JUST THE FACTS
I try to read a lot, whatever I can reasonably get my hands on. Do I watch the news on TV in order to find out what’s happening? Not really. I don’t like to be lectured or preached to by someone who is merely a commentator, or worse, a wannabee commentator. We surely have enough of those. To quote a line from an old TV show, “Just the facts Maam, Just the facts.” Just the facts please, and I’ll make up my own mind.
LIBERALS
A word that is getting a lot of press these days is, “Liberal”. Some people love to call themselves Liberal but I suspect they don’t even know what the label stands for. Liberals are supposedly smart, well educated and part of the intellectual elite. At least that’s what they tell us. But I can tell you that most people who refer to themselves as Liberal have little or no knowledge of the history of our country or any country for that matter. Their version of history is their version of what they would like it to be. But they do like the sound of that label.
GUN CONTROL
Some of the latest rallying cries of the Liberals are, “Down With The NRA” and “We Want Gun Control”, or words to that effect. I don’t care if you are a right wing conservative fanatic or a left wing liberal fanatic, it should be painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain that gun control never stopped any criminal from getting a gun any more than it stopped them from getting whiskey.
You should know that all of the cowardly shooters of defenseless children and adults, are either certifiable nut cases or religious fanatics and none of them are members of the NRA. If you do know history you would know that all of the dictatorships were able to do their thing only after they had disarmed the people.
The other night I watched the Academy Awards, certainly not for its political insight but rather for its entertainment value. During the course of the evening it was suggested that we are in need of massive and total gun control. I find this somewhat ambiguous because it was reported that there was in excess of five hundred guns belonging to various security and police personnel on hand to protect the Hollywood elite. In fact, some years ago when I was with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department I worked that assignment. My partner and I cruised the area in our Black and White on the lookout for any troublemakers. We did not have AR-15’s. All we each had were our 9 mm Berettas which typically had 15 rounds in the clip and one in the chamber and we each had two more 15 round clips. Fortunately it was a quiet night.
TARIFFS
The recent implementation of protective tariffs has resulted in a number of so-called experts complaining that this move will only serve to create a trade war. I find this strange since I was under the impression that we were already in a trade war. You know, the one that we have been losing for the past few years. Thank goodness that we’re still ahead in Broadway Shows.
IMMIGRANTS
My parents and my grandparents were immigrants. When they came to these shores they did so legally and they embraced their adopted land. They did not ridicule it nor did they attempt to turn this country into the kind of shit hole from whence they came. They worked hard and did their best to blend in. They did not take advantage of our system but instead helped it grow. That is what immigration should be about.
TERRORISTS
What are we going to do with our terrorists? In the old west, the saying was, “We’ll give him a fair trial and then we’ll hang him.” In this day and age that is not going to happen. So why are we housing them and feeding them? At this point they are certainly not going to reveal any of their secrets. I say that we should immediately find them guilty of whatever and sentence them to death, with the sentence to be commuted under the condition that they be immediately deported back to the country of their origin which is the direct opposite of immigration and that the commuted sentence be carried out should they at any time ever come back to our country.
THE PARTY OF THE PEOPLE
A friend of mine, or at least he used to be a friend, until I had the gall, the audacity, the chutzpah to dare to challenge some of his beliefs, told me that the Democratic Party was the only Party that ever did anything for the people. And what did I do? I checked it out. We all know from our early schooling that Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and in so doing abolished slavery. And guess what? He was a Republican. As I checked out the statement of my friend I found out that it was the Democratic Party that supported slavery, segregation and Jim Crow as well as being against Women’s Suffrage. They also put all of our west coast citizens of Japanese origin in concentration camps during WWII. And forget about Franklin Delano Roosevelt being a friend of the Jews as most Jews believe. History shows that he did absolutely nothing for them.
MEDICARE
Medicare Fraud is alive and well, still in the vicinity of 75 to 250 BILLION per year, which is more than the 40 BILLION per year of non-medical insurance fraud. That is certainly a lot of change to be sweeping under the rug. Instead of harassing small businesses and small taxpayers, even if they cheat a little bit, the IRS should somehow change its mandate and get after these outrageous violators of our Medicare, Medical and Medicaid programs.
CENSORSHIP
When I was in college, a long long time ago, one of the best sellers was “1984”, which at that time seemed so far off in the future that everyone said that the events depicted therein were only fiction and that it could never happen, at least not here in the US. I am not a proponent of conspiracy theories but on two occasions I have had some material mysteriously disappear from my iPad. It would appear that those companies that control the internet also troll cyberspace and simply remove or erase anything that is not to their liking. Why would they do this? Because they can. I sincerely hope that these two events are the result of some ‘normal’ malfunction and not a form of censorship by our mega-corporatioins, for if it is, we are all going to be in deep doo-doo.