Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Who are you Obama?

This is a great video that really does say it all.

Are you ready?

With only 6 days left to go before we vote, thngs are not looking great for McCain. Which has me worried, very very worried. Honestly, I have no idea why anyone would choose to vote for Obama. I mean, really. All you have to do is a little bit of research and you will see how scary a choice he truly is. And I know, you say you watch the news and watch the View and you feel informed. Well, if your watching network news, reading liberal newspapers and watching shows like Saturday Night Live or The View for your news, you are not informed. You are brainwashed. That said, just read the following article. It pretty handily sums up Obamas socialist plans and why they wont work.


Defining Problems With Socialism For The Post-Cold War Generation
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, October 27, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: John McCain has finally called Barack Obama's agenda by its proper name. But if he assumes voters understand what he means when he uses the word "socialism," he assumes too much.
IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism
To slap a label on it isn't enough. Sadly, most people under 60 in this country went to schools and universities where socialism isn't considered a bad thing.
McCain has to educate them about what socialists believe and how they want to rebuild "the world as it should be," as Obama quotes his socialist hero, Saul Alinsky.
In this final week of the campaign, McCain should draw contrasts between socialism and capitalism and free enterprise. He should also explain in detail what economic freedoms are at risk if liberal socialists get their way in reshaping the country from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
McCain has smartly seized on Obama's revealing side-comment to Joe the Plumber about his plan to "spread the wealth around." The GOP hopeful says it smacks of socialism, and he's right. But socialist sympathizers in the punditry have pooh-poohed his sound bites as passe or even racist.
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, for example, argued that socialism no longer has the evil connotation it had during the Cold War, when the right used it to bludgeon the left. Kansas City Star columnist Lewis Diuguid, meanwhile, dismissed the "socialist" label as merely a "code word for black."
Many economists would equate what Obama has in mind with socialism. Among them is the late F.A. Hayek, a one-time socialist, who wrote a book on the dangers of socialism titled "The Road to Serfdom." When it debuted in the final days of WWII, socialism unambiguously meant the state control of the means of production and central economic planning.
But decades later, in a new preface, the Nobel Prize winner wrote that "socialism has come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state." Yes, that's Obama's economic plan.
He concluded that even this softer socialism means reduced economic liberties, opportunities and living standards for all.
According to Marxist theory, socialism is the stage between capitalism and communism where private wealth is distributed for the benefit of all. It's a romantic notion because hardly anyone is willing to share their wealth with strangers.
So to get from theory to practice, force must be used. Wealth must be taken by the state — and not by a faceless bureaucratic machine, but rather by flawed humans with their own selfish ambitions and ulterior motives. They decide who gets what, taking cuts for themselves and their cronies in the process.
Think ex-Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines and ACORN.
Socialism is centralized power. That's why socialist movements, which often begin as cults of personality, usually end in fascism. Witness Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism — and, yes, Nazism, which, as Hayek noted, stands for "National Socialism."
Again, almost every major society that started with socialism has ended badly. Socialism has been refuted repeatedly, yet that hasn't stopped neo-Marxists — hiding now behind the title "community organizer" — from dreaming their dreams of collective sacrifice for collective good.
They see capitalism with its profit motive as vulgar and immoral because it's at odds with altruism — the idea that the general welfare of society is the proper goal of individuals.
What they fail to realize is society is the greatest beneficiary of our system of rational self-interest. The poorest of the poor and the laziest of the lazy still benefit from the genius of the entrepreneur and the risk-taking of the venture capitalist.
Almost every modern-day invention, from lifesaving drugs to computer software, was inspired by profit, not public welfare. Yet everyone shares in the greater efficiencies, cost savings, life expectancies and job opportunities created by the inspiration and perspiration of money-hungry individuals.
No system in history has created more wealth, per capita, over a shorter time than unbridled American capitalism.
In fact, America has led what economist Angus Maddison calls the "capitalist epoch" — a 17-decade period in which workers saw their hours cut in half and life expectancy doubled. In a seminal study last decade, Maddison calculated the aggregate output and population growth in the U.S. and 15 other advanced capitalist nations since 1820. He found a 14-fold explosion in combined per capita product, dwarfing the living standards of communist and other nations.
Ignoring this history, the left uses the current financial crisis to redefine capitalism as "dangerous" to the welfare of mankind, and to justify greater government economic controls.
"Market capitalism is a dangerous tool, like a machine gun or a chainsaw or a nuclear reactor," former Clinton budget chief Alice Rivlin last week told Democratic Rep. Barney Frank's finance committee. And she's a moderate in her party.
The left wrongly asserts that unregulated capitalism caused the financial crisis; in fact, government overregulation of banks distorted market incentives and corrupted capitalism.
Wielding a socialist-inspired cudgel called the Community Reinvestment Act, government forced banks to make loans to uncreditworthy minorities who couldn't repay them.
It didn't matter that banks weren't racist. The assumption was they might be, and it was government's role to enforce "fairness." The same assumptions are made about the rich.
"The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed are . . . rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness — the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost," Obama wrote in his 2006 autobiography. "Solving these problems will require changes in government policy."
In other words, people get rich on the backs of the poor, even take from the poor. It's therefore up to the state to take from the rich and give to the poor. In a feudal or colonial society, such a sentiment might be noble. But capitalism is a system in which one person lives well and another person lives better.
The idea that whole classes of people are exploited or oppressed in this country is a figment of the left's class-obsessed imagination. And it's refuted by Federal Reserve data showing constant income mobility even between the lowest and highest quintiles. Policy shouldn't be built on such fantasy.
Still, Obama insists that spreading the wealth is "good for everybody." But as the rich shelter capital or reduce their work to avoid higher taxes, all Obama will end up "spreading" is poverty and all he'd redistribute is more power to Washington.
He argues that raising taxes is not socialism, and he's right: By itself, it is not. But it is socialism when the motive is "for purposes of fairness," as Obama explains it, which is simply class-warfare jargon for punishing the rich.
"Was John McCain a socialist when he opposed the Bush tax cuts?" Obama asks. No, McCain wanted spending cuts first. His motive was fiscal restraint, not restraint on society's most productive members. Obama further argues that redistributing wealth to the needy is better than redistributing it to greedy bankers as the Bush administration has done. Actually, both policies are wrong, since both favor groups over individuals.
Obama denies having socialist designs. But it's no coincidence he virtually always votes with socialist pal Bernie Sanders, as the two most liberal members of the Senate.
Nor is it a coincidence that nearly all of Obama's mentors and close advisers supported Marxism, including: James Cone, Dwight Hopkins, Jeremiah Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Jim Wallis, John McKnight, Cornel West and William Ayers.
It's also no coincidence that Obama devoted his first memoir to the memory of his late father, a communist, who proposed massive taxes and redistribution of income in Kenya.
"What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic gains to the benefit of all," wrote Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Harvard-educated economist, in a 1965 policy paper. "This is the government's obligation."
Make no mistake: Sen. Obama isn't a liberal in the tradition of Jimmy Carter or John Kerry. He envisions a bloodless socialism, where IRS agents take wealth and where the Justice Department dictates contracts between labor and management.
But while force isn't used for murder, it's force nonetheless. And it does violence to the American promise of a right to pursue your own life, your own riches and your own happiness without government interference. America promises a chance at success, yet Obama and other neo-Marxists twist that to mean America guarantees success through equal outcomes, and that it's government's role to do the equalizing.
"What would help minority workers," Obama wrote in 2006, "are tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation's wealth."
"It may sound noble to say, 'Damn economics, let us build up a decent world,' but it is, in fact, merely irresponsible," Hayek wrote. "Our only chance of building a decent world is that we can continue to improve the general level of wealth."
If Obama wins, he can claim a national mandate for his socialist agenda. If he gets a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats in the Senate, he might get major planks in that radical agenda passed in the first 100 days. It's shaping up as a battle between those who create wealth and those who loot it.


Monday, October 27, 2008

Menu plan Monday and a contest

Help Bring Owen Home!


This fab
family is having a terrific fundraiser with great prizes. Just check out her site. They are trying to raise funds to bring their son Owen home from China. So go to her site, enter and help them out in the process. And hey, if you win, share the love OK?





OK, so on to My menu. It is not very exciting but whatev.



Monday: crock pot chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, corn

Tuesday: spaghetti and italian sausage

Wed: chicken fajitas, red beans and rice

Thursday: cheeseburgers, oven fries

Friday: Halloween party at our house so all kinds of goodies!

Saturday: Halloween party at a friends house!

Sunday: Road trip to Baltimore so dinner at Moms.






Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Aunt Jane

My aunt passed away last night. She was recently diagnosed with colon cancer. She had surgery but never really recovered from the surgery. I have to hope she is in a better place now.

In some ways she had a pretty sweet life. Never had to work. Never had to worry about money, a roof over her head, etc. But in other ways, her life was somewhat rough. She was retarded. Born premature she received too much oxygen and it rendered her brain damaged. Or that is the theory. So she stopped developing intellectually at around age 12. Maybe a little younger. Part of her knew that she was different. I think that is the saddest thing of all. When a person is retarded and they don't realize they are different, they just lead this happy go lucky life. But when they are intellectually there enough to know that they are retarded, they always have that hanging over their head. Jane knew she was different. It frustrated her. So in that respect, she had a rough life.

I just hope that now she is with her parents in heaven and as Mike said, her heaven is probably just like Disney World (a place she was looking forward to visiting again this spring). At Disney she would ride the boat across from Ft. Wilderness to the Magic Kingdom All - Day - Long . She never tired of it and she would talk to everyone she met. She loved everything Disney. In fact, last Christmas I gave her a toaster. It was a Disney toaster. The toast would cook and Mickey Mouse would be cooked onto the toast and when the toast popped up, it would play that song from the Mickey Mouse Club. "Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me. M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E". Anyway, I think that toaster may have been her prized possession. My mother told me one day she was at the doctors and she told the doctor or a nurse that she has a toaster and it talks to her. My mother said they were like, O.....K..... They must have thought she was a nut job. But her toaster really did talk to her!


Jane could be quite frustrating at times. Much like your average 12 year old. But she had a heart of gold. She loved her nieces and nephews and she crocheted every single one of us blankets. They were often crazy blankets. Too long and skinny, crazy colors, etc. But they keep us warm and we loved her for them.

Another hobby of Jane's was taking pictures. She captured all of us over the years. Many times completely off center or minus the tops of our heads. But she got pictures at times when no one else was taking them. So we are grateful for those pictures she snapped through the years.


A couple of years ago she met a man at an adult daycare place she was going to. We did not care for that guy too much. He was, well he was just weird. But Jane loved him and we knew it was good for her to have someone like him in her life. They would spend lots of time together. They had a standing date every weekend at the Baltimore Harbor where they would "greet" the tourist. I am thinking they may have scared some tourist away. But she loved people and loved talking to them. I have no doubt she is probably in heaven taking a boat back and forth between the pearly gates and the check-in point for newcomers. And she will be there greeting all of us when we get to heaven.

We will miss you Jane but we will see you again. Love you!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Menu Plan Monday...a day late. Sue me

OK, so I have not been blogging lately. Too much going on. Sick relatives, kids, school, midterms. It is all a little too much. I can't guarantee I will be any better in the future but oh well. Here is my menu a day late.

Monday: Spaghetti with sausage
Tuesday: Beef tips, mashed potatoes, corn
Wed: chicken in crock pot, beans, mashed potatoes or cous cous
Thursday: hot dogs, homemade mac and cheese and sugar beans
Friday: homemade pizza-cheese and pepperoni for kids, veggie for me and everything for mike
Saturday: steak, shrimp, baked potatoes, peas
Sunday: artichoke chicken, angel hair pasta, spinach (also this is Brooks 10th birthday so cake too)!


Sunday, October 5, 2008

Menu Plan Monday

Here we go again. This week is going to be a b----h. I have midterms this week and well, lets just say I am not happy about it. Math just sucks. I just do not get it. I am awe of people who actually get math. Why can't I remember this crap? Why do the formulas not stick in my mind? OK, so we have determined that I am math deficient. Whatever.... But that does mean that meals this week are subject to change and are going to be, well, easy. Quick. Maybe even a little bit boring. What can I say? It is what it is...

Monday: Spaghetti and Italian sausage
Tuesday: manwich, oven fries
Wed: crock pot chicken, potatoes, beans
Thursday: potatoes and kelbasa
Friday: homemade pizza
Saturday: steak and shrimp (held over from last week) (again)
Sunday: going to a crab feast

Today I had a Tastefully Simple party. It was lots of fun. If you want to order anything, feel free to follow this link to place an order. It will be delivered right to you and I will get credit. Hey, pretty good right? Anyway, lots of good stuff so if you are a Tastefully Simple lover, check out their new Fall line of products. They are delish!

https://pomm.tastefullysimple.com/pomm/loginhost.aspx?pxid=167104&key=962436eb-22c0-4f18-8d99-0ca57913d84f