What if they were right in 1974?

The government has passed or is attempting to pass regulations that cover everything from which light bulbs you can use, low flush toilets, what type shower heard you use, to if you can sell your house without replacing an older model dishwasher of microwave. Never mind if they still work or not, if they don’t meet certain energy savings requirements, you will have to replace them before selling your house. In the name of global warming and farming practices, the government wants to regulate small farmers that raise and sell their produce on street corners or at farmer’s markets. The government is passing so many laws that at any one time you may be in violation of several of them without even knowing it.

I had heard several people talk about the fact that there was an “Coming Ice Age” scare back in the 70’s. I kind of remembered some of the discussion but I couldn’t remember all of the facts. I decided to get on line and see what I could find. What I found were hundreds of thousands of different blogs and articles about it. I wanted to narrow it down so I went to time.com, as Time Magazine was one of the fear mongers sounding the alarm. This link will take you to the Time article published in June 1974.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html

So what if they were right then and wrong now. What if the last two decades of excessive sunspot activity actually provided a stay to the global cooling that they were discussing back then? If you take a look at the last seven to ten years, you will find that the temperatures have been falling again even with the increase of CO2.

One recent blog actually wondered if Al Gore would be in favor of subsidizing SUV production to help warm the planet once it is discovered that we are in deed cooling instead of warming up. It concluded that if Mr. Gore could make a dollar doing it, he would be at the front of the line.

In the mean time Congress, which is suppose to work for the people is going about making energy slaves out of the people. Other countries that have Cap and Trade laws are trying to undo the damage that it has caused. Germany reportedly pays 25% more for electricity now after Cap and Trade took effect.

One of the reasons that unions made headway into the mining business was because the miners were little more than slaves to the mining companies. This was supported by the company store. Miners could purchase food other needs from the local store. The mining company owned the store. The miners lived in company housing. The mining company ran the hospitals. No matter how hard the miners worked, they could never get out of debt because the mining company just raised their prices. If they went on strike, they would be without food, shelter and medical care.

Is that were we are headed in America? Instead of a company ran store, company housing and company hospitals; will it be government ran? Will the prices be kept so high that it’s all we can do to keep our heads above water? Will the taxes, hidden in the cost of products and taken out of our paychecks leave what we need to survive as free men and women?

If the direction the country is headed isn’t changed, you and your children won’t live in the America that you grew up in. The problem is the Democrats or Republicans are taking us down the same road to destruction. Is there another Ronald Reagan out there?

Palin resigns as Gov.

Maybe she just wants out of the spotlight but with her resignation the speculation of her running for Pres. in 2012 begins. If she is ready to throw her hat in the ring is she a viable candidate?

Honduras

The U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear arguments stating that Obama isn’t qualified to be President as he doesn’t meet the citizenship requirements. Should the court rule him ineligible, all hell will break loose. I don’t think that there is a chance in a trillion of that happening.

Having discounted the chances that that will happen, let’s say for sake of argument that it does. The Supreme Court rules that Obama isn’t eligible to be president. Obama laughs at the ruling and states that the majority of they people that voted elected him and he is staying put. The Joint Chiefs of Staff which have sworn an oath to the Constitution and the American people remove Obama from office and place Joe Biden in as President of the United States. Under these circumstances, did America just have a military coup or did the constitutional process, enforced by the military, take effect?

What does this have to do with Honduras? Honduras has a clause in their constitution similar to that of the U.S. Constitution that states that the president can only serve two terms. Recently, towards the end of his second term, the President of Honduras decided that he was going to have a petition election to allow him to serve for a third term. The opposition filed suit and the Supreme Court of Honduras ruled that the petition election was unconstitutional and that the then serving president couldn’t serve again. The President decided that he wasn’t going to follow their constitution or their Supreme Court’s ruling. The military, all sworn to protect the country and the constitution stepped in and removed the president. The legislative body of Honduras appointed their leading person to fill in as president.

From what I have read and hear about the change in leadership in Honduras, the military was performing their sworn duty to uphold their constitution as ruled by their Supreme Court. I fail to understand President Obama’s position on this matter. President Obama has aligned himself with the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chevez. Neither are supports of democracy. This was not a violent overthrow; it was their constitution process working.

Write your Representative and Senators and request that they support the new Honduran government.

No time to give up.

The fact that Common Sense didn’t prevail in the House of Representatives with regards to the Cap and Trade bill doesn’t mean that it’s time to admit defeat. To the contrary, it means that it’s time to dig in and contact our Senators.

It doesn’t matter if you senators are democrats or republicans, they needs to be contacted and your voice raise against this mind numbing, economy killing, tax raising bill.

The national news media is stating that there isn’t much chance of getting this bill through the Senate. Could this be a ploy to get concerned citizens to back off their duty to contact their senators? After all, why go through the process if it’s going to fail anyway? Then when it passes, those senators sitting on the fence can say they didn’t hear anything from their constituents one way or the other.

Now I am going to pen a email, odd statement, type and email to my two senators asking them to vote against the Cap and Trade bill. While I’m at it, I will express my opposition to the health care bill too.

Finally-some common sense

Madame Speaker:

While there is still vigorous debate over the amount of the human contribution to global warming, it seems clear that man has played a role. I believe that we have a moral obligation to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and use clean, reliable, affordable sources of energy. But we must balance this moral obligation with an equal obligation we have to our constituents to do this in a manner that preserves our nation's economic competitiveness and jobs for Americans.

The Cap and Tax bill before us today is exactly that - an attempt to collect more money from Americans through indirect taxation; it is not a serious attempt to reduce carbon dioxide or other GHG emissions. The basic message of Cap and Tax bill is that "you can still emit CO2 as long as long as you pay the government for this privilege." This would be called extortion under other circumstances. Tony Soprano would be proud.

Other means of reducing emissions, such as phasing out older, dirtier, less efficient coal plants and replacing them in an orderly manner with clean, reliable, affordable energy like nuclear power were dismissed by the Democrat Leadership without even cursory consideration. However, this approach would produce more jobs than the Cap and Tax bill, and result in significant CO2 reductions without the significant increase in costs to consumers' utility bills this bill creates.

Advocates of the Cap and Tax bill state that it will not significantly increase the economic burdens on our constituents. This is just not true. The Cap and Tax bill also contains a Renewable Electricity Standard and other elements which will significantly increase costs to utilities and consumers. The Power District in my District conducted an independent analysis of the costs to my constituents, free of political interference like the one put out by EPA. Even with the free allowances allocated under the Waxman-Markey Cap and Tax bill, costs for ********* will increase by $74 million in 2012, and increase to $410 million a year by 2030 in the most optimistic case. My constituents will pay a new energy tax every time they flip on a light switch, turn on their computers, or charge their cell phones.

When the Energy & Commerce Committee met, amendments to replace old coal plants with clean, reliable, affordable energy from nuclear plants, or to encourage the construction of more nuclear plants to reduce our carbon emissions, were rejected on mostly party lines. This makes no sense. Nuclear power is clean, reliable, and the cheapest means of producing electricity in history to date. I urge my colleagues to reject this costly, job-killing legislation

This wasn’t written by a Grouchy Old Man, it was written by his Congressman. The letters were changed to red and italics by me. I think that he hit the nail squarely on the head.

I don’t have to write to my Congressman to push for this point of view but maybe you do.

A Grouchy Old Man

Strip search follow-up

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090625/pl_afp/uscourtjusticesearch;_ylt=Ah5XzwcP3vLuhp_duCvVwAV1fNdF

This is a follow-up to my April 21st 2009 blog about the strip search of a 13-year-old girl. They were looking for ibuprofen. As you might guess, I was outraged by the school official’s action of strip searching a 13-year-old looking for over the counter non-aspirin.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – School officials in Arizona violated the rights of a 13-year-old girl when they ordered her strip-search and looked for extra-strength pain medication in her underwear, the US Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

I was even more outraged by the following portion of their decision.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court said the plaintiff could not sue for damages, because at the time the illegality of the strip-search had not been established.

The illegality had not been established? What about the mere insanity of the matter? Why wasn’t the child made to sit in the office until her parent(s) arrived and they could have handled the problem? What ever happened to common sense? Apparently the Supreme Court has lost some of theirs.

If the Supreme Court didn’t want to allow the girl that had her Constitutional rights violated the Constitutional right to sue her abusers; they should have come up with some other punishment. Why should the wacko school officials get away Scott free?

Here we go again!

I thought that relaxed lending rules lead to the current housing trouble. Well, Barney Frank is at it again....

"Two U.S. Democratic lawmakers want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery, the Wall Street Journal said."

Here's a link to the article...and another copy of the best video about Barney Frank!

http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Housing/idUSTRE55L39120090622

3 years for stealing a bike

Donte Stallworth is driving drunk and kills a guy. He pleads guilty to DUI manslaughter and receives a 30 day jail sentence and a monetary settlement with the family.

Lance Armstrongs bike is stolen and the theif gets 3 years.

So the moral of the story is: If you need to get somewhere and have no wheels it's better to get drunk and drive than to steal someone's bike. Either that or get the liberal judge that gives 30 days for killing a guy.

Obama's eligibilty going to court

Under growing pressure from several groups, Justice Antonin Scalia announced that the Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear arguments concerning Obama's legal eligibility to serve as President in a case brought by Leo Donofrio of New Jersey . This lawsuit claims Obama's dual citizenship disqualified him from serving as president. Donofrio's case is just one of 18 suits brought by citizens demanding proof of Obama's citizenship or qualification to serve as president.

AP- WASHINGTON D.C. - In a move certain to fuel the debate over Obama's qualifications for the presidency, the group "Americans for Freedom of Information" has Released copies of President Obama's college transcripts from Occidental College. Released today, the transcript indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia as an undergraduate at the school. The transcript was released by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by the group in the Superior Court of California. The transcript shows that Obama (Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program. To qualify, for the scholarship, a student must claim foreign citizenship. This document would seem to provide the smoking gun that many of Obama's detractors have been seeking. Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya and there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship, this is looking pretty grim. The news has created a firestorm at the White House as the release casts increasing doubt about Obama's legitimacy and qualification to serve as president. When reached for comment in London , where he has been in meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Obama smiled but refused comment on the issue. Britain's Daily Mail has also carried the story in a front-page article titled, "Obama Eligibility Questioned," leading some to speculate that the story may overshadow economic issues on Obama's first official visit to the U.K.

Do we really want Pres. Biden?

Appendix to Obama's Bogeymen

I sense that I need to come clean and not be a hypocrite here. When speaking about Obama’s bogeymen I may have sounded as if I don’t care about the people who find themselves in financial problems. I truth is, I do. Once in my youth I found myself out of work once again (seniority layoff) and unable to pay my bills. There are several causes for reasons beyond a person’s control that he finds himself unable to pay his bills. It might be not having enough seniority to hold your job, it could be unexpected health issues, it could be a bubble in the housing market that drops the value of your house to half of what you owe on it. Then on the other hand, it could be that you made some bad choices in life.

I know the pain and heartache of having to swallow my pride and admit that I was not able to make it. I know the shame that I felt that I wasn’t man enough to provide for my family everything that everyone else had. Even though the turndown in the economy meant that there weren’t any jobs to be had, I still felt that I was less than a man because of the financial trouble we were in.

I made the hard decision, I bit the bullet and we lost everything, the house, the furniture, and even the baby’s bed. You know that you’ve sunk low when you watch as they take away your baby’s crib and there is nothing that you can do about it. It’s something that you look back on with shame for many years until you understand that there were no other options. We made the decisions that got us in trouble, we suffered the consequences of those actions and we learned the lessons that needed to be learned.

There were no rich relatives or liberal governmental programs that came in and bailed us out. It changed our lives in the short term for the worse but it modified our lived in the long term for the better.

The point of my listing wasn’t to belittle anyone who finds himself in financial difficulty. I’ve been there and done that. It was to speak against those who feel that it is the government’s job to come into their lives and make everything right. It’s to wake people up that the more you take from the government, the more they take from you.

Drug companies give away.

By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent David Espo, Ap Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON – The pharmaceutical industry agreed Saturday to spend $80 billion over the next decade improving drug benefits for seniors on Medicare and defraying the cost of President Barack Obama's health care legislation, capping secretive negotiations involving key lawmakers and the White House.

"This new coverage means affordable prices on prescription drugs when Medicare benefits don't cover the cost of prescriptions," Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement announcing the accord.

While this may be good news for people like me; old and getting older by the minute. It’s bad news for younger people like you. The drug companies aren’t like the US Government. They can’t just go out and print 80 billion dollars to cover the loss earnings due to this Medicare give away.

In order for drug companies, any company to stay in business, they have to show a positive return on the money that investors placed in their care. Those investors are common US citizens who have drug company stock in their portfolio. This will mean a smaller return on IRA’s and other pension funds.

It will also mean higher prices for those who actually have to pay for their medications. If the return on the invested dollar goes too low, the investors pull out and the company goes under.
So between higher prices and lower returns, you will be paying for this give away.

Obama's Bogeymen

If you want to have a good laugh or two, purchase a CD of any of Bill Cosby’s older comedy sessions. Bill was always able to make you laugh without being vulgar or using foul language. In one of the short tales, he explained how his parents kept him in bed at night. His parents told him that there were snakes under his bed. If he set foot on the floor, they would bite him and he would swell up and be dead until morning. Then followed a conversation that he had with the snake as he needed to go to the bathroom.

As children, we were told that a large creature lived in the big river that flowed by our city. Children had been reported missing after wondering down by the river by themselves. It was sort of a local "Loch Ness Monster". There was supposed to be a "village" of albinos living north of town nest to a graveyard with sunken graves. Children out at night who wondered too far from home would put their life in peril. The albinos would chase you through the graveyard where you would trip and fall into one of the sunken graves. Once there, you were at the mercy of the albinos.

It was funny how parents used mythological bogeymen and creatures to scare children into doing what they wanted them to do. What isn’t funny is when the adult telling you these stories is the President of the United States.

Obama has had one bogeyman after another since being sworn into office. There were the evil home loan officers that broke into you homes at night and made you take out a home loan that you knew you couldn’t afford. There were the evil car companies that made gas-guzzlers that you didn’t want and forced you to purchase. Then they made you take out loans with payments bid enough to be house payments. Now it’s the evil credit card companies that twist your arm to take another credit card and then charge it up to the limit. You didn’t want to purchase all of that junk on your credit card but they made you do it.

Not only are we victims of evil home, car and credit car lenders, there is only one way out. We need to sign over more and more of our rights to the federal government and they will take care of us.

The amazing thing that I noticed is that none of the bogeymen are current Obama supports. It’s funny how that worked out.

Apology for slavery

Thursday the Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. My first reaction is, with all the problems facing this country (health care, take over of companies, terrorists, Gitmo etc) is this a good use of the Senates time? My next reaction may get me in trouble with the PC crowd.

Even though blacks were treated like animals, abused and killed. Even though there is no justification for slavery my question is: Are blacks in the US today better off than those that are still in Africa? Meaning could slavery with all its horrors actually have benefited those blacks that live in this country?

First we have to state that slavery was going on before the US was born and continues today and that only 3% of all slaves were in the US. The last numbers I could find were the average black makes $35000 in the US and $1500 in Africa. The life expectancy is much lower in Africa and AIDS is much higher. US blacks are better educated and healthier than African blacks.

While the atrocities of slavery cannot be justified are there any blacks living in the US today who would want to go back to the poverty of Africa? What does an apology for slavery do for the country? Will the race baiters be satisfied and move on now? I thought this was supposed to be all behind us now that we have a black President. This is not a justification for slavery just a realistic look at where we are today. Perhaps it was a dark time in history that was used to teach us and those families that went through it were given grace and are today better off than if they hadn't.

Liberals getting crazier

Senator Barbara Boxer chastises a Brigadier General in a committee meeting on New Orleans and the levies. When he calls her Ma'am (he called the male senators sir) she asks him to call her Senator since she worked so hard to attain that title. This is a perfect example of the thought process in DC and how they put themselves on a pedestal.

Obama swats a fly and PETA is upset but you won't hear one word about the 5000 abortions performed daily.

As long as Obama is in office the libs will continue to be bold about their thoughts and the lunacy will get worse.

4F=Fishing, Food, Family and Fun

I know that I promised not to do this again but I can’t help myself.

My oldest daughter, her husband and four children came down to the cabin for ten days. It has been my duty to make daily trips down there to deliver items needed and pick up garbage and dirty clothes. We have done this every year for the last five years.

We have a grandfather, father and grandson fishing contest every year that I engrave an award plaques for. The winner receives the plaque with everyone’s name and standing engraved on it. I have never won the fishing contest. I almost did last year until my grandson came up and said that Daddy had given him his count so that put him over mine.

I’m required to fish 2-6 hours every day to make sure that everyone gets a chance to fish with Poppa. (That’s another alias that I use.) Needless to say, a good time is had by all. This year my other two grandchildren are also visiting. The picture you see is of Zoe’s (9 yrs old) catch of an 16" catfish on a child’s Barbie rod and reel. This was her first time fishing. I’m sure that she’s hooked for good.

The weather has been about as nice as you could ask for, warm but not hot with little or no breeze. There haven’t been very many bugs at all. The water temperature is still cool so you have to really work to get the bass to bite. We have been averaging 5-6 fish each for a couple hours of fishing in the evening. The largest was 16-17" with most in the 12-15" range. Whenever someone catches one less than 10" they receive a hard time from everyone.

We have been grilling outdoors and we have had plenty of side dishes and deserts. The food, fishing and family have made the last week one of the best ever.

Maybe there is hope.

I just found this editorial by Dick Morris...it may answer my question on when this is Obama's economy and not Bush's.

"Obama’s issues crumbling"

"At last, there is convincing evidence that Obama’s poll numbers may be descending to earth. While his approval remains high — and his personal favorability is even higher — the underlying numbers suggest that a decline may be in the offing. Even as he stands on his pedestal, the numbers under his feet are crumbling.

According to a Rasmussen poll, more voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle the economy, by a margin of 45-39. Scott Rasmussen notes that “this is the first time in over two years of polling that the GOP has held the advantage on this issue.” Last month, he had the Democrats holding a one-point lead, but they lost it in June’s polling."

More reading here:

http://thehill.com/dick-morris/obamas-issues-crumbling-2009-06-09.html

How long is this Bush's fault?

Pres. Obama told us that his porkulus package needed to be passed ASAP to avoid another great depression. The members of congress didn’t even have time to read the entire spending bill before they had to vote on it. “In pushing to get his $787 billion stimulus package passed in Congress, President Obama's economic team said that without the federal spending jolt, the unemployment rate would hit 8.8 percent by the last fiscal quarter of 2010. With the package, his advisers argued, the unemployment rate would reach only 7 percent.”

Well, we now have unemployment numbers at 9.4 percent and if, from what I’ve heard, figured as past unemployment numbers have been, we are easily into double digits.

So I ask, what good did the stimulus package do? Ok wait…it saved around 150,000 jobs so far. How can you measure that? We’ve lost around 1.8 million since Obama took office. At what point do we begin to cite Obama’s policies as taking us down further? When is this no longer a problem the previous administration had left him?

So far I have not seen any benefit besides a whopping $16.00 in my paychecks! We spent all this money to bail out the auto companies because they were too big to fail. Now their filling for bankruptcy…what happened to our money?

When will (or have) the American people woken up to what’s going on? Is it just the media that is on Obama’s side still?

I know that’s a lot of questions, but for my first post in a couple weeks, that’s what’s going through my head!

Chastity Bono and was God wrong?

Chastity Bono has come out and said she is changing to a he. From time to time there are those who say they feel they were born into the wrong body. Is this possible? If so, if God is perfect and knows all how can this happen? Sounds like something for Grouchy.

All politics think of them selves.

This, according to former vice-president Dick Cheney, who reportedly admitted in a recent interview on Fox News that the Bush administration floated the $17.4 billion auto industry bailout package in order to give the outgoing administration enough time to exit and for the next administration to settle in before the house of cards in Detroit came tumbling down. According to Cheney, President Bush "decided that he did not want to be the one who pulled the plug just before he left office."

Roadblock

President Obama might just have hit the biggest bump in the road on his way to turning America into a socialist nation. The funny part is that a liberal and not a conservative, although temporary, put up the roadblock.

Supreme Court justice Ruth Ginsburg put the sale of Chrysler to Fiat on hold. It seems that she is at least giving lip service to the notion that we are a nation of laws. If she does the right thing and has the whole court hear the case, there is a better than even chance that the sale will be blocked.

The issue is whether we are governed by "the rule of law" of if a power hungry President can skirt the laws to bring about what he wants to happen. The problem for President Obama is that our bankruptcy laws dictate how the assets of a corporation will be divided up when a company fails. Those creditors with secured loans are first in line for any funds to be dispersed. Obama want to pick and choose who gets what. He gave a bigger percentage of return to the unions than he did to say, state employee pension funds. It’s great payback for the union’s support during the election but will he get away with it?

The bigger problem is if secure creditors’ rights aren’t upheld by the courts, you will see billions of dollars of foreign investments leave America and go overseas where secured investors are still protected. Even China, communist China, no human rights China protects the rights of investors.

Newsweek editor finds God!!

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas talking to Chris Matthews of MSNBC comparing Reagan in 1984 with Obama today "Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is - we are above that now. We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something, I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above above the world, he's sort of God."

How can anyone in their right mind think the media is impartial? Can someone tell me what Obama has done? Reagan inspired us to be better than we thought was possible. He told us that the U.S. was the best place on earth and to be proud of that. Obama tells us we aren't the best, we are just one of many. He gives us no reason to be proud. He tells our allies as well as foes that the U.S. has made many mistakes and we are sorry.

The only thing I'm sorry for is the stupidity of those who voted for the guy.