Wolves vs. Us Sheep

Wolves endanger us sheep

I don’t know about you, but I think government is entirely too full of itself nowadays. Granted, the upcoming elections in November are raising many fusses like mine. But ever since the Democrats took over the government when Obama swept, everything today seems totally out of whack.

Moreover, things here haven’t improved a lot although Virginia has gone GOP in state elections. Virginia did end its fiscal year with a surplus, noteworthy for its rarity in the other states. And our firecracker Attorney General is making impressive waves. But goofy things keep emanating from Richmond.

A massive computer failure recently bogged down state DMV offices, in case you noticed any difference. Their workers do their best, but have too many details thrust upon them, like those weary clerks you encounter at the post office.

That bureaucratic, customer-be-damned atmosphere leads me to applaud the governor’s new effort to privatize liquor sales. More taxpaying businesses are what we need anyhow. But would the switch from those dreary state stores, as claimed, do much to solve Virginia’s highway financing problems? Dream on.

I also like the thought of collecting more taxes on liquor sales. If it’s OK to start taxing cigarettes out of existence, then why give booze a free pass? Alcoholism, I’d guess, is as deadly as lung cancer.

These snipes at Richmond, however, are piddling in comparison to our outrage over Washington’s overwhelming federal “governance.” Notice I avoid the term “socialism,” which is beyond the pale, but not by much.

Just look: Obama’s head of Health and Human Services has explicitly threatened America’s health insurance plans, warning that “there will be zero tolerance” if they dare to “falsely blame premium increases” on Obamacare. Specifically, Ms. Sebelius threatened to punish non-subservient firms by excluding them from the government regulated and mandated health insurance exchanges.

Is it thus any wonder why Americans have increasingly detested Obamacare the more we’ve found out about it?

Plus this: The official IRS taxpayer advocate says his agency’s new reporting requirement passed by Congress to make firms file 1099 forms for all payments of over $500 received in a year would apply to over 38 million businesses, including 26 million sole proprietorships and 2 million farms. “The IRS will face challenges making productive use of this new volume of information reports,” he said, in a gross understatement of the coming impacts.

I could go on -- the illegal immigrant mess, the impossibly huge federal debt, Obama’s thin-skinned White House--plus this:
The LA Times reports: “White House aides owe the IRS $830,000 in back taxes,” and “638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget.”

I‘ll end this sad litany with a prescient quotation from the late great broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow: " A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”

But nevertheless, we voters can still bleat, at least via the ballot box. So by all means come November, vote.

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Ben Blankenship is an Aquia Harbour resident and career journalist. Reach him at Benblanken@aol.com

Wolves among us

I don’t know about you, but I think government is entirely too full of itself nowadays. Granted, the upcoming elections in November are raising many fusses like mine. But ever since the Democrats took over the government when Obama swept, everything today seems totally out of whack.

Moreover, things here haven’t improved a lot although Virginia has gone GOP in state elections. Virginia did end its fiscal year with a surplus, noteworthy for its rarity in the other states. And our firecracker Attorney General is making impressive waves. But goofy things keep emanating from Richmond.

A massive computer failure recently bogged down state DMV offices, in case you noticed any difference. Their workers do their best, but have too many details thrust upon them, like those weary clerks you encounter at the post office.

That bureaucratic, customer-be-damned atmosphere leads me to applaud the governor’s new effort to privatize liquor sales. More taxpaying businesses are what we need anyhow. But would the switch from those dreary state stores, as claimed, do much to solve Virginia’s highway financing problems? Dream on.

I also like the thought of collecting more taxes on liquor sales. If it’s OK to start taxing cigarettes out of existence, then why give booze a free pass? Alcoholism, I’d guess, is as deadly as lung cancer.

These snipes at Richmond, however, are piddling in comparison to our outrage over Washington’s overwhelming federal “governance.” Notice I avoid the term “socialism,” which is beyond the pale, but not by much.

Just look: Obama’s head of Health and Human Services has explicitly threatened America’s health insurance plans, warning that “there will be zero tolerance” if they dare to “falsely blame premium increases” on Obamacare. Specifically, Ms. Sebelius threatened to punish non-subservient firms by excluding them from the government regulated and mandated health insurance exchanges.

Is it thus any wonder why Americans have increasingly detested Obamacare the more we’ve found out about it?

Plus this: The official IRS taxpayer advocate says his agency’s new reporting requirement passed by Congress to make firms file 1099 forms for all payments of over $500 received in a year would apply to over 38 million businesses, including 26 million sole proprietorships and 2 million farms. “The IRS will face challenges making productive use of this new volume of information reports,” he said, in a gross understatement of the coming impacts.

I could go on -- the illegal immigrant mess, the impossibly huge federal debt, Obama’s thin-skinned White House--plus this:
The LA Times reports: “White House aides owe the IRS $830,000 in back taxes,” and “638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget.”

I‘ll end this sad litany with a prescient quotation from the late great broadcaster, Edward R. Murrow: " A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”

But nevertheless, we voters can still bleat, at least via the ballot box. So by all means come November, vote.

-----
　
Ben Blankenship is an Aquia Harbour resident and career journalist. Reach him at Benblanken@aol.com

What Obama said

Bensblurb # 571 9/22/10

Obama’s daddy--Followup
A while back, one of my blurbs carried stuff questioning Obama’s earlier claim in his presidential campaign that his dad was in WWII. Then the other day I repeated that material in a response on HuffPo, a few of whose loyal readers reacted with umbrage, let us say. One reactor provided the youtube reference of a Snopes rebuttal ("http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/service.asp").
Even so, Obama actually said it on camera: "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv4jnlkxOaw").
I rest my case.

Another blogger, on DocZero, had this to contribute about President Obama’s assertions:
Let me put this bluntly: virtually no one in America gives a damn what Barack Obama says about anything at this point. What could be more predictable, and less interesting, than Obama's opinion on any given subject? Who wants to contemplate the economic wisdom of a guy who looted the Treasury for a trillion dollars, with less benefit than we could have achieved by stuffing hundred dollar bills into random cereal boxes?...Who wants a lecture on ethical business practices from the titular head of the party that gave us Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters? What use is another hollow foreign-policy speech from a man who sees no global adversary to rival the menace of Arizona? Even Obama's supporters don't hear anything he says any more. There's nothing left to hear.
　
More blather about immigration “enforcement"
“Washington's elites are once again having it their way. On Aug. 20, Immigrant and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton wrote a memo to the agency's head of removal operations, telling him that being in the U.S. illegally is no longer grounds for deportation. Only illegals who pose a security threat or have violent records need now be deported. The memo represents Barack Obama's announcement of open borders to a waiting world.,,,The agency now has also begun an ‘outreach’ program to illegals closest to eligibility for permanent status. It's coaching illegals on how to obtain the proper credentials to vote. ICE even sent a form letter to one illegal who had admitted to voting in a previous election, a felony. But ICE's priority is to get him his U.S. citizenship, not to enforce the law.
ICE workers themselves are so angry about Obama's dereliction of his duty that their union issued a membership consensus of "no confidence" in the agency's leaders...But the drug cartels, whose aim is to turn Mexico into a narco-state on our southern border, are thrilled with the new policy and have already stepped up the terrorizing of residents in Northern Mexico.”--The Patriot
　
Also in The Patriot:
“Speaking of the auto industry and the government, the Cash for Clunkers program has had an entirely predictable result -- prices for used cars have jumped 10 percent over last year. When people traded in their used cars on the new cars they likely would have bought anyway under the Clunkers program, the government ordered those assets destroyed rather than resold. That contraction of supply has caused price increases for those who can least afford it.” As blogger Hot Air put it, "In other words, the White House spent $3 billion to make used cars more expensive for working-class families. Nice work."

Columnist Kathleen Parker, for a change, remembers Reagan:
A new ad, produced by Citizens for the Republic, a group of organizers who identify themselves as friends and fans of Reagan..."There's mourning in America. Today, 15 million men and women won't have the opportunity to go to work. Businesses shuttered. Twenty-nine hundred families will have their homes foreclosed by nightfall. This afternoon, 6,000 men and women will be married, each of their children to be born with a $30,000 share of the runaway national debt."

To end on a positive note...
“[T]he Tea Party has moved the Democrats to the right and the Republicans even more so, and President Obama’s agenda is dead. . . . What debuted in nationwide protests on April 15, 2009, has taken less than 18 months to become the current driving force in American politics.”--The Hill
--Ben Blankenship

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Unforgettable moment

Bensblurb # 570 9/10/10

Forget Young Rabbit Ears,
We have a moment never to forget...

Please put Obama’s latest rants behind you for a moment...How he’s whining that interest groups he has battled, “talk to me like a dog,” forgetting his comments in 2008 about getting a shelter dog: a “mutt, like me.”
　
　
For tomorrow, we commemorate what happened nine years ago, but like yesterday for friends on my block. For that was when we lost a good neighbor, Marian Serva, to the terrorist attack on the Pentagon, on that 9/11 day of infamy.

We didn’t forget or let it pass. Rather, we built a permanent memorial in Aquia Harbour. It commemorates the sacrifice of her and another neighbor, Martha Reszke, plus county resident Teresa Martin and all others who lost their lives in those three terrifying conflagrations.

Never to be forgotten? Let’s hope so. At least our local reaction was timely, in seeing our memorial in place before two years had passed. I don’t know why New York City’s own memorial to the monstrous Twin Towers attack has been so long tied up in controversy. How outrageous it would be if that proposed mosque nearby gets built before the massive 9/11 hole in the ground can be restored and commemorated.

Thinking back, it was also only nine years ago that our country was finally getting used to accepting George W. Bush as our president. Because for much of the first half of that year, his election had been disputed by Democrats claiming Al Gore had the election stolen from him because of Florida’s vote recount shenanigans. Not much grumbling here, though: Stafford and the whole state had gone strongly for Bush in the previous fall’s elections.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks also led directly to retaliation soon thereafter via our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Aside from that drawn-out Bush-Gore election squabble, not all had been otherwise tranquil here In the summer leading up to 9/11. Stafford had a major argument over whether to build an “Outer Connector” that would connect I-95 in mid-county (at the eventual airport’s interchange) and thence southwestward to cross the Rappahannock River and connect to Va. 3 west of Fredericksburg.

Promoters backed down on the whole project in the face of vicious opposition from environmentalists and “not-in-my-backyard” anti-sprawl residents who would have been most affected. Opponents applauded instead the imagined soon-to-be- extended HOV lanes down past the Rappahannock River. That's still only a dream.

Today, Stafford supervisors are revisiting the Outer Connector concept to the extent of building only the portion from the airport interchange down to U.S. 17 in the western part of the county.

Earlier opposition to any such project had centered mainly in South Stafford and Falmouth, which subsequently led to the replacing of two county supervisors with Democrats.

Another county project begun in 2001 was the ultimately successful effort to preserve Crow’s Nest, the large forested parcel touching Potomac Creek.

Economically in 2001, Stafford was booming, although the national stock market was falling and a recession got underway in the spring. County population climbed to 100,000 (over 125,000 now). Unemployment plunged to a negligible one percent in the spring. Home prices continued their upward advance. New business starts flourished. Household incomes in Stafford had climbed to an average of over $75,000, well above the rest of the area, and home values were also highest, at $167,000 on average. Our Aquia Towne Center was bustling, alas.

What a difference the years have made, right?

Ben Blankenship is an Aquia Harbour resident and career journalist. Reach him at Benblanken@aol.com