blatant lies by Democrats, you must investigate what they say. If you do this, you will likely see that Democrats lie with impunity because they know the mainstream media won't take them to task. The mainstream media won't ridicule Joe Biden when he illustrates his shocking ignorance (such as not knowing when Roosevelt was President, when television came into use, or even how many letters are in the word "jobs"), but they carefully probe Republicans for the slightest weakness and make a mountain out of a molehill if they find anything.

Joe Biden's near-fatal brain aneurysm
Biden had surgery in 1988 to repair two brain aneurysms. His condition was so grave at one point that a priest read him his last rites in a Wilmington hospital. As a doctor, I can't help but wonder if some of the daffy things Biden says are the result of some associated brain damage. One of the conservative radio talk show hosts likes to say that Biden is the "dumbest guy in the Senate." That's ridiculous; Biden is obviously not the low man on the Senate IQ totem pole. However, Biden's mind seems to be a strange amalgamation of islands of genius mixed in with a few islands of idiocy. All smart people do dumb things now and then, but Biden sometimes does things that are conspicuously odd for someone who is generally very smart. Biden also seems to have difficulty censoring himself before he speaks, leading him to say things that even he probably wishes he'd never said. This problem can result from damage to a specific part of the brain (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), or it can result as a side effect of certain drugs and herbs. Biden's reputation for being occasionally cantankerous may also result from brain damage. Bottom line: Biden's intelligence and magnetic charm would likely be even greater without those aneurysms. Flawed or not, he is still one heck of a likeable guy.

I realize that most of my readers are young and hence more inclined to be impressed by economic liberalism, ignoring the fact that it is just a euphemism for socialism, Marxism, or plain ol' pickpocketing as money made by productive members of society is stolen and given to people who want others to pay for their food, education, medical care, clothes, cars, utilities, and homes. (Here are two humorous stories that really drive that point home.) However, I am delighted to hear that many young people switched their votes after realizing the huge price they'll pay for an Obama presidency. Obama thinks that people who want to keep their own money are selfish. Is it really selfish for you to keep what you've earned? I don't think so. However, many Obama supporters who think they will benefit from Obama's redistributionist ("spreading the wealth around") policies are thrilled about the things they will get without having to pay for. They are the selfish ones: they want to take what you have earned. Obama has indicated that he nominate future Supreme Court justices who do not strictly interpret the Constitution. This isn't surprising, because nothing in the Constitution permits this form of theft.

History has shown that giving people money isn't an effective antidote to poverty. Before Washington spent $850 billion of our money trying to stabilize the stock market gyrations following the Fannie Mae calamity, American taxpayers already had six TRILLION dollars (that's 6000 billion!) taken from them and given to people who weren't fond of working, yet found the energy every four years to ride an ACORN-supported bus on Election Day to vote for politicians who would give them stuff. In True Emergency Room Stories, I predicted years ago that Americans might fight a second civil war when one of two virtually inevitable disasters occurs:

If you analyze the demographics of this brewing catastrophe, you will come to the conclusion that many eminent economists have: It's a huge and unprecedented problem, but no one has any good idea about how to avert it without causing widespread economic suffering.

You may scoff when I suggest that a civil war could erupt again in the United States, but the recent fiscal crisis stemming from the subprime mortgage collapse revealed that our economy is far more fragile than we thought. Throw in tens of millions more retirees expecting to not be cheated out of their Social Security money, add a clueless government that spent their money buying votes years ago, and top it off with workers who would rather fill an IRS agent with lead than fork over three-quarters or more of their pay.

By the way, if you think that taxes would never rise that high, welcome to the year 2008 and Dr. Pezzi's Amazing Lecture on Taxes: some of you are already paying 75% or more of your income in taxes. The most astonishing thing about the US government is how successful it has been in pulling the wool over taxpayers' eyes to shield them from realizing how much they actually pay. Many Americans already lose half their income in taxes! I'm not talking about "rich" doctors, lawyers, and plumbers (such as "Joe The Plumber" Joe Wurzelbacher, who scowled at Barack Obama when The Messiah explained why he wanted to raise his taxes to "spread the wealth around")—I'm talking about average Americans. Perhaps you, your siblings, or parents.

Two days later, Obama and Biden haughtily attacked Joe The Plumber, thereby erasing any doubt that they are condescending elitists and devoid of common sense. Joe The Plumber isn't some fat cat Wall Street robber baron, but a symbol for hard-working middle class people who are fed up with money-grubbing politicians stealing more of their money and terming that theft "fair" or "patriotic." Joe resonated with the American public because he wants to earn more in the future, as most of us do, but his ability to get ahead is hampered by punitive taxation. Obama is bent on snatching money from people like Joe, yet Barack won't give a penny of his millions to his half-brother, who lives in a hut in Africa on less than $1 per month. Here's some change for you, Barack: how about opening your own fat wallet first? And while you're at it, stop mocking people like Joe. Picking on middle class folks is very petty and unpresidential. (Update: Later in the campaign, Obama was seen scornfully laughing at Joe The Plumber. Now I know why Rush Limbaugh calls Obama a man-child: Barack acts likes a snotty juvenile.)

Speaking of Obama's brother . . . and Palin's IQ
During an interview with The Early Show's Harry Smith, Obama said,". . . if you're not, um, carin' for your family, uh, then, ah, you, you're probably not, uh, the kind of person who's gonna be carin' for other people."

First, isn't it odd how Sarah Palin is ridiculed for sounding like a hayseed hick because she sometimes does not pronounce the terminal "g" of certain words? Obama is equally guilty of this, yet he is lauded for his supposedly grand rhetorical ability even though he says um, uh, or ah ten times more in one day than she has in the entire campaign. Doctors use speech fluency as one way to assess a patient's mentation, and whether that may be affected by disease, drugs, or trauma. After years of doing this in the ER, it is obvious to me that Governor Palin's speech fluency is clearly superior, while Barack's ranges from very good to subnormal. When liberals don't have any substantive basis for attacking someone's reputation, character, or intelligence, their characteristically cavalier disregard for the truth often leads them to concoct wacky ways to slam their opponents. The supposedly enlightened press (ha!) delighted in disparaging Palin's intelligence, but in doing that they merely manifested their bias against conservatives and women in general. In her first national debate, Palin performed better than Joe Biden, a man with decades of debating experience. (Her relative margin of victory was more apparent to people who researched whether the candidates gave factual statements; some of the more impressive Biden moments in that debate were made possible because he fabricated lies that sounded better than the truth.)

Camille Paglia, a longtime Democrat who is an author, teacher, social critic and feminist with an awe-inspiring intellect, said this about Palin: "I can see how smart she is—and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma."

Second, if Obama is truly caring, how could he let his half-brother live in abject poverty while he lives better than most kings? Third, isn't it odd how liberal Democrats are always eager to seize more of our money to give to others, yet they are so tightfisted with their own? Joe Biden donated only $3600 to charity in the past 9 years. That's about $1 per day—hardly generous for a millionaire. Fourth, Obama has an aunt who is an illegal immigrant now living in a Boston slum. Mr. Moneybags Obama isn't very carin', is he?

Obama might honestly believe that his Robin Hood philosophy of robbing from the rich to give to the poor is somehow not criminal because that theft is perpetrated with good intentions, but come on, is T-shirt-wearing Joe The Plumber really rich? Hardly. Democrats are so eager to steal money from people that they adopt an absurdly low threshold for defining who is rich, and hence who is fair game for plundering based on their wacky old class warfare ideas.

You knew that politicians are screwing you. You just didn't know how much.

If you added up all of the taxes you pay, you'd be stunned. I discussed some of those taxes in one of my blog postings, and questioned the value of what we receive in return for those taxes in another entry. I illustrated what a farce it is when politicians claim they need even more of your money. The big tax that almost everyone neglects to consider is the business or corporate tax. This tax is embedded into the price of what you buy and is ultimately paid by you. Corporations do NOT truly pay taxes; they merely pass them along in the form of higher costs of goods and services to consumers. On average, 22% of the base price of your purchases is that corporate tax. If you live in Michigan, where the sales tax rate is 6%, you don't pay $6 for every $100 you spend. You actually spend $28 (6% sales tax + 22% embedded corporate tax = 28% combined tax). If you think about this, you'll realize that you're being taxed on taxes! This 28% is a starting point that even poor people pay. When you add in income taxes, Social Security taxes, state income taxes, property taxes, and hundreds of other taxes or fees, it is easy to see how even average folks can work over half the year to pay those insatiable thieves in government who incessantly hunger for even more of your paycheck.

Make a list of everything government does for you . . . is that REALLY worth half or more of your pay?

Make a list of everything government does for you, and then ask if that is worth half or more of your income every year. Everyone's list will include national defense, police protection, and roads. Your list might include education if you have children, but my education was already paid by myself and the taxes my parents paid decades ago. Come to think of it, weren't most roads built decades ago, too?

I have a question for you? What's too much? Should the government take what you earn by working six months of the year? Seven? Eight? Nine? Ten? Eleven? At some point, we have to call it what it really is: part-time slavery.

100% of what slaves produced was taken from them, but slave owners had to pay for slave's food, clothes, and housing. I've never seen an economist attempt to quantitate the value of those expenses, but I wouldn't be surprised (given the inefficiencies of that era) to learn that it was 50% or more of their output. Hence, a good case could be made that the US government is now seizing a greater percentage of income from taxpayers than what slave owners took from slaves after deducting what they paid to support them.

People tend to think in quantal terms and hence may have difficulty appreciating the concept of partial slavery. If the government takes everything you earn, who could argue that you aren't a slave to the government? If they take half, in economic terms you are half free and half slave. Slavery—including economic slavery, a.k.a., exorbitant taxation—is so repugnant to most people that they will fight to abolish that abomination.

Democrats have a long history of favoring higher taxes not just on rich people, but even the middle class. By taking more of what you earn, they aren't just stealing your money, but something that is even more important: your time. If you work half or more of the year to pay your taxes (most of which are so cleverly hidden that you never recognize them), the government is taking several months of your time that could be put to better use. Wouldn't you love to spend more time with your family and friends? More time traveling or enjoying a hobby? More time to put your feet up and relax instead of frenetically rushing all week long?

In the not too distant future, I think that Americans will finally wake up and realize how the US government has been robbing us blind. Nancy Pelosi can shake her bony little hand at us all she likes, but all of her histrionics won't camouflage the fact that she and others of her ilk are nothing more than rapacious tyrants who lust for absolute power and control. They sit on their high horse in Washington and decide how much of your paycheck they will take, and they enact laws (such as limiting access to American energy resources) that inflate what you pay at the pump, in the grocery store, and virtually every time you buy something. Then they lie through their teeth about taxing corporations, knowing that those taxes will ultimately be paid by you and other consumers.

Democrats profess to advocate for poor people and the middle class, but they actually kowtow to special interests who profit from making you pay more. Current Democratic economic policies are designed to reduce your economic freedom and reduce your power to control your life. Politicians know that whoever controls how money is spent has economic power, so they want to take more of your money so they can spend it, increasing their power, and decreasing yours. The control freaks in Washington have an unquenchable thirst for money because they have an insatiable hunger for power. They won't stop until they control virtually everything. One of the least gifted members of Congress, Maxine Waters, was stupid enough to reveal that Democrats might nationalize American oil companies; that is, to seize them, converting them from private to governmental ownership and control. They are now nationalizing banks and insurance companies, and have already nationalized much of our healthcare system. What's next? Auto companies? Kids with lemonade stands? Bizarrely, the government insisted on "bailing out" banks whose chief executives insisted they didn't need or want a bailout; in fact, they wanted nothing to do with a bailout.

Taxes are inversely proportional to economic freedom. When taxes rise, your economic freedom is curtailed. Liberal Democrats try every shenanigan they can think of to raise your taxes. They want—no, they demand—that you slave away to pay the taxes they impose, or they will sic the IRS on you. That form of cowering has worked well for them, but . . . .

But what? Did you see how enraged Americans became when legislators in Washington discussed the $700 billion dollar bailout that grew to $850 billion when cash-strapped politicians decided to saddle us with even more debt? Almost every American, not just conservative Republicans, was seething mad. I previously thought that I wouldn't see such rage for decades, when the Social Security mess threatens to starve senior citizens or enslave workers to pay decent benefits to retirees. However, the fury is here, now, and it is bound to grow as politicians hike taxes and mismanage the government. More financial disasters are looming, which will test the patience of Americans of every political stripe (here's one). The US national debt is usually quoted as being around 10 trillion dollars. While that staggering figure is very alarming, the truth is far worse. An article in the September 29, 2008 issue of Forbes ("Is the U.S. Going Broke?") said the government uses deceptive accounting methods to camouflage the true debt, which is actually over $70 trillion dollars. Politicians deliberately hide the truth because it is too painful to bear (and would doom their political careers): the United States is doomed. We cannot tax our way out of this mess, and politicians won't do what they should: radically cut the size of government. They use every crisis—real and fabricated—as an excuse to expand government. Expanding the government increases the national debt even more. This vicious circle will snowball until the Crash of 2008 seems like the good ol' days and everything comes crashing down.

You're angry about the bailout. You'll be even more angry when you find out where much of that money went.
In addition to reimbursing billionaire foreign investors such as Saudi oil sheiks, billions of your dollars will be given as bonuses for executives of the corporations that were bailed out. Aren't bonuses supposed to reward executives for a job well done? And now they're being rewarded for performing so poorly that our lovely politicians in Washington had to steal YOUR money to keep them in business? Nuts.

Must-read excerpts from the October 30, 2008 Lou Dobbs Tonight:

LOU DOBBS: Half of the money spent so far on these banks [$200 billion; mentioned later in the interview] will go over the next three years to dividends to their shareholders . . . That is unconscionable, is it not, Professor Morici?

PROFESSOR PETER MORICI (University of Maryland): Absolutely. We haven't seen hubris on the part of aristocrats like those in New York since just before the French Revolution.

DOBBS: As a matter of fact, we heard from the treasury secretary, we've heard from the Democratic leadership of this Congress, that they were dealing with the issue of CEO compensation. They're going to constrain it.

DAVID SMICK (Author, The World is Curved): Yes.

DOBBS: There will be no golden parachutes. Now we find out that they're lying through their teeth.

MORICI: These executives have quite simply purchased the United States Senate. Folks like Dodd and Schumer from New York [both Democrats]. They've collected enormous campaign contributions from these guys. So now they're willing to turn a blind eye.

DOBBS: I thought the Democrats were going to actually be serious about constraining excess compensation to CEOs and executives. Both of these parties are frauds, are they not?

BRUCE BARTLETT (former Treasury Department economist): Yes, absolutely. What we're doing to the entire financial sector is turning it into Fannie Mae. We're making -- we're going to have a kind of public-private kind of partnership deal, where the risks are all borne by the government and all the profits go to private executives, as was the case with Fannie Mae.

DOBBS: I suppose both of these parties, the House, the Senate, the White House -- they all think that they fooled someone. And of course, they took care of their contributors, both of these parties, on Wall Street.

Think about what Lou Dobbs said: "Both of these parties are frauds." How could anyone disagree with him? The evidence is overwhelming. The US government is the largest corrupt organization ever. Politicians have been screwing taxpayers in so many ways for so many years that their misdeeds inevitably lead to one conclusion: their crimes are intentional. Isn't it time that we did something about it?

As part of the bailout, taxpayer money was given to banks so they would give loans to get the economy moving again. But did they? No, they're largely hoarding it. Predictably, the stock market nose-dived after the bailout, so the US taxpayers received very little in return for such a massive amount of money. Don't look at what politicians say, look at what they do. Democrat or Republican, the one thing they do is screw us. When will we wise up?

The US government is so relentlessly inept and corrupt that it will increasingly leech off taxpayers until "the straw that broke the camel's back" point is reached and they revolt. Recent history has shown that even strong governments can collapse, usually by an implosion, not after losing a war to another country. The US government recently considered imposing martial law, but they stand no chance of subjugating an enraged American populace. Nuclear weapons are the primary strength of the US military, but they are useless in a civil war. Our Navy can't float into Topeka, and I can't imagine that any Air Force pilot would climb into his jet and drop bombs on Americans. What's left? Most Army soldiers are busy fighting terrorists overseas, and would feel like members of the Gestapo or KGB if they had to return to fight US citizens. Even if they tried, there are far more citizens than soldiers; any GI who pointed a gun at a civilian would see a dozen barrels pointing at him. Who, then, will be The Enforcers? Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Hardly.

Even politicians who once were wildly popular can become targets of rage. During World War II, my Dad photographed Benito Mussolini and his mistress after Italians, furious with how he had destroyed their country by allying with Hitler, killed them and strung their bodies upside down so people could vent their rage by spitting on them, then beating their bodies beyond recognition.

Democrats are so obsessed with punishing people with above-average incomes, including many members of the middle class, that they insist upon increasing tax rates even though they should know that this will decrease overall revenue and increase unemployment. However, most of their political posturing is done to benefit them and their special interests, not the people they ostensibly serve. Obama is reputed to embody stepping away from the old and ineffectual ways of the past, yet even he is hidebound. The policies he proposes are hardly new and innovative. SOS: Same Old . . . Stuff. He should look at new ways to increase revenue to the government while reducing tax rates, but why do that? Just send the federal agents out to shake down Americans for more money. If they object, put 'em in jail, take their homes, and seize their bank accounts. Who cares about "change" when the old way of doing things works so well?

Interestingly, while writing this, I took a break and turned on my radio to hear Lou Dobbs discuss the bailout, saying that BOTH parties have effectively denied representation to the middle class. In short, the government is screwing us. You know it, I know it, and the military knows it, too. Barack Obama is so unpopular with the military that he couldn't get them to slap an American teenager, let alone have tanks knock down US homes, schools, or businesses. If Obama thinks otherwise, he can go ahead and try. Then he'll see real change. So will his vituperative wife, who loves to get on her high horse and lecture us about our imperfections—one of Barack's favorite themes, not surprisingly.

Michelle reportedly received a $316,000 salary working for the University of Chicago Hospitals. That's about twice what most doctors earn, and they work longer hours with more stress and responsibility. Perhaps not coincidentally, Michelle's pay increased by $195,000 soon after her husband was sworn in as a United States Senator . . . oh, and that million-dollar grant he requested for the hospital? We're told that it's just a coincidence. Yeah, right.

Affirmative action as a flimsy justification for academic fraud

Personally, I don't care that Michelle loves to wallow in the woman-as-perpetual-victim rhetoric, or that she repels people by walking around with a monumental chip on her shoulder. Nor do I care that her undergraduate thesis reveals an odd fixation about racial views that isn't supported even by her own data. That's all predictable, and fairly harmless. As her husband would say, they're "just words." Not very impressive ones, because several people who read her paper were surprised that someone could obtain a degree from a prestigious university (Princeton) by writing a thesis with such poor sentence structure and numerous errors of spelling and grammar. One reviewer, disgusted by her "childish view of race relations" and semi-literate discussion of it, lamented that Princeton's faculty was condescending to black people by lowering their standards for black students.

This academic farce is nothing new. As an undergraduate at Michigan State University (MSU), I worked for their Office of Supportive Services (OSS) tutoring primarily minority students. This gave me the opportunity to discover something that most MSU students didn't know: MSU had certain class sections hidden from other students—and hence inaccessible—because they were not listed in the course catalog. Certain sections were reserved for athletes, and others were reserved for minority students. Students in those classes were guaranteed a passing grade if they merely showed up for the exam and signed their name. If the students attempted to answer any question, they were given a B, and if they got any question correct (even by random chance guessing), they were awarded an A.

On his December 12, 2008 show, Rush Limbaugh read from a news report revealing that this idiotic idea isn't confined to MSU: "Pittsburgh Public Schools officials may change a policy that makes 50% the lowest grade students can receive—even if they do zero work."

In talking with my students, I learned that they also received free tuition, room & board, books, miscellaneous expenses, and even a surprising amount of spending money. When I asked those students what their parents did for a living, it was obvious to me those generous scholarships were awarded on the basis of skin color, not financial need or brainpower. I knew their parents earned more than my Mom, who was working as a supermarket cashier many years after my Dad abandoned us for good after making a few child support payments a decade earlier. With three kids to support, it isn't surprising that I had to pay for most of my education, which I did by mowing lawns, weeding, painting homes, tutoring, building roof and floor trusses, building large industrial transformers, delivering newspapers, working as a security guard, working in a bottle recycling plant, serving as an aide to a handicapped man, helping to put on auto shows, and basically serving as a human mule to carry boards up a steep hill to a building site that no truck could reach. I struggled to live on the money I had, and even starved at times, subsisting only on free sugar packets and coffee creamer from the school cafeteria. Some friends suggested that I apply for public assistance, but I preferred starvation to taking money from someone else. That is the fundamental economic difference between conservatives and liberals: Conservatives want what they have earned, while liberals want what others have earned.

After becoming a doctor, I lived modestly in an apartment and drove an economy car so I could repay all of my student loans before I began saving to buy my first home. Had others exhibited this degree of financial restraint, the Fannie Mae meltdown never would have occurred. A lack of handouts didn't hurt me or keep me from achieving my goals; having to bootstrap my way to a doctorate degree simply made me stronger. Democrats need to learn that this hard work and boundless determination recipe for success works for anyone, regardless of their skin color. Forcibly transferring money from the productive members of society to the unproductive ones merely reduces their initiative to succeed, and hence does not benefit them.

When I was young, my Mom sometimes fed us by serving food that she found on the side of the road, and I saw my older brother moaning in pain for days because my Mom couldn't afford to take him to a hospital. Long before I became a real physician and surgeon, I performed minor surgery on myself several times without anesthesia (ouch!) because I couldn't afford to pay a doctor. Consequently, I know what poverty is, and I know that people can easily escape from it without help from the screwballs in Washington. I didn't need Obama spreading the wealth around to support me. My Mom helped me as much as she could, and I did the rest myself, working from the time I was in 7th grade. People saw that I was very conscientious, so I could always earn money. If poor people spent less time committing voter fraud and looking for handouts, and more time looking for work, they wouldn't need partners-in-crime like Barack Obama to shake down taxpayers. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to find a job. When I was too young for any of the jobs in the Help Wanted classifieds, I found older folks who needed help around the house, and I did it.

Why liberals haven't been more successful in fighting poverty

When will poor people finally realize that Democrats don't want to end poverty? Instead, they want to perpetuate it so they have a ready pool of people eager to vote more money for themselves. In To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Robert Heinlein gave his readers a virtual time machine for looking into the future to see how America will end.

"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens . . . which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it . . . which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’ ‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—[such as] the barbarians enter[ing] Rome."

This observation is profoundly important and is so vital to our future that it should be read by everyone, from producer to parasite. Some parasites might be smart enough to take a lesson from nature and see how various parasitic organisms improve their odds of long-term survival by limiting how much blood or nutrients they sap from their host. If they took more, they could live high on the hog for a while, but the depleted host might die, leaving them with nothing to leech off. By taking less, they can continue to drain resources indefinitely. If a nematode such as a pinworm can figure this out, why can't the pinhead parasites in the US realize that it isn't wise to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? If Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, and other leaders were half as wise as they think they are, they would realize how shortsighted they are in greedily sapping the producers. The parasites they so vigorously represent are dangerously close to slitting their own throats.

Despite what they say, Democrats don't want the poor to ascend financially and really make it, because the minute they did that, they'd rebel against the taxes taken from them. Which party is jeopardized by black success? The Democrats, of course, so they intentionally hinder black advancement. All that Democrat rhetoric about helping the little guy is pure BS, intended to deceive people who don't look beyond the surface (watch this YouTube video by a black man who is remarkably more insightful than Obama, Oprah, and the entire mainstream media combined). Democrats love black votes, not black people. The Democrats, and even most Republicans, don't care about the rich, middle class, or poor; they care about using their ideological platforms to hide the fact that they're out for themselves and their special interests. I'll never forget the looked of shattered disappointment in my brother's face when he was an intern for a state legislator who dashed his idealistic dreams by saying something such as, "Hey, kid, I'm here for the pay and the pension, not the taxpayers."

The economic decline of the United States was precipitated by (possibly) well-meaning but hopelessly naive ideas, such as putting people into homes they couldn't afford. The $850 billion bailout that followed was just another down payment** on the penalty we will ultimately pay for our collective stupidity in failing to heed one of the greatest lessons of history: socialism is the fertilizer of mediocrity and poverty, not excellence and wealth. People who think that socialistic wealth redistribution is good, like Barack Obama, should listen to people who left socialistic countries and moved to America. They detest socialism, and think that any politician who leans that way has rocks in his head. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "America cannot afford the economic proposals of Senator Obama. I left Europe four decades ago because socialism has killed opportunities there, and many, many, many entrepreneurs and business leaders all left and have taken jobs with them. And I tell you, in recent years Europe has realized its mistakes and begun rolling back some of its spread-the-wealth policies."

(** A few days after I wrote this, the giant AIG insurance company had already spent most of the $122.8 billion it originally received from the bailout, and it wanted more. Welfare doesn't work for people or corporations; they always want more; enough is never enough.)

Recipe for making a liberal politician
Take someone who avidly desires power yet isn't smart enough to think of ways to help the poor without robbing from the rich and middle class. Add enough hypocrisy to please their special interests, and remove any traces of compunction about lying through their teeth. Presto! Another lib who can do no wrong in the eyes of The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and the rest of the hopelessly biased mainstream media.

The Federal government attempted to mollify taxpayers by claiming their $850 billion bailout was really to help Main Street, not Wall Street. What they didn't tell you was that Main Street could have been bailed out for much less money. They also conveniently neglected to admit that much of the money supposedly going to Wall Street was going straight out of the USA, headed for foreign banks, such as those owned by the rich oil sheiks from Saudi Arabia. Did you notice how eager Nancy Pelosi was to have that bailout bill passed? She and other liberal Democrats give lip service to helping the little guy in America while really helping oil companies and oil producers inflate their prices. She isn't working for us, but against us. The #1 mistake that people make about politics is looking at what politicians say, not what they do. Democrats want to help the little man. Republicans want to reduce the size of government. Hogwash!

The role the press is supposed to play, but isn't

Freedom of the press isn't constitutionally protected because our Forefathers thought it was important for lunatics to speculate about whether Sarah Palin actually delivered her baby or whether her husband is sleeping with their daughters, as some Martians have suggested. Instead, the men who framed the Constitution realized that a free press performed a vital function by serving as a watchdog over the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. An impartial press helps to keep government in check, curbing its tendency for excesses, fraud, waste, and abuse of power.

Just one problem: the mainstream press is no longer impartial, or anything close to it. Everyone with common sense knows they are enthusiastic cheerleaders for Democrats and pit bulls who loathe conservatives (this is why I refused to date Katie Couric, as I discussed in my blog). This lack of oversight emboldened Democrats, giving them an almost unfettered ability to stray ever further left. In their zeal to destroy conservatism, they've forced Republicans to follow their zany ideas in a last-ditch attempt to have the press find them semi-palatable.

Result? Many Republicans are further left than Democrats were a few decades ago, and most Democrats have now adopted core tenets of socialism and Marxism. The big loser is the American public, ranging from paupers to the ever-shrinking middle class, and even most rich people. The current American system of government is great for the thieves who masquerade as politicians, and great for the special interests who pull their puppet strings. The rest of us are being screwed day and night, year in and year out. Most of us never realize it, though, because the press favors Democrats and glosses over (or totally ignores) their faults while hyperfocusing on even irrelevant imperfections in Republicans, such as Todd Palin's DUI arrest years ago. That can't possibly influence how a McCain-Palin administration might govern, so who but a busybody with the brainpower of a gnat would care about it?

The mainstream media put Sarah Palin's family under the microscope and didn't waste a minute investigating Joe The Plumber. In less than 24 hours, hundreds of media personnel camped outside his home as thousands more dug into every facet of his life, searching for even trivial things to discredit him. The message was clear: How dare you question Barack Obama! We need to quickly divert focus from your question, so we'll ignore that and shift the spotlight to you and your past. Official Ohio government computers were used to search for dirt on Joe The Plumber, which is clearly an abuse of power.

Strangely, the mainstream media all but ignored the connection between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, an avowed anarchist and Marxist. This link is so troubling that it alone would guarantee that Obama would never receive security clearance from our government for any other job. Obama flippantly dismisses that connection by saying he was 8 years old when Ayers was a co-founder of the Weather Underground, a radical left organization hell-bent on domestic terrorism. What Obama conveniently omits is that Ayers is one of the most dangerous maniacs in American history. Chicago Magazine quoted him saying, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at." They also pictured him stomping on an American flag in 2001. Great timing. Rather than apologizing for his prior savagery, he expressed regret that he did not do more. Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder a judge and his family at home. And he wanted to do more? After learning that he escaped justice by getting off on a technicality, Ayers gloated, "Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country." We're also a generous country. I would like to do my part by offering Ayers a free lobotomy.


You won't believe what you're about to read . . .

Obama has often attempted to make Ayers seem more mainstream by pointing out that he is now a professor of education. Conveniently, he never bothered to mention that Ayers is helping future teachers turn our nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers. Ayers has never gotten over the fact that his kooky idea of bombing people to spur social change flopped, so he turned to propaganda to achieve his objectives.

Even if you've heard about Ayers a hundred times, you likely have no idea of just how evil and depraved he is. On the October 26, 2008 Monica Crowley Show (which I highly recommend), the brilliant and captivating Dr. Crowley had me glued to my radio as she played a recording of the testimony of FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weather Underground as an undercover operative to see what those wackos were contemplating. A few bombs here and there at the Pentagon or police headquarters? Nah, those were just baby steps. What they had in mind was far more chilling. In the 1982 documentary No Place to Hide, Grathwohl said:

"I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. You know, we become responsible then for administrating, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people?

The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, and the North Vietnamese, and the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the Southwest where we would take all of the people who needed to be re‑educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be.

I asked, 'Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't re‑educate, that are die-hard capitalists?' And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they'd have to eliminate 25 million people in these re‑education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious."

Re-education centers? Killing 25 million Americans whose sole crime was capitalism? These savage genocidal plans reveal a psychotic desire to either brainwash or exterminate more people than Adolph Hitler did during World War II. Ayers is so disgustingly notorious that when Obama claims he didn't really know about Ayers' past, that Ayers was just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood," it is almost as preposterous as saying that Hitler lives in your neighborhood, but you don't know much about his past. This is especially difficult to swallow, considering Obama's fascination with extreme left-wing radicals from the 1960s. Imagine that you're an avid baseball fan and you lived in the same neighborhood as Babe Ruth, yet claimed that you didn't know much about what he'd done to earn his fame. This doesn't pass the laugh test. Many people strongly suspect that Ayers wrote much of Obama's book, Dreams From My Father (read Jack Cashill's impressive analysis). Just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood." Yeah, right.

When the full truth eventually comes out, I think it will show that Obama was intimately familiar with Ayers and it was their shared ideology that fueled their relationship. I saw Ayers on television yesterday wearing a shirt with a large red star on the chest that looked exactly like the red star on USSR military vehicles. Hardly subtle. Obama defended Ayers, calling him "respectable" and "mainstream." Thank you for this remarkably candid insight into your morality, Barack.

In a July 2, 2008 speech in Colorado Springs, Obama said, "We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." Some people excused that chilling comment as merely being a bland reference to expanding community service opportunities. If that is true, it's difficult to imagine how a Harvard-trained lawyer would be careless enough to use the words "civilian national security force" in that context because anyone who knows even a smidgen of history can't help but think of Hitler's civilian national security forces that used force to subjugate German citizens.

Don't they teach this in Chicago?
In one of my college classes, the professor taught that ostracizing deviant members of a society was the ultimate tool it had to punish those who violated laws or customs. Unfortunately, people in Chicago allowed Ayers to integrate into society instead of banishing him. Redemption has its place, but not for those who are unrepentant and incorrigible. I've seen many mug shots, but the one taken of Ayers after his arrest shows an unusually reprehensible countenance that appears to be intentionally provocative, defiant, immature, and flippant. How on Earth could Obama have thought so highly of this man that he wrote a glowing review of Ayers' A Kind and Just Parent in 1997? Hasn't Obama tried to suggest that he barely knew Ayers? Then why did Ayers mention him on page 82 of his book?

Have you heard about Ayers' first book?
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism was written by Ayers and other members of the Weather Underground. One of the people to whom the book was dedicated is Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian who assassinated Robert Kennedy. Ted Kennedy should have investigated Obama more thoroughly before endorsing him. If the mainstream media were as tough on Democrats as they are on Republicans, Ted Kennedy would surely have been asked, "Bill Ayers dedicated his first book to the man who killed your brother, Robert. Barack Obama said that Ayers is "respectable" and "mainstream." Senator Kennedy, how can you endorse a man who exhibits such poor judgment?"

Ayers: "Innocent people have to die"
On the October 30, 2008 O'Reilly Factor, FBI informant Larry Grathwohl said this about Bill Ayers: "I was in meetings with him when we were planning to put bombs at the Detroit police officer's association building in the 13th Precinct, and he specified that the bomb should contain fence staples in order to have an anti-personnel effect, in other words to kill people. I also pointed out the fact that the restaurant next door to the Detroit Police Officers Association would sustain more damage from the bomb than the DPOA building would. And his response was, 'In a revolution, innocent people have to die.'"

In a documentary about the Weather Underground, an interviewee said, "What we wanted to do here was deliver the most horrific hit that the United States government had ever suffered on its territory. We wanted to light it up. Our slogan was 'bring the war home,' and we really wanted to give the United States and the rest of the world a sense that this country was going to be completely unlivable if the United States continued in Vietnam, and that was the goal of this group."

The mainstream media is too busy drooling over Obama to explore why Ayers and other extreme radicals helped launch Obama's political career but didn't lift a finger to help other Democrats. Isn't the answer obvious? Barack Obama isn't just a Democrat, but an extreme liberal whose ideology appeals to those radicals. Obama's longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a hatemonger with a twisted view of history who is nuttier than some people I've involuntarily committed for psychiatric reasons. Wright says that blacks should sing "God damn America," not "God bless America." He also refers to the United States as the "US of KKK A." Wright suggested that the 9/11 attacks were justifiable payback for terrorism that we committed. When confronted with these manifestations of mental illness, Obama said, "I don't think that, uh, my church is actually particularly controversial."

Just something to think about:
What kind of people would take their children to such a church? Is it good for kids to see a Reverend boiling with so much rage and acting more like a political rabble-rouser than a man of God?

Barack Obama is a veritable magnet for attracting the most extreme radicals in America, including nut jobs who would be shunned by most liberal Democrats. This isn't a coincidence, but proof that birds of a feather flock together. No Presidential nominee in history has had such radical associations, yet the mainstream media is too busy fawning over Obama to explore his myriad danger signs. If you read everything Obama wrote in his books, it is easy to see that his attractive facade may just be a clever way to disguise who he really is and what he stands for. Personally, I don't think that he is essentially a sleeper cell, just biding his time, as some have suggested, until he becomes President and can accelerate the destruction of the United States. While I don't think that even he is that radical, I don't know it, thanks to nitwits like Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, who delight in posing gotcha questions to Republicans while Democrats get softball queries.

While I don't think that he intends to destroy the United States, I am convinced that he will try to warp it to fit his socialistic dreams of wealth redistribution, which is almost certainly his way of sugarcoating racial reparations. While an Illinois State Senator in 2001, Obama was clearly already considering how to best achieve that goal, as he revealed in this Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ-FM) interview (note: all of the ums, uhs, ahs, and repeated words are just the usual Obama stammering and stuttering, not typos on my part):

"If, if, if you look at, um, the, the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, um, and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights, uh, in uh, previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote. I would now be able to uh, sit at (sic) lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be OK. Uh, but the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, uh, and [unintelligible, but he was likely slurring together the words sort of] more basic issues such as political and and economic justice in this society. And, uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, uh, it wasn't that radical. It, it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by uh, the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the Federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, uh, and that hasn't shifted and one of the, uh, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused, uh, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and ah, activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. And, uh, in some ways we still suffer from that . . . I think that, uh, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it [redistributing wealth] legally, um, you know, I think you can, any, any three of us sitting here could, could come up with uh, a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts."

Obama wasn't just thinking of ways to expand redistribution of wealth, but in 2001 he was already plotting ways to achieve that objective. Unfortunately, Obama's plans for redistributing wealth are not limited to the United States. He clearly wants to transfer wealth from the US to foreign countries to elevate their economies while depressing ours.

Obama has too many radical associations for them to be explained away on the basis of chance. It's like flipping a coin and getting 50 tails in a row; it might happen, but it is so improbable as to be beyond reasonable doubt. Either:

In either case, this says a lot about the character and mindset of Barack Obama. His political career was launched in the living room of a man who founded an organization that wanted to brainwash Americans and exterminate the 25 million or so folks who still believed in capitalism, not socialism—and we're supposed to believe that this is just a coincidence?

Some of Obama's other radical associations include:

The fact that Dohrn, a cheerleader in high school, would later cheer such a horrific murder of innocent people seems to indicate ideological support for Charles Manson, who dreamed of (and tried to incite) a racial rebellion in which blacks would triumph.

Ayers and Dohrn were proud of their past and did nothing to conceal it. How could Barack Obama not have known how sick they are? He knew, and he is no doubt laughing at people who are gullible enough to believe his explanation for why it was OK to pal around with them.

On the October 30, 2008 Charlie Rose Show, Rose and guest Tom Brokaw admitted that they really don't know much about Obama's worldview, foreign policy, advisors, heroes, books he's read, or him in general. These are professional journalists who look at Obama and see a giant question mark! The mystery of just who Obama is was made possible only through the utter incompetence of the mainstream media, who bent over backwards to not examine him. After the election, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas appeared on the Charlie Rose Show and said that Obama is "a deeply manipulative guy" and that "there is a slightly creepy cult of personality about all this." History has clearly shown that national leaders who manipulate their citizens via a cult of personality often use such manipulation to hide their malicious goals. Obama's pre-election speeches sound statesmanlike but are often so devoid of substance that even professional journalists are puzzled about what he said and how it might translate into practical policy. In short: Obama is manipulating us, but no one knows exactly what his ultimate objectives are. Creepy indeed.

Giving a radical Mystery Man control of our armed forces and economy is the greatest risk our country has ever faced. This gamble could never have occurred if the press scrutinized Obama's many glaring warning signs, as wary Americans would have rejected him as quickly as a man with common sense would shun a beauty queen with multiple incurable STDs. Hence, the next four years will be a gamble in which we must hold our breath, waiting to find out if Obama is just a very liberal Democrat with good but misguided intentions, or whether he possesses a dark side that might plunge America into civil war, or otherwise ruin us.

Update: We may not have to wait for long. On October 19, 2008, Joe Biden admitted that foreign leaders will take advantage of Obama's inexperience by creating a crisis soon after Barack takes office. Biden admitted that Obama's response will be so dopey that even staunch Obama supporters will wonder if he has his head screwed on straight. Biden said, "Whoa, wait a minute, yo, whoa, whoa, I don't know about that decision." He then pleaded with people to be patient as Obama stumbles through the crisis. Before Obama picked him to be his running mate, Biden said he didn't think Obama was ready to be President, saying the job doesn't "lend itself to on-the-job training."

I appreciate Biden's candor about admitting that his running mate is so weak that he is bound to precipitate an attack, and his response will leave voters questioning Obama's intelligence—and their own, for having voted for him. If Joe The Plumber were there, he would have asked a question that none of the media posed: If electing Obama is bound to throw us into yet another major crisis, why don't we just save a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives by electing John McCain? Things are bad enough now. Why make them worse? Oh, yeah, I forgot: Half the country is desperate for change. Any change. If that's the change you want, vote for Obama. He'll give it to you.

The first lesson that kids learn during elementary school recess is that the big, strong kids aren't the ones who are picked on. There were numerous terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad during Clinton's presidency. Clinton either did not respond to them, or did so weakly, which emboldened terrorists and encouraged future attacks. Figuring that America was weak, the terrorists attacked again on 9/11. Bush responded forcefully, and we haven't been attacked since. That's not a coincidence. One of the most common questions reverberating through our nation after 9/11 was, "When are we going to be attacked next? Tomorrow? Next week? Every September 11th?" Who would have thought that President Bush would be able to keep terrorists at bay for so long? Shouldn't we give credit where credit is due? Pseudo-intellectuals despise Bush because he often doesn't sound very intelligent. Isn't it remarkable that someone who is supposedly that stupid was so successful in keeping us safe at home?

Many people speak favorably of Biden's extensive foreign policy experience, neglecting the fact that he has a long track record of advocating things that would have been disastrous for the United States. For example, Biden opposed the first Gulf War. Had Saddam Hussein been allowed to keep Kuwait, our inaction would have emboldened him and led to him ruling every oil-producing nation in the Middle East. Biden loves to brag about his intelligence, but for all of his supposed smarts, he says and does some amazingly stupid things. Brit Hume, managing editor of the Fox News Channel and a panelist on Fox News Sunday, said that Biden "acts like a man living in a fantasy world."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that Obama's ideas on how to deal with Iran are naive and "utterly immature." We're going to pay a high price for his naiveté.

Pop quiz #2
Why did President Bush want to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime? Hint: It wasn't WMD; that was the justification for the war, not the ultimate factor that made Bush determined to depose Hussein. It wasn't oil, either, because we haven't stolen a single drop from Iraq. It wasn't even the war on terrorism. So what was it?

Pop quiz #3
What was the single greatest benefit of winning the war in Iraq? Hint: The mainstream media never mentions this benefit. Even conservative talk show hosts haven't grasped it. Your answer is:_________?

If the mainstream media weren't so busy yapping about how much Sarah Palin's clothes cost, they may have had the time to explore these and other critical matters. However, they're so busy trying to get you to react that they never spur you to think.

Barack Obama is obviously following Saul Alinsky's advice in Rules for Radicals, his step-by-step guide on how to overthrow the American democracy by organizing, agitating, and deceiving your way into power. Most Americans are too engrossed in the incessant antics of the oddballs in Hollywood to spend time researching more important matters, such as how kooky Alinsky was, and how anyone who subscribes to his radical ideas for change is similarly nuts. However, like a snake charmer, Obama has mesmerized half of our population as they mindlessly echo his "change, change, change" message without comprehending where that change will lead us. Probably to hell.

In News of the Day In Perspective on the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons web site, the author suggests that Obama may be deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis.

During his Presidential campaign, Obama said, ". . . if you want real change, if you want an economy that rewards work, and the work's not just for Wall Street but for Main Street . . . then I need you to go out and talk to your friends, and talk to your neighbors . . . I want you to argue with them, and get in their face . . ."

Get in their face? Does that sound presidential, or like a street thug?

In any case, I made a concerted effort to speak about the Presidential race with everyone I could over the past few months, and found so many Obama supporters that I knew he would win the election. Courteously quizzing those devotees on why they supported Obama, I found only one person who gave an intellectually coherent justification. The rest stammered and stuttered as they struggled to formulate a reply. The most common response was, "Uh, he's for change." When I asked what he wanted to change and how that would benefit them, no one could answer that simple question.

On the October 20, 2008 Sean Hannity radio program, Joe The Plumber said that he will sometimes ask customers with an Obama-Biden sign in their yards why they're pro-Obama. Joe said he gets the same simple "he's for change" responses. He offered to not charge one customer for the $200 of work he'd just performed if that customer could give him an intelligent answer as to why he wants Obama to be President. Even with that incentive, the customer couldn't think of anything after 5 minutes.

99% of Americans obtain their sketchy knowledge of politics from the mainstream media, who purposely filter what they present to favor their chosen candidate. In this election, it's obviously Barack Obama. The mainstream media is therefore no longer serving its vital watchdog function, but instead acting as a giant propaganda machine in cahoots with far-left Democrats.

Today's Democrats are nothing like Hubert Humphrey or Harry Truman, who despised the Stalinist left. Today's Democrats think so little of the American public that they brazenly lie to them, such as in explaining what caused our current fiscal crisis without uttering a peep about how Democrats were the ones whose transfer of wealth ideas engendered this mess. The lapdog press parroted their explanation without mentioned some key facts, such as how President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, signed the Community Reinvestment Act into law in 1977. If you follow how that law was subsequently amended, you will see that Democrats worked to expand it, while Republicans—including perennial piñatas such as President Bush and Senator John McCain—advocated more regulations to halt the ticking time bomb they knew would eventually explode. Now that it has, Democrats and their accomplices, the mainstream media, have duped the public into believing that Republicans were responsible for the problem. Absurd!

The anger is justified, but its direction is not
On February 24, 2004, Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, warned, "If we fail to strengthen GSE regulation, we increase the possibility of insolvency and crisis. We put at risk our ability to preserve safe and sound financial markets in the United States."

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were defended by influential politicians. On April 7, 2005, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said, "Things are good in the housing market. Why are people entertaining radical change?" Instead of doing the right thing, Schumer used his influence to encourage more Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac loans.

Representative Barney Frank, D-MA, had an affair with Herb Moses, a Fannie Mae executive who sought to relax lending restrictions when Frank served on the House Banking Committee that had jurisdiction over Fannie Mae. Frank received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise that employed his erstwhile boyfriend. With corrupting influences like sex and money involved, is it any wonder that Frank manifested his bias (or lack of judgment) when he said, ''These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.'' Frank was quoted by The New York Times in a September 11, 2003 article, when he was the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. Incidentally, if you read that article, you will realize that the Bush administration, which is currently less popular than a cold sore, recommended that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should be subjected to what the Times termed “significant regulatory overhaul.” According to U.S. News & World Report columnist Michael Barone, the Bush administration tried 17 times to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Two months before they crashed, Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said, "Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound; that (sic) they are not in danger of going under." He also reassured worried investors by saying, "I think they are in good shape going forward . . . I do think their prospects going forward are very solid." When warned that giving homes to people who could not afford them might result in massive defaults, this genius said, "The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disastrous scenarios. And even if there were a problem, the Federal Government doesn't bail them out. But the more pressure there is there, then the less I think we see in terms of affordable housing."

Bill O'Reilly said that Barney Frank ". . . epitomizes everything that is wrong with the federal government. He was incompetent in his oversight of the federal mortgage agencies, and when they folded, causing a chain reaction of financial disasters for honest investors, he blamed other people."

O'Reilly also explained why McCain and Obama behaved like automatons in response to the Fannie/Freddie collapse instead of becoming angry as other Americans did. He explained, ". . . in the land of conventional politics, anyone showing anger and passion is deemed to be 'out of control.'" O'Reilly suggested that anger is sometimes appropriate. Clearly, it is now. Any politician who wasn't angry about this matter is out of touch with reality.

Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd is the #1 recipient of money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Barack Obama is #2, despite having been in the Senate for only a few years. Dodd and another Democratic Senator, Kent Conrad, Chairman of the Budget Committee and a member of the Finance Committee, are alleged to have received sweetheart mortgage deals through a company (Countrywide) that offered them rates not available to ordinary borrowers—in other words, people who did not regulate them. Both Democrats denied any wrongdoing, evidently because lax Senate ethical rules do not require disclosure of home mortgages. However, to many citizens, these sweetheart deals stink to high heaven and smell like graft. Is graft received in the form of a home mortgage any less corrupting than other forms of graft?

In 2005, the Bush administration renewed its call to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. On April 7, 2005, the Senate Banking Committee considered legislation to prohibit Fannie and Freddie from acquiring bad mortgages. All of the Republicans on that committee voted for it, while all Democrats opposed it—including Christopher Dodd, who is now Committee Chairman and doing his best to run a sham "investigation" of what precipitated the subprime mortgage collapse. This isn't a mystery, Senator Dodd: it resulted from half-wits like you who opposed regulation that could have averted or minimized the crisis! (Isn't it odd how the government permits politicians to investigate themselves?** What's next? Allowing criminals to serve on their own juries? Sheesh!) Democrats then blocked a vote by the entire Senate. And we're actually paying you nitwits for your idiotic incompetence?

** When speaking of governmental reforms, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "You can't get a hog to butcher itself." When politicians can screw up year after year and still keep their jobs, what incentive do they have to change? None. If doctors are held personally accountable for their errors, why shouldn't politicians also be held accountable? Politicians want far more power than doctors, yet they want zero responsibility. It's time to change that. Being held personally accountable might force them to serve the citizens, not the special interests. If you agree, contact me and I'll describe what we can do to make politicians work for us, not against us.

In 2006, Senate Republicans introduced another bill to deal with the mounting mortgage problem. Senator John McCain was one of the sponsors of that bill. Republicans voted for the bill, while Democrats, now in the majority, killed it. In a May 26, 2006, press release, Senator John McCain said, “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”

Although there are plenty of valid reasons to criticize Bush and McCain, only partisans with a compulsion to distort the truth to fit their agenda would fail to acknowledge that Bush and McCain tried to fix the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae mess years before it mushroomed out of control. Inexplicably, Bush and McCain are bearing the brunt of the wrath for this debacle, while voters increasingly favor Senator Barack Obama and other Democrats, such as Rep. Maxine Waters, who insisted in late 2004 that, "We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines.” Yes, that is the same Frank Raines who is now alleged to have cooked the books to inflate his bonuses.

On September 25, 2008, Bill Clinton said, "I think that the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans . . . to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

If Democrats could have found a Republican on which to pin the blame for this crisis, you can bet they would have made a spectacle of grilling that person in Congressional hearings. But it didn't happen. If there is Republican blame in this debacle, and I'm sure there is, it is trivial compared with the instrumental role that Democrats played in initiating it, ignoring warning signs, and even fighting Republicans who sought to fix the problem before it blew up.

By the way, I am not a Republican or Bush supporter; I am a fiscally conservative populist who believes in the rights and power of the people. I strongly believe that most of the elitists who rule us are ruining our country for their benefit—and if you disagree, may I ask what planet you are on? Mars? What more evidence could you possibly want? Bush could have, and should have, done much more than he did, and he should not have signed the bailout bill, but one thing is clear: a couple of years before our economy collapsed, he and McCain tried to stop the brewing disaster but Democrats stood in their way.

When a lie is the truth, and the truth is a lie (or perceived to be one), then we live in a world where wrong is right, and right is wrong. However, reality can be suppressed for only so long. Americans will eventually wise up and overwhelmingly reject the myths they've been fed by the Democrats and the mainstream media. When the next major crisis hits, Americans will not be so ready to pay for the mistakes of others. We're already at the "enough is enough" point, and won't tolerate the many looming disasters that Washington politicians will use as excuses to steal more of your money, and hence limit your freedom.

ACORN: More than just a nut

Despite his protestations, Obama is indelibly linked to ACORN, a group that is unquestionably linked to the mortgage disaster and so many election scandals, present and past, that they've been likened to an organized crime ring, triggering an FBI investigation under the RICO statutes—the ones designed to combat the Mafia and other mobs. Interestingly, computers mysteriously disappeared from an ACORN office under investigation. Might they be trying to hide something?

The October 18, 2008 Mike Huckabee television show featured two guests who said that ACORN reps induced them, sometimes with bribes, to register over 100 times. Another guest, the Rev. Al Sharpton, said that such activities "makes people more cynical and distrustful of the voting system." Ya think?

On the October 26, 2008 Monica Crowley Show, former prosecuting attorney and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said, "ACORN is a radical organization. It is a self-righteous organization that believes because it is serving the poor, it can violate anything or do anything, which is why their people are constantly putting in these phony registrations. They may say they think there is something wrong with it, but they actually encourage it. They encourage it because they want to bring the system down. They believe in destroying the system from within, and that anything is justified in doing that—and they're taught that. And that is what they're doing, and you're seeing it playing out not just in one place, but in a lot of places. This is not a Republican plot of some kind. Democratic states with Democratic Secretaries of State have them under investigation. There are people who've been convicted in a number of states. This is for real, and this is on the largest scale I've ever seen. Plus, they have endorsed Obama, and this is what I don't get at all, Monica; I'll have to really do more research on this, but I really don't understand: they get federal money—ACORN has gotten $30 million at least from the federal government—they are a charitable organization, meaning they don't have to pay taxes—they are 501(c)(3)—yet they are endorsing a candidate . . . that just stinks, doesn't it?"

Yes, it does. 501(c)(3) organizations are supposed to be nonpartisan; they are prohibited from conducting political campaign activities to influence elections to public office. But what does ACORN do? Brazenly flaunt the law.

The rule of law, my foot
One of the central principles of the rule of law is that laws apply equally to everyone. Obviously, it does not. In the United States, liberals and blacks can get away with much more than conservatives and whites. If ACORN were a conservative organization, it would have been dissolved years ago and no taxpayer funds would continue to support it. The real ACORN group, liberal as it is, with a strong focus on black people, can effectively steal votes from others, and yet they're allowed to get away with that, year after year. The government swats flies without cleaning up the manure pile, and taxpayers must pay to sustain that manure pile.

Another example of a double standard in regard to race was manifested when the FBI investigated two nuts in California who put a noose around the neck of a Sarah Palin effigy and hung that outside their home. The FBI concluded that it was in poor taste, but no crime was committed. Others who hung an effigy of Barack Obama may be charged with a hate crime.

People in power who permit this black/white double standard to continue are probably not aware of research showing that even some animals possess a sense of fair play and react in anger when the rules are more stringent for them and more lax for others.

With ACORN and affiliated groups working overtime to commit the most massive voter fraud in US history, they are conspiring to effectively nullify my vote, and the votes of other conservatives, thereby denying us our most precious and essential Constitutional right. The federal government is investigating this election crime, but their slow and halfhearted response ensures that a few people may get a slap on the wrist a few years from now, but those criminals will succeed in neutralizing my vote. If Obama wins, no one can honestly say with certainty that his victory was legitimate. Instead, it may have been a direct result of that voter fraud. This seriously undermines the legitimacy of our government. Here is a relevant excerpt from the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Although the US government has taken great pains to physically preserve the Declaration of Independence, many current politicians don't seem to comprehend the words in it, especially the words I emphasized by putting them in red. Our forefathers basically said that when any government abuses its citizens, they have a right to eliminate that government and form a new one. The only legitimacy that elected officials have stems from the fact that we gave them power by voting for them.

Thousands of ineligible voters are now flooding the system, ranging from 7-year-old kids to Mickey Mouse. If the voting process is corrupted, as the current one definitely is, thanks to a nationwide (and even worldwide) conspiracy to put Obama in office, millions of Americans will reject the legitimacy of his election and look to the courts to order a new election that scrupulously adheres to the law. I hope the court isn't shortsighted enough to say, "We agree that 'President' Obama might not have been elected had ACORN's workers not engaged in fraudulent voter activities throughout the United States, but gee whiz, he's in office now, so can't you folks please go home and forget that your most basic civil right was violated? While the Declaration of Independence might now give you the right to kick us all out, won't you please let us stay? I mean, we've been Your Government for so long that it seems we're destined to exist forever, even if we screw you right and left. Especially left. Now go home and pay your taxes to help spread the wealth around."

Philosopher and author Robert A. Heinlein said, "There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." Like millions of other taxpayers, I don't want to be forced to pay taxes that ultimately go to ACORN and groups like it that use that money to undermine my vote, and the votes of others. ACORN is supposed to be nonpartisan, and is in fact REQUIRED to be nonpartisan, but it clearly is not. When the US government forces taxpayers to fund ACORN, it is just as infuriating as it would be if the Mafia could force you to pay for the gasoline they use in driving to your business to extort money from you. It's sheer tyranny, and sensible taxpayers are sick of it.

On the November 1, 2008 Mike Huckabee show, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said this about Obama: "I think he is a charlatan . . . I think he is a phony. I am sorry but I do. I've got all sorts of evidence for it starting with the way he raises money without any responsibility, spends it and then has the ACORN running around trying to keep show that the right voters vote."

In regard to "the way he raises money without any responsibility," Secretary Eagleburger was referring to how the Obama campaign is allowing donors to use prepaid credit cards that are largely untraceable and therefore can be used to evade donation limits or to mask a contributor's identity or even country of residence. The latter permits Obama to illegally accept donations from foreigners. The Obama campaign also removed many of the credit card security features on its online donor page, thereby allowing anyone with a valid credit card number to donate using any name or address. A standard online security practice is to ensure that a cardholder's name matches personal information, such as an address. The Obama campaign accepted donations from Bart Simpson, Family Guy, King Kong, and Daffy Duck, who listed his address as "124 Wacky Way, Beverly Hills, Calif.” Wacky, indeed. Another name for it is "donor fraud." By going out of his way to facilitate these fraudulent donations, Obama has shown that he is a fraud and an unprincipled thug who will violate any law he thinks he can get away with to be elected President—the chief law enforcement officer in the United States. If he were more prudent, he would realize that his multiple scams ensure that his presidency will not be legitimate. The man who envisions himself as The Great Unifier will instead be The Great Divider, because no one with an ounce of common sense will accept the legitimacy of the chief law enforcement officer in the US when that person broke multiple laws during his campaign.

Near the beginning of this topic, I said, "It's tough to make an intelligent choice when you hear only half of the story." That applies to many decisions, from career choices to voting. However, it's difficult to formulate an informed decision in this election when the mainstream media has abandoned their vital role as journalists and functions as an army of press secretaries working for Obama and other liberals, presenting a stunningly brazen distortion of the truth. Like other contemplative voters, I've done my best to make informed voting choices, but the hundreds of hours that I've spent researching the candidates and their positions may effectively be thrown out the window by fraudulent voter activities linked to ACORN. After leaving office, Bill Clinton and especially Jimmy Carter have jetted around the world to combat fraud in foreign elections. Predictably, they haven't uttered a peep about the voter fraud in America. This proves that their foremost allegiance is to their fellow Democrats, not their fellow Americans.

In a FOX News special (Barack Obama: Ties that Bind?), Stanley Kurtz said, "ACORN made a practice in the late '80s and early '90s of forcing banks to make these high-risk loans to low-credit customers. They would run a kind of intimidation campaign where they'd pour into the lobby of a bank, scare away the customers, and make the bankers capitulate. [...] They went to their lobbyists on Capitol Hill and forced their lobbyists to work on the Democratic Congress. And it was this alliance of ACORN and their Democratic friends in Congress that forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to loosen up credit standards in the whole banking system."

Kurtz continued, "When Barack Obama was a wet-behind-the-ears community organizer in Chicago in the late 1980s, he ran into a woman named Madeline Talbott," a longtime ACORN director, who asked Obama to begin training her staff. After law school, he began training ACORN leaders. Obama's FightTheSmears.com web site initially said that claim was false. When Kurtz pointed to news reports and articles from the 1990s that discussed Obama conducting "classes for future leaders" of ACORN, FightTheSmears.com then changed its story by instead saying that ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee. In other words, Fight The Truth with Clinton-type obfuscation.

In the New York Post, Kurtz wrote, "The Woods Fund report makes it clear Obama was fully aware of the intimidation tactics used by ACORN's Madeline Talbott in her pioneering efforts to force banks to suspend their usual credit standards."

On December 1, 2007, Obama said, ". . . let me even say before I even get inaugurated, during the transition we're gonna be calling all of you [community organizers] in to help us shape the agenda."

In the final Presidential debate, John McCain said, "We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, and may be destroying the fabric of democracy."

Unfortunately, the damage that ACORN inflicted upon the fabric of democracy by voter fraud is trivial compared to the harm caused by the pressure they exerted upon banks and Congress that contributed to the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That housing collapse triggered a domino effect of financial failures that is devastating our economy now and for decades into the future. In From Bailout to Bliss, I mentioned that a leading Russian political analyst, Professor Igor Panarin, is predicting that our economic crisis "could well lead to the breakup of the United States." Before I began researching this crisis two months ago, my reaction to such a statement would have been something along the lines of, "Yeah, right. He's nuts." Now that I have a much better understanding of the mess we're in, and how it will be all but impossible to dig our way out of this hole, and how things are bound to get even worse in the future, I think that Professor Panarin is a prescient genius who has good reason to think that the USA's days are numbered. Considering his ties to ACORN, it is ironic that Barack Obama, a man who said he'd bring us together, will likely be judged by history as one of the pivotal players in triggering the destruction of our country.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, McCain said that Obama's "campaign paid $832,000 in the primary to a front group for ACORN, and you know what it was described as? 'Lighting and site preparation.'" In view of how ACORN has wounded the United States, it is no wonder that Obama has used deception to hide his ties to ACORN.

The next civil right to go: free speech

Democrats have threatened to further warp the political landscape by reinstituting and expanding the Fairness Doctrine. Like many pieces of legislation, its name is misleading. Democrats salivate at the opportunity to use the Fairness Doctrine to nullify the last great bastion of conservatism: talk radio. Other than that, FOX News, and a smattering of newspapers, almost every other media outlet in the United States is overwhelmingly liberal. Nancy Pelosi and other extreme liberals don't care that liberals already dominate almost all media, except for the few aforementioned exceptions. Like other tyrants, she wants total control. If she gets her way, making an informed choice will be increasingly difficult as journalism further morphs into lopsided propaganda. She and Obama will be jumping with joy as America is changed from a great nation to one that is socialistic. However, it is no accident that the most prosperous nations are capitalistic democracies. Socialistic countries inevitably have second-rate economies, at best.

Harry Reid, who is currently the Senate Majority Leader and perhaps the most passive-aggressive politician ever, will undoubtedly rejoice along with Pelosi, Obama, and Ayers as the United States is changed to fit Obama's vision of a country in which the government—and its heavily armed federal agents, of course—gets to tell you how much of your paycheck you can keep. Joe The Plumber wisely realized that Obama's $250,000 threshold of higher taxation is subject to whimsical reduction, especially after the election when Obama, Reid, and Pelosi can unleash their pent-up longing to take even more of your money. Joe said, "I mean, $250,000 now. What if he decides, well you know $150,000, you're pretty rich, too. Let's go ahead and lower it again. You know it's a slippery slope. When's it going to stop?"

Never. That $250,000 figure has already fallen to $200,000 before the election. (Update: On October 27, 2008, Biden spoke of a $150,000 threshold. Two days later, the Obama-Biden team finally made clear that those figures apply to couples and will be lower still for individuals. Earlier in the campaign, they said, "If you make less than $250,000, you won't pay a penny more tax." You means you, not you and your spouse. This is so obvious that only one conclusion can be drawn from it: they were lying through their teeth to deceive voters. On October 31, 2008, an Obama spokesperson (Governor Bill Richardson) suggested that $120,000 may be their threshold—remember, Obama previously voted to increase taxes on people making $42,000 per year.) Don't breathe a sigh of relief if you make less than that, because Obama will let the Bush tax cuts expire, so everyone will pay higher taxes. Low-income taxpayers will be especially hard hit; their tax rate will increase by 50% (from 10% to 15%). Didn't Obama say low- and middle-income taxpayers would pay less? Yes. He lied. And half of you believed him, because the mainstream media let him get away with that deception. What's truly odd about Obama's insistence on higher taxes is that countless economists have warned that raising taxes during a recession may lead to a depression. Obama has shown no signs of heeding that advice from people who clearly know much more about economics than he does. Biden attempted to justify the higher taxes by calling them "patriotic." Since when is it patriotic to ruin your country and destroy the American dream for people who are willing to work hard?

Obama is a clever man with a slick ability to camouflage his intentions, but based on his voting record and veiled threats (such as saying that "words are not enough," suggesting that whites will be forced to pay cash reparations to all black people in America), almost everyone will pay higher taxes. That includes doctors, teachers, plumbers, and other blue-collar workers. Even struggling single moms will struggle more to survive as more of their paycheck is looted by the government. If you're white, you may pay even more, although a good case could be made that whites have already atoned for slavery with the blood of Union soldiers during the Civil War, and with trillions of dollars subsequently transferred to blacks via countless welfare programs.

Let's also not forget that innumerable whites had their civil rights curtailed via affirmative action that enabled blacks who were less qualified, or simply didn't want to work as hard, step ahead of others. Even whites who weren't directly victimized by affirmative action have paid a price for it. I had to work multiple jobs in college to pay my way, while I knew blacks with richer parents who had their education handed to them on a silver platter, courtesy of Michigan taxpayers, including my Mom. During those college years, I lived in perpetual fear that I would not be accepted into medical school despite my high grades. In those days, the competition for med school acceptance was fierce, and many highly qualified white applicants were rejected in favor of blacks with much less impressive grades and MCAT scores. Between working and studying enough so that I obtained a perfect grade in almost every class I took, I had so little free time that I didn't go on my first date until my last year of college.

That's a trivial matter, though. What is far from trivial are the academic scams that allow blacks to obtain college degrees by merely going through the pretense of college, such as the one I uncovered by happenstance at Michigan State University. This academic fraud is yet another example of how bleeding-heart liberals poison society with their cockamamie ideas. Even the supposed beneficiaries, black people, are victimized because affirmative action automatically makes any black person's achievement suspect. Whites sometimes wonder and seethe, "Did you really earn that college degree? Do you really deserve that job?" Consumers are victimized when blacks who did not truly deserve their degrees or jobs perform poorly. I recently ran smack-dab into this incompetence when two black employees of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (one representative and her supervisor) effectively denied me coverage for an eye problem necessitating surgery (not LASIK; I'd already paid for that myself years ago) that my policy OBVIOUSLY should have covered. I was shocked when they asserted that the surgery required to correct my problem was not "medically necessary." This was so absurd that I knew those BCBS reps were either fighting a race war and hence depriving me of my civil rights, or were so stupid that they should be summarily fired.

Obama's talk of making whites pay reparations for slavery intentionally overlooks the fact that we already have paid for it in many ways, and we continue to do so every day. In addition to being penalized by affirmative action, academic fraud, and welfare, some black leaders such as Jesse Jackson have used race as a weapon to shake down corporations for staggering amounts of money that is simply passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Ultimately, the crux of this and other racial issues isn't skin color, but ideology, so it isn't just whites who are incensed by Jackson and others like him (see Jamaal Michaels' review of Shakedown: Exposing The Real Jesse Jackson).

Liberals pushing for the Fairness Doctrine intend to use it to attack only conservatives, not fellow libs such as Charles Karel Bouley, a gay activist and Obama supporter who is a KGO radio Host. Bouley is notorious for childishly rejoicing in the death of former President Ronald Reagan and maliciously suggesting that former White House spokesman Tony Snow's cancer may be payback for serving President Bush and FOX News. On November 2, 2008, Bouley blew a fuse and screamed into his microphone, "Fuck, God damn, Joe the God damn motha fuckin' plumber! I want mother fuckin' Joe the Plumber dead!" If a conservative said anything even half that reprehensible, he would be taken off the air permanently and referred to a psychiatrist. Liberals are allowed to get away with virtually anything: wanting to kill people who respectfully ask questions of politicians, threatening Sarah Palin with rape, or hanging her in effigy.

Update: The latest tack in the liberal plan to silence conservative talk radio is to push the FCC to enforce localism rules requiring a minimum amount of local programming, and therefore less national programming (such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Monica Crowley). Local programming usually isn't as captivating as national shows (except when I am being interviewed :-), so many people would rather turn off their radios than listen to people discuss the PTA or fee increases for dog licenses. Why not continue to let audiences decide what's on the radio? Popular shows will survive; unpopular ones will not. This system represents true democracy; the people decide what is on the air. There is no need for government to step in; any attempt to do so is clearly a violation of our First Amendment rights. Isn't it odd how the government is constantly assaulting our rights? The only thing that keeps them at least partially in check is our