the Centrist

It’s the Economy… Again… Stupid:

Those were the immortal words of the Clinton machine as they rolled over Bush 47 in the 1992 presidential election. It was all about the economy, never mind that Bush won a war against Iraq with almost no casualties, it was about the economy, and moreover, it is always about the economy… unless a liberal progressive is running it.
The Obama economy is in what can only be described as a tailspin. The TARP Funds were wasted, the auto bail out was a joke, and the Stimulus Package was hardly stimulating. Promises of transparency and low unemployment have evaporated with the Bush 49 tough foreign policy. One can hardly see a clip of our president on foreign soil without him abdicating GW Bush’s ‘Pax Americana’ for TS Elliot’s ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. As unemployment is approaching double digits and the banks are arguably in worse shape than they were a year ago (over 100 have gone belly up in the Obama economy), it is time to ask for accountability for the trillions. Neil Cavuto, Head of the Fox Business Network, stated that every American, man, woman, and child is in debt to the Obama economy to a tune of over $300,000 each. That figure is simply unsustainable, and does not include his latest plea for a second stimulus package or the health care fiasco now being debated behind closed (locked) Democrat Majority doors in the Congress.
A definition of insanity is failing at a task, yet doing the same thing over and over again. That is exactly what this Congress and President are doing… in merely a matter of 9 months tripling our deficit and national debt, yet refusing to change course. They have yet to tell us where the buck stops… or for that matter the new value of that buck.
For instance one could intelligently argue that the economic tsunami began because of under collateralized home buyers. Banks were forced by the Congress, headed by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) and Sen., Christopher Dodd (D-Conn), to make under collateralized loans on the premise that real estate always increases in value, therefore when these homes are ready to sell they can be sold for more than they were purchased. The problem with that rational is that markets go up and markets go down. That is the basic rule for every commodity and real estate is a commodity. Moreover low interest variable rate loans were made when real estate was at the top of the curve. In short, both the loans and the homes were priced wrong. The loans were to low and the homes to high. When the interest rates were raised most of the home owners were unable or unwilling to pay them… so they ‘got outta town, they abandoned the overvalued homes to the banks. This left the banks holding a mortgage for let’s say $300,000 on a home that had depreciated to $200,000. They not only were not collecting their interest, they also had a commodity that was on the wrong side of supply and demand… there were (are) too many home. That was the first shoe to drop in this fiasco. The problem was caused mainly from a philosophical bias that “everybody deserves a home”… rather than everybody who had saved for a down payment and who could afford a home, deserved the opportunity to purchase a home. So what is the reaction of this Congress? With the same inane leadership they are now offering similar deals to similar people, those who cannot afford homes are being invited to purchase them… because they ‘deserve them’. What is more, we have yet to feel the effect of the commercial real estate properties in the very same scenario.
T

hat is why we are at the beginning of this depression, not at the end. If Obama would have used tried and true capitalistic methods, rather than failed socialism to solve this problem, i.e. no company is “too big to fail”, we would now be emerging from this depression, rather than deepening into it. The problem with ‘redistributing the wealth’ is, as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said, that every nation eventually runs out of rich people to pay the taxes. The marginally rich soon become poor due to over taxation; the truly wealthy leave the country. They did not get rich because they were stupid, but the inane politicians do get elected by the dull witted who honestly think there is a free lunch. Therefore, it is not surprising that our naïve populace is still waiting for the stimulus money to create ‘shovel ready’ jobs. They refuse to believe that they were lied to, that there were no ‘shovel ready jobs’… the money was used to maintain status quo. Nothing has worked because no government in history has ever spent their way out of a depression. The only thing our President and this Congress has not tried is a capitalistic solution. It is time to get back to basics, back to free enterprise.

Here is an article from the Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell”… You heard me warn against Saul Alinsky’s and his instructional book “Rules for Radicals”. My first warning was before the election then again I told you to look for the signs as Obama took over the reins of power. I ASKED YOU TO BUY IT AND READ IT, AS I DID LAST WINTER… Here the Heritage people delineate how this community organizer is using Alinsky’s rules in the White House… read it and pray for our nation:

img src=”http://billbellavia.com/wp-content/uploads/obamopoly_11.jpg” alt=”obamopoly_1″ title=”obamopoly_1″ width=”300″ height=”300″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-1598″ />

Rules for a Radical White House… by Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei

President Obama is working systematically to marginalize the most powerful forces behind the Republican Party, setting loose top White House officials to undermine conservatives in the media, business and lobbying worlds.
With a series of private meetings and public taunts, the White House has targeted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest-spending pro-business lobbying group in the country; Rush Limbaugh, the country’s most-listened-to conservative commentator; and now, with a new volley of combative rhetoric in recent days, the insurance industry, Wall Street executives and Fox News.
Obama aides are using their powerful White House platform, combined with techniques honed in the 2008 campaign, to cast some of the most powerful adversaries as out of the mainstream and their criticism as unworthy of serious discussion.
We are in no way the first to point this out, but this Obama administration strategy is taken directly from the pages of Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. It identifies thirteen rules for progressive activists including, “The thirteenth rule: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Explaining just how far progressives must be willing to go to marginalize their “enemies” Alinsky explains a few pages later:
Many liberals during our attack on the then-school superintendent, were pointing out that after all he wasn’t a 100 percent devil, he was a regular churchgoer, he was a good family man, and he was generous in his contributions to charity. Can you imagine in the arena of conflict charging that so-and-so is a racist bastard but then diluting the impact of the attack with qualifying remarks such as, “He is a good churchgoing man, generous to charity and a good husband”? This becomes political idiocy.
And then in his final chapter, Alinsky reveals what progressives really think of the average American: “Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt. They are right.”
Contempt for average Americans, and the desire to marginalize their common sense questions is both at the core of the Progressive vision for governance and completely antithetical to the values of our Founding Fathers. Thomas G. West, author of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science, explains:
The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.
The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. … Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. … Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s inchoate will into concrete policies.
This is why you have Obama’s Energy Secretary telling auto makers how they must build cars. This is why Obama’s health care plan empowers a panel of health care “experts” to reorganize one-sixth of our economy from the top down. Commonsense questions like, “Won’t our electricity bills go up if we mandate power companies use more expensive alternative energy sources?”, and “Won’t our health insurance premiums go up if everyone is charged the same price and nobody can be refused coverage?” can’t be tolerated. People voicing such criticisms must be isolated and silenced. That’s what the White House campaign the Politico identifies today is all about.

I have harped on the unscientific scientists, posers as my grandchildren would call them, and the leader of their pack and the man who has made countless millions in the wake of ignorance is former Vice President Al Gore. But karma is a bitch… and perhaps this low budget film will finally debunk the crap if which we are filling our children’s heads… here is the scientific truth about global warming… it ain’t happening and it ain’t about too much CO2.
And From Townhall.com… Inconvenient Rebuttal
Suzanne Fields
Friday, October 23, 2009
Ann McElhinney’s low-budget documentary refuting the global warming hype and hysteria arrives in Washington just in time to break Al Gore’s crystal ball. “Not Evil Just Wrong,” the feature-length film she made with her husband Phelim McAleer, coolly reveals how Al’s disguise of hot fanaticism as cold fact arrives as the Senate begins to gear up for debate on “climate change” legislation.
“We know you can’t teach religion in school,” McElhinney says. “But there is a religion being enforced, a green religion.”
Her film illustrates just how schoolchildren have been indoctrinated with fear, loathing and foreboding, as Al’s film attempts to recruit them as tiny prophets of doom. Her camera shows children in Northern Ireland describing how the sea level rises when the ice caps melt and polar bears drown. “It may (happen) here, and we will all die,” says a little girl on the verge of tears, trying hard to look as though she understands what she has been taught. Pipes up an earnest little boy: “And most of us can’t even
Last my hero, Charles Krauthammer, has this analysis, again from Townhall.com, on the White House attack of Fox News…

This is from arguably the most erudite editorialist in the nation Charels Krauthammer… he say it much better than I
Fox Wars – Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 23, 2009
WASHINGTON — Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’ bed.
Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.
The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”
Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.
The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.
At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House “pool” news organizations — except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.
This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.
Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other — and an otherwise imperious government.
Factions should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.
But didn’t Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical — and that doesn’t even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a “Saturday Night Live” skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?
Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?
The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER…

Lighter Side:
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS (from Grammysammy)
If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.
If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for
everyone.
If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy.
A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.
If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.
If a black man or Hispanic are conservative, they see themselves as
independently successful.
Their liberal counterparts see themselves as victims in need of government
protection.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his
situation.
A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced.
(Unless it’s a foreign religion, of course!)
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for
it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.
If a conservative slips and falls in a store, he gets up, laughs and is
embarrassed.
If a liberal slips and falls, he grabs his neck, moans like he’s in labor
and then sues.
If a conservative reads this, he’ll forward it so his friends can have a
good laugh.
A liberal will delete it because he’s “offended”.
Kaybob sends us this advice on the pig… swine… well the flu:
Feeling stupid, just read on my genius friends, read on… and these are the government people we are trusting to fix the health care system!
“Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life,”
–Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for f ede ral anti-smoking campaign .
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“Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country,”
–Mayor Marion Barry, Washington , DC .
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“That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I’m just the one to do it,”
–A congressional candidate in Texas .
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“We don’t necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people.”
–Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instructor.
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“Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.”
– Department of Social Services, Greenville , South Carolina
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“Traditionally, most of Australia ‘s imports come from overseas.”
–Keppel Enderbery
“If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there’ll be a record.”
–Mark S. Fowler, FCC CHAIRMAN

Please do not forget your flu shot!!!!
The first half of this makes sense, but I like the second half better.
Eat right!
Make sure you get your daily dose of fruits and veggies.
Take your vitamins and bump up your vitamin C.
Get plenty of exercise because
exercise helps build your immune system.
Walk for at least an hour a day, go for a swim,
take the stairs instead of the elevator, etc.
Wash your hands often.
If you can’t wash them, keep a bottle of antibacterial stuff around.
Get lots of fresh air.
Open doors & windows whenever possible.
Try to eliminate as much stress
from your life as you can.
Get plenty of rest.
OR
Take the doctor’s approach.
Think about it…
When you go for a shot,
what do they do first?
They clean your arm with alcohol…
Why?
Because Alcohol KILLS GERMS.
So…….
I walk to the liquor store. (exercise)
I put lime in my Corona. (fruit)
Celery in my Bloody Mary. (veggies)
Drink outdoors on the bar patio. (fresh air)
Tell jokes, laugh. (eliminate stress)
Then pass out. (rest)
The way I see it…
If you keep your alcohol levels up,
flu germs can’t get you!