Congrats Mr. President: 30 Things You Now Own!

Comments from John in Orlando after article appearing on CBS Philly website:

Congratulations to the Democrats and Young People! You now own it and you can't blame Bush.

1) The next terrorist attack you own it.

2) Can't get a job after graduation, you own it.

3) Sky rocketing energy prices due to Obama's EPA shutting down the energy producing states, you own it.

4) A nuclear Iran, you own it.

5) Bowing to Russia, you own it.

6) Another severe recession, you own it.

7) A volatile border with Mexico, you own it.

8) Trouble getting good health care, you own it.

9) Higher health insurance costs and health care costs, you own it.

10) No budget, you own it.

11) Our allies mistrust, you own it.

12) Another trillion of debt, you own it.

13) More Benghazi situations, you own it.

14) No one willing to join the military, you own it.

15) Trouble getting a loan to buy a home, you own it.

16) More dependency on food stamps, you own it.

17) Trouble finding good employment, you own it.

18) Several part time jobs instead of a good job, you own it.

19) A World Government, you own it.

20) The UN governing the United States instead of ourselves, you own it.

21) A Senate that will not bring any legislation to the table even if it is "Dead on Arrival", you own it.

22) China controlling our world trade trampling all over us, you own it.

23) Loss of our freedoms as we have known it in the past, you own it.

24) A dictatorship instead of a democracy that follows the Constitution, you own it.

25) Less take home pay and higher living costs, you own it.

26) Driving a car that looks like a toy, you own it.

27) More government corruption and lies, you own it.

28) More toleration of extreme and fanatical Islamists, you own it.

29) Terrorist attacks called work place incidents, you own it.

30) Your revenge instead of love of country, you own it.

President George Bush is out of it now, and there is not another good man for you to vilify and lie about. In a way, I am relieved that another good man will not be blamed when it was impossible to clean up this mess you voted for. Have a good day.

God bless the United States! God is our hope now.

Rutgers....Really?

                                                        

Once again my faith in college football is shattered. Last week the Big Ten which is actually the Big Twelve announced that it is now the Big Fourteen with addition of the University of Maryland and Rutgers University. Rutgers…really?

Rutgers is also known as the State University of New Jersey and is the largest public institution of higher learning in the state with three campuses.  The largest is in New Brunswick.  It is a blue blood university founded in 1766 by the Dutch Reformed Church and named Queens College.  It was closed for a period of time because of financial difficulties, but re-emerged as Rutgers College in 1825 named after an American Revolutionary War hero.  Like Ohio State, Rutgers became a land grant college in 1864 with a strong emphasis on agriculture.

The major football conferences have been on a re-alignment binge. The big loser is the Big East which, in addition to Rutgers, has been gutted with the loss of schools like Miami, Boston College, Syracuse, Pittsburgh and West Virginia. Of course, it now has Boise State which is what…east of California which is also home of new Big East Conference member San Diego State which is east of the Pacific Ocean. The University of Maryland was a charter member of the ACC and is about to pony up $50 million to leave the ACC to join the Big Ten. Its students are shocked asking the big question….

Why???? At the root of all the conference moves is money. Maryland in particular seems focused on increased revenues from lucrative television contracts. Rutgers, in addition to money, is looking for the cache of the Big Ten to compliment its new and improved football program in the making these past ten years.

More curious is the Big Ten which apparently sees a media market of 14 million people in the DC and New Jersey areas. This casts a large Big Ten shadow which stretched its Midwest boundaries east when Penn State joined the conference and west with Nebraska last year. But at least those schools made sense.

If the Big Ten thinks for a minute those on the east coast are going to be sitting on the edge of their chairs anxiously awaiting Big Ten football…it will be sorely disappointed. Start with the basic mindset of those who live in the DC and New Jersey/New York media markets. They don’t think much of Midwesterners. We are viewed as a bunch of rubes. We live in fly over country. There are no ties. There are no traditions. There are no common values.

Jump to Indiana. Do you really think the Hoosiers…right wing conservatives…are going to identify with eastern liberal snobs? Maryland? It is such a tiny state. And Rutgers? How do you spell it? State school not withstanding, it's NEW JERSEY! Who is going to watch? That ultimately is the determinant of what these media contracts are worth.

Boundaries have disappeared in the modern digital age. The world has shrunk. But within our United States there are still regional loyalties and sensibilities. Midwesterners who could identify with Penn State and Nebraska will not identify with Eastern schools with which there are NO ties and NO common identification. Just because you put a football game on television doesn’t mean anyone is going to watch. Rutgers and Maryland will always be the add on schools…the poor relations.

I give the union between the Big Ten and these two eastern schools about ten years, if that, before Maryland and Rutgers search for ways to rejoin their traditional conferences. Better fits for the Big Ten would have been Missouri, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, or Notre Dame. But those schools got away.

But what would you expect from a conference that named its two divisions Leaders and Legends. Nobody said they were smart!!! Go Bucks.

Shell Holidays - Running on Empty

The political season is over. Now it’s time for a break. The weather is getting colder and the nights are getting longer. This time of year is steeped in tradition. Thanksgiving is upon us and Christmas is just around the corner. We look forward to Thursday and a sumptuous turkey dinner and football and family and then the Christmas rush begins in earnest. This year Thanksgiving is at its earliest date making the Christmas season a full four and half weeks. It’s going to be a long haul.  I am looking for after Christmas sales already.

Lost in the stories about the fiscal cliff and Mideast violence are retailers pushing the envelope once again as they attempt to push Black Friday into Thanksgiving night. I am actually a Black Friday fan. When my son was smaller we used to get up at 5:00 AM to be at the electronics stores when they opened at 6. Then we had to get up at 4 to be there when they opened at 5. Then they made the quantum leap to open at midnight and I said to hell with it and slept in. But this year they have crossed the line. Several of the big box stores have decided to open at 9:00 PM…and then others tried to outdo them by opening at 8 on Thanksgiving night.

I am a free enterprise kind of guy. But enough is enough. I listened to these jackasses boohoo about how tough business is right now. Do they really think that 3 extra hours on Thanksgiving night is going to make a difference to their bottom line? Do they really really think that? They very self righteously say that they don’t force their employees to work on Thanksgiving. It’s voluntary, they say. We have people lining up to work, they say. Really?

I remember years ago when Kmart tried to stay open on Thanksgiving morning. I went there to get out of the house while my wife and crazy mother and crazy aunts cooked. Kmart had a cafeteria at the time, so I bought a piece of pie and cup of coffee. When I went to pay the bill, the waitress looked at me and said it was because of people like me she had to work on Thanksgiving. Her kids would not have a Thanksgiving Day dinner because she could either work or cook. The boss said she had to work. I left her a big tip and slinked away.

America has always had great traditions. Unfortunately as our society has secularized, what’s left are the shells of the traditions. The guts have been eliminated. Thanksgiving Day is for thanks. Now it is for football and shopping. Christmas celebrated the birth of Christ. Now we are obliged  to leave the religion out in the cold. It is all Santa and presents and parties. Watch the Christmas movies and the birth of Christ is all but ignored except when a sappy ending is needed and town folks sing Silent Night in the town square…fine for the movies but would result in a lawsuit by the ACLU if it really happened.

It’s like watching all of the Say Yes to the Dress bridal shows. Out comes the white dress and the big wedding…and the bride either has kids already, has lived with the guy for three years, or is pregnant. And the white dress tradition lingers because…..

This year I am going to try to lose at least some of the trappings of the holiday and concentrate on restoring part of the guts. Shell holidays look good, but I think I want something more at the core than a holiday running on empty. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and don't forget to thank God for your blessings. 

Where's the Celebration?

This past election was an election of hate. The Democratic campaign strategy was simple. Demonize Mitt Romney to the point that no matter how bad Obama was, Romney would be worse. It worked. Politics is hard ball and you either play the game or get out. In politics, it’s not really helpful to be a nice guy. They finish last. So we had a war on women. We had a war on blacks. We had a war on the environment. We had a war on just about everything by a rich country club type whose sole goal was to make the rich richer while throwing the rest of the country out the window. None of it was true. And all of the problems are still here. And the country has been riddled with messages of hate and class warfare for a year.

That probably explains why there hasn’t been much celebration in the country. There is going to be a lot of bad stuff happening over the next several years. The deficit is not going away. Entitlement solvency is non-existent. FEMA has actually topped its Katrina debacle closing offices because of the storm. Iran is shooting at our drones over international waters. Our ambassador was murdered in Libya. Health care is going to put the economy in reverse. All of the platitudes and feel good rhetoric don’t make the problems go away as the country will continue to splash about rudderless in Obama’s ideological sea of academic clap trap.

Is there going to be thunder coming down from the heavens smitng America? Probably not. It will be a slow process over a period of years as the economy steadily goes south. More likely than not there will be some resolution of the fiscal cliff that is permeating the media right now. Taxes will go up now. Entitlement cuts will come later if at all. Addiction to spending is hard to conquer.

But 1/5 now approaching1/4 of the population is reaching complete dependency on government assistance. The country has reached the tipping point. Those who are working under the yoke of government regulation are becoming smaller in number. There will come a time when those taking will crush those that are working, and that will be a bad day.  The average value of government assistance per household receiving it, excluding social security, is $60,000.00.  How many of you working are making that much money?

And it’s not the fault of those who find themselves is dire circumstances. Most people by nature are not slackers. It’s government policy that has forced many of those from the work roles to the welfare roles. And the health care bill is going to multiply that even more. Full time employment for folks with college educations will be hard to come by, and not available at all to those with just high school diplomas…and they will all be paying their own health insurance cost out of their own pocket under the watchful eye of the IRS.

You see, Obamacare may be rooted in the best of intentions. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The end result is a shift of the cost of health care from business to the individual. Can a family of four making $60,000.00/year afford a $4,000.00 a year hit in out of pocket health insurance cost?

The end result is that these folks will ultimately be exempt from having to comply with the mandate, leaving 45 million Americans still uninsured and a big mess in our health care system with fewer and fewer working Americans picking up the cost. It is a recipe for disaster.  But I can tell you who won't have to worry about it, government employees.

The rich will always have their ways of skirting the system. It’s the shrinking middle class that will ultimately pay the bill. And that’s too bad. And that’s why there is no sense of celebration in the country after this past election.