No Joke

Fido, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Juan Valdez walk into a polling place.  No this isn’t the beginning of a joke it is a key part of the Chicago Plan to re-elect the worst President in American History.

The Voter Participation Center (VPC), a left wing organization whose work to register Democrat voters exemplifies the process used for generations in Chicago to ensure the Outfit/Machine maintains control of the government, the power, and the swag.  The VPC is mass mailing pre-printed voter registration forms to selected voter blocks known to be part of the Democrat coalition, African-Americans, Latinos, young adults, and single women. In their effort to extend the Chicago system to the rest of the country VPC mailed nearly 200,000 third-party voter registration forms to Virginia residents in June.  This has resulted in more than 15,000 new voters being registered.

However, there are a few problems with this exercise in Chicago-style democracy.  They are violating rules set forth in the state code and the Virginia Constitution requiring that voters fill out their own form.  The State Board of Elections, which the group says pre-approved their forms and their methods, has asked the group to stop filling in the forms prior to sending them to the people, and pointing to the errant forms they have also raised questions concerning how the group obtained lists of registered voters.  In addition, according to Justin Riemer, the Virginia State Board of Elections' deputy secretary, forms have been sent by the group to “deceased infants, out-of-state family members, and non-U.S. citizens, among others.”  Given the fact that these forms can be mailed in and that the Federal Government will sue any State that has the chutzpah to require a photo ID to vote don’t be surprised if in this, the most crucial election of our lives Fido, Casper, or Juan cast their vote to continue the occupation of Washington by the Progressive Statists and their totalitarian plans.

The list of problems with Democrat voting procedures that have ensured their iron-fisted rule in the tottering hulks of our once great cities is as long as it is disturbing.  There are the great Democrat machines that have used every form of voter fraud and intimidation to dominate the urban political scene in America for generations in places such as Philadelphia, Detroit, and of course the Mecca of corruption President Obama’s adopted hometown and political base, Chicago.  In East St. Louis and Indianapolis there are actually more registered voters than eligible citizens. 

As the Obama Justice Department circles the country like a bird of prey waiting to pounce on any jurisdiction that attempts to purge the dead the illegal immigrants or felons from the voting lists, it is apparent that voter fraud has been elevated from a crime to a national policy.  So far Attorney General Holder has sued Florida, Georgia, and Texas while investigating Pennsylvania.  Yet there is no time or resources spent on investigating sixteen counties in Texas with more voters on the rolls than in the census or sixteen jurisdictions in Illinois that also have more registered than eligible. There also was no interest in prosecuting the clear case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party who patrolled voting locations armed with clubs while making racist statements to voters.  And the most reprehensible case of voter suppression of all is the campaign waged to limit the vote of our active duty military.

Any attempt to slow the growth of phantom voters is met vigorously by the Federal Government with strident accusations of racism saying that anyone who requires a photo ID to vote might as well burn a cross on the White House lawn.  This is patently absurd.  It takes a photo ID to do many things people do every day.  You need a photo ID to:

Get a Driver's license
Buy alcohol
Buy cigarettes
Apply for welfare
Apply for food stamps
Cash a check
Purchase a firearm
Make any large credit card purchase
Open a bank account
Rent an apartment
Be admitted to a hospital
Get a marriage license

And yet according to Attorney General Holder any jurisdiction that requires a photo ID to vote is placing an undue burden on minorities akin to a poll tax collected by a man in a white hood.  But for security purposes you needed a photo ID to get into the NAACP meeting recently to hear Mr. Holder speak in a state he is currently suing over their requirement of a photo ID to vote. The irony never ends in a world that is fast becoming the theater of the absurd.

Add into the mix that most states offer free IDs and provisional ballots that are counted once ID is verified to anyone who shows up without an ID, and it’s easy to see the righteous battle against voter ID is really a reprehensible defense of voter fraud.

And just in case the actual living citizens of America show up to vote in great enough numbers to compete with Fido, Casper the Ghost, and Juan the Obama administration has retained the services of thousands of lawyers.  These devil’s advocates will challenge the vote in any district that goes against them or to defend themselves in any jurisdiction with the gall to challenge their manufactured majority.

Passing over the debates of who is Barack Obama, where did he come from, and what motivates him we must deal now with the Fete Accompli.  He has been legally sworn in and has run the country into the ground for almost four years.  We cannot afford four more years of the Progressive’s spend us into oblivion with the Cloward–Piven Strategy as national policy.  We cannot afford another four years of international support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s march to power in Middle East and serial apology tours.  We cannot afford another four years of trillion dollar yearly deficits.  We cannot afford another four years of Barack Obama if America is to have any chance to remain the land of the free and the home of the brave.

If we don’t end this soon the Progressives will end it later. 

If we don’t reassert our devotion to constitutionally limited government, personal liberty, and economic freedom we will sink into a quagmire of endless entitlements for the idlers paid for by plundering the productive.  In four short months we will have an opportunity to choose.  The opponents of liberty are lined up to steal the election, but we can overwhelm them if we will all show up and vote.  Make sure every Patriot is registered, and do anything and everything you can to make sure everyone you know votes, because you can bet Fido, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Juan Valdez will. And that’s no joke.

Keep the faith.  Keep the peace.  We shall overcome.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College.  He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com  Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens

What’s A Patriot to Do?

Mr. Obama may not be the only President we have ever elected who has little real world experience, but he may be the first who has none. And hopefully he will be our last.

President Obama’s latest insult to hardworking Americans has drawn massive press, at least in the portion of the Media that isn’t consumed with repeating and debating his false allegations concerning Romney’s business record. It isn’t hard to understand how a Marxist would consider the accomplishments of a capitalist to be criminal. It also isn’t hard to understand how a Marxist would believe that no one can accomplish something on their own; they do believe it takes a village to raise a child after all. What is hard to understand is how America was gullible enough to elect a Marxist president when the evidence of his beliefs, his associates, and his political activities were so easy to see.

What will be utterly beyond comprehension is a majority of our fellow voters drinking the kool-aide a second time when it is obvious from Mr. Obama’s rhetoric that he is selling a blatantly anti-capitalist and anti-American line of constitutional suicide.

With serial apology tours, bowing to foreign leaders, and abandoning our surrogates to help install the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East, it is obvious Mr. Obama is a walking disaster for America’s foreign policy. It is also obvious from the recession he has managed to turn into the Great Recession that his spread around the wealth transfer policies are an unmitigated disaster on the domestic front. His record wouldn’t inspire anyone except a fellow American hating Marxist to vote for him, so his only viable tactic is to make the other guy totally unacceptable. In the coming months watch as the President, his fellow traveler mouth pieces, and the Corporations Once Known as the Mainstream Media turn squeaky clean bland, boring Mitt Romney into a nefarious arch criminal who has built a massive criminal enterprise on the backs of exploited victims.

Even if President Obama really believes personal accomplishments, except his own of course, are merely the trophies of exploitation that doesn’t mean the rest of us should accept this as a legitimate premise for discussion. The Democrat Media may want to spend endless hours asking Mitt to explain why he threw grandma off the cliff after stealing her Social Security check, but that doesn’t mean any sane person should waste time considering it.

A better question might be if capitalists have claimed personal success unfairly while using roads and electric grids built by others why is it fair for Mr. Obama to claim as his own the fame for killing Osama when someone else started the campaign and someone else executed it? Why aren’t the failures of his forays into venture socialism such as Solyndra, the Volt, or anything else his fault? Our Dear Leader is a walking example of socializing the costs while personalizing the profits. If it goes bad it was someone else’s fault, but if it goes right it was all him. He has changed the famous Truman quote to "The Buck Stops with You" and since the teleprompter told him to say it he was able to do it with a straight face. The saddest thing of all is that the dumbed down crowds he wows probably don’t know he changed the quote at all.

All of this is shaping up as a surreal election cycle. We have a Democrat doing everything imaginable to lose. He is abandoning the white middle-class, attacking capitalism, and lavishing insult after insult upon anything and everything Americans have always held dear including our founding principles. We have a Republican who passed the template for Obamacare and can’t generate as much excitement as a Saturday night of rearranging your sock drawer.

America hangs in the balance.

If we re-elect a Marxist on a platform of class warfare and soak the rich, I imagine we will see class warfare and soak everybody. If we elect a middle of the road Massachusetts Republican with a veneer of conservatism who is enamored of the foreign affairs advice of John Bolton, the angriest of the neo-con war hawks I imagine we might get a reprieve on the Marxism as the government grows to sustain more wars for peace.

What’s a patriot to do? Are we teetering on the edge, past the tipping point, or already careening into the Abyss? Do we throw away our vote on someone with no chance to win? Do we choose the lesser of two evils knowing that we will still be choosing evil? Do we do as one of my oldest friends is doing: sell everything and leave the country before all this progressivism hits the fan? Do we store food, bury guns, and wait for the zombie apocalypse?

The answers could be so simple. Domestically we could cut taxes, cut regulations, and let the economy surge. In foreign affairs we could follow the direction laid out by the founders: a friend to all and an enemy to none, withdraw our far flung international police precincts, make our homeland an impregnable fortress and let trade be our currency and peace be our policy.

Instead we face a future of austerity and contraction based upon a bloated government swallowing ever more of the American pie no matter who wins. We face endless interventions and undeclared wars in quagmires defending a status quo that is no longer tilted in our favor. China, the rising dragon of the East, is playing chess as our dithering Progressives moan about chickens coming home to roost, and political correctness prevents us from doing what we should do when we should do it.

We are truly between Barack and a hard place with every forward indicator pointing down.

These are times when I draw upon the true source and summit of my being and remember that the God of Heaven and Earth has not left us without understanding. We face these problems because we have forsaken Him, and the only way back is through Him. He told us long ago, "if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land." That isn’t just an observation it is a promise. And unlike our fickle politicians who merely want to tickle our ears, God always keeps His promises.

Therefore as we turn to face the change don’t be discouraged, don’t be depressed, and don’t worry. God has our back if we will give him our faith. For He also told us, "A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but it shall not come near you."

Keep the peace. Keep the faith. We shall overcome.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens




　

　

A World Filled With Strangers Keeps Getting Stranger

Some people believe in the Six Degrees of Separation Theory: the idea that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by six links.  Some people believe all of us are in this thing together, and that diversity is our strength and I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. 

Even if we are all connected in ways we cannot know I believe the world is filled with strangers.  Take a ride and as you pass through country, town, and city you are constantly presented with the faces of people you will never know, and all of whom have lives and families that will never know you or your life or your family.  Every day we see people we have never seen before and will never see again.  They rise out of the mist beyond the pale of our personal knowledge and immediately are submerged again never to rise again.  Our only connection will forever be that one fleeting moment when we moved through a single frame of the separate sagas which are our lives.

Unlike Cain I do believe we are our brother’s keeper, and unlike Scrooge I believe we should help our brothers in need instead of seeing them boiled with their own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through their hearts.  However, unlike the rhetoric of Marx, Lenin, and President Obama I do not believe that life should operate on the basis of from each according to their ability to each according to their need, or as we say in America today, spreading the wealth around.  In other words, I am not a socialist.  I believe in personal liberty, individual freedom, and economic opportunity.  Sadly I find myself out of phase with the Progressive Clique which has successfully maneuvered its way to power using the education system, the media, and uninformed, uninvolved, and emotional voters.

Out of phase or not, I believe in the equality of opportunity which gives everyone a shot at success as opposed to the equality of outcome which our Leader and his fellow travelers wish to foist upon us, and which gives everyone the assurance of mediocrity.   No matter the consequence, no matter the sacrifice we must stand up for what we believe or we will stand by while our nation is transformed into what we won’t be able to believe is still called the United States of America.

Day by day the bean counting pencil pushers who make up the nameless faceless bureaucracy grind out rule after rule and regulation after regulation.  President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare, is already churning out thousands upon thousands of pages of federal requirements all meant to fill in the blanks in a 2600 page bill that we had to pass to find out what was in it. 

Hope and change has become bait and switch.  Mr. Obama isn’t even trying to win votes from those who disagree with him.  He isn’t trying to change minds. He is trying to buy votes.  He is betting that generations of entitlements have finally birthed the lumpen proletariat that his theories of government proclaim must exist for History to reach its summit.  He is betting his second term on the belief that there are now enough people dependent upon the government that they will vote for a handout instead of voting for a hand up.  He is betting that America has been dumbed down enough and bribed enough to trade our heritage of freedom for the yoke of a guaranteed something instead of the opportunity for everything.

Class warfare, penalizing success, dividing America into interest groups and voter blocks this is the strategy Mr. Obama thinks will win as he works to build a coalition of leftist intellectuals and those convinced they are disenfranchised.  Looking at the polls it appears he has the solid core of 40+% who will vote for a Democrat even if he is the devil himself.  The question is will the unengaged and uninformed voters who should at least hope he will change when combined with the illegals and the dead who at least get to vote in Chicago be enough for him to win? 

Can you imagine what a second Obama term will look like won on the basis of a promise to double down on social democracy, a complete disregard for the balance of power, and a desire to totally transform America?  What will be left of the America we have known?  How would we ever get back to where we came from?  No entitlement once enacted has ever been repealed.  The size of government never shrinks.  The power it usurps from the people and the States is never surrendered. 

A world filled with strangers keeps getting stranger all the time.  No matter how many degrees of separation we should never be as divided as our Dear Leader tries to portray us.  We are Americans, and we can do better than this.  Reject the siren song of free entitlements which are never free, and embrace the liberty our forefathers won for us.  Let us renew the great experiment in human freedom and strive to see our nation rise again to be the last best hope of man that it is meant to be.  The shining city on a hill that can light the way to a future worthy of free men and women held together by unity not united in our separation.

Even if it takes more than six degrees of separation to connect to others what does it matter how connected we are to people around the world if we are in terminal disagreement with our fellow Americans?  As a nation we are divided between those who want to strive to achieve and those who thrive because they receive.  The Progressives have bred generations of passive takers who believe they are entitled to the fruit of others’ labor.  They pay no taxes so they don’t care how high taxes go.  They have no conception of paying for what you have, so they don’t care about the national debt.  They see America as a vending machine, so they don’t believe in our unique place in History.  They desire a shabby world of bread and circuses based on equality of outcome, so they don’t long to be all they can be.. 

Those of us who want America to be what America has been and what it should be, the home of the brave and the land of the free, can’t let divisions divide us anymore!  We must unite to save liberty or we will stand alone at the end of the day.  We may be strangers to one another.  We may not know each other but if we are fellow believers in the personal liberty, individual freedom, and economic opportunity we must unite over what connects us to save what has always made us E PLURIBUS UNUM.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College.  He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com  Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens

How Chicago Plays Ball

In Chicago they play "Chicago Ball." This is a form of soft ball that is as location specific to the Chicago area as Hoover Ball is to West Branch, Iowa. In this game a sixteen inch softball that is as hard as a baseball is used with no gloves. If at least one or two fingers aren’t broke in each game it must have been in girl’s division. It is a rough sport, and everyone who plays it knows it. Catching a line drive is like catching a cannonball in the stomach and catching a high pop-up is like having an incoming meteorite land in your hands.

In Chicago they also play another kind of ball that is rough, and everyone knows the rules. They call it politics. In other places they call it organized crime.

Back in the Dream Time, elders were honored because of their accumulated knowledge. If Pops knew a better way to saddle horses, that knowledge helped Junior since he saddled horses. Today if Pops knows how to tune-up cars what good is that when cars don’t need to be tuned-up anymore? Now the old are relegated to extolling their own relevance while exclaiming, "I’ve never seen that before." Doddering ancients who use their cell phones merely to talk wonder why their grandchildren never answer their emails as Gen Z tweet each other: "Don’t trust anyone over fifteen." The world is moving so fast not only is today tomorrow’s yesterday the generations are living in different todays today. Gen X and Y parents with their once hip lap-tops under their arms stare in wonder as their pre-teen Gen Zs text with one hand while Wii skydiving in the backseat. For these new additions to middle-age who’re just old enough to remember Star Trek imagine Captain Kirk visiting Captain Picard pointing at Commander Data and saying, "What’s that?"

After years of being treated as if the Wisdom of the Ages were as relevant as Confucius in a fortune cookie, now that we have Chicago on the Potomac the wisdom gained in the City that Works is suddenly spot-on. Of course George the Second’s doctrine of pre-emptive war made one old saying make sense beyond the Southside, "Never start fights, but if you have to hit someone back first once in a while that’s all right." Then again ACORN has shown the everlasting relevance of Chicago’s best known adage, "Vote early and vote often" as well as eternal life or ACORN by another name is still the same corrupt mob of community organizers organizing their way to personal power and prosperity.

With President Obama and the Chi-Town hustlers large-and-in-charge, Windy City Proverbs may help many believe what kind of change we’ve stepped in. Such as "Everybody cheats so if you don’t cheat you’re a cheater," or "What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable." Maybe the taxman could use, "They must not have wanted it they didn’t have their hand on it."

Looking at our Congress, "If you’re going to get mad at thieves you’ll never have any friends" comes to mind. Thinking of the new Green Home Efficiency Inspectors they want us to deal with when buying or selling a home is reminiscent of the Chicago Fire Marshal conscientiously telling a young business owner, "We’ll save the city some gas money if we just do the inspection right here in my office," while patting his desk indicating where to place the money.

The Obama Administration started off with some Southside swag calling the biggest earmark in history a stimulus bill aimed at shovel ready jobs. Then again as the President later joked, "Shovel-ready was not as ... uh .. shovel-ready as we expected." After this predictable

Southside of Chicago opening act the poster child for a different kind of politics continued the virtuoso performance calling ward-heelers czars and followed a time-honored Second City tradition in the Minnesota recount by finding a bag of votes giving us a good laugh by installing Al Franken in the once revered United States Senate.

Who says you can’t go home again? They may turn the old neighborhood into Yuppie Heaven by knocking down the middleclass housing and putting up three-story imitation Victorians but right here right now the machine that gave no-show jobs to half the wise-guys on the corner as well as Michelle at the hospital is in the process of not just fixing tickets but fixing everything else. The political descendants of Big Bill Thompson, Richard the First and Richard the Second parlayed community organizing into a national organization that should make the Five Families green with envy.

Having fixed the economy and with health care, hate-crimes, immigration, and cap-and-trade all queued up to flow through the system before the voters get a chance to register their disapproval, Don Barak also had the opportunity to begin fixing the highest court in the land. In the Chicago justice system ( an oxymoron) lawyers give out printed pricelists stating how much acquittals cost verses dismissals and the old saying concerning courthouses goes, "It may say justice on the outside but that doesn’t mean there’s any on the inside." Since the Democratic Machine and their Me-To Republican allies rubber-stamped Mr. Obama’s first pick for the A-Team, how do the prospects for judicial restraint and the Constitution look? Fine if you fit the profile for the protected or promoted classes, but not too good if you naively look for that lady wearing the blindfold and holding the scales.

Joining the sisterhood on the bench, Ms. Sotomayor felt her gender and her race made her uniquely qualified to reach wise decisions and believes international law should be consulted when weighing appeals. She should feel right at home with the former chief counsel for the ACLU who apparently believes American Citizenship is the right of all mankind. In one decision she said, "You would have a huge statelessness problem if you don't consider a child born abroad a U.S. citizen." And now they have turned Chief Justice Roberts to the Dark Side. Ah justice, what is it good for? Or as they say in Chi-town, "How much justice can you afford?" The difference between Chicago Prime and Chicago on the Potomac is in the original version mayors serve for life followed by a power struggle. Vive la Différence!

How does Chicago Ball fit into all these old sayings? There are multiple sayings associated with playing ball. Such as, You have to swing the bat to have a chance to hit the ball," or "I ain’t cheating if they don’t catch me." So how do our now nationalized Chicago Pols play ball. One recent example is in the financing problem faced by the owner of the Chicago Cubs. The plans to renovate the dilapidated Wrigley Field were being held up because of the current owner’s political associations. And that’s how they play political ball in Chicago.

And how does that translate to Chicago-on-the-Potomac? In 2009 the Obama Administration played Chicago Ball with the Drug Industry to get their support for Obamacare. These types of tactics have become standard operating procedure for the Obama Administration as department after department make their wishes known and their power felt.

And just recently the President strong armed the Supreme Court asserting any interference with his take-over of 1/6th of the economy would be unprecedented. What was unprecedented was his use of manipulation and brow beating to pressure a supposedly independent court to become another place where the fix is in, or as they say in Chicago Ball "When they send out their best hitter, aim for the head."

And if this article makes you feel politically as if you’ve had your fingers broken, well that’s just the way they play ball in Chicago.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College. He is the Historian of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2012 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens