Obama’s campaign meme: “Wealthy people should pay their fair share. You know, like my Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (D-Turbo Tax Fail) and my friend Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-Tax Evasion) did.” Wink, wink.
Word on the street is the New Black Panther Party is changing its name to “Holder's Irregulars.”
Being on a diet makes me feel like a frog that is only snagging two flies a day.
I may be on a diet, but apparently a few extra pounds didn’t bother my namesake, Robert “Rab” Hall, the Glasgow Glutton.
The diet seems to be working, though. March 31, 2012: 225.2 lbs. May 31, 2012: 196.2 lbs.
“Ambrosia” is my new favorite variety of apple, though I still like Fuji and Gala as well. Tried one from a convenience store and got hooked. They are a bit hard to find. They apparently started as an accidental cross breed in British Columbia in the 1990s, now spreading as they get more popular. Nature still surprises us.
The current irresponsibility and vote-buying of our government—both parties—will be paid for by the tears and blood of our grandchildren. And their children. I no longer see almost any hope of avoiding very dangerous and violent times down the road.
Most people will vote to avoid any pain now, even if it means much greater pain in the future. See Greece and France if you don’t believe me.
The schools being forced to give up their Indian Mascot names should choose something like “The Over Bearing Bureaucrats,” “The Fighting Weenies” or “The Politically Correct Peanut Brains.” Especially hard on Indian Schools on reservations to be required to adopt something like “The Fighting White-Eyes.”
When I was at U-Mass, we were the “Redmen.” This was deemed to denigrate Native Americans, so it was changed to “The Minutemen.” No explanation of why it was okay to denigrate the founders. Of course, now there are attacks on this mascot who is not only carrying a musket, but is a male. The horror.
Almost every obit I read says the person died, “…after a courageous battle with (the disease).” Some day I’d like to read, “John Smith passed today, whimpering and pleading, after being scared silly for three years by hemorrhoids.”
I don’t really like the euphemism “passed.” Sounds like the person was just passing by. When I go, I’d prefer you to say something like, “Bob bought the farm,” or “Bob croaked.”
Increasingly the stark choice facing mayors, governors and eventually the president is, “Break the unions or break the government.” Of course, a completely broke government will break the public employee unions much more painfully than reforming the system now, but union leaders get rich and powerful promising to fight all pain, hang the future.
First they came for the rich, and I wasn’t rich, so I didn’t care. Then they declared the well-employed at $250k to be “rich,” and I wasn’t at that level either. Trust me, eventually they will come for everyone who works or saves. Does that not include you?
This came to me in an e-mail, and I thought worth sharing. (But it should be “Mountain Folk,” not “Hillbilly.” Mountain folk are often independent and pro-freedom.) An old West Virginia Hillbilly saying: “You cannot get the water to clear up, until you get the pigs out of the creek.”
I notice that the people who interrupt you when you are speaking become incensed at your rudeness if your interrupt back.
If a Muslim terrorist gets depressed, does he refuse to commit suicide?
We are very close to having a permanent, clear voting majority of the something-for-nothing crowd over the producers. Once that happens, it’s over, just as Greece is over. And it may have already happened, I fear.
European Socialism is terminally ill of the usual causes. But the death will be protracted and painful. It seems unlikely we can avoid the contagion.
When someone says there’s “too much partisanship,” what they mean is you should shut up and do it their way.
I think there should be a dating website called “Sociopath Singles.” Get them together in one place so gullible folks could be protected.
I’ve read that psychologists believe that sociopaths/psychopaths constitute as much as 2% of the population. Throw in all the Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder types, and you better be prepared to deal with folks who don’t have your best interests at heart.
I suspect that the number of people who are “undecided” in the 2012 presidential race is really quite small. And many of them will be among those who are too busy to vote.
It’s a bit unsettling when you discover your 11-year-old granddaughter is doing sit-ups so she’ll look good in a bikini this summer. Still eating cupcakes, though.
OWS are the “everyone gets a trophy” generation. And they wonder why they can’t compete in the job market.
If the UN forces American land to be returned to the Indians, does 1/32nd of Elizabeth Warren become the full owner of her mansion?
It appears that in the “War on Unsustainable Debt,” France has surrendered again.
If Obama new composite girlfriend, “Julia,” comes to your home, slam the door. She’s after your wallet.
I told my 11-year-old Granddaughter that her share of the National Debt was now $50,000. She didn’t seem too concerned. I wish I was so insouciant and wasn’t so worried for her future.
Do you get the feeling that Progressives won’t be satisfied until everyone’s “Fair Share” of taxes is 100% of their income, and they must live on the government dole?
I’ve reached the age where I know I have a lot more “past” than “future.” But it’s a pretty good “past.”
I notice that when a person decides to do an injustice to another, such as not pay back a loan, they first justify it by demonizing the victim as being bad or evil, thus somehow deserving of the coming injury.
In my view, peer pressure has led more people into iniquity than evil intent.
As I get older, I seem to have more, rather than fewer, daily maintenance tasks, often involving health care. Can I go back to when once my rifle was clean and my boots spit shined, I could go to the Slop Chute for a beer?
In every job—well, almost every one—one of your responsibilities is to make your boss or bosses look good. (Or as good as possible.) Yes, it can get tedious, like the committee chair (who was suspicious of me due to my plumbing) who every time she wrote a newsletter column, used "irregardless" two or three times. I always fixed it to "regardless," despite my temptation to let her ignorance show. So, do it anyway.
People wonder why moderate Muslims don’t speak out against the violent Jihadists who profane Islam through violence and murder, and make a mockery of the “Religion of Peace” meme. For the same reason that moderate whites soon learned to shut up in the face of violence, murder and terror against blacks and Republicans in the South during reconstruction, at the hands of the Democrat-led KKK. Terror works. Few will fight and die for “moderation.”
Laundry math: You need to do two loads. You do three. That leaves only four still needing to be done.
I saw a protest sign for the NATO summit in Chicago: “NATO is a war machine!” Yeah, that’s what I like about it.
It has been the long standing policy of the Democrat Party to keep black folks in subjugation. First as slaves in the South. When the Republican-led North defeated the Democrat-led slave power and liberated the slaves, the policy turned to terrorism to deny the freedmen the vote and economic rights. It was to the shame of the country that the Democrats succeed in terrorism. The Democrats pursued that for almost a hundred years, successfully. With the passage of the Civil rights Act in 1964, with more Republican votes than Democrat, that status quo defense also crumbled. But a new strategy arose: make blacks dependent on government, so they would have to subserviently vote for Democrats to keep the handouts from the taxpayers flowing. Too many black folks who wanted nothing more than political rights and the right to work in 1865, even if with only “forty acres and a mule,” are now dependent on Democrats for subsistence and the dole. Any who escape the Democrat plantation and think for themselves, like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas or Star Parker, are vilified in acts of verbal terrorism reminiscent of the Democrat-led KKK terror of the reconstruction years. For a good history of the Democrats’ destruction of the freedmen’s rights during reconstruction through terror, I recommend, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War By Stephen Budiansky.
This is also interesting: “The History of the Democratic Party and Racism”
The effort to defeat the slave power almost cost me my life, as my great, great grandfather, Sgt. Oliver Vernal (then childless) fought through the war with the Sixth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, and was badly wounded twice.
Some days the e-mail comes in faster than I can read it. Others it comes in faster than I can delete it.
For a long time, I thought Twitter was a huge time waster. Then I joined it to get links for the digest. Turns out I was right. I don’t have time to read even 2% of the Tweets of the folks I follow.
I wonder how many public employee union members will have to be laid off in Wisconsin to cover the cost of the recall election, estimated at $18M?
Many years ago, since I do 99%+ of my writing on the computer, I gave up cursive for printing when writing notes, as increasingly I couldn’t read my cursive. Now I can’t read my printing, so have gone back to cursive, as I’m finding it more readable. But that’s probably because I have to write slow to recall how to do it. Writing, “I will not talk/throw spitballs/hit Billy in class” 5,000 times as punishment—often—didn’t do a lot for my handwriting. And I’ve never been good at hand-skill work. I wasn’t a great electronics tech in the Marines, though I excelled at the book work. You wouldn’t want me for your surgeon.
Hard to believe working-class folks who can’t afford to send their kids to college are happy to vote Democrat so they can pay taxes to cover student loans for elitist liberal kids to major in things like “Peace Studies” or “Interpretive Dance.”
True “Rights” are indivisible. I get equally as much freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as Warren Buffet, George Soros, John Kerry, Liz Warren, Michael Moore, Barack Obama or other “One Percenter” liberals. But if health care, education, food, shelter, etc. are “rights,” everyone should get as much as those rich folks. We don’t and never will, because they are “goods,” not “rights.”
When you are on a diet for your health, the moment of truth every day is when you step on the scale to see if you are up (boo), down (yea) or the same (meh). I find myself a lot more interested in the daily weigh-in than the daily presidential tracking poll. Self-centered lot, we humans. That’s why capitalism improves standards of living, other systems degrade it.
The recent French elections remind me of the joke about the lifelong French communist who dropped out of the party after they proved to him that if all the wealth of France was shared equally, everyone would get 50,000 Euros. He already had saved 70,000 Euros.
We stopped at Walgreens to get the Sunday paper on May 13. My wife came out laughing. She said there was a long line of men in front of her, all with just one item: A Mother’s Day card.
Obama has joined Dick Chaney in thinking Gay Marriage should be left up to the states. Fine. How do we get him to think the same about the states enforcing immigration law, requiring voter ID, making their own decisions on healthcare and banning the anti-woman, anti-freedom application of Shari’a Law in their borders?
Why the excitement over Obama “evolving” on Gay Marriage, back to his 1996 position? He evolved on the deficit, which he promised to cut in half. He evolved on raising the debt ceiling, which he once called a “failure of leadership.” He evolved on closing Gitmo. He evolved on the War Powers Act, attacking Libya with no Congressional authorization. He’s constantly “evolving” on issues, as evolving becomes politically expedient. Obama will have even more ‘flexibility” to “evolve" after the election. Worry about what he will evolve on next.
I told my wife I don’t believe in special treatment for Gays. They should have to get married and suffer like the rest of us. She was not amused.
If you lie awake at night worrying that someone is better off than you, has a bigger income, nicer house, or newer car, you will never get much sleep. Nor deserve to.
The Progressives’ policy seems to be, let’s take the seed corn from the productive who could grow it, distribute it to supporters to eat now, and let the future worry about itself.
An easy way to tell if a restaurant is cheap and cuts corners: they have Sweet and Low, but not Splenda or Equal low-cal sweeteners. Even McDonald’s has those.
The trader who lost $2B for Morgan-Chase was reportedly making $15M a year. I can’t help but think, being conservative with money, I could have done better for them for a lot lower salary.
Europe is starting to remind me of Obama bundler Jon Corzine and MFGlobal, desperately shifting the customers’ money around to temporarily stave off disaster.
I admire those who can suffer in silence. I can do the suffering part, but the silence is a real challenge.
Bill Clinton’s been talking about how brave Obama was to send the Navy SEALs after bin Laden, because if they had been captured and killed, it would have been very bad politically for the President. Ah, Bill, it might have been a tad tough for the SEALs too, don’t you think?
If you drive a Jeep Cherokee, you’re more “Indian” than Liz Warren (D-OWS).
Why is being Anti-Muslim racist, but being Anti-Jewish or Anti-Christian is liberal-chic?
Funny how the media is more interested in what Romney did many years ago, including high school, than what Obama has done in the last four years. But there’s no interest in things like Obama’s college record or drug use. And it’s now declared “racist” to mention that Obama sat in a church listening to racist rants from the preacher for 20 years, without speaking up—or even hearing them, so we were told.
IDs were required to get near the NATO meeting in Chicago. Since freedom of assembly is a constitutional right, isn’t that racist?
Progressives think that not paying for up-scale college students birth control is a ‘war on women,” but avert their eyes from female genital mutilation, honor killings of daughters, stoning of rape victims for “adultery,” child marriages and the general oppression of women in Muslim countries. If the choice is being called “Islamophobic” by a Muslim, well, the women will just have to suffer. One wouldn’t want to feel bad for being non-PC, would one?
The WaPo hit piece on Romney being a bully in High School probably moved a lot of folks, who were bullied at one time or another. In High school, I wasn’t very big, very strong or very athletic. Plus I was weird. I was more interested in poetry, politics and history than cars and sports. So I was a natural target. There was one bully in our class who didn’t like me much. One Thursday in gym, we were playing bombardment, sometimes called dodge ball, where the two sides throw volleyballs at each other until one is eliminated. I think it’s no longer played because aggressive games aren’t politically correct. This guy was out of the game. But after I caught a ball on the bounce, he ran on the floor, wrestled it away from me, and threw it to his team. The coach either didn’t see this blatant cheating or ignored it. On the way down to the lockers, the guy was giving me grief for having had the temerity to resist him. My blood was up and I told him to go to hell. He came over to my locker and promised to “get” me outside of school. Gulp. But now I had nothing to lose. “Go to hell,” I replied. On Saturday, the pick-up truck he was driving went out of control and he was killed. I believe that others in the truck were not injured at all. His buddies talked about beating me up in his memory, but I think they were afraid to do so. When Bob Hall tells you to go to hell, you don’t pass “Go,” you don’t collect two hundred dollars, you go directly to hell. I guess I’m supposed to feel bad about this, but I never have. There are too many other things in the world to feel bad about.
In my high school, anyone named “Willard” would have been the bullied, not the bully.
If a guy comes into your bar, orders drinks for everyone, and every time you try to give him the bill, he just orders more drinks, you can be sure he’s a progressive.
Words matter. If a restaurant were advertising the daily special as “chunks of cow,” you’d probably skip it. But “medallions of beef”? Ah, that’s different.
Obama strategy: “The economy, jobs and the deficit? Hey look, a war on women because they can’t get free birth control. Hey, look, Romney transported his dog on the car roof several decades ago. Hey look, Romney is said to have bullied a kid when in high school. Hey look, I’m for gay marriage, just as I was in 1996. Hey, look, I shot bin Laden. Hey look…..”
We were in an IHOP for breakfast, and the district manager, a Marine vet, spotted my Marine cap. Breakfast was on the house. The brotherhood lives.
All this talk of commencement speakers. I have no idea who the commencement speaker was when I graduated from U-Mass in 1972. Might have more to do with the fact that I didn’t attend, than my memory. I was out knocking on doors, running for the state senate seat I’d win by nine votes in November. I still think it was a good decision to skip the expense, especially as they didn’t even call your name—too many sheep in the graduating herd.
Okay, I’m 66, looking at retirement, so I’m ready to sell out. Offers? No? Half-price special today…
Does “Paying Your Fair Share,” mean unionized public employees should pay the same percentage of their retirement and health care costs that workers in the private sector do? No? Why not?
A Planned Economy is an economy based on coercion. You must be coerced, one way or another, into doing economically what the planners believe is best for everyone, rather than what you believe is best for you and your family.
People who go around vandalizing political signs and bumper stickers of their political opponents are not only unethical, but stupid, as it helps the opposition by making their side look bad. A two-fer!
Want to make a sound long-term investment in your economic future? Donate to Mitt Romney and Republicans running for the Senate and House. It’s going to be ugly in the future. It’s too late to avoid that, but a re-elected Obama and a Democrat Congress, plus likely statist appointments to the Supreme Court, would make it hopelessly catastrophic.
I think we could beat “Islamophobia” if Muslims would stop the daily murders of people, mostly fellow Muslims, in the name of Allah.
Want to help Obama? Forward racist jokes and cartoons to let the left feed the narrative that racism is the only reason people oppose his policies.
I collect these over the course of a month, but try to review before posting, as I seem to have reoccurring random thoughts. Sorry.
When someone asks, “How are you doing?” I usually say, “I’m feeling good and looking better.” If I say, “Fine,” it’s probably a bad day.
I’ve never quite understood how the phrase “Colored People” could be racist, but if you reverse it to “People of Color,” it becomes highly politically correct.
Dr. Thomas Sowell points out that 119 blacks were lynched in the South in the 1930s decade. This is quite rightly considered to be a national shame. But in 2012, 120 people, mostly black or Hispanic, were murdered in Chicago in the first three months. But since most of the killers were black or Hispanic, this is considered to be business as usual—no big deal.
When you have pulmonary fibrosis, putting “breathe” on your daily to-do list is not really a joke.
We were at our condo in Madison, and my wife discovered we didn’t have a can opener there. So I handed her my key chain, with the new P-38 “John Wayne” C-rat opener I bought at the Marine Corps museum. “What’s this?” she asked. So I opened two cans for her. She was suitably impressed with this advanced technology.
Every morning to give two of our cats pills, I lure them to the kitchen with cat treats. Now they beat me there. But who has who trained?
Local Chicago TV news reported a Predator Drone over Chicago for the NATO summit, “armed with surface to air missiles.” Ah, if the missiles are flying, intended to hit ground targets, isn’t that “air to surface” missiles? Not sure why they’d have this kind of fire power over Chicago, unless they suspected some major threat to the President or world leaders. An accident would be devastating.
If fixing problems was as easy as protesting, this would be a trouble free world.
I expect that former President Obama will make over $200 million on books and the speaking circuit. I’m doing all I can to give him a head start next January on being in the high—rather than as currently in the lower—“one percent.”
In the old days, the Catholic Church sold “indulgences.” Today the Green Church sells “Carbon Offsets.” Same scam, different set of bigwigs getting rich.
In the Brave New World of the statists, kids will be raised in a protective bubble. And as adults will have no immunity from the vicious vicissitudes of life. (Yes, I used this in my daily digest. I liked “vicious vicissitudes” so decided to repeat it.)
When you give someone a book as a present, it isn't polite later to ask if he or she has read it.
Being black, Hispanic, Gay, Mormon or Muslim doesn't automatically make someone a bad person, and anyone who thinks so is an ignorant bigot. But anyone who thinks belonging to such a group makes someone a good person, or who gives a bum a pass on bad behavior because of group identity, is also an ignorant bigot.
A woman I dated when I was in the Senate said her landlady told her I was a "roustabout." I've always kind of liked that. I think my tombstone should read: “Robert A, Hall. Marine. Senator. Poet. Author. Loving Husband and Grandfather. Roustabout.”
In my book, Advice for my Granddaughter: For When I'm Gone. (http://www.amazon.com/Advice-Granddaughter-When-Im-Gone/dp/147004238X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1329662198&sr=8-2 All royalties go to the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation.) I gave Britnye rules for not being poor: 1. Don’t have babies until you are married in a stable relationship and can support them. 2. Get an education, at least high school, but preferably college, and don’t marry until you have it. 3. Get a full-time, 40-hour-a-week job and work at it, no matter how bad, to develop work habits and a record so you’ll have a career. 4. Avoid debt as much as possible, as debt makes people poor. Buy far less house and car than the max your salary will cover, pay off your credit cards every month, and do with out toys rather than be in debt. Accidents of life can make anyone poor, but if your kids live in America and follows these rules, they may not be rich, but are very unlikely to be desperately poor.
The good news is that having given up the cough drops to lose weight, white wine now tastes good to me again. The bad news is that I've mostly given up wine for the same reason.
One of the doctors I work with told me he lost weight because he discovered the secret—eat less and exercise more. Seems to be working for me too. Who knew?
One of the talking-head financial analysts on TV said the Facebook IPO, by raising $100B, created $100B in new wealth. I guess I don't understand economics. I thought the wealth was created by building the company, and that selling it off just transferred wealth from one place in the economy to another. If I take $20 from one pocket and put it another, did I create $20 in wealth?
I had an older gentleman notice my cap, come up to me, identify himself as a "holocaust survivor," and thank me for my service in the Marines. "The world still needs America. I thank you for defending it." I told him it was a privilege to wear the uniform. An “aw-shucks, don’t choke up” moment.
I recently had a call asking me to take a short, 30-second survey on the state of the country. Always ready with an opinion, informed or otherwise, I held on until they said that in return I'd receive a free 4-day cruise for two people. Scam! Click.
How come J.P. Morgan Chase losing $2B of their own money, gets so much more attention than Jon Corzine and MFGlobal losing $1.2B of the customers money they were legally not supposed to touch? Other than that Corzine is a Democrat pol and Obama’s Wall Street bundler, I mean?
My idea of a good computer program would be when a jerk tries to hack a legit US computer—or send me Scam Spam—a huge hand reaches out from the screen and throttles him. Now that would be cool.
The true measure of a leader is how the organization you lead will fare after time or events have removed you. (Of course, if you are replaced by bad leadership you had no hand in selecting, it doesn’t count against your record.)
I recently read Brave New World. I found it dated and depressing. A friend summed it up as a world full of “Julias.”
I tend to think of the Mormons as out of the mainstream of Christian theology. Just not as far out as Black Liberation Theology, where Obama was a member for 20 years before it became politically inexpedient. But we need to fight the left’s bigoted “Mormonophobia.”
If I understand, the Left thinks stopping folks from voting more than once, or in the wrong place, or because they are not citizens, is racist.
Having children you cannot support, and abandoning them for others to support, is child abuse. Period.
Most Marines I know are hopeless romantics in peace, and cold-eyed realists in war. No better friend—no worse enemy.
Today, I am the best educated I have ever been. But I expect to be better educated tomorrow. I try to read a book a week in history, economics, politics or biography.
I figure if Obama was anywhere near as smart as his supporters claim, he’d be releasing his SAT scores and college transcripts so they could brag on him.
There’s a lot around the blogosphere about Hustler Magazine, owned by Obama Supporter Larry Flint, photo-shopping a picture of a conservative female pundit to make it appear she is giving oral sex. No call of commiseration from the President, as for Sandra Fluke when Rush insulted her. One wonders about the reaction if a porn magazine had done the same with a photo of Michelle Obama?
I can’t help but think that the goal of most Greenies is not to save the environment, but to feel good about trying to save it. So much of what they do turns out to be counter productive, but whatever the fad of the day is, they go with it.
I don’t care what the “experts” says. Pluto is a planet, tomatoes are a vegetable and for all they know, there were three identical snowflakes in my backyard last winter. I didn’t see them out there checking.
I get e-mails and calls at work from convention and visitors bureaus wanting the organization I manage to hold our convention in their city. I always feel sorry for the folks pushing Detroit as a wonderful destination.
Tee Shirt Ideas: “There is nothing so successful that the government and politicians can’t screw it up.” And: “NCOs: Making officers look good since 1775.”
If a “Woman’s Right To Chose” trumps everything, then there is nothing wrong with aborting a baby because it’s female. Or doesn’t have blue eyes, for that matter.
Someone keeps leaving messages on my home voice mail telling Vanessa to call them, despite me clearly saying they have reached The Hall Residence. Finally I called back and left a message on their voice mail saying we had Vanessa tied up in the basement and didn’t allow her to use the phone. Yes I did.
With all the phony heroes surfacing, wearing medals they didn’t earn, it’s only a matter of time until one turns up with decorations from the War of Jenkins’s Ear.
I heard the European Debt Crisis strategy being called “delay and pray.” Great line.
When I heard Mayor Bloomberg wanted to ban “Big Gulps,” I thought…well, never mind what I thought.
I sent $50 to the Walker campaign. They spent at least half of it mailing me appeals for more, which I don’t have, being in save-for-retirement mode. So, instead, I gave $3 to the Barrett campaign (the credit card minimum). Gets me their e-mails so I can see what they are up to and so far they’ve spent three times that sending me mail asking for more. Hoping for at least one more appeal, spending money on me, not on ads.
I’m not a “birther,” unlike Obama’s publisher, which claimed he was born in Kenya for years, in order to sell books. This is attributed to a “fact checking error.” No word on whom the fact checker checked with. Almost always bios are checked by the author, which would make Obama a recovering birther. Maybe he’s a “Kenyan” like Liz Warren is an “Indian.”
A majority of Americans now oppose abortion. And they only polled the ones who weren’t aborted.
The NYT reported that Obama had a secret “kill list.” I bet jobs, American energy and the free market are on it.
Everyone’s so upset about Syria that you’d think Muslims murdering other Muslims was rare. Bit it’s as common as black thugs murdering decent black people in Chicago, gets about as much attention.
*****
Robert A. Hall is the author of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic.
For a free PDF of the book, e-mail him at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com
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