AND WE THOUGHT WASHIGTON WAS A MESS!

Only some one with their head in the clouds would not realize that all politicians aspire to public office to better themselves. All the pious platitudes about going to Washington, DC to do good is then lost, if it ever existed, in the maelstrom of special interest lobbyists and foreigners bearing "gifts".

The average Senator is wealthy when he goes to Washington, but many middle class people who are backed by special interest groups go to the US House of Representatives. None leave without the life time benefits afforded to their elected office. High end health and dental care, a pension and whatever they can accumulate under the cover of campaign contributions. It is a given in our free enterprise system. Power corrupts,and absolute power corrupts absolutely!

But my home State is the granddaddy of all double and triple dippers in the whole of the USA!

Florida has laws that allow people to collect government pensions from as many as three sources and still work in the government sector building up another pension.

Approximately 150 million Americans face the future with little or no retirement income. A majority of Americans aren't saving nearly enough for retirement -- or aren't saving anything at all. And the expenses they'll face in their later years are stagering.

Not in the State of Florida if you work in one of the many state or local government positions. Judicial Watch has an article on the web detailing the tangled mess of pension benefits involving government employeees at all levels in the state of Florida.

While many states have laws prohibiting elected officials and public employees from returning to government work while drawing taxpayer-financed pensions, an epidemic of it exists in Florida where taxpayers are financing the lucrative salaries and multiple pensions of more than a thousand public servants. The" good old boy network" you see!

Known as double and triple-dipping the practice is rampant in the Sunshine State where more than 1,200 former state employees collect two or more pensions and hundreds more collect at least two pensions and a salary. Nearly 200 of them get paid more than $100,000 a year on top of public retirement benefits of up to $14,000 a month. Many of them also collect a lump-sum of hundreds of thousands of dollars upon retirement.
The triple dippers include public school principals, teachers, law enforcement officers, health department employees, court clerks and dozens of other public employees throughout the state. Additionally, more than 200 elected officials and senior managers who have quietly retired actually continue working, many in the same job where they earned their pension.
Because many state lawmakers benefit from this outrageous system, they aren’t motivated to pass legislation to stop it.
Many other states have made it illegal to take any public sector job in the same retirement system without forfeiting retirement benefits. In New York, for instance, public employees who retire and return to government work must forfeit their pensions during the time they get a salary.
There is little hope that a similar law will pass in Florida, according to one Republican legislator who says “it’s going to be a bit of an uphill battle” because there are more “double dippers in the legislature” than anyone thought. He called the situation a mess.

No wonder we keep getting bigger and bigger government. Where else can you find the high end medical benefits and retirement with a pension at any age as long as you put in the requisite number of years?
From 1957 to 2006, Florida's population increased 302%, but the number of state & local government employees increased 583%. Therefore it can be stated that there is a 357,000 employee headcount excess in Florida governments.
If state and local government employees in Floirda had delivered improved productivity, as the private sector was doing, then their headcount totals (full-time equivalents) would have increased less than the state's population growth from 1957-2006. No such luck !!

So much for efficient government! The state population increased from 4.5 million to 18 million 1957-2006 (302% increase) - -
But, the number of state government employees increased 517% (from 31,000 to 191,000)
And, the number of local government employees increased 604% (from 96,000 to 676,000)!

Whatever the 'excuses', the facts are today's young families in Florida must carry on each of their backs many, many more government employees than did prior generations. And, government employees have job security with wages and benefits protected from inflation and better medical coverage as if it is a right - - not so with many from the private sector.

There is a lesson here!

IS OBAMA A CLOSET MARXIST?

Once again I must write about a subject that will probably never appear in the overly protective Media covering Obama.

My subject today is the important question that must be asked: Is Barack Hussein Obama a closet Marxist?

There are some associations in his past that would lead a person of suspicious nature like me to believe he has a Marxist inclination.

Will anyone in the major media talk about the mysterious “Frank.” He’s Obama’s childhood mentor in his book, Dreams From My Father. It has been discovered he’s Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member and anti-American revolutionary.

In Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father. He writes about “a poet named Frank,” who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of “hard-earned knowledge” and advice. Who was Frank? Obama only says that he had “some modest notoriety once,” was “a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago...” but was now “pushing eighty.” He writes about Frank and his "old Black Power dashiki self” giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18.
This “Frank” is now believed to be Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist writer now treated by some to be in the same category of prominence as Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Davis’s career, and notes, “In Davis’s case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War II—even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership.” Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis. source: Accuracy In Media

Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about Obama's connection with Davis during a speech last March at the reception of the Communist Party USA. source: archives from the Tamiment Library at New York University.

The remarks were posted online under the headline, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.”
Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson,” came into contact with Barack Obama and his family and became the young man’s mentor, influencing Obama’s sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known black actor and singer who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet Union. Davis had known Robeson from his time in Chicago.

It was in Chicago that Obama became a “community organizer” and came into contact with more far-left political forces, including the Democratic Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist groups and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), William Ayers and Carl Davidson.
The SDS laid siege to college campuses across America in the 1960s, mostly in order to protest the Vietnam War, and started the "terrorist" Weather Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the group and turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor and served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago.
Davidson is now a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), an offshoot of the old Moscow-controlled CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002 rally where Obama came out against the Iraq war.

Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw “Frank” only a few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college “An advanced degree in compromise” and warned Obama not to forget his “people” and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that s**t.” Davis also complained about foot problems, the result of “trying to force African feet into European shoes,” Obama wrote.

Guilt by association is a bad way to judge a person. But Obama's record in the few short years he has been in the US Senate illustrate that he voted the most liberal of all the Senators! His platform is full of socialist programs, and he has failed to repudiate, the few times it has been brought up, his consorting with known Marxists. You be the judge!

THE BIG LIE ABOUT BIG OIL

It appears to me that the majority of Americans have not considered what the stampede to eliminate OUR "habitual" use of oil will have on our ability to defend ourselves and the way of life that we all take for granted.

Predictably, when consumers, oblivious to the realities of the global oil market and everything else involved with delivering gasoline at the pump, begin to complain, politicians begin to think about regulating gasoline prices. It doesn’t work, never will and it will likely worsen the recession we’re now in.
It was tried by the Carter administration in the 1980's, and was a full-scale disaster. Between 1978 and 1980, thanks in part to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, crude oil prices more than doubled from about $9 a barrel to over $21. Back then, Carter was advocating solar energy, conservation, synthetic fuels, and other “solutions”, but they didn’t work then and they won’t work now.His efforts resulted in around the block lines to get gasoline for our cars, and many angry people.
In terms of our enormous energy needs, Congress and the White House are seriously mismanaging and misleading America.

The Democrats like to blame "Big Oil", and Hillary Clinton has proclaimed that if elected she will "seize" the profits of the Oil Industry. An industry that already pays an average of 28 billion dollars a year into the tax cesspool!

Energy is the “predominant"world resource.” Without it everything including our National military forces slows, stalls, and grinds to a halt. The nation’s economy is entirely dependent on our ability to function in a world where oil, natural gas, and coal are global commodities. They don’t have a nationality. They have a price. And that is set by supply and demand, not the federal government. We are losing the battle for natural energy while Russia, Communist China and Venezuela are gaining prominence and power.
The government is literally wasting billions on “alternative forms” of energy and “climate change.” It should be encouraging the building of more refineries( none for 40 years), more nuclear fission, clean coal or gas-fired plants to generate electricity, more pipelines. It should be eliminating the restrictions on accessing oil, gas, and coal within our borders and thereby reducing the need of those sources from beyond our nation’s borders.

While we tinker with fossil fuels, the Russians announced last week hat they will build four new nuclear power plants to boost their energy production. The Russians already have ten nuclear plants that deliver over 23,000 giga- watts of electricity.They already have so much oil drilled and extracted on their own soil to sell it to most Countries in Europe. Here at home we fiddle to Al Gore's tune of Global Warming while Not Rome, but our way of life is being ignited. Will we allow it to burn?

The Contradiction of Attitudes Toward Kosovo and Iraq

During the Clinton administration the USA waged war in Kosovo against the Serbians to help the Muslim Albanians. We did this without first obtaining a mandate from the UN. It all began with the bombing of Belgrade in 1999.

Americans were told it was a humanitarian mission to stop genocide, but it was not, nor is it now what we were led to believe.In fact the Muslim Albanians are killing Serbian women and children on a regular basis.

The Serbs are predominantly Catholic. The Albanians are over 90% Muslims. I guess Secretary Albright and her minions in the State Department convinced President Clinton that they were all moderate Muslims.

At any rate, we bombed the H##l out of their Country, and the NATO force mopped up the remaining Serbian fighters on the ground.NATO is still there 7 years later.

In Kosovo, more than 250,000 Serbians were driven out from their homes by Albanian separatists. Presently, Serbians are living in Kosovo as if in a ghetto. After the NATO occupation, more than 150 ancient Orthodox churches were destroyed by Albanians in Kosovo. There are currently no repair works. Serbians are living there in constant fear. Serbian children cannot go to school without adults.

After NATO's occupation, hundreds of Serbians were killed in Kosovo. More than 3,000 Serbians are "missing" in Kosovo (that means "killed"). There are no investigations, and no News stories about the "civil war that is being waged.

Presently, Albanians are confiscating Serbia's federal, social, and private property. The occupation's forces in Kosovo, the so-called peacekeeping forces, ignored Resolution 1244 of the Security Council of the UN. They misrepresent the current situation in Kosovo in its reports to the UN General Secretary. Today, Kosovo is a crucial point in the drug trade, which traffics heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Europe.

It would appear that Clinton and Albright's war has produced unintended consequences that the anti-Bush/Cheney crowd has failed to notice.

Because of the position establish by the Clinton/Albright administration, the USA has recognized Kosovo as an independent State, and last month granted diplomatic recognition of Kosovo as a separate state entity. The reaction was swift and radical. A group of Serbian youths set the US Embassy on fire!

According to latest reports, over 100 Serbs were wounded in the worst outbreak of violence in the region since Kosovo declared independence on February 17.

And there are news reports that in recent talks between the Serbian Foreign Minister and the Russians in Moscow, the discussion centered about the possibility of Serbians joining with Russia. The United States having recognized Kosovo's independence, apparently has violated Serbia's sovereignty and territorial integrity if you respect that a Country has a sovereign right to their territories.

It would be nice if the Democrat Left in the USA, and people like the Bush hater, Seymour Hersh, would recognize the mess their leadership created in Kosovo, and accept the fact that it started before Iraq's war, and is still being fought in guerrilla style.

The Invasion of Iraq had been addressed many times in the UN Security Council, and after two years of sanctions the US took action! They invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam!A notorious murderer of his own people was eliminated, and good was done!

Leftists talk about the long five years we have been fighting in Iraq, and five years is a very long time to be in harms way".

Never the less, we have been in Korea for over fifty years, Japan and Germany for over 60 year, and soldiers do die in those Countries. No, not from IED's or terrorist bullets, but in the service of their Country while driving down the Autobahn, as a victim of assault and many other reasons. In fact there is danger for the man/women in uniform where ever they serve, but the Leftist media only concentrates on Iraq and Afghanistan. Before you scream about the nearly five thousand dead, remember we lost over 7,000 in the taking of Tarawa!

It would be easy to pull out and help partition Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurd regions. This would seem to solve the ethnic and religious problems that leaving would indubitably create.

But not unlike in what used to be Yugoslavia, the same chaos would begin soon after we leave.The civil war, the liberal anti-military crowd proclaims we have now in Iraq, would begin. Chaos between sectarian and religious factions would surely break out.
In conclusion, I must say that an end must be found in Iraq, but all the carping and sniping here at home will only result in the destruction of the will to win a good fight. Why can't Americans unite behind the Jews, Christians and Muslim who are wearing the American flag on their shoulder patch the same way they did when Americans supported the war against the Serbs?