Donald Trump for President

Don't you want to hear Donald Trump tell the establishment in Washington: You're fired!!!

He's already President of corporations, employs thousands and who knows better than the Donald just what it's like to go beyond broke and still parlay that into success?

I don't know about you, but I am tired of the tassle shoed, glib, silver tongued harvard/princeton/Rhodes Scholar type graduates telling us how to live. They never held an honest job in their life besides working as chronic politicians, community organizers, or in some government policy making job somewhere. With all of their purported knowledge, they have steered our nations ship onto the shoals of bankruptcy.

I want someone in there who has had to meet a payroll and knows what it is like to deal in the real world and has had to labor under the same laws that the politicians in Washington subject us to. Give us someone who has had to work in the sausage factory of the private sector and knows the sometimes ugly, sometimes trying process it takes to get that slickly wrapped (USDA inspected I might add) package of sausages to the market...and make a profit.

Donald Trump has noted in a recent interview with Newsmax:" My friends from China said to me just recently — they didn’t know that I might be thinking about running for president — we cannot believe how stupid your politicians are to allow us to get away with what we’re getting away with".

The main stream media probably won't annoint Mr. Trump with the presidency, they'll go after him and his public/private life history and try to stifle him or anyone else that dares to come out of the non approved woodwork to take the helm of our ship, but the moment is coming for a captain of the private sector to climb into the bridge and take charge.

Because as sure as when ToTo pulled the curtain aside to expose who was the real wizard of Oz, we are now seeing, courtesy of the new media, who is behind the curtain in Washington DC.... and frankly my fellow Americans, we can do much much better.

Will Barack Obama have a Jimmy Carter moment?

Events are moving quickly in the middle east and it should be apparent to everyone that it is time for strong leadership from the President of the United States. This could mean showing outward and material support for the present government, at least until there can be a peaceful transfer of power to another democratic form of government. But to do nothing would be a mistake.

It has been reported that the Muslim Brotherhood is behind the rioting in the streets of Egypt, their aim is to topple the Egyptian government and replace it with an Islamic form of government. Already Tunisia has toppled, Yemen is teetering and Jordan is getting restive. The Mideast is a powder keg ready to explode.

The comparison is similar to events back in 1979, when inaction by Jimmy Carter opened the door for Ayatollah Khomeini to come into Iran and turn it into an Islamic terrorist state. Iran has been spreading mischief and mayhem throughout the world and is on the precipice of getting nuclear weapons. We are still paying for Carters foreign policy weakness in the face of earthshaking events.

They say a smart man learns from his mistakes, but a brilliant man learns from other peoples mistakes. Obama has the opportunity to be a smart man as well as a brilliant man and salvage this situation. Help the Egyptian people to help themselves. Don’t let this anarchy create another fundamentalist oppressive state.

The real way to defuse the potency of the middle east is to stop being addicted to their oil. Mr. Obama, take the chains off of our energy industry and let us become independent by using our own energy resources. We have enough coal, oil, natural gas & hydroelectric for all of our energy needs far into the future, our technology will make them clean. Enough with the windmills, they will never generate enough power to help us. Remember this truth: You can make windmills with steel but you can’t make steel with windmills. PS. How deep is that global warming out there in the east?

Beware of Momma Grizzlies and Celtic Warrior Queens

Anyone that has spent time in bear country learns to be on the lookout for momma bears and their cubs and most importantly to never get between the two of them. Often it is a good idea to make a lot of noise when going through these areas to let them know you are nearby, this can avoid very unpleasant confrontations. I used to put a bell on my walking stick so they could hear me. But even with my bell, in the Alaskan bush I would carry a heavy caliber firearm.

Many Native American Peoples legends center around bears and how they are reincarnated spirits from ancient tribes. One in particular I encountered years past was known throughout the land as the "Phantom of the Hoback", a silver backed old bear who bedeviled many who crossed paths with it. Like many ancient tales and lore passed down from our past generations, most can be found to have some fact attached to them.

When Sarah Palin used the Mamma Grizzly metaphor to describe herself and her fellow female candidates in the political arena, I thought it was a beautiful and powerful graphic reality. I have seen more and more powerful women on the right standing up to protect and defend what they believe is their family, our country the U.S.A..

The main stream media descends and savages any right of center female candidate who dares enter the political arena. They are attacked for their looks, for their religious beliefs, for their educational backgrounds, for any imperfections in their family. The press will focus on their pasts with the enthusiasm of a pack of jackals, looking for ANY past indiscretion going back to their elementary school years and even earlier. If that same press would have used its resources and zeal to delve into the background of our current President, I wonder if he would have stood up to the scrutiny, would he have even made it to the nomination stage?

Any right wing female candidate will have to be tougher than her male counterpart in order to survive the slings and arrows tossed at her. Sarah Palin has survived unprecedented attacks on her character over the past 2 1/2 years, that no one running for public office should be subjected to. Our editor, Niall O'Dowd wrote a great piece on that very subject a while back noting the savagery of the attacks on Sarah.

But the reality of the Mamma Grizzly shined last night when I saw Michelle Bachman deliver the Tea Partys rebuttal to President Obamas state of the Union speech. She has taken a stand and is going to fight to protect and defend what she believes in. She is not only a Momma Grizzly, but she has put her Celtic Warrior princess armor on. She is in this fight to the finish. No matter what your political beliefs, you have to respect that kind of strength and determination.

President Obama to focus on making America competitive!

Judging by the heading, this means the President will be turning his policies 180 degrees from where they have been over the past two years. To a bystander, this administration has seemed to be anti business, anti growth and pro big government every chance it got. The cherry on top was a massive health care bill turning 1/5 of the nations economy over to government controlled socialized medicine.

If the President is serious about making America competitive again, I can make a few quick suggestions, from my humble perspective:

Open up Americas vast oil and gas reserves that have been cordoned off to exploration by extreme environmentalists. Allow the development and extraction of huge oil reserves from Alaskas ANWR. This barren piece of land is close to already in place infrastructure on the North Slope and would be up and running quickly. We are like the crew of the ship adrift 100 miles off the coast of South America dying of thirst, but don’t have enough sense to lower down the bucket to get the fresh water that flows out to sea from the great Amazon river.

OK, America doesn’t export enough, so here’s a uniquely American product that we are awash in. We can export it which will instantly boost our production and make us competitive at the same time. This products export will have another effect beneficial to Americas economy, it will hamstring our competitors by decreasing their production. It will also hamper our competitors efficiency and endurance, kind of like putting a 50 lb. weight penalty on a horse race: Lets export 80% of our trial lawyers to foreign countries.

Lets lower taxes for all the taxpaying Americans. Encourage employment in America by lowering the tax rate for all American Corporations who manufacture products and employ American citizens in America.

Reform our education system! Promote, push and champion the hard sciences. We need to be at the cutting edge of technology and new ideas. Loosen the grip of educations organized labor and make our education system a merit based outcome system, rather than constraining it to conform to what the latest negotiated labor contracts are.

If I heard President Obama champion any of these ideas and actually follow through by executing them, I would become his greatest fan...OK I got a little carried away, maybe not his greatest yet, there are several other issues he has to deal with first, but any of these would be a great start.

Here’s to the “new” Irish American pundits

The decline of the old main stream media, is offset by the rise in popularity of alternative sources of information, cable news, talk radio and the internet. This has introduced us to a new type of journalist, not seen before on the airwaves because they were never given a seat at the main stream medias table: The conservative pundits, lead by Irish Americans and their distinctive pugnacious style. Everyday we can invite these personalities into our homes for a bit of journalistic pugilism, Irish American style. Hey we’re not fighting we’re just having a family get together.

This has caused lots of angst among the established media as they get unseated from their thrones and Americans get to hear the other part of the story, something denied to them before: The unvarnished truth, warts and all.

Leading the way for this new media are such superstars as Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan & Megan Kelly…With them you know there will be a journalistic brawl Irish style and there will be no backing down. Guests must prove their point with facts, sound bytes don’t work on these guys, you need to back up your stand intellectually with facts, or be exposed. There are no softballs when you sit in the chair opposite these tough Irish people.

For years all we got was a left dominated media filtering our information. We seldom heard, or got a chance to hear a point of view polar opposite to the established media. No more are we going to settle for a script reading pompous newscaster telling us we are getting all of the news we need to know.

And a special shout out to the politicians who want to insert the “Fairness” Doctrine into our media because YOU don't like America getting the other side of the story….Don’t even try. Americans now know what the other side of the story is and we don’t need government censoring what we see and hear. Do you hear us?

The birth of the Tea Party

I'd heard on the radio about Tea Party gatherings, so when I was told by a friend there would be one in my local town, I decided to go and see what it was all about. This was almost 2 years ago, it was just ordinary folks showing up, taking time off work. There were Mothers with kids, retired folks, students, the police were there too just in case. But it was a diverse group of people that measured thousands as the day went on. All were there with a singleness of purpose: To show their concern about the direction of the country and to show support for the Tea Party. I was wondering how many would have shown if it was on a weekend or holiday? Everything was peaceful with no disrespect for anyone, just a group of American citizens exercising their constitutional right to gather peacefully.

The last Presidential election in the USA did not offer much of a choice for many of us. On the one hand you had a community organizer in his 2nd year in the senate with the most liberal voting record. VS. A Republican rino(republican in name only) lifer in the Senate. Who was an uninspiring orator referred to by the liberal media as a "maverick", which is code for: he caves in when the situation suits him. The choice was distasteful for many. The chant for those who cast their vote for the Republican was "slice a vein and vote for McCain". Obamas was:" The hope and changey thingy", which was simple enough for those that look no deeper than the slogan.

The result of these choices was a perfect storm of liberal controlled, House, Senate and Whitehouse, with virtually no check and balance. Tax and spend on steroids, many saw this as a crossroads for the country and felt they were no longer being represented by either party, there had to be another way. A collective consciousness brought forth the spontaneous birth of the Tea party. A groundswell of support rose up for this alternative voice for American citizens, who were no longer going to accept the status quo of politicians saying one thing and doing just the opposite.

The Tea party has taken off like a wildfire across the USA. There are and were no leaders, it is all grass roots and spontaneous by citizens, who want to get some sanity back in their government. They have not affiliated with any of the established parties either and they will not be bought off or placated, they demand responsibility from their employees (elected representatives) or they are going to fire them and get someone else in there who will do the job they got elected to do.

The first primaries came and soon enough it became obvious the Tea Party was a force to be reckoned with as quite a few rinos (republicans in name only) bit the dust to be replaced by those pledging to follow the Tea Party platform. When the November elections were held a landslide victory was given to those that pledged to follow the Tea Party principles.

The Tea Party will keep their eye on the ones they helped elect and fire them if they don't follow through. They will help shape the next Presidential, Senate and House elections and get people in there who are responsible stewards of our country. There is a new day dawning for America.

Hu's your Daddy?

In times like these my mind wanders back to those idyllic days spent in St. Patricks elementary school, learning the 3 r's, from the Sisters of "Mercy". Of course back then if I was too idyllic, Sister Mary Pureta would break my reverie with a whack of her ruler. Yes in those impressionable years the Sisters taught me the basics of math and the important concept of negative numbers, which I found later on wasn't a good thing if it concerned your personal finances.

Back in those early years I think the highest number we got to was fifty thousand, a million had too many zero's for our little heads to comprehend, a billion was was just a word and a trillion hadn't been invented yet. A favorite past time for adults to get rid of us for a while would be tell us to go outside and count to ten thousand.

Which brings me to the President of the Peoples Republic of China, President Hu landing on American soil, being wined and dined & kowtowed to by President Obama. Ironically Obama is a past recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the current recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize is a Chinese citizen who is imprisoned in a Chinese Gulag, so much for human rights.

We owe the communist country almost 1 trillion dollars in debt. On top of that we have a huge imbalance of trade with this country due to many reasons, but chiefly because we compete on an uneven playing field and no one is doing anything about it. The communist country does not have labor laws, as we know them, convict labor and children are used to manufacture cheap products. They also, with impunity, manufacture knock offs of everything ranging from designer hand bags to Ipads, flooding the markets with cheap imitation goods. They put on line a new coal fired energy plant every week, don't dare wear a white shirt while outside in Shanghai and don't even think of sticking your toe in the Huangpu River .

This choreographed visit to the US, will show a little window dressing and give a bone to Obama by the announcement that the Chinese will buy 46 billion worth of goods from the US, but that is a drop in the bucket to what needs to be done. Obama is not strong enough to impress the communist leaders, they know he is all talk, but no action, so they eat his/our lunch. The only thing that's saving us right now is that we are too big to fail for the Chinese, because we can bring them down too.

Until we get our financial house in order, balance our budget and live within our means, Hu and the Chinese communists are our daddy and will dictate to us what the next moves will be. But real fiscal sanity will not happen until the big tax and spenders are swept out of office in 2012. Until then, to put it in an old Abbott and Costello baseball simile: Hu's on 3rd ready to steal home.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Whenever our politicians come up with a new scheme to make everything "fair", or to make our society even more "perfect" I tremble, knowing that whatever they conjure up for the rest of us, there will be side effects. The first side effect is "someone" is going to have to pay for it. Secondly, no matter how many experts have given their esteemed opinion as to the benefits of the new law, it will have unforeseen effects.

For instance when Jimmy Carter heralded in a new day with his "Community Reinvestment Act" back in 1976, nobody paid too much attention, it had such a benign sounding name, it must be a good thing, right? The basic premise of the law was to make banks loan to areas that they had previously red lined as too risky. Never mind the details as to why those areas were risky in the first place. The law under Carter, Reagan and Bush 1, never got enforced and was backburnered. But when Clinton got in office, he gave the law teeth and started cracking down on banks that weren't making loans to high risk areas, individuals and businesses. If the banks were still recalcitrant to make risky loans, community organizers would stage public protests and picket the banks, claiming discrimination, etc. Simply put, this started the whole mortgage crisis ball rolling which lead to financial institutions crumbling and to the worldwide banking crisis we have today. Of course there are many villains in this, but the crux of the crisis was the good intentioned CRA under Carter.

Which leads me to another unintended consequence of a feel good law which mandated we use ethanol made from corn as an additive to our fuel. We are the largest producer of corn in the world, not only is it a food source for us , but it is a main livestock feed. Have you noticed since this law was passed food prices have shot up, the packages that food came in not only cost more but they were smaller and meat is more expensive...Oh has anybody noticed gasoline is now 3.50 per gallon here in the west?

Now the politicians gave us a 2,700 page total overhaul of our health care system, without themselves reading, or if they did, understanding it. Of course they have their own health care and they will not be affected. But to get the bill passed, many politicians had to be bribed and coerced, the Senate rules bent in an arcane way in order to squeak this by in the middle of the night. If it was so good why all the chicanery?

Americas health care system is/was responsible for 90% of medical breakthroughs, cures for many once formerly deadly illnesses and lifesaving medical procedures. This wasn't done by government bureaucrats, this was accomplished by mostly private industry. This Obamacare is at its core, socialized medicine and will kill our once vibrant health care system. Sure the system had its faults, but it didn't call for the total overhaul of the system with government as the end all be all in the final analysis.

The House of Representatives are prepared to repeal Obamacare. If the Senate is truly looking out for the citizens of the US, they will repeal this flawed piece of legislation too...Because I don't know how many more unintended consequences we can afford.

Is there a conservative Kennedy?

How long are the Kennedy clan going to wander in the liberal desert before they produce a conservative?

My parents were Kennedy Democrats, both from Brooklyn. My Dad was a WW2 veteran of the Pacific and felt an additional kinship with JFK because they both fought in that theater of war, risking their lives for our country. My folks were Democrats because their parents were Democrats, because that's just what you were when you were Irish back then in New York and that's what they grew up with. The Irish grabbed power through unity, we fought our way up from the streets and the low rungs of the totem pole when we emigrated here. We would either hang together or hang separately, it was our call.

My Grandfather told me stories of how he was part of the political machine back in the 20's on the streets of New York working with the party bosses. Is that modern day version of vote gittin' called ACORN?...I don't know how much things have changed since then as far as voter registration and actual "voters", but I feel the modern day version of the democrat party would not be the party of John F. Kennedy in today's political reality.

I too started out my younger days as a democrat, why? Because that's what my folks were. But unlike my folks I didn't grow up in Brooklyn, I grew up out in the west away from the old big cities and got exposed to different political philosophies, so I broke the mold, I wasn't an automatic Democrat, I started to question things and question dynasties. I did begin to see the wisdom of the Chinese that generations are an endless wheel of mandarin, beggar, thief.

So what could get my attention and support for a Kennedy today? If an accomplished Kennedy stepped forward, bucked the trend and espoused a conservative view. In fact I think that's what could get the Kennedy family back in the arena. Could they do it within the confines of the present day Democrat party? I think not, conservative/blue dog Democrats seem to be a dying breed these days. The party seems to have been seized by the far left, epitomized by the rein of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

After experimenting the past 2 years with liberal control in the House, Senate and Whitehouse, the American voters decisively spoke and sent a Kryptonite missile into the engine of the Obama Reid/Pelosi juggernaut. Americans said enough! as they watched our national deficit/debt skyrocket to record levels, record unemployment levels, a frankenstein monster of a healthcare bill rammed through congress and a government growing larger and more out of control. There is also a perception that the rest of the worlds bullies are kicking sand in our face, they don't respect us anymore.

The vote results in November, also reflected that Americans have decidedly shifted to the right. All over the country the political infrastructure of the states and cities had a seismic shift, with conservatives making huge gains throughout the political landscape. The message is loud and clear: it is time to get back to where have always been as a country, right of center. Not that we have lost our compassion for the less fortunate, Americans have always been the most generous people in the world, but they see a need to give everyone on board our " Good Ship USA" an oar and help row us forward, no more free rides..

So, in the present political mindset of America would the public welcome another liberal Kennedy with a big government tax and spend message? I don't think so. But would the country welcome a Jack Kennedy type with a conservative message? Most decidedly so, the Kennedy name with a conservative message would be a person the citizens could rally around and be inspired by. If Jack Kennedy came on the scene today he would most likely identify with conservatives and would probably be a supporter of the Tea Party. He was a hawk when it came to defending our country by making us strong, he had seen first hand that the world is capable of producing great evil. He was also of the belief that you should not ask what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country. How inspiring are those words today? One of the first things he did as president was to call for a reduction in taxes saying that a rising tide lifts all boats. Does that sound like anyone in a leadership position in the democrat party?

One other thing you can say about JFK, he was not one of the "blame America crowd". He championed America and knew we were the lantern on the hill for the rest of the world. He was proud of his country and inspired us with that pride. He never blamed America or belittled us, unlike what you hear today when the present occupant of the Whitehouse goes on apology tours around the world. The Kennedy clan has married into Arnold Schwarzeneggers clan, technically he is a Republican. Bavarian Terminator blood, mixed with Irish blood could make a potent combination. Maybe there is a conservative Kennedy in the wings for the coming years. I think that would be a dynamic shift for the Kennedys and prove to be a blessing for America.