Election Day Prayer

Received as an email originating at Mississippi University for Women–

Dear Beloved God in Heaven, Please give us a president that loves this country and everything it stands for. Please give us a president who respects you as the one true God. Please give us a president who will, with your help, restore this nation to its former glory, the way you created her. Please help us to respect what you have given to us and not take anything for granted ever again. Please God weaken the evil and strengthen the good both without and within. May our eyes be opened. In Jesus’ name, Amen God Bless America

Confidence and Credibility

H/T for below to William Been and Ray Hartland

I'm confused.  If Romney gets elected, will he have inherited the economic mess from Obama .......... or Bush?

One thing I am absolutely certain of, however:

This man did not spend his entire first term blaming Jimmy Carter.

Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.  Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.  Winston Churchill

Sharing the 'Single Most Important E-mail I've Ever Sent'

2012 Elections: Last chance to undo Obamacare and send its namesake packing

Modleski–Our Path Forward

"It is time for accountability to be forced by we the people."

Cover picture above– U.S. Air Force Thunderbird pilot, Matt Modleski's book "The American Dream and What We Must Do to Secure Our Children's Dreams."

Matt recently wrote an article for ROC Newsletter outlining some thoughts about what we need to do as a country to move forward. We share it below.

Random Thoughts On Our Country and Our Path Forward

By Mathew Modleski

I asked [ROC editor} if I could share a few thoughts with all of you this week and he graciously said yes.  Many of these thoughts are related in some fashion and in my book I more fully explain some of that interconnectedness.  Thanks for the chance to contribute to the dialogue on ROC.

The $29 trillion dollar illusion

Unfortunately the illusion is our US standard of living as it has been propped up by credit for more than 40 years. I heard Mitt Romney say that if we cut spending by a trillion dollars in one year we would go back into a deep recession or perhaps a depression as the GDP would shrink by 5%.  Let’s turn that math around and look at it this way.  We are borrowing and spending $1.5 trillion this year to sustain the illusion and using Romney’s math, instead of our GPD growing at an anemic 1.8%, it is really shrinking at about 5%.  That means without the illusion of borrowing and spending we are actually in a steep recession or maybe a depression already, aren’t we?  Math is math, and no matter how it’s spun, it doesn’t lie (statistics can be manipulated to lie; basic math is not subject to that same problem).

Let me ask you this.  Let’s say you make $50,000.00 per year.  You have borrowed and spent $70,000.00 and pay interest on that amount in order to live a lifestyle that you’ve grown accustomed to.   Each month in order to “live that lifestyle,” you borrow 40% more than you make and you spend it?  Would your life appear better than it actually is in terms of sustainability? That’s what we’re doing in America.

 

It is time for accountability to be forced by we the people.  Please vote out of office anyone who serves you in government who has been there for more than 6 years, they have mismanaged our country so badly they don’t deserve the honor of continuing to serve (notice I wasn’t party specific).

Where are our Leaders?

Albert Einstein said, “Setting the example isn’t the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.”  When you look across our great nation, do you see anyone that you would want your children to emulate who is serving us?   If the answer is no, ask yourself why you can’t find a single leader in public service that you would have your children emulate? Then, please find men and women of character to send to Washington, D.C. this year, because when the illusion comes crashing down, we are going to need people of character to lead our nation.  We may have to wait for the crash to see these people stand tall and serve us.  More than likely they will not be a byproduct of establishment politics; if there is a crash the country will want something very different.

College and High School Graduates-Get Skilled, Not Simply Educated

For most of the last 20-30 years a college education meant opportunity for a good job in America.  Even as our reliance on borrowing and spending at both the household level and federal level spiraled out of control, there was always a job for college graduates.  Those times are over in terms of the “automatic” aspect of jobs for people with academic knowledge.   We will now have to have graduates who have learned how to “do something” with their knowledge or said more simply, they will have to be skilled.  Knowledge is wonderful, but you wouldn’t want your airline pilot to be chock full of knowledge and have no skill.  You would want them to have taken the knowledge they have accrued and then turn that knowledge into the skill of flying your airplane.  Our children have been lead to believe that six figures waits at the end of the party called a bachelor’s degree.  We’d better communicate that the party is over and skills are going to be required to succeed in the new America (the one that comes after the very hard landing that’s now inevitable).  Skills are learned through practice and repetition, there is no shortcut to becoming skilled.

There was an interesting article a year or so ago that made the point that Military Academy graduates go on to achieve more with their lives than Ivy League school graduates.  It seems pretty simple to me when trying to discern why.  Academy graduates must learn skills that they apply everyday to solve real problems where lives are at risk.  Ivy League graduates aren’t forced to learn skills that have those same consequences. Even M.D.’s errors result in someone else dying, not them or their surgical counterparts.   The same cannot be said of a combat leader who has to be skilled.  If they make mistakes, they pay with their lives or those of their friends.

Skills will be required in the new America; knowledge has been overpriced in our run-up of borrowing and spending in almost every aspect of our lives.  (Just as an aside, most of the people in the current administration are “academic experts”).

So What is the Plan?

One of my biggest knocks on the right is the unwillingness to put forth a plan based on the truth and then lead its implementation.  My knock on the left is simply they won’t do math in public, a simple yet basic tenet of problem solving. So, based on my lack of patience for those who won’t put a plan forward, here is one aspect of my plan to address the crisis we’re in now.

Let’s cut spending across the board for the next 5 years.  We’ll reduce it 8%, 7%, 6%, 5%, 4% for each of the next five years.  The first two reductions include Presidential and Congressional pay, it’s time DC felt some sort of sacrifice for the good of the nation.  For those who want to know how much money each of those reductions would result in, it’s roughly $288 billion, $264 billion, $250 billion, $230 billion and $200 billion.  At the end of those 5 years we would still be borrowing money each month, but a revision of the tax code will close that gap.  In 5 years we will have stopped digging the hole we’re in, and will have balanced the budget.  We can then begin to pay off our debt which by then will be more than $20 trillion dollars.  Once the budget is balanced we should index Medicare spending and Defense spending as a percentage of GDP so that both parties can take care of their constituents by focusing on one thing, a healthy US economy.

The time for apathy has long since passed; most of America simply hasn’t realized it yet.

God Bless,

Matt

 

Visit Matt's website– http://www.mattmodleski.com

Remembering D-DAY

D-Day

June 6, 1944

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D-Day Documentary Film

Photos From the Front

Big Blame, Little Progress President

Obama's unfortunate, real inheritance continues to be his unprecedented "blame game" and lack of personal accountability as president–he is never to blame, quick to claim undeserved credit when something good happens, but it's never his fault and he "inherited problems" when things are going badly.

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Tea Party– Mike Parrish–"Live Free or Die"

I would like to share with you a video I created in the Tea Party theme. It is a music video called "Live Free or Die." Please feel free to post this video on your site or pass it on to those who you think might appreciate it. If you have any suggestions for me I would be most grateful. Thank you for your time. Below is the YouTube link to the video. (You can search YouTube for "Live Free or Die" by Mike Parrish.)

Thanks. Mike Parrish
http://www.mikeparrish.net/

 

Live Free or Die

Well have you had enough?
Have you had your fill?
Now’s the time to replace,
The folks on the hill?

They’ve gone way too far.
They don’t respect our rights.
We’ll take our country back.
Now rise up and fight.

Live free or die
Is our battle cry
Stand up now tell the feds
They can stick it where the sun don’t shine live free or die

Don’t tread on me
Let freedom ring
Let Old Glory fly
From sea to shining sea.

Too many bums and thugs.
Too many crooks and thieves.
Have put us all in debt.
Serving their own needs.

It’s time to make our stand.
And send them on their way.
We’ll keep our way of life.
They can keep the change.

credits

released 28 May 2012

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Weeding the Overgrown Rosebed

Originally published in ROC Newsletter Issue #20-2012
America's National Interests– A Job For the Responsible

It is hard to imagine what we might be thinking about our country if it were not for the flow of information online. We might all be doubting our sanity if we only had the rosy picture the media paints. Our reality looks nothing like what they present.

They have a whole lot of stories to suppress this week too. From word that the Green River Deposits on federal land in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming have more recoverable oil than the entire rest of the world combined (not good for the fossil-fuel hating leftist agenda), to news Obama is still sinking in the polls, despite more pandering (this week for the gays). The Tea Party is far from dead, and still striking fear into the hearts of entrenched incumbents.The jobs' numbers are horrid and the Obamacare uncertainty nightmare promises to keep them that way for a long time. Obama's phony wars against the right for political purposes have been duds. The canary in Europe is beginning to have fits from lack of oxygen– and may soon croak due to their obstinate and irresponsible politicians and overly dependent people. Elements we ourselves are not in short supply of either. The left of course deliberately failed to pass a budget again, and stopped all other proposals by the right for meaningful fiscal responsibility from government, as if they don't seem to care about anything but winning elections.

In our reality, we observe that we have the most incompetent and corrupt federal government we have ever had, making the wrong calls, cutting bad deals, meddling in our lives or doing a whole lot of nothing in areas they should act on. We need a new change– one that has a media that reports reality, and a government that actually acts on America's behalf. America's national interests are best met when only responsible people have, and are doing, their jobs. The roses have been overcome with weeds!

November sure seems to be taking a long time to get here.