The associated Press reports that

Social Security recipients will get a raise in January — their first increase in benefits since 2009. It’s expected to be about 3.5 percent.

Some 55 million beneficiaries will find out for sure Wednesday when a government inflation measure that determines the annual cost-of-living adjustment is released.

Hadenough.us has to ask: lucky timing for seniors and Washington “leaders”, or a transparent attempt to swing votes in 2012?

via Social Security To Hand Out First Raises Since ’09 | Fox News.

image courtesy of yahoo images and gimmejustice.com

As published on examiner.com

Today was the day we were to remember and honor America’s fallen.

Just a few months ago Democratic House members chose to disgrace that noble body they sit in as well as  our fallen heroes by taking a big slice out of the spirit of the Constitution from which our leaders get their authority.

Each of us owe our liberties to the Constitution. That inspired document is the thing our fallen have given their lives to preserve and protect.

On this Memorial Day I fear for my nation and our Republic if the spirit of a resolution introduced by House members regarding anti Muslim speech and bias is accepted by Congress (or by the people).

Representatives John Conyers, Jr., Andre Carson, and Hansen Clarke chose in  March to introduce a resolution in the people’s House of Representatives that stinks of authoritarianism, tyranny,  and censorship.

Congressional Resolutions define the sense of life of that body. 

H. RES 283 states that the members who sign on to it are

expressing the sense of Congress that the federal government should take steps to counter anti-Muslim sentiment

that this anti Muslim sentiment

should be addressed by official government policy

which would

take steps to counter the growth in anti -Muslim sentiments, targeted rhetorical attacks

[read the full resolution here.}

We must keep in mind that this resolution is

expressing the sense of the House of Representatives.

If accepted by Congress, our leaders will be acknowledging that they believe that the Federal government of the United States may, as it deems necessary, use the force of government policy and the mechanism of law to counter the sentiments and rhetoric of the people of the United States.

In other words, Congress would be stating in this resolution that speech by individual citizens of a free republic  may be countered (of course no clarity is given as to what ‘countering’ would entail) simply because some in Congress (or anywhere) might not agree or approve of the speech in question.

When a free nation has degenerated to such a point that Representatives of the people  expressly declare that they believe that they can and should ‘counter’ the sentiment or speech of that people, I worry for my nation.

When my leaders  do not grasp that they are violating the very document that they themselves derive their power from, and that they are shutting down voices of people who have chosen them , and yet are doing so in the name of ‘free speech’,  I fear for my Republic.

as published on examiner.com

Conservative and liberal “commentators” (read: opinion hacks who pretend they are journalists) love a good scandal, controversy, or public disagreement. When they can’t find one, they make one up with the old stand by of “X is raising eyebrows”, all the while  conveniently failing to identify any actual individuals whose eyebrows have been set high upon the forehead.  The Left is aghast at Conservatives at Fox and other outlets who are atwitter over what Conservatives view as the latest in a long line of poor reasoning and outright poor taste from the White House. Of course,  one must ask when aren’t Conservatives incensed over the actions of liberals?.

The political and media Left wishes to have the public believe that First Lady Michelle Obama’s White House  invite to hip hop artist Common, and his subsequent visit, is just one of those ginned up controversies.

The Liberal left insists that Common’s visit is a non sequiter.  Online supporters of this view go so far as to suggest that the invite was a baiting game: invite the most innocuous black artist one can find so as to drive those big old bigots on the Right into a tizzy.

Official Atlas Shrugged The Movie (part one) movie poster

as published on examiner.com

Fifty years plus have passed since Ayn Rand published her masterpiece of philosophy and Romantic literature.  Fifty plus years later and Conservatives still do not get Atlas Shrugged, nor do they apparently care to.  To paraphrase the epithet that Conservatives love to apply to the anti  Palin mentality, a label that has already become a worn out cliche — the traditional Right has spent the past fifty  plus years wallowing in “Rand Derangement”.

This derangement takes the form of the typical Conservative’s pathological need to distance themselves from Rand while simultaneously recognizing her influence, her prescience, and her grasp of ethical  and ideological truth.  Fifty plus years of history validating Ms. Rand’s premises and prophecy cannot be evaded, even by the Masters of Evasion within Conservative circles.

No one today can,  with either a straight face or with intellectual honesty, fail to acknowledge Mr. Rand’s achievements.  Those achievements can be and are still, however,  misrepresented, appropriated, and maligned — particularly by those threatened most by the ideas themselves.

I’m speaking of course of Religious Conservatives who evade the reality of Ayn Rand’s ideas so as to hide from themselves their own ideological bankruptcy.  I speak also of Conservatives who know full well that traditional Conservatism is as dead as the ghosts and corpses it tries to worship.

One week from tomorrow (4/15/2011) part one of a three part film version of Atlas Shrugged will be released to a movie going public.  That public has been saturated in treacle, terror, timidity, and toneless banality for so long it mistakes rehashed comic book plots and overly redone thirty year old classic films as original, entertaining,  and risky.

Those who attend such inane films (usually  in vain attempts to find in these movie’s moderately romantic style of story telling some form of original thought and some heroes to admire and aspire to be) will finally have the opportunity to enter  Galt’s Gulch.

True to form for Conservatives, the reviews, near reviews, reviews of reviews, and non review hatchet jobs are in — and ain’t they pretty?

Did I miss the memos from the White House and Congressional Quarterly in which Democrats admitted that their philosophical Emperor of progressive taxation has no clothes?  Did Christianity’s Holy See forget to send out their letter of resignation in the last issue of Guidepost?  How could there have been a second Renaissance and yet the Enlightened New York Times fails to report it? Have the alleged defenders of values — Progressives and Religionists — not heard that their preachers and prophets have admitted defeat, have admitted they’ve been promoting a mirage, and have acknowledged that their agenda is dead?

In 1967, Professor Arthur A. Ekirch (1915-2000), announced that the American Left was on life support with his publication of The Decline of American Liberalism. In “Decline..”, Professor Ekirch, himself a Liberal, described the chaos and inconsistencies within the framework and the philosophy of American Liberalism, yet he offered no explanations and no solutions which might save the Left. I would like, in the wake of N.P.R.’s firing of Juan Williams, to say that there were and are no solutions, and to announce that as a political force and as ethical and philosophical theory, American Liberalism (and its underpinning, Progressivism) is no longer in decline. The plug has been pulled on the patient by the Left’s friends. Liberalism is dead.

We, The American Tea Party Movement – the Republic’s defenders against injustice, tyranny, and Statism, have had enough. We are ending this phony dialogue on motivations and our identity. We have allowed a year of unwarranted and unprovable attacks on our character, our identity, and our motivations to go unanswered in the vain expectation that our opposition would be rational enough to see that schoolyard taunts are not the same thing as intellectual argument. We expected our opposition to act in their own interest and cease the nonsense when it became apparent to them that no one was buying what they were selling. We assumed that our silence would be understood. On that, we were mistaken. As a result of the NAACP’s ridiculous “vote” on our character and their demand that we apologize for each and every individual within our movement who might hold racist thoughts or opinions, we have been forced to respond.

Our response is this: We are school teachers, firefighters, shopkeepers, elected officials, homemakers, retirees, students, bankers; we are police, business leaders, husbands, wives, small town merchants. We are the voice of every American who believes that his life is his own, and that his neighbor is not responsible for or entitled to either his failures or his successes. We are the voice of every American who believes that he answers to the dictate of his own conscience, not to the demands of the barrel of a gun. It matters not whether that gun is held by the hands of a street thug, or a thug in Washington, our response is the same, a gun is not an argument.

We have been stoic in the face of the intellectual equivalent of the barrel of a gun as an argument. Namely, unprovable smears that racism is the motivation for our opposition to the “fundamental transformation” of America. The fact that this transformation is coming via the hands of a black president does not change the fact that it is a transformation into Statism, which we abhor. We do not care that the vessel for that transformation is a black president, we oppose the change, not the man.

As to the man, we do not withdraw our recognition that he is a radical, regardless of his race. We do not withdraw our assertion that his past and current associations with radicals matter, and should not be ignored, regardless of his race. We do not withdraw our acknowledgment of his accomplishments or his achievements, regardless of his race. We do not believe race and identity are equivalent, though many of our opponents do.

As to our identity, we define it, we do not allow the Alinsky method to define it for us. To that end, it is interesting that we have been painted as ignorant and incompetent on one day, and well coordinated astro-turf the next. It is interesting that we have been portrayed as violent extremists one one day, and passive social security recipients the next. It is interesting that those who comment on our motivations frequently surmise that we must be unemployed layabouts while we are actively opposing policy that would make such a life untenable. It is utterly fascinating that our opponents are unable to use reason and logic. Finally, it is beyond comprehension that they have not yet figured out who we are.

We are the voice of reason in an irrational world, and we will not be silenced or muted into submission by accepting an unearned guilt. We are the choir which is the combined voices of America.

For those who have demanded that we repudiate or apologize for the small fraction of racists who may believe that they are tea party members or that they hold our values,; for those of you who demand that we do the logically impossible and, by default, prove our lack of racism – we say: are you serious? We can not, of course, prove a negative, except by implication. So we call out those who believe without evidence that we are motivated to oppose the radical that has inherited the sixty plus year old Progressive agenda at the peak of that agenda’s success, because that President happens to be black. We will be happy to engage on the merits of that argument, and on the merits of our ideas for the future of our Republic. We will not, however, continue the absurd distraction that is identity politics. We are too busy and have too much to do to engage in such nonsensical distractions.

We are too busy transforming America back to the vision our founders had for her to distract ourselves by engaging with those who wish to alter our identity in the minds of our fellow citizens, when those citizens have not yet met us face to face.