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Co-founder of GraniteGrok, my concern is around Individual Liberty and Freedom and how the Government is taking that away. As an evangelical Christian and Conservative with small "L" libertarian leanings, my fight is with Progressives forcing a collectivized, secular humanistic future upon us. As a TEA Party activist, citizen journalist, and pundit!, my goal is to use the New Media to advance the radical notions of America's Founders back into our culture.

How to start a Fight – Part 1

I rear-ended a car this morning…the start of a REALLY bad day! The driver got out of the other car, and he was a DWARF!! He looked up at me and said ‘I am NOT Happy!’ So I said, ‘Well, which one ARE you then?’ That’s how the fight started.

How to start a Fight – Part 2

My wife was standing nude, looking in the bedroom mirror. She was not happy with what she saw and said to me, “I feel horrible; I look old, fat and ugly. I really need you to pay me a compliment.’ I replied, “Your eyesight’s darn near perfect.” And then the fight started……..

Once again, a Progressive confirms: if you aren’t spending it the way we think you should, we’ll tax it away from you

And then we wonder why the heck the US is dropping in the Economic Freedom rankings (down to 18th – we used to be in the top five a short few years ago)?  Could this attitude be one reason?  Hillary took off the mask and went past “tax and spend”.  Taking a page out of Moochella’s playbook (“sure – eat!  But only what we want you to eat”), Hillary makes it rather clear when talking earlier this week at her husband’s Clinton Global Initiative – translation: “You get to keep only what we think you should have – because you aren’t spending it the way we want!” (a take off on “you didn’t build it”):

And one of the issues that I have been preaching about around the world is collecting taxes in an equitable manner, especially from the elites in every country. (Laughter.) You know I’m out of American politics, but – (applause) – it is a fact that around the world, the elites of every country are making money. There are rich people everywhere. And yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries. They don’t invest in public schools, in public hospitals, in other kinds of development internally. And so it means for leaders telling powerful people things they don’t want to hear. It means being transparent about budgets and revenues and bringing corruption to light. And when that happens, we shouldn’t punish countries for uncovering corruption. We should reward them for doing so. And it means putting in place regulations designed to attract and protect investment.

Where do I start?  There is certainly a move afoot to “harmonize” taxes all over the globe – countries with high taxes have been trying to force those with lower ones to raise them so as not to be at a disadvantage (sorta like on a union job when the “eager beaver” gets shut down for being too quick and good, thereby making all the others look bad).  So if someone “of means” wishes to protect his assets from greedy politicians all too willing to spend other peoples’ money, there is no safe harbor.

But Hillary shows her Progressive roots – unless your money is spent on what SHE thinks is important, she is advocating taking it away by shaming others to do her dirty work (i.e., as in “don’t worry, they are like troublesome children that cannot share.  Like kindergarten children, we who are better will teach them that you can take it without feeling guilty to share”).  After all, those rich folks are screwing everyone else ought of what they need!

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Michelle Obama’s nationalized school lunch menu – a bit more

Steve has done good work in covering the fiasco-in-progress (here and here), so I have just a bit to add to the story: One government official tried to put the blame on the students. “One thing I think we need to keep in mind as kids say they’re still hungry is that many children aren’t … Read more

Words of Wisdom – even for Jan Schmidt

Advice from a 90 year old wise guy.  Read them – and yes, very wise advice.  This one is my favorite: 41. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have, not what you think you need. This one is great advice for all – but certainly for a certain Progressive over at … Read more

Blogline of the Day: on Free Speech

Glen Reynolds of Instapundit (emphasis mine): DOES THE U.S. “OVERVALUE” FREE SPEECH? No, I think we undervalue kicking the ass of people who oppose it. Indeed – the response of our President, our Secretary of State, and the others in the Obama Administration (and the Democrat Operatives with bylines in the MSM) have been on … Read more

Grokster Mike has become a cartoon!

Heh!  Mike is out at a tradeshow where there is a cartoonist, Doug Shannon,  hard at work – and Mike got cartoonized: Not bad, Mike, not bad at all….I think his smile is MUCH broader in real life.  But I do think the cartoonist caught his mischeviousness, though….

Pat Condell: I think

“Let me get this straight.  We’re supposed to show tolerance and respect for a religion that doesn’t know the meaning of either word and goes out of its way to prove it every day?”

“All week we’ve heard Muslims telling us that we in the West need to understand how important the prophet is to them.  We do understand, and we don’t care… we don’t give a damn about your feelings.  Our feelings are more important, and our feelings tell us that we’re sick to the back teeth of hearing about your religion, so stick a sock in it.”

Respect is earned in the West – not demanded. It is also a two way street – when Muslims think it is one way only and that our Rights are something to be sacrificed on your Alter of an Honor-Society.  Of COURSE there are Dhimmis in the West that will bow so low that you Islamists might think they are showing respect. Or, at least the Dhimmis think they are showing something akin to “respect”.  You Islamists know better – their Neville Chamberlin show-alikeis merely a mask of something more dangerous to us: fear.  You smell weakness in our elected American leaders, Barry and Hillary – you’re smiling as half of your work is already accomplished. That commercial that the State Department ran in Pakistan of President Obama and Sec. of State Hillary prostrating themselves over an American exercising their First Amendment Right was not just a waste of $70K of taxpayers monies, they merely showed us how partisan they are – and not on the side of the traditional American way of life.  Free Speech means being able to say what we want, when we want, where we want, and about what we want – and whether it offends you or not.

And they are embarrassed about it. And that is the saddest thing of all.

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If there’s a Flag, there’s gotta be a Pledge, yes?

With the now “down the Memory Hole” Obama Flag (as observed by Grokster Tim), there has to be words for that Flag, right?  OK, a 15 second off-the-top-of-my-head one-off (and I really don’t want to think about it any longer than that – the whole idea is just plain cultish-creepy) along with this campaign’s Pledgers to Obama:

Pledge To ObamaI pledge allegiance to the “O”
of the United cult of Obama,
and to the useful idiot collectivism for which it stands
One Kingdom under the Organizer,
Divider,
with redistribution and socialism for the rest of us

And if after that, you can’t remember the real thing (given that some schools and teachers no longer believe in filling young skulls full of mush such nonsense), go after the jump.  In the meantime, here are a bunch of those cultists (otherwise known as “entertainers”) who actually did pledge allegiance to Obama back in 2008:

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And now for a bit of honesty…

I guess he’s sitting in a heavily Conservative district or in one with a WHOLE BUNCH of Obummed voters (who will not be stating the same pledge as last time). (H/T: Maggie’s Farm)

Data Point: Household Incomes down 8.2% under Obama Administration

Note: the time limit for Obama to keep blaming Bush has expired.  The time limit has been reached and expired in which Obama can keep blaming what he inherited – he campaigned for the job. Note: this is a result of his Administration, his ideology, his grasp of systematic economics, and his skill as a … Read more

Founders: Government exists to create environment for citizens to create wealth. Obama: Government exists to extract wealth from citizens

We remember back to the Declaration of Independence: “pursuit of happiness”, which the meaning of the Founders for the word “happiness” was Private Property.  The founding philosophy was that Government was to be a neutral player; it set the table in a flat, even handed fashion in creating the rules and then backed out of the way and let citizens go about creating their wealth in a manner they saw fit, with the intensity of effort and innovation that fit them and their goals.

Winners and Losers picked by Government as a matter of course?  Nope!

Obama seemingly has never had that as a grounding philosophy – raised by a mother who had a philosophy, by all accounts I’ve read, of an anti-Americanism, fathers / husbands that left she and Barry after some period of time, spending formative years in Hawaii at the “Red Church”, and mentored by outright Socialists, Marxists, and Communists.  By his own hand:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structured feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpets or set our stereos so loud the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions…

And in my opinion, never truly learned what American Exceptionalism is all about; instead, he was taught to despise it.  And he became the President without really understanding in his soul what America was all about – only a black Marxist nightmare doppelganger of it.  I will say one thing – he hid it well until it was too late for us.  Now, in yet another piece of vetting (that the MSM should have done before the LAST election), it comes out that ““When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody” in 2007 was being formulated well before that in 1998:

What that means then is that as we try to resuscitate this notion that we’re all in this thing together, leave nobody behind, we do have to be innovative and thinking what are the delivery systems that are actually effective and meet people where they live. And my suggestion, I guess would be that the trick, and this is one of the few areas where I think there are technical issues that have to be dealt with as opposed to just political issues. I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure everybody’s got a shot.

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A reply to a commenter on Steve’s “About All that Ron Paul business…”

which can be found here concerning the RNC, delegates, Ron Paul speaking / not speaking, nomination, and the like.  His problem was not with Ron Paul but with his supporters.  I concur (having had to deal with nastiness of some even back in 2008).  So he (and I) expected some commenters in opposition and our expectations were met.

Given the set up here at the ‘Grok, I also get notification (and have to approve / disapprove) of comments inbound on all the posts.  Given that Steve’s post was almost a month old, when a comment by RageFury came in today, I spent the time reading that long comment in which much time had to have been spent.  But one line:

“I previously thought you guys were better than this…”

caught my eye and of course I had to answer:

“nor will I vote for Obama who only gets a potential 4 more years of horrible country crushing policy” and ” I previously thought you guys were better than this.”

To the former – to use that old phrase: “You ain’t see nothing yet!”  Obama has figured out that with the Senate locked up by Reid, and the House Rs cowering behind the idea that they’d be responsible for a shutdown if they even thought about growing a spine, Obama has become enamored with doing what he wants without Congress – an FDR on steroids by issuing declaration upon decree.  He has become addicted to being a dictator – he knows that he can do what ever he wants NOW and when the Courts nullify a Dept decree, the Secretary of the Dept just uses another way to do it all again (e.g., Salazar in stopping drilling in the Gulf, the NLRB’s actions, and the FCC at doing Net Neutrality by other means, just to name three).  Recent History is very much predictive of what he will do the next four – only much faster, much bigger and FAR more Liberty destroying than this first term.  You think he’s packed on the Debt thus far?  His next target, already under attack, is Liberty and Freedom and he is well on the way to destroying that.

And you, RageFury, among others that will not pull the lever for Obama’s enemy…

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Blogline of the Day – on Charity

Steve has the info on Romney’s tax returns – consistently outgiving, percentage-wise those that have been yammering for his returns to be made public.  From Instapundit, reflecting on the ReProgressive definition of Charitable giving: “If you really care, you don’t give money yourself. You get the government to force other people to give. That’s what … Read more

Environmentalists who love crony capitalism

Because they can’t stand seeing their fellow citizens ignoring their bleats of “You shouldn’t do that” in some cases (like, you know, use electricity to live a modern lifestyle, or be allowed to drive a car that can, like, you know, can actually hold all of your family members and the grocery bags needed to feed them for a week – in 1 trip).  So, they’ve convinced elected politicians (or increasingly, the unelected bureaucrats that doing the pols’ job).  They certainly are in favor in taking away choice in little ways as in what kind of light bulbs you may purchase.

And when it comes to industries they like, like all things green, they are bound and determined not to let “green go dark” simply because the Free Market hates their ideas.  From that ever amusing, ever complaining, bastion of Watermelon Environmentalism (otherwise known as TreeHugger), the denizens are complaining about the Federal Venture Capital spigot being turned off (gee, and I thought ALL forms of conservation was good – including conserving our tax dollars!).

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There is a difference between the Free Market and the Government Market

And TreeHugger decided to demonstrate that, with clueless irony, all on their own.  Yes, one more from TreeHugger that shows that Environmentalism has really left its roots of DOING environmental work and very much all about getting Big Government and its big teat (and very much, dependent on that teat) to do it instead as well as forcing lifestyle changes upon people that otherwise would not.  This time, trying to go all yammering that Republicans not supporting Govt supported jobs is hypocritical and ignoring the foundation of their illogic:

Siemens Lays Off 38% of US Workforce – Cites Lack of Wind Power Support Romney Favors

That wind power jobs and installations in the US rise and fall in line with federal tax policy for the renewable energy source is solidly established,…

You’d think after decades of watching the “ups and downs”, and being tax experts (as all Big Multinationals are), some would learn to not play the game.  Problem is, profits are to be made when the Government either directly or indirectly manages a marketplace via tax policy.  And the writer of the post is surprised at this?  Mere youngster that thinks history starts with his birth.  However, he yammers onward:

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