We are blessed to be a blessing

Buffalo Grove, IL : "Tesla car owners, dealerships and charging stations have been targeted nationwide by protesters and vandals because of CEO Elon Musk's involvement with the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which aims to slash wasteful spending and fraud within the federal government."

Shocking. This story was about a suburban woman. The Left used to admire electric cars and tackling government waste and fraud. Obama and Clinton lauded it. Now we know that was all scripted by Soros and others who were drinking from the Government corruption hose. Our own citizens are having their brains warped and wounded by Trump Derangement Syndrome. They now hate what Democrats used to stand for.

 
I still want care for the environment. We forgot that in the "Green New Deal." Reduce waste and clean up after yourself. If we had a cabinet member for that we could all breath fresh air and not look at trash along every intersection. I want fair tariffs and honest government workers, and grants that go for worthwhile research instead of building academic empires. How did we end up with so much graft? The lower and mid-income in our country are the biggest, most generous (in percentage) and the two biggest corporate giants, Buffett and Musk , are the most generous in amounts. Rich or ordinary--we have been blessed to be a blessing. Let's get back to that value system.

Cook County woman allegedly vandalized Tesla service center in suburb | FOX 32 Chicago

Warren Buffett Tops List of Biggest Donations - Business Insider

Elon Musk: The Donations of the World’s Richest Individual Focus on Education and Innovation - CEOWORLD magazine

What Kamala Harris believes

 https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-kamala-harris-believes-c1136006

What Kamala Harris Believes

The Vice President’s political record reveals the views of a California progressive.

---

By The WSJ  Editorial Board

Democrats are rapidly unifying behind Kamala Harris as their party nominee, yet the Vice President remains relatively unknown to most Americans. That means it’s important to look at her record to see what she believes.

As VP she’s closely identified with the Biden agenda, for better or worse, and she embraced that record in remarks on Monday. She said President Biden’s first term has “surpassed the legacy” of most Presidents who have served two.

So mark her down as endorsing the spending blowouts that caused inflation, the Green New Deal, entitlement expansions and student loan forgiveness. Until she says otherwise, we should also assume she’s in favor of Mr. Biden’s $5 trillion tax increase in 2025.

The Vice President’s four years as a Senator from California are another window on her worldview. She sponsored a bill to create a $6,000 guaranteed income for families making up to $100,000. Another Harris proposal: A refundable tax credit that would effectively cap rents and utility payments at 30% of income. Liberal economists panned the subsidy because it would drive up rents.

She co-sponsored legislation with Bernie Sanders that would pay tuition at four-year public colleges for students from families making up to $125,000. This is more honest than the Administration’s back-end student loan cancellation. But it would cost $700 billion over a decade and encourage colleges to increase tuition.

Another Bernie mind-meld: Single-payer healthcare. Ms. Harris co-sponsored his Medicare for All legislation paid for by higher income taxes. She tweaked Bernie’s plan when running for President in 2019 by extending the phase-in to 10 years from four and exempting households making less than $100,000 from the “income-based premium.” But it would still put government in charge of all American healthcare over time.

As a San Francisco Democrat, Ms. Harris shares the state’s hostility to fossil fuels. She used her power as California Attorney General to launch an investigation into Exxon Mobil over its carbon emissions. In 2019 she endorsed a nationwide ban on oil and gas fracking, which would cost tens of thousands of jobs and cause power outages like those that often occur in her home state. Expect this to be a GOP talking point in Pennsylvania.

One question to ask is whether the Vice President wants to restructure the Supreme Court. She said in 2019 she was “open” to adding more Justices, but that idea doesn’t poll well. Does she agree with Mr. Biden’s mooted plan to endorse “reforms” to the High Court that would make the Justices subject to Congressional supervision?

Mr. Biden famously put Ms. Harris in charge of border policy, and we know how that has turned out. Rather than push for border policy changes, her first instinct was to blame the rush of migrants on “root causes” in developing countries, including corruption, violence, poverty and “lack of climate adaptation and climate resilience.”

Climate change makes the U.S. border a sieve? Apparently so. “In Honduras, in the wake of hurricanes, we must deliver food, shelter, water and sanitation to the people,” Ms. Harris declared. “And in Guatemala, as farmers endure continuous droughts, we must work with them to plant drought-resistant crops.” These “root causes” take decades to address, and in the meantime she had nothing to say about actual border security.

Ms. Harris’s foreign policy views aren’t well known, or perhaps even well formed, apart from promoting Mr. Biden’s policies. While she has backed the Administration’s military assistance to Ukraine, she has equivocated about support for Israel. In March she chastised Israel for not doing enough to ease a “humanitarian catastrophe.” Leaks to the press say officials at the National Security Council toned down her speech’s criticism of Israel.

She lambasted the Trump Administration for killing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani, claiming it could lead to bigger war in the Mideast. The killing chastened Iran’s rulers instead, at least until the Biden Administration began to ease sanctions and tried to repeat the 2015 nuclear deal.

It will be especially important for the press to ask Ms. Harris about her national security views. If her handlers control her as much as White House advisers have Mr. Biden, we’ll know they’re afraid that the Vice President might not be able to handle the scrutiny.

A fair conclusion from all of this is that Ms. Harris is a standard California progressive on most issues, often to the left of Mr. Biden. Perhaps as she reintroduces herself to the public in the coming weeks, she will modify some of those views. She would be wise to do so if she wants to win.

Given the rush by Democrats to anoint Ms. Harris as their nominee, the press has a particular obligation to tell the public about who she is and what she really thinks. Does she believe California is a model for the country?

What societal changes have created the "Nones"

Not all societal change moves at the speed of the lockdown’s spiritual and moral disruptions. Some take decades. So when Charlie Ollermann summarized in Sunday School on October 30 a few details about how Christianity and organized religion are losing both the numbers and the influence game, I took note. It went something like this (a quote from Pew site), “Pew's National Public Opinion Reference Survey found that the majority of Americans -- 63% -- consider themselves Christian, down from 78% in 2007. Meanwhile, 29% of adults list their religion as "none," meaning they consider themselves atheist, agnostic or "nothing in particular." That figure has increased since 2007, when 16% said they have no religion.” As he moved on to our lesson in 2 Thessalonians, I jotted down four societal changes which I thought were the root causes building over the last almost 60 years. I expanded my thoughts here at my blog.

1 ) The War on Poverty (launched January 1964). Trillions (est. 16 in 2014, 27 in 2019) have been spent, the power of the federal government has grown enormously, and both liberals and conservatives strongly disagree on results, or even how to describe poverty. In my opinion religious groups whose Biblical charge was charity, benevolence, feeding and clothing the poor, in short, following the commands of Jesus as outlined in Matthew 25, were severely compromised by taking grants to do their “good works.” (This worsened after GHW Bush’s “thousand points of light.” Yet, over 50% of Americans do not pay federal income tax, and 25 million workers are given money when they file for taxes (EITC, $60 billion). The median income of a single mother household is $49,214, and for a married couple household it is $101,517 (i.e., 2 incomes) according to U.S. Census, 2020. Uncle Sam is not a good step-father, but poverty pays well. Children of married parents rarely grow up in poverty. All four of my points directly or indirectly involve marriage. If poverty were to be ended tomorrow at noon, millions of people would be out of work. . . very well paid jobs with amazing benefits, most in government, but many in non-profits and NGOs. That would require new government programs to aid those recently unemployed.

2 ) Vatican II (1962-1965). Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc. don’t usually think that Vatican II affected us much, but in my opinion the Roman Catholic Church is our mother, or at least a grandmother in our major doctrines—Diety of Christ, the Trinity, a canon of scripture we call the Bible, sacraments as an expression of faith, the Christian life, evangelization, missions, what is heresy, etc. People catechized in the 70s or 80s speak about how poorly they were taught the basics of the faith. When we joined UALC in 1976 our “catechism” book cover was pink and orange with balloons. And that’s also a description of what was between the covers. I’d never seen a Luther’s Small Catechism until Dave and Pam Mann taught a night class at Mill Run about 20 years ago. I think growth of the “nones” reflects on the sloppy, silly and social justice Pablum people educated in the 70s and 80s received. They were not prepared to educate their own children when they were so poorly catechized—both Protestants and Catholics.

3) The Population Bomb and Earth Day (1970s) moving on to earth worship, Green New Deal and pantheism. Paul Ehrlich’s book “The population bomb” scared me to death. He said hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in spite of all the agriculture and aid programs we (many by churches) were supporting. Well, we’d already caved to contraception, so why not abortion? Now in the 21st century we can’t sustain a population replacement rate and killing the next generation is considered righteous even by many Christians. Now we’re forced to accept immigration, even illegal immigration, just to support our economy. But we’ve made a Faustian bargain (deal with the devil) and are taking in drugs, sex trafficking and criminals in the deal to maintain the population. Plus, Christian non-profits are taking huge grants from the government to manage all this. People from 200 countries now come through our southern border adding great stress to those states, which then make us all border states. Communing with nature now replaces “organized” religion designed for the family (which often seems very disorganized to some) with various efforts (and riots) to save the planet, our so-called Mother. This pantheism combined with demonizing men and marriage is reducing society’s need for churches.

4) Second Wave Feminism (early 70s for the general public). Although scholars would date this from the “pill” developed in the 1960s and various books, I didn’t pay much attention until “The women’s liberation movement” became a kitchen table topic among women. I was quite caught up in it myself. I had young children, had a master’s degree, and could really identify with the conversations so many were having. We were already active in a fair housing group, a prison reform group, and a race relations group (all loosely church based). Falling for the seductive message that the male/female differences were just cultural and should be changed was easy for my generation. Between the availability of the pill and free sex (which has never been free for women, only men) and the siren call of fabulous careers, prestige, and a bigger bank account, women were literally fleeing the home for the office. So who passes on the faith to the kids if both parents are working, exhausted in the evening, and using week-ends for family time, especially Sunday morning?

I do not point to the Baby Boomers (born after WWII and before 1965) for initiating these changes. The leaders of the various movements and authors of the transformational books were mostly born in the 1930s, or even the 1920s. But the Boomers as adolescents certainly bore the brunt of the changes and misinformation. They are the parents and grandparents of the “nones” who are not just skipping church-- many live in fear of a collapsing planet and won’t commit to anything, not even a job let alone marriage and a family, made worse lately by Covid, and no faith in Jesus.

Investing in your retirement and other boring topics

I got a late start in preparing for retirement. I was in my mid-40s with a full time tenure track job at Ohio State University and a put and take savings account. When I read the pension forms that came with all the other forms I might as well have been reading Russian, Распишитесь, пожалуйста. I began reading the Wall St. Journal--which was delivered to the Veterinary Medicine Library. I was trying to figure out the difference between a stock and a bond, learning about long term gains, what is a mutual fund, figuring out defined benefit and tax deferred annuities. And I'd call my Dad or talk to my brother who was a stock broker. We still made horrible mistakes by anyone's gauge of naivete.

 
But early on I know I decided I didn't like certain stocks, and that some investments weren't worth the return because they were in violation of my core beliefs. I didn't know what it was called but I wouldn't invest in tobacco, alcohol, certain food, health and beauty products (animal testing), and viaticals (insurance plan cash out, like for people with AIDS). Eventually, because large corporations eat up smaller ones, if I liked a snack product it later would be owned by a tobacco company (R.J. Reynolds and Nabisco or Philip Morris and Kraft). And then that group would split or merge into an even larger blob. But still, for awhile I could feel smug and self-righteous--I was a Democrat then and that's what they do.

 
That's the principle when talking people into accepting ESG--environmental, social and governance investing. Most of us do want to be moral, upright and kind to the poor and patriotic. The rub is who gets to decide, and who is pushing this? At this point in our history, the left is moving from the locker room pep talk to a full court press. This is how a Republican study committee looks at ESG:

"A small handful of leftist bureaucrats and board members are behind ESG. Americans never voted for it, but ESG is still making the entire country poorer, more reliant on foreign oil, and less free. ESG is a cornerstone of Democrats’ Green New Deal agenda and one of the most serious long-term threats to energy independence and Americans’ pocketbooks. The Republican Study Committee will push to make combatting ESG a priority after 2022."

In other words, we won't be able to make the choices and mistakes I made in the 1980s about what values and products I wanted to take care of me in my old age. However, if you google, bing, brave or duck-duck-go the term ESG, you'll find several pages of only the most wonderful, positive and downright religious sounding explanation. But if you start or own a company, you won't be able to invest, expand or even use a bank to pay your employees if you don't meet the government (or United Nation's) ESG goals for climate, equity, sustainability (never defined), science, gender, guns, abortion, etc.

The Left’s ESG Movement Is Coming After All Americans (dailysignal.com)

What Is Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing? (investopedia.com)

And as far as retirement goals? Nothing has hurt us as badly as Biden's inflation and killer green economy, or helped us as much as Trump's Make America Great Again ambitious plan.

Biden wants $2 Trillion for infrastructure

Who owns U.S. Infrastructure? Not the federal government. So with a $2 Trillion request from Biden for something it doesn't own, where is the money going? State and local governments and the private sector own 97% of the nation’s nondefense infrastructure, and they fund 94% of it. This is just a "green new deal" tax. In other words, a pay back to unions, oligarchs and party hacks for getting Biden into office.

Who Owns U.S. Infrastructure? | Cato Institute

Every time I see CDC director Walensky's emotional news clip about Covid I am reminded of Biden's lies during the campaign about how he had a plan. (Deja vu. Obama had a secret plan in 2008 to get us out of a war, and kept us there 8 more years.) I remember how Biden and Pelosi criticized Trump for closing air traffic from China as racist and xenophobic. He and other Democrats ridiculed the idea of fast tracking a vaccine without years of red tape. He had no plan, and for the most part he is doing nothing except instilling more fear and asking for more of what we've been doing for a year.

 
His lies worked, and Democrats voted for a cognitively impaired head of a family crime ring with close to 50 years in government. While all his advisors worked behind the scenes to take advantage of this crisis, they busted the border wide open while busting the budget with more trillion dollar green deal give aways, and stealing our rights guaranteed us as Americans. No one advising Biden was doing anything about Covid because all scientists and researchers were already going full steam ahead.

 
Trump was a victim of his enemies in the media, Big Tech, and RINOs, but Biden is a victim of old age and feebleness--something none of us can control. We still don't know who's in charge, but I'm pretty sure it isn't Harris who hasn't had enough time to clear out her enemies in the party. (She only got a paltry 1% in the primaries--a good indication of the faith they have in her). A cabal of Obama cronies and their straw bosses is my guess. They believe they didn't think big enough with the 2008 financial crisis with just billions, so they've moved on to trillions. They've been controlling our education system for such a time as this, and Americans probably don't know the difference.

 
Only China of all the countries in the world has made out with the crisis it engineered.

The Socialist dreams of today's Democrats are expensive

The Green New Deal.  Forgive student debt and make college free. Medicare for All. $$$$$$$$

"The bill just for the Green New Deal, forgiving $1.5 trillion in student debt, and Medicare For All tops $100 trillion. No proposal for financing the cost has passed the laugh test. Most are variations of the “make the rich pay their fair share” cliché, meaning various tax-hikes that would stop the current record-setting economic boom in its tracks. The reality is, the top 10% of earners just don’t have enough money. We could confiscate outright all the wealth of America’s 707 billionaires, $3 trillion, and still not be able even to fund the federal government’s FY 2020 budget estimate of $4.7 trillion.

Nor can those evil corporations that create jobs and wealth be tapped for more funds. The Fortune 500 wealthiest companies are worth $22.6 trillion, just about enough to cover the fed’s total debt of $22.7 trillion rising as we speak. And of course, then the economy would implode. Nor can raising the corporate tax rate generate the money socialists need to fund their proposals. After all, Trump’s reduction of corporate rates has contributed to economic growth, more jobs, higher tax revenues, and wage-gains for workers. Why would voters want to throw that all away to achieve some vague idea of “social justice”?"

These candidates all went to public school.  Did they flunk math?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/socialism-makes-people-do-strange-things-bruce-thornton/?

The critics of Trump need to look in the mirror

The same people who scream and cry at Trump's behavior and claim he doesn't have American values (like my cousin Ron and former tenant Vern) and should be impeached are the ones lusting after every crazy program the 2020 candidates can come up with to distinguish themselves from the next socialist on the ballot. Green new deal. Death to the unborn. Confiscate the guns. Destroy free speech. Force the NFL to have 20% LGBTQ (I made that one up, but it they want it for TV why not football?). Tax wealth, not just income. Legalize and encourage homelessness with increased housing regulations. Start more forest fires with bad environmental rules. Fly in the illegals--don't make them walk; and force all artists and doctors to violate their religious beliefs.

MSNBC hosts has it wrong

“Kamala Harris supports Born Alive abortions, open borders, a centrally planned socialist economy, free healthcare for illegals, the abolition of private health plans, the Green New Deal, and the Iran Deal.

And the only reason MSNBC thinks Republicans don’t want to vote for her is because she’s Black.”

dk  African American Conservatives

The Democrat platform for 2020

The 2020 campaign and platform for the Democrats, based on recent behavior of those in Congress and those who have declared:

1. Open borders.
2. Pack the polls with ex-felons, 16 year olds, and illegals.
3. Destroy the electoral college so Democrats can legally win all future presidential elections with 4 states they packed with #1 and #2.
4. Implement the Green New Deal so the public sector control and influence is greater than the private sector--aka socialism.
5. Infanticide and late term abortion for any reason.
6. Abortion's progressive outcome, euthanasia for the inconvenient, ill, disabled and elderly.
7. Ratchet up the hate, fear and distrust with more identity politics and intersectionalism.
8. Reparations for slavery.
9. Destruction of first and second amendments, with more regulations, more laws, especially on religion, speech, and assembly on college campuses which then infects the whole society as academe has been doing for 50 years.
10. Find more charges to bring against the President and his family.

During the campaign, because it pleases the gullible and fattens the purse, the emphasis will be #1 (worded in compassionate and Biblical terms), #7 and #10. The others are really distasteful for most Americans and will need to be more incremental with more changes in the language with talk of core values, ethics, etc., the best double speak they can find.

AOC’s New Green Deal

Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, issued a spanking to do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter. [according to Dan Flynn of Spectator.org]

“Pompous little twit,” he wrote the freshman congressman on Twitter. “You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death.”

But guess who would still have food and fuel? The socialist politicians like Alex Cortez. 

Bookworm says

  I always worry I won’t find Stupid Leftists posters, but every week, whether it’s abortion, borders, race, gender, guns, etc. they keep outdoing themselves.

AOC filled a vacuum

Tucker Carlson made an interesting observation last night (don't know if it is original with him). For 2 years the Democrats have done nothing but scream impeach and jail the President, leaving a large hole where policy and plans ought to be. Alexandria Cortez jumped in with the "New Green Mess" to fill the vacuum and is dragging her party further to the left and candidates are scrambling to outdo her to get back control. From her posh DC kitchen (in a complex with no set-asides for poor and middle class) she released a video suggesting her generation stop having babies. It's just not fair (to Mother Earth?). Of course, the U.S. birth rate is already below replacement level. That's why we import illegals--so they can have babies who will grow up and support the social safety net, which is up 60% since the beginning of this century.

The baby she suggests you not conceive or abort, just might be the next scientist or politician who solves the climate mystery of why the climate has been changing for millions of years. He or she might be able to avoid the next ice age.

Just in time for the Green New Deal

"California’s new governor, the prim and grim Gavin Newsom, announced that the project [bullet train] would be taken off its $650-million-a-month life-support apparatus and euthanized. The end of the project leaves Californians with no way to travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco except a 90-minute, $149 flight." Kevin Williamson, Feb. 13

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/california-bullet-train-boondoggle-central-planning/?

Democrats working hard to destroy us

Realizing that the Mueller investigation will go nowhere, Congressional Democrats are gearing up for an all out assault on Trump--investigating everything about him. (Wouldn't surprise me if Jeff Bezos isn't funding it.) Along with the Republican Never Trumpers they can't believe someone has blown their cover exposing the graft and corruption in Washington. They are furious at what he's been able to achieve in 2 years. Every time they do this, his ratings go up, and his base becomes more solidified. So they've had to change tactics.

The latest trick is the Green Grab Deal of AOC and her aging groupies. Hoping to make the stock market shake in fear and collapse the roaring economy, they proposed to take our property, transportation and health care and then denied it. If they can get people to lose faith in America, in our economic system and our president, they hope to be able to destroy her as Marxists have been attempting to do for 90 years.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” Winston Churchill

https://www.npr.org/2019/02/12/694060405/mcconnell-plans-to-bring-green-new-deal-to-senate-vote  This NPR article is good to read if you want to see how biased this source is.  McConnell is exposing how silly all this is, and NPR leans backwards (or leftward) to say it just isn't fair to Democrats to catch them with their pants down.