Savage Republican

I’ve always enjoyed P.J. O’Rourke. He is to me what Will Rogers was to my Dad.
I came across a page of his quotes. The one that leapt out at me was this one:
“The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.” P.J. O’Rourke

Her sticker says “Governor, we have a problem.” Really?
Well, I’m your Mom’s , and the Governor’s employer and I don’t see a problem…except that there are 9,000 “non-essential” employess laid off. Now, therein is the problem: non-essential.
And why should we hire back “non-essential” employees?
Her Mom did want their last name used.
Who do you think her Mom voted for in the last Presidential election?
If you had to guess?

Stormi Greener Mpls Star Tribune All rights reserved 2005

P.S. 7 July-I got a call from a member of the Republican caucus today. We did a rough calculation on what we could save if we eliminated 9000 “non-essential” state employees. Figure $50,000 per employee (salary and generous benefits. I was surprised ,being their employer, at how incredibly generous I am). Add what it costs to support them (computers, furniture, utilities etc.) and we came to a figure of about $900,000,000. Nice savings.
OK. I’m convinced. Congratulations, non-essentials. You are now a part of the solution.

Mitch over at Shot in the Dark has been covering the case of Jeff Skelton, who is accused of shooting his wife’s lover 5 times (in the eye, the foot, the groin and 2 times in the chest), killing the man. Mitch goes into great detail on the case, how Mr. Skelton was released on bail, called a local radio station to brag about what he had done, was re-arrested for violating a condition of his parole (not contacting his wife) and was released yet again. While I agree with Mitch’s outrage over the situation, I do not agree with his conclusion that it is Amy Klobuchar’s (Hennepin County Prosecutor) problem solely . This is not just happening in Hennepin County (see my post “My heart is breaking…”) – it is happening all over in Minnesota. If the blame is to be laid at any politicians feet, it should be laid at the feet of the man who wants to be our next governor – Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch! AG Hatch is the man who sets the pace for the county prosecutors – he sets the standards that the counties must abide by. Maybe we need to send the AG the memo that we are fed up with perps getting more rights than their victims! It is time for the people of Minnesota to stand up for the rights of the victims and make sure that their stories are heard!

As I have mentioned before, I am the parent of a grade school aged child. I also live in a suburb of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. It is with a heavy heart that I heard (yesterday) that Shasta Groene (the missing 8 year old Idaho girl) was found yesterday in the company of a known sex offender who had been released from a Minnesota jail. This is following the sad story of Dru Sjodin who was murdered by another sex offender who had been released from a Minnesota jail. As more and more comes out about Shasta’s 6 weeks of horror, the angrier I – as a mother – get at the system.

Convicted child predators, like Shasta Groene’s attacker, are supposed to register with the state. According to the US Department of Justice records, 67% of ALL sexual assult victims are under the age of 18. According to the same US DOJ records, there are approximately 550,000 convicted sex offenders in the country and 100,000 of them are “lost” – location unknown to law enforcement officials. Did you see that dear reader – 1/5 of the convicted sex offenders in the US can not be found by law enforcement!!!! One of them now stands accused of murdering 3 members of Shasta Groene’s family, of kidnapping and sexually assulting Shasta and her 9 year old brother Dylan (before murdering him that is). The beast (for there is nothing human in my mind about him) was paroled from a Minnesota prison, where he was serving a sentence f0r raping a 6 year old boy.

What, in heavens name, are we – as a nation thinking, by placing the rights of people such as Joseph Duncan, John Couhey (who raped and murdered Jessica Lunsford in Florida), Roger Bently (who raped and murdered Jetseta Gage in Iowa) and Alfonso Rodriguez (Dru Sjodin’s killer) above the rights of their victims? What happened to the rights of these beautiful little girls? Who is advocating for them? Starting now, this mom is! I am tired of having to explain to my child why he can not go do things that I used to do when I was his age. I am tired of having to train him self defense methods. I am sick and tired of being afraid for my child’s life and safety.

We need to start – TODAY – to battle for the rights of our children. Our children deserve to be protected from the likes of those above who have no respect for anything but their own sick, twisted desires! We need to join up with groups like this who are fighting to do the right thing – to keep sexual predators of children locked up in jail for good! We need to get with our state and federal representatives and make jail terms for sex offenders longer and if they are paroled for any reason, they should be forced to wear an ankle monitor (if it’s good enough for Martha Stewart…) and be on 24 hour GPS monitoring! We can no longer afford to “trust them” to check in with their Parole officer every 2 weeks or so! We need to hold these offenders AND the law enforcement system accountable for the deaths of these innocents! We need to do a better job protecting our children from the monsters of the night!

Every year there is a study that ranks the nations in the world based on economic freedom. Not surprising those countries with more economic freedom also enjoy a higher standard of living (duh!).Let me pose the level of economic freedom with a question: You own an orange tree orchard. This is the harvest season. You and I strike up a conversation and my eyes fall on a particular orange. Now, I’ve never enjoyed an orange right off the tree and I decide that that one orange is for me. You, the grower/owner, pluck the orange off the tree and I pay an agreed upon price. Have there been any laws broken? If that orange is under 3 1/8 inches in diameter, both you and I have committed a crime. It’s illegal to sell or to buy an orange of that size. Why? Because the Department of Agriculture says so. An agreed upon transaction, no force, no fraud. But illegal. A small segment (pun intended) of economic freedom is peeled away (intended again).
The Heritage Foundation does a study each year that ranks nations (161 this year) into four categories Free, Mostly Free, Mostly Unfree and Repressed. There are seventeen nations in the Free category. And the United States is NOT #1. Not even #5. #10? Nope.
We are #13. 13. Way below Singapore, below Estonia (Estonia?). Even below Chile (no offense to Guillermo, my first scrum half at the U of MN Rugby Club, who is a hard working capitalist in Santiago. My apologies Willy).
Click on United States and you’ll see the category rankings and a graph of the past years ranking for that particular country. (www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cfm )
The very first sentence in the introduction states “The U.S. Constitution provides strong protections for private property, and the vibrancy and dynamism of the U.S. economy are testimony to these constitutionally protected economic liberties.” The listings were before the Kelo v City of New London Supreme Court decision.Go down the list to near the end where there is a ranking for Property Rights and read the dire pre Kelo predictions.
Now, the lefties will seize upon the comment under Regulations “By global standards, the level of regulation in the United States is low.” Now, the lefties ALWAYS claim “It could be worse.” Well, I’ve ALWAYS found little comfort for my misery by seeing someone else who’s more miserable. Especially when that misery is inflicted on me by someone else by force.
Vox Day, in his column yesterday ( www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45111 ) , near the end he comments:
” The genius of America was its independence. As that independence has been systematically reduced over the years, so too has its competitive advantage over other, less free, nations declined. The best and brightest have been leaving the country for years, and the American brain drain is accelerating as the Internet has made it possible to run a software company from the Bahamas or an import-export operation from Ireland, where the taxes are lower and there’s no danger of losing your home to a Wal-Mart.“
I remember about a month ago, while I was stopped at Hwy 13 and Cty Rd. 42, looking around and trying to find one thing, just one thing that was not taxed and/or regulated (as regulation has a cost and is therefore a tax). I couldn’t find a thing.
When I look around and see what we have, I wonder how much more we could be if the government just got out of the way.

Today, after my morning Bible readings and prayer, I took a moment to thank The Lord that I was born in the United States of America.I’ve often thought about gratitude towards God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and how I really don’t show much.Certainly not anywhere close to what’s due Them. When I see the bumper stickers saying “Proud to be an American” I’ve always thought that to make a true statement it should read “Blessed to be an American”.Humility becomes us and shows real gratitude.None of us earned America, achieved America or have America coming to us. We inherited America as it was bequethed to us from The Lord and those who came before us.
I see the bumper stickers “God Bless America”, and when and how does
“America Bless God”? How do you show your gratitude? To the Lord? To those who are “out there” on the wall for you and for me? What are you doing to reclaim the promise that our Founding Fathers (and Mothers) suffered and bled and died for to provide this nation that was founded on liberty for you and for me? And do you acknowledge that liberty which has been grossly eroded thanks to yours and my indifference?
Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence? In it’s entirety? (I’m impressed at how closely the complaints against the king mirror what we could list against our present overseers in Washington and St.Paul. We went to war over a 3% tax on sugar and yet today tolerate working over half the year to pay for government [http://www.atr.org/national/cogd/ ] and then call ourselves free{ see my blog The Economically Freest}).
I just finished David McCullough’s book “1776”. I’m a student of history and have always been amazed at how great events in history have turned on very small incidents (the horseshoe nail and the fall of the kingdom). And in “1776” it’s amazing how close we came to NOT being.
So, go out and enjoy what God and our predecessors have provided and our armed forces protect (“Our loved ones sleep at night because of those rough men who will do violence to those who would do harm to our loved ones”).
Always remember: Freedom is not free.That the only acceptable currency for liberty and freedom is and has always been blood.
May America Bless God!
He has certainly blessed all of us.

At least one has to think that is the case with our esteemed friends on the left. They seem to have a glaring lack of historical knowledge or context, given some of the statements that they have made recently. For example:

Many claimed that President Bush should have never started the war in Iraq because “they didn’t attack us”, the implication being that America has never attacked countries that didn’t attack us first. Well, FDR sent American troops into Europe, against Germany but Germany never attacked us – Japan did. JFK took American troops into Viet Nam when the Viet Namese never attacked us. Bill Clinton took American troops (who are still there by the way) into Bosnia – another country that never attacked us.

Many claim that the Iraq war is a “quagmire” that we must exit, a quagmire, like Viet Nam was. Let’s take a look at the Viet Nam quagmire versus the Iraq “quagmire. In Viet Nam, we lost (on average) 5,900 soldiers lives a year. In Iraq, we have lost a little over 1700 soldiers in the year that we have been in there. In Viet Nam, we never made any progress against the Communists. In Iraq, we have gotten rid of a despotic leader and we are slowly cutting the “head” off of the foreign “insurgents” all the while restoring public services like electricity, water and phone service to levels not seen in Saddam’s 30+ year rule. They claim that we need to have an “exit strategy”. What was the exit strategey in Germany? Korea? Bosnia? I will give you that, at this time, there does not seem to be an “end date” of when our troops will leave Iraq, but you know what – we still have troops in Germany 60 years after the “end” of WWII, we still have troops in Japan and the Phillipines and Korea as well.

Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) and officials at Amnesty International compared our treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to Nazi death camps (like Auschwitz and Dachau) and the gulags run by Stalin in Russia. Really? No medical experiments are being done on the detainees at Gitmo like there were in the Nazi camps. No “ovens” to gas prisioners. No 6-12 million dead. Shoot we have not even detained 700 there. In Gitmo, there is no thin soup made of human refuse and fish heads as there was in Stalin’s Gulags. Instead detainees eat orange glazed chicken and rice pilaf. I understand that there is a “Gitmo cookbook” being published so that we can eat like a detainee. I don’t recall Stalin publishing a cookbook.

There is so much more we could talk about, but you get the picture don’t you dear reader? I certain understand and appreciate an honest, principled opposition, but that is hardly what we have here. Instead we have intellectually bankrupt party that is more concerned with scoring political “points” than they are in doing the people’s business. JFK, FDR, Herbert Humphrey II and even Paul Wellstone would be embarrased that this is what their party has come to. I know I am…..

However, it is not the kind of abuse they were hoping for. This report, compiled from documents obtained by the AP from the US Government shows that the abusers at Gitmo are the detainees and not our military men and women.

Senator Durbin et al, you can announce the real apology (on the Senate floor) any day now!!!!! You owe it to the American people, our service men and women and to your constituents (for emabarassing the heck out of them). We expect it but I am not holding my breath waiting for it to come!

This week, an East St. Louis (Illinois) jury convicted 5 people of voter fraud (hat tip Gateway Pundit). I have been following this story every since Gateway Pundit first filed it for a couple of reasons – 1) I grew up in Illinois and 2) I went to college in the St Louis (Missouri) area. What makes this case all the more troubling is that the 5 defendants were members of the East St Louis Democratic Party!!! The defendants were accused of using money, supplied to them by the St. Claire County (Illinois) Democratic Party to buy votes for the Democratic slate of candidates! One of the 5 defendants is next going to trial for the attempted murder of a state witness for the prosecution as well.

Last week, in Milwaukee, 2 more people were charged with voting twice in the ongoing voter fraud case in Wisconsin. More charges are expected as federal prosecutors are investigating more than 200 cases of felons voting (illegal in Wisconsin) and 100 people either voting twice or filing a voter reqistration card using an invalid address!

I find it interesting that these cases are not out of Florida or Ohio, but out of states that went to the Democratic candidate for President. In the one case (Wisconsin) the state was so closely contested, that it is plausible that such fraud could have changed the outcome of the election in that state.

It makes you wonder what motivated for the cries of “voter fraud” in Ohio and Florida. Could it be that certain parties wanted to throw those states in doubt so that if they got caught with their fingers in the fraud cookie jar it would be overlooked by a willing establishment media?????

Swingin’ Sandy Day O’Connor is going away. Now, I ain’t going to celebrate until I see who GWB appoints. I’m going to hold my breath (and hopefully not my nose) until the appointment.

Just a thought on Miss Swing Vote.And God’s sense of humor:
My most vivid memory of our top unpredictable female politician in a black robe (Justice Ruth “Buzzy” Ginsburg is entirely predictable) is this picture (to the left, of couse. Irony? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge?!?!?) from almost exactly two years ago.
The event was a dual event: the awarding of the Liberty Medal at the dedication and opening of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
A mural and frame fell on the front row of honored speakers on the dais.
The incredible irony in all this was the combination of this event, where it happened, when and to whom came just days after Swingin’ Sandy sided with the majority in finding McCain/Feingold constitutional (McCain/Feingold is also known as the badly and bogusly named Bi-Partisan Campaign Finance Reform Act). As soon as I saw the picture and description, I again thought “In The Lord’s world there are no accidents and there is no happenstance.”
If I had been Swingin’ Sandy’s counselor, I’d have advised her to immediately give back the medal, do a very public mea culpa after announcing her resignation, wear sackcloth underwear for the rest of her life and be a Johnny Appleseed of liberty by giving away copies of the Federalist Papers and “The Law” by Bastiat to anyone she met.
Now, the incredible importance of this resignation:
Swingin’ Sandy was a/the swing vote on many issues. GWB needs to follow though on his comments that Scalia and Thomas are his models for Supreme Court appointments. The fact that the lefties are losing the swing vote is going to prove for very predictable actions by the usual gang of extreme constitutional criminals in the Senate.
I would HEARTILY recommend Janice Rogers Brown…this afternoon. No, on second thought, make the announcement on the 4th of July. In Philadelphia. At the National Constitution Center.
Let’s roll!