STARVE THE FEDS

Martha Coakley just conceded the race and Scott Brown will soon be United States Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts. This brings a miraculous major hurdle to the health care debacle. I’m still a little too jaded to be elated like I thought I would be. You would think a Republican/semi-conservative victory in Massachusetts would bring tears to my eyes, but it doesn’t.

I still have a strong irksome feeling that the Feds are going to pass health care anyway – they can bribe another senator, use the reconciliation process, delay Senator Scott Brown’s swearing in, or get around the whole thing by some BS executive order.

Still encouraging though is the fact that if the Progressive agenda gets shoved through, it won’t be because of the people of Massachusetts. Even though I’m not elated by the whole thing, this is still a miracle. Only God or some similar force that overpowers humankind could have seen this coming. A Democrat victory in Massachusetts was an automatic gimme; a birthright; a political elite etched in stone. Never did I foresee the Tea Party movement having a major effect in Massachusetts.

I isolated myself. In order to restore some sanity in my life, I’ve had to distance myself somewhat. I’ve been told I’m doing more than my share by running for political office, so in my mind I took the liberty of letting everyone else handle the national and state stuff. I feel like if I have to delve any further into what my mind is up to, then I’d have to resort to some sort of psychobabble.

Truth is, we kept another lawyer from holding office. The race was not close enough to suspect the SEIU and ACORN were getting their grubby fingers involved. The people have spoken; there is no doubt any longer. The United States Government have heard several times from all of us. The only “victory” the Progressives got was Owens over Hoffman, and that was because the Republicans had to screw the whole thing up – even if it truly exposed Michael Steele for who he truly is: unprincipled.

None of this has really hit me yet. I haven’t lost motivation; I just feel like our work is not done. I have the same divine dissatisfaction that comes from an artist or musician that hasn’t fully expressed themselves through the perfect song or painting. We haven’t taken back our country yet, but we took a big step getting there, and it would have never happened if it weren’t for the fearless and vociferous resistance from the Tea Party movement. We’ve never really gotten much credit where credit was due, but the hell with that. We don’t need any credit or validation from everyone else. We know who we are.

While Jon Stewart’s Daily Show cameras were fixated on my campaign update (that quickly turned into a campaign speech), I quipped about how our government would operate if we kicked out all the lawyers and replaced them with accountants like Doug Hoffman, who was still running for the NY-23 congressional spot that Bill Owens eventually won. It was an off-the-cuff remark that came out of nowhere, but it elicited the loudest cheerful applause of the night. That was probably my best speech so far, maybe we should bring Jon Stewart back….

All I wanted to accomplish in that spontaneous remark was to lift up accountants in general, since I am an accountant myself and wanted to inject in some sarcastic self-promotion in my speech. It appears there’s more truth to the statement than I originally thought, now that I’ve given it more time to settle.

How shall I compare and count thee lawyers in an oppressive federal government? Let me count the names – that I can rattle off the top of my head: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards. With the help of Wikipedia: Chris Dodd, Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Harry Reid. Who’s running in place of retiring Chris Dodd? It’s Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal – the nutcase that couldn’t name one law on national TV that supported his crusade to seize the bonuses of private firms. I’ll stop the list there so I have time to finish writing this.

There seems to be something fishy and almost conflict-of-interest-like about lawyers writing and enforcing the law. It’s why we’ve “progressed” from a six-page Constitution that is the granddaddy basis for United States law to 2,000+ health care bills that are kept secret from the public that employs these lawyers in love with each other. It’s why our representatives may not fear being rejected at the polls, because they can work as consultants to interpret the laws they’ve created. It’s not enough to be paid to write laws, now they get paid to read and interpret them to the public as well?

Lawyers always win. Whether they lose their case in court or not, they win. In a typical ambulance-chasing injury case, the lawyers win by suing everybody – the cause of the accident, the construction company that created the road/sidewalk/building, the city that the accident took place in, the company renting, the company leasing, the employer, etc. Companies agree to settle to avoid bad public relations, even if they did absolutely nothing wrong.

Lawyers are also the reason tort reform wasn’t even considered as part of health care reform. If most lawyers are paid a fixed percentage of settlements in contingency cases, why lower a $47 million settlement for spilled coffee to a cap of $250,000? Whoever their lobbyists are, they are certainly putting themselves ahead of the people.

Lawyers (as well as tax services) also have an interest of keeping the tax code as complicated as possible. They create the loopholes, and can pass along the loophole to protect their friends until the public finds out, then they can be the hero for closing the loophole. Tax law is used as a weapon, as evidenced by Rush Limbaugh being audited year after year while broadcasting his show from New York City.

This may well be the death knell to the idea that I may need legal representation someday. I’m tired of feeling the inner pressure to self-censor myself in my own personal self-interest. No more defense – time to go on offense.

It’s exactly why bills at every stage should be readily open to the public, and be shorter than 20 pages long – no fine print either! Common sense needs to come back, and encouraging articles I’ve been reading this morning tell me it just might.

I haven’t been a fan of the New Year holiday (except for the time off work) because it just seems that changes and resolutions occur in name only. Sure, the calendars on the walls have to be changed, and it does give us opportunity to review the calendars that we put away and reflect on what really happened in the previous year.

This past holiday season – from Christmas Eve 2009 to this weekend – has proven pretty difficult for me. With the exception of one campaign speech last week, I have pretty much walked away from politics in order to focus more on family and friends. The hurt seems too great to confront, and the temptation to turn hope into hopelessness looms heavily.

I am still shocked and stunned by the political turn of events beginning with the U.S. Senate’s passage of their version of health care legislation. Common sense says I need to snap the hell out of it or I’ll become depressed by the whole thing.

The year 2010, symbolically or not, has been widely accepted by our fellow freedom fighters as the banner year in which we unite and take back our Republic to its Constitutional roots. In recognition of our political slacking and taking our peaceful system for granted in years past, we are banding together this coming year and are looking to make a true impact on our government – on ALL levels. I don’t want to even consider what will happen if we fail at this effort. I don’t want to look at ourselves at the 2011 New Year wondering where we went wrong. This is it, right here.

I will pause for one paragraph’s worth of reflection. The year 2009 has marked the year when the Tea Party movement was born. Many organizations had begun or became popular due to our citizens’ quest for liberty: Don’tGo, American Majority, 73Wire, Blood Of Patriots, New American Patriots, The Patrick Henry Caucus, The 912 Project, The Patriot Caucus – all these and many more are examples. Social networking sites are ripe with pro-liberty sites. Ordinary Joes are taking their citizenship to the next level by challenging incumbents directly at all levels of government. A Republican won the New Jersey governor’s seat. Doug Hoffman almost won the election heard around the political world. The 9/12 million-and-a-half-man march on Washington DC was the best of times; the health care bill passage on 12/24 was the worst of times. Approximately 20% of our American population did not take this big government debacle sitting down.

The new year will begin with these assertions in mind:

It will take another national tragedy in order to wake up America.

The health care bill has proven that even though there is resistance, it is too little too late. There may be a chance that state attorney generals may challenge the constitutionality of the bill, or that the House and Senate may be unable to reconcile the bill. However, our government has shown us how they overcome that – and that is by major payoffs. Mary Landrieu’s $300 million, Chris Dodd’s $100 million, and Ben Nelson’s free Medicare for Nebraska for life – that’s how it’s done. If there is hope, it is in the proles; and the proles need another tragedy to wake them up, because the health care bill wasn’t a big enough tragedy that provided immediate consequences for the majority of American citizens. We are officially a pre-9/11 country overall, even if 20% of us refuse to accept it. It’s absolutely sad that it has to come to this point; that people are just simply not vigilant enough to spot evil when they see it. Because people take their freedom for granted, it will take a senseless loss of innocent American lives in order to snap them out of it.

Big government is STILL wrong, point blank.

I don’t say this as one conservative person’s opinion, I say that as a theory that has been proven time and time again. Every spiritual person that believes that religion is personal and that no person should ever have the power to play God with our lives must immediately reject our government’s current state. Our government can give us health care in 2014, but it can take it away in 2015. A Troubled Asset Relief Program promised to be used to bail out banks only has just had its purpose changed to some “job creation” fund, even though government cannot create private sector jobs. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are all examples of how our government can step in and help us through our lives, but also provides the quiet implication that it can all be taken away at the government’s whim. Free money is never free; there are always strings attached, aren’t there? Isn’t money given to us by any party come under some condition or an unspoken obligation or implication? States that were all too willing to accept stimulus money will be finding that out if they haven’t already.

The United States Government is the Ultimate Monopoly.

I don’t care how anti-corporation you are, how can government administration be the solution when there is no competition to keep the government honest? If you’re sick of Time Warner being the only choice available for your cable company, how are you going to feel about the Feds being the only option for your medicine? I advocate for the breaking up of the current federal monopoly similar to the way the government split up AT&T into the “Baby Bells” in 1984. We even have the structures in place to handle the Baby Bell government workload – they’re called “states”. The only way to do that – starve the Feds of their money (power), and state sovereignty enforcement. It may be time for states to gather their own armies in defense of that enforcement.

Entitlement Programs are Bribes.

We’re being paid off. Not only must entitlement programs end or be phased out, but we as a people will have to reassess how we can help others on our own, so that government can stay the hell out of that business.

My wish list for 2010:

More and more people become aware of what is truly surrounding them by rejecting what their media tells them.

More on that later.

A new or current marketing organization will take it upon themselves to make the public aware of conservative candidates well before the primaries.

If people don’t know we exist, then we lose.

We precinct our way into government like the Tea Partiers in Nevada did.

If 20% is all we have, let’s put that 20% into productive use. It will only be then that we can prove the theory that the activists are all we need because the activists are the only ones that put their money and time where their mouth is. Then 20% won’t seem so bad. We can do this, people.

I have got to quit expecting people to understand us, because it will not happen. I can bury my head in my girlfriend’s shoulder all I want, but I cannot expect her to understand or accept the weight that I put on myself or the weight that all of us liberty fighters have taken on in order to ensure we don’t ever approach socialism or communism again. It’s all on us. We can be the “go to” person politically for our circle of friends, and that may be the most we can expect. We cannot stop altogether. For every silent response, someone is listening out there. Someone is taking our ideas in. Someone out there welcomes the cognitive dissonance that we create in order to challenge what they have always believed as true.

It’s going to get worse in this country before it gets better. Inflation has to hit. States have to go bankrupt. People are going to see this government fail them. We have to be there to pick them up when the government knocks them down. We know there will be no economic recovery. We know Obama cannot blame Bush for all four years of his term and expect everyone to believe him for that period of time. People will have their turning points. We just have to be there when that happens, and show them that the way out is through themselves, just as we have seen that we ourselves are the only salvation for the United States Of America.