Louie Giglio - Laminin

This moved me and I hope it supports you and lifts your spirit, what is "Laminin" take a listen to learn

Just Wild: The American Form of Government

I like this example and is a great learning opportunity for our children

My comments to Karl Rove's article "It's the economy stupid"

Well will miracles never cease, I had the distinct pleasure of providing a comment to Karl Rowe's article on the Wall Street Journal's site below is what I wrote:

Mr Rove,

I would first like to say. Thank you very much for your continuing efforts to make sure the real message is out in the public.

Nowadays I watch with shock daily as my great, great, grand-children's future is squandered on useless efforts. The only result I am seeing is a rapidly growing federal government; and I doubt our founding fathers would ever have imagined a government so large and still yet doing so little. Is the current administration suggesting that the current state of the world economy requires the federal government to become a banker and automobile builder? What ever happen to the open market and market forces, I know they still exist we only need to get back to the basics (God, Family and Friends). Does the current state require such a behemoth federal organization, should we not just adhere to the laws of the land as they were initially created. This was never the intended goal of the founding fathers, how do we turn this around.

I would like to offer an opinion; we as American citizens need to stop and realize the difference between our "Needs" and our "Wants" and manage them more successfully than we have in the past. It certainly looks like were heading down the right path with our savings rate starting to increase. However were only saving because we know its bad times were not saving because we know smart thing to do.

I would also suggest that maybe it's time that we review the need for a federal minimum wage, now I know this is an extremely hot topic and will raise the dander of many a liberal. But let's look at it a different way, what if we were paid for the value we bring to an organization and not paid based on the value that the government deems we are worth. I would suggest with the current bail-outs, the government has no ability to determine the worth of any asset of any type. Free market must dictate the value of assets and products. Now I know there's no way to back-out the minimal wage policy, but this can be done over time.

This should be something that is considered and looked at as one viable solution. Did you know that if you removed the minimum wage barrier that your goods and services would have the potential to start going through a deflationary process and we could see a loaf of bread under a dollar. Would really like to talk in more detail about this idea and provide more granularity with explanation and an approach.

My apologies if this comment was not briefed on how often you get a forum to provide an input option. I want to extend a sincere appreciation for your ongoing and proactive attempts to make sure people understand "it's the economy". I would be glad to help where needed

Cheers and best regards,
Harold C. Heard Junior
http://www.twitter.com/haroldcheardjr

Your new Supreme Court Justice!?

Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is a disaster for average Americans.  For one thing, if she's confirmed, there's every indication she'll be a big promoter of the radical gay agenda on the court.  She's replacing David Souter, a lifelong bachelor and recluse who lived with his mother when he was appointed.  President Bush Sr. assured us that the unknown Souter was a real conservative, but he turned into one of the biggest champions of gay rights on the court.  Likewise, Sotomayor was briefly married thirty years ago, had no children, and has never remarried.  She's certainly not going to be a friend of the traditional family, to put it mildly.

She is also a radical left wing Hispanic with deep seated biases in favor of her own race, and against other ethnic groups.  Her ethnicity and her radical liberalism are the only reasons she's being considered for the high court.  Qualified?  Hardly - five of her rulings have been appealed to the Supreme Court, and they have overturned three of them, an appalling sixty percent rejection rate.  This is all about pandering to Hispanics, and getting a radical liberal race hustler on the court.  Sotomayor unashamedly belongs to a number of race based organizations, including the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the Hispanic National Bar Association, the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage, and the National Council of La Raza.

If you're not familiar with La Raza, it's a left wing Hispanic "advocacy" group whose name means "The Race" in Spanish.  It's quite clear what they stand for, and Sotomayor has no problem being a member of such a group.  (Just try to imagine the reaction if a white male judge belonged to a white advocacy group called The Race.)  La Raza supports amnesty for illegal aliens, increased immigration, more affirmative action and quotas for Hispanics, more welfare spending, and countless other big government programs to
benefit Hispanics, whether here legally or not.  They also have mounted a campaign to outlaw what they call "hate speech" about illegal immigration.  They want it to be against the law to use words like "illegal alien", "invasion", "hordes", etc, to describe the hordes of illegal aliens that are invading America.  In their view, pointing out that most illegals are poorly educated, low skilled, and often illiterate is also "hate speech" that should be criminalized.  If they have their way, anyone who talks honestly about illegal immigration will risk going to prison.  This is the group that Obama's Supreme Court nominee is proud to be a member of.

Sotomayor is proud of her racism.  In a speech given at a law school in 2001, she said that a female Hispanic judge like herself is probably superior to a white male judge:  "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn't lived that life."   (Again, imagine the reaction if a white male judge had made the reverse argument.)  She also said: "Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.
My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage."  You'd better believe there are going to be "differences" in Sotomayor's rulings based on her gender and ethnicity.  Nominating this brazen racist for the Supreme Court is nothing less than an assault on the rights of white working Americans.

If you need proof, just ask Frank Ricci.  Who is Frank Ricci?  He's a white firefighter in New Haven, Connecticut who wanted to be promoted to lieutenant.  To qualify, he had to pass a test.  So Frank Ricci quit his second job, spent a thousand dollars on study materials, and because he's dyslexic, paid a friend of his to spend hours reading the study materials onto audio tape.  He then spent six months studying, about eight hours a day, in preparation for the test.  All his hard work seemed to pay off, because he came in
sixth out of dozens of applicants for eight promotions.  I say it seemed to pay off, because despite his extraordinary efforts and his high score, Frank Ricci didn't get that promotion to lieutenant.

Why didn't Ricci get his well deserved promotion?  It's because he's guilty of a crime - the crime of being a white man.  Due to the fact that no black firefighters passed the test, the city of New Haven threw out everyone's scores, saying the test was "racially biased", even though they've spent millions of dollars to heavily stack the deck in favor of the black applicants.  With the stroke of a pen, they destroyed Frank Ricci's dreams, and trashed his months of hard work, all in the name of affirmative action, quotas, and diversity.

So Frank Ricci and a dozen other white firefighters sued the city for violating their civil rights.  The first court, incredibly, ruled against them.  So they appealed, and the appeals court ruled against them, too.  Guess who was one of the judges on the appeals court that upheld this blatant anti-white discrimination? Sonia Sotomayor!  Not only did she uphold it, she wrote a terse, one paragraph ruling dismissing their claims.  This is unheard of.  Judges normally write lengthy rulings, sometimes hundreds of pages long, explaining their decision.  In an equally unheard of development, one of her fellow appellate judges spoke out against this travesty, saying that Sotomayor's one paragraph ruling "contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case" and its "perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal."   The U.S. Constitution, legitimate claims, weighty issues - those don't matter - not to Sotomayor to whom Frank Ricci is a white male oppressor, which means the government is free to trample his rights in order to benefit minorities.

With his first opportunity to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, Barack Obama has openly declared war on middle class America.  This Sotomayor nomination is an ominous sign of just what the remainder of Obama's term holds for people like you and me, and our families.   In his heart, Obama is a radical black activist who has nothing but contempt for people like us.  During the campaign, lots of people exposed him as a racial radical with a chip on his shoulder, and a desire to "settle the score" with mainstream America on
behalf of minorities.  These researchers were ignored and marginalized by the mainstream media that fawned over Obama, who allowed him to cover up his past, and present himself as the "post-racial" candidate.

That "post-racial" business was an outright lie.  He has now made that crystal clear by nominating Sotomayor, to whom race is sometimes all that matters.  Obama said he looks for "empathy" in selecting judges for the federal bench.  Make no mistake though. By "empathy", he doesn't mean what you or I mean when we use that word.  We want judges who have empathy for victims of crime, for people who've been defrauded, assaulted, or otherwise harmed, and are seeking redress and blind justice from a fair and impartial court system.

That's what being a judge used to be all about and that's what most people understand when they hear the word "empathy" with respect to judicial nominees.  That's because they think they're still living in the old America, and haven't yet come to grips with the fact that we're now living in Obama's America.  In Obama's America, empathy in judges doesn't mean sympathizing with people who have been wronged by someone else, and striving to ensure that they get justice.  It means sympathizing with and taking the side of "the oppressed," i.e. non-whites, homosexuals, radical feminists, illegal aliens, etc. 

The flip side of Obama's "empathy" is apparent hatred and contempt for white people, traditional families, small business owners, evangelical Christians, conservatives, and everyone else that liberals call the "racist, heterosexist,  nativist, Christianist, capitalist, homophobic power structure" in America.  In other words, what most of us call normal people.  These radical leftists regard folks like you and me and our children as the enemy, and it's their mission in life to put us in our supposed place, which to them means at the back of the bus.  They're in charge now, and they fully intend to use their power to remake America in their image.  If the Senate approves Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, Obama will know that he has carte blanche to escalate his all out war on traditional Americans.  We've got to contact our Senators and demand that Sotomayor and all other far left nominees for the court be rejected or we'll vote them out of office.  We cannot allow Barack Obama to get away with this. 

If they approve her (and to be honest, with only 40 squishy Republicans in the US Senate, it's unlikely), it's time to get serious about finding a way for our beloved Texas to exit a system where Barack Obama and his racist friends interpret the laws that undergird our very life, liberty and material security.  I have faith liberty will prevail, but only with much travail.

The Tax man is coming, and well you will be paying

Okay I hope that I at least got your attention with the title, now this is really serious and we as citizen need to pay attention to what our perspective state Senators and Representatives are doing to us right now and "Remember" around election time.

With states facing nearly $100 billion in combined budget deficits this year, we're seeing more governors than ever proposing the Barack Obama solution to balancing the budget: Soak the rich. Lawmakers in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York and Oregon want to raise income tax rates on the top 1% or 2% or 5% of their citizens. New Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn wants a 50% increase in the income tax rate on the wealthy because this is the "fair" way to close his state's gaping deficit.

Mr. Quinn and other tax-raising governors have been emboldened by recent studies by left-wing groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that suggest that "tax increases, particularly tax increases on higher-income families, may be the best available option." A recent letter to New York Gov. David Paterson signed by 100 economists advises the Empire State to "raise tax rates for high income families right away."

Here's the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

More than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holiday relocate from the highest income-tax states to tax-haven states with no income tax, including Texas, Florida, Nevada and New Hampshire. Also over these same year the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs with a 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair?  No. Dozens of academic studies -- old and new -- have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

Since individuals can avoid unfavorable taxes by migrating to jurisdictions that offer more favorable tax conditions, a relatively unfavorable tax will cause gross wages to adjust.

Here is a great example of this thought; finally, there is the issue of whether high-income people move away from states that have high income-tax rates.  Examining IRS tax return data by state, E.J. McMahon, a fiscal expert at the Manhattan Institute, measured the impact of large income-tax rate increases on the rich ($200,000 income or more) in Connecticut, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 5% from 4.5%; in New Jersey, which raised its rate in 2004 to 8.97% from 6.35%; and in New York, which raised its tax rate in 2003 to 7.7% from 6.85%. Over the period 2002-2005, in each of these states the "soak the rich" tax hike was followed by a significant reduction in the number of rich people paying taxes in these states relative to the national average.  Amazingly, these three states ranked 46th, 49th and 50th among all states in the percentage increase in wealthy tax filers in the years after they tried to soak the rich.

One last point and a shining star: States aren't simply competing with each other.  As Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently told us, "Our state is competing with Germany, France, Japan and China for business.  We'd better have a pro-growth tax system or those American jobs will be out-sourced." Gov. Perry and Texas have the jobs and prosperity model exactly right. Texas created more new jobs in 2008 than all other 49 states combined. And Texas is the only state other than Georgia and North Dakota that is cutting taxes this year.

The Texas economic model makes a whole lot more sense than the New Jersey model, and hope the politicians in California, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota and New York realize this before it's too late.

[Source]