Votes for Felons NOT the Military

Anyone remember all the trouble with counting absentee ballots from deployed military during the 2000 election. This seems to have triggered numerous campaigns to strengthen the Liberal/Democrat Party hold on voting in this country which includes the George Soros funded project to elect Secretaries of State who would be sympathetic to Democrat candidates. Also, several laws were passed to help get the Vote from deployed military counted. One of these laws was a law sponsored by Texas Republican John Cornyn that required states to mail out military ballots 45 days before an election in order to ensure they would be received in and counted back in the home district.

Now it seems the Obama Justice Department has other priorities, Felon's need to vote before the Military. This story by the washington times shows how PresBO and his puppet Attorney General (Erick "America is a Coward" Holder) are intentionally sabotaging the vote of the military. Here are a few snippets:

"..the Department seems to be encouraging states to apply for waivers so they won't have to follow that law. More than 17,000 Americans serving overseas were denied the vote in 2008 – but, presumable because military personnel are thought to lean conservative, the liberal Obama administration is in no hurry to correct the situation."

And..

"The Justice Department is so unenthusiastic about military voting that its website still lists the old requirement for a shorter 30-day military voting window, rather than the current 45 days. On the other hand, the Justice Department has no legislative mandate whatsoever to involve itself with helping felons to vote, but its website devotes a large section – 2,314 words – to advising felons how to regain their voting privileges."

Go read the full article, it is frightening.

Yeah, get those hardened criminals the rights that the Men and Women in Uniform are fighting to protect and deprive them of that same right. What are they going to do next, Voting Rights for the Dead! Let us not hold our breath!

BT: Jimmy T sends.

Death and Taxes – IRS Close Up

Immediately before my latest trip to New Mexico to visit my Father I had the pleasure of an IRS Audit. The IRS does not call these "Audits" any more; they prefer "Examination" instead. The "Revenuers" were interested in my Business Deductions for tax years 2007 and 2008. It was brutal, lots of hair splitting and reading between the lines of the Tax Code.

While winning here and there I lost more often and had to give up many deductions. More importantly the IRS is considering disallowing all my business deductions en-total. They can do that because they have only two tests to determine a viable business from a hobby and the business owner has nine (9) tests to prove it is viable. We will have to see.

This episode simply illustrates how complex the tax code is and to what lengths the Fed will go for revenue. Despite having paid enough taxes in both years to buy a nice 4-door automobile they wanted even more. They use the convoluted tax code to pull this additional revenue to their advantage and if you are not intimately familiar with it you are toast.

This is the same agency that will administer the bulk of Obamacare. Yep, I can't wait to be called in for an Audit and leave bleeding in reality from both the wallet and from the proctologic Examination given at the same time.

Ain't progress fun.

BT: Jimmy T sends.

100 Years of Scouting

I have posted here in the past about my time in the Boy Scouts of America. Although I never made Eagle Scout, I was in Scouts for a very long time. I joined the Cub Scouts and worked my way up the chain of badges, Wolf, Bear and then Lion, all with the appropriate number of arrowheads. I also participated in other workshops held for young boys that are used to prepare you for the Boy Scouts such as a Weblows.

Once graduating from the Cub Scouts I moved on to Boy Scouts and worked my way from the raw Tenderfoot to Life Scout. I was also selected by the Leaders of my Troop to be the very first Scout from my Troop to be a member of the secret Order of the Arrow, a sect of Super Scouts within the Scouting organization. I was proud and wore that pocket flap badge with pride. I also tended several Baden Powell conferences which taught leadership skills to the young men who attended. My troop crossed the Grand Canyon (Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim) and we hiked the Santa Fe Trail, earning the 50 Miler award (Afoot - Afloat). That same troop did community service projects in every venue.

I had 21 merit badges which was the minimum required for Eagle however my Troop disbanded when the Scout Master who was in the Air Force was transferred to an Air Base in Alaska. It never stood up and I moved on.

The impact of scouting on me personally is easily seen. Many people comment and assume that I was a Boy Scout in the past and I have even been asked if I was an Eagle. I always tell the folks that inquire that I was in fact in Scouting but never made that final mark. It haunts me to this day.

Scouting and my Parents made me the Man I was when I joined the Navy. I am fiercely independent and resourceful: to this day I carry a multi-tool on my belt, I can my own veggies grown in a garden I plant and tend through the year. When I lost my job last year, I took it upon myself to go out and find a new job, I did not wait on our Government to provide for me and my Family, it was my responsibility.

I am a Scout, I may not wear the uniform any more but I hold all the values taught me those many years that I spent in both the blue and green uniforms. I, to this day remember and can recite the Scout Oath and the Scout Laws.

Though I wish to comment on the fact that our President has chosen to go to New York and raise money for Democrats and tape an episode of the TV talk show The View instead of attending the 100 year anniversary celebration of Scouting at Fort AP Hill, I will not; the simple fact that he chose between the two tells you all you need to know about what kind of Man he is.

BT: Jimmy T sends.

Life and Times – More Life Please

I have been spending some time out west with my family. My Father is desperately ill suffering from both a bleeding ulcer and cancer. The cancer is the small cell stuff in the Lungs, spleen and the liver. It is an especially aggressive variety having appeared and spread in a matter of a few months, he was clean and clear back in March but by June he was two legs into the grave. The bleeding ulcer is actually the ailment that has caused the most problems as it is responsible for his lack of an appetite resulting in a dramatic weight loss. Something like 100 pounds since March, maybe more. And this before the chemo treatments.

He was taken in to the hospital a couple of weeks ago when he started bleeding out; this was when they caught the ulcer. Treating it at the same time as his first chemo treatment may not have been smart but they needed to get started on the cancer since it was moving so fast and causing his liver to shut down. The chemo did reverse that and he is home recovering however he looks like death warmed over. A very sad sight indeed.

A year ago at this time he visited us here in the Swamp. He flew out with two of our nephews (Grandsons #7 and #8 for him out of 9, I can't count the Granddaughters) and a niece (I can't count the total of Granddaughters, there are so many I have 4-sisters and one Brother all mass producing). Back then he was vital and vigorous. He handled the all day flying that it takes to go from Albuquerque to Philadelphia (stopover in DFW, no one fly's direct to Albuquerque from Philadelphia) in good humor even with the three young one's in tow (they are good kids). And we took them to Gettysburg and Washington DC for touring. Both places require a lot of walking and in the July heat it was hard on all of the visitors, even some of us residents of the area. Of course the humidity did its trick but the Good Wife and I did a good job keeping everyone hydrated carrying bottled water in coolers filled with ice. My Father trudged around the National Mall stopping for the occasional smoke. I stayed with him while the Good Wife took the point with the kids. He never complained.

Now, today he needs help standing up, uses a walker to get around and requires more meds than I can count.

Bless my Sisters, all of them. They are the true angels in this story. One of them has been with him since his health took the dark turn some 8 weeks ago. They have some flexibility in their lives right now to accommodate having someone there every day and another that spends the night with him. He is never alone. Even when he was in the hospital one of them would spend the night in the room with him just so that he would have a familiar face and voice with him in the wee hours of the night.

With their help I am sure my Father will get some of his old form back and maybe, just maybe we can get him back here for some more of that humidity torture that the Swamp area is famous for. I can only pray.

Living here in the Far East makes it very hard to get out to see my Family. Over the years my Kids have been deprived of the best two Grandparents one could imagine having. Now, one of them is gone and the other has two legs in the grave. My greatest hope is to find some way to get all of us out there to be with him. I fear time is not on my side. I can only hope that the Angles do their work and he stays with us a few more years.

BT: Jimmy T sends.

Blog Fodder – News You Can Not Use!

Here are some headlines that defy the usual effort to ignore. I can hardly believe what passes for Journalism these days.

Larry Hagman, Dallas's Evil Oil Baron, Goes Green!

Oh yeah this is good, you see the "Evil Oil Baron" was a TV act and who in his right mind takes advice on going Green, or Red or even Black from a person who's only qualification is simply memorizing lines out of a script. How can anyone take this "Green" movement serious when they dig up hacks like this guy to pedal their agenda? Makes sense however, the whole Global Warming/Climate Change was a huge made up story just like the JR Ewing character.

Mechanical Problem Hampers BP Effort to Shut Off Well

I thought that was the problem some 90 days ago that started this whole mess? Good grief wouldn't you think the smart money here is to simply put a huge pipe on this and run it back to shore and right into a refinery. If all that black gold wants out, give is somewhere useful for it to go. End it already!!

Politicians who tell you democracies can't slash spending are lying.

Yeah, they simply made cuts to the DOD budget thereby double-dipping in their mind, cutting spending and weakening the country at the same time. Lying, what did they find that $100 million in budget cuts that PresBO wanted out of the Federal Budget last year. Remember they held a huge photo-op showing the PresBO and his cabinet pouring over reams of documents looking for cuts to the budget. No one that is a democrat is serious about cutting federal spending because the three largest drivers are sacred cows, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Lynwood Prison Lesbians Gangs Want Lindsay Lohan

Oh this is rich. Don't those prison lesbians know Lindsay is bisexual? Hell, she might give as good as she gets if they do get their hands on her.

House Democrats hit boiling point over perceived lack of White House support.

Oh this is nice; all those commie's not getting along. I guess the House Democrats are getting tired of carrying the water for the Marxist in Chief since he has such short coat tails they get nothing in exchange for dragging the country into the Socialist Utopia. Either that or they finally run out of stuff to complain about!

Democrat Bart Stupak Accuses Pro-Life Groups of 'Politicizing' Abortion Issue to Undermine Health Care Reform

Hey Bart, what do you call trading your vote for a Presidential Promise not to fund abortions with federal money? Is that not the very definition of "Politicizing"? Of course Bart got punked by the PresBO because his little presidential Executive Order was not worth the paper it was printed on. Nothing like selling your soul to someone worse than the Devil himself.

BT: Jimmy T sends.

Retired too Soon?

Here is what they are catching in the Pacific coming up from Columbia:

That would be a kind of submarine. A drug runner's submarine. Here is the caption that came with the picture:

"Photo released by Guatemala's Defense Ministry on Sunday July 11, 2010. Guatemala's soldiers and sailors escort a drug smuggling submarine captured last Friday July 9 off Guatemala's Pacific coast and arrested four Colombian men on board."

That thing was 57 feet long and carrying 5 tons of cocaine.

Now, I bring this up because this thing was working its way north to the US of A. Oh, it would most likely come ashore somewhere in Mexico and the goods then transported across the border which our great Secretary of Homeland Defense is as secure as it has ever been. At the same time other senior administration officials (David Axelrod) claimed that no one had done more to secure the border than the current Administration. Yeah, just the thing you want to hear knowing all along that the border is as porous as a screen door on the submarine.

This brings to mind two rants that need to be made. The first is the bald face lying the Administration is doing regarding the poor status of the southern Border, of course the northern one is no better. Any enemy of this country can bring in whatever toxic chemical, biological or nuclear weapon right over the border. Who is going to catch them? And proof that the border is still very porous and so easy to get across unmolested is that drug lords are hauling 5 tons of cocaine at a time to the border. They feel the hardest part of the journey is not the crossing the border, it's getting from Columbia to Mexico. This submarine is proof that they are going to great lengths to get their product up to Mexico. Because this was not the only one of these captured. There have been hundreds.

The second rant is the part of about how this was discovered. By the DEA. Now at one time we had a once proud fleet of ASW aircraft and ships. The aircraft were P-3 Orion and S-3 Viking aircraft (my old Jet). The Navy owned more than 400 P-3's and they were stationed all round the US coastline (there were two main bases on each coast and one in Hawaii but they deployed detachments to many places). The S-3's numbers were vastly lower and their duty was mainly carrier based anyway but when we did Caribbean deployment we were always tasked with anti-drug missions. In later years we would deploy a squadron to NAS Key West for this function and a few times the Wings would send aircraft to South America again for the drug interdiction mission.

Today, all but a few of the S-3's are in the great desert graveyard while the P-3's are fast joining them their wings are tired and in need of replacement. There are a mere 100 or so remaining and are as we speak preparing to retire to the desert also. The Boeing P-8 will take its place however there will not be nearly enough of these to cover all the operational demands and that leaves these submarines almost a free pass to Mexico.

Until someone actually gets serious about the border or deploying surveillance aircraft to the waters off South America we will be at risk of not just the drugs but of way worse an import. PresBO wants amnesty and he will keep the borders open as a political weapon to gain support for that. Meanwhile anyone or anything can be brought across.

What the hell are we doing?

BT: Jimmy T sends.

Courage in America

The PresBO administration is quick to sic lawyers on problems here in today's America. The best coordinated response to the Gulf Oil Leak was to send the US Attorney General down there with a team of Lawyers to make sure things were going smoothly I am sure. Now they have filed suit against the state of Arizona to strike down a new law that is patterned after the federal law that he will not enforce. And then there is this festering pustule:

Eric Holder, United States Attorney General on race in America, "is a country of cowards."

Below is King Samir Shabazz, the New Black Panther member that stood outside of a polling place on election day with a club in his hand to prevent white people from voting.

Here is more:

"I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker I hate him, because we're still in this condition."

"No wonder we're not free. Your enemy cannot make you free, fool. You want freedom? You're gonna have to kill some crackers. You're gonna have to kill some of they [sic] babies."

"I can't wait for the day that they're all dead. I won't be completely happy until I see our people free and Whitey dead."

Yeah, and he gets a pass. Let a white guy stand in front of a polling place with a baton calling out in a similar manner about Blacks or Hispanics and watch how quickly that guy is put in jail. But the black radical gets a pass.

That's called "courage" by the Attorney General, Eric Holder. Real courage would have been to arrest this man and put him in prison for a very long time. But no, the AG dropped all charges on him and set him and his cohorts free.

BT: Jimmy T sends.

Fighting the 2nd

One of our basic rights as citizens of America is the right to keep and bear arms, the 2^nd Amendment is supposed to guarantee that the Government will not prohibit the citizenry from being able to defend itself with the force of arms. It is one of the most attacked rights by the Left in this country and is so misunderstood by both the left and the right.

It is plain to me what the framers of the Amendment wanted in passing the Bill. They had only recently fought a war against a tyrannical government and they were living in a wild country. The musket was carried by every able bodied male in this country at that time. This was what was meant by bearing arms, it was to protect them in the main but also to throw off another tyrannical government if one were to emerge.

The Left's contention is that Guns kill people and that if we outlaw them we will have peace. Now they feel this way even though there is no evidence this will happen, in fact the opposite is true. There is plenty of evidence that banning guns disarms the citizenry leaving them vulnerable to those who ignore all the laws including the taking of life. Just look at Washington DC until the Heller ruling overturned the laws in the country's most restricted anti-gun city. And at that time the city that had the most homicides as well.

Today that honor is held by the city of Chicago. And they too have the mantel of the most restricted anti-gun city in America. Well until we sort out this week's Supreme Court ruling that basically ruled that States and Cities have to abide by the 2^nd Amendment as well as the Federal.

The point of this for me is that it is time for Republican Senators to strap on some balls and stand firm on Supreme Court nominees.

When nominee Sonia Sotomayor was being questioned in her confirmation hearing she answered the question about the 2^nd amendment this way: "I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller." And "I understand how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans."

Leaving little wiggle room for interpretation she recognized that the 2^nd amendment was an individual right. Now look at her position NOW as a full member of the Supreme Court and not just a nominee, as a member of the dissenting opinion she sided with the following statement: "the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense."

This is called a two faced lie. Saying one thing to win the nomination and gain confirmation and doing exactly what she wants' politically when she is on the bench.

And now we have Elena Kagan doing the same thing. That is, saying one thing to win the confirmation. Claiming as "settled law and Heller has decided that the Second Amendment confers such an individual right to keep and bear arms," in the discussion on the 2^nd Amendment posed to her during her nomination hearings. Elena Kagan has a long history of fighting against the 2^nd Amendment. She has helped to develop several bans on weapons the most notable being the Clinton Administrations 1998 weapons ban.

She is yet another radical that is fully vested in the mutation of this country to a Socialist Democratic state similar in nature to many in Europe. She must be stopped.

There will be many cases of import brought to the Supreme Court over the course of her tenure if she were to win confirmation. Do you think she would be sympatric to a constitutional challenge to the Obamacare health care bill, I do. When asked if the congress has the constitutional authority to dictate what people eat, she stammered for many seconds before she started her response. And unfortunately the Republican who posed the question answered it for her cutting her off in the process. But the many seconds in delay in answering spoke volumes.

Republican Senators need to filibuster this nominee or voter her down outright. She is being disingenuous when she answers questions put to her by the Republicans. She will be a willing participant in the demise of what had once been a proud country.

BT: Jimmy T sends.