If you are surprised that the Obama administration has sicced the IRS on conservatives, Republican donors and Tea Party supporters, wake up. It’s happening everywhere and very easily for them, too.
On her facebook page, former candidate for the House Charlotte Bergman said she wondered why she has been bothered by the IRS ever since her 2010 campaign. Could it be that she is conservative, a woman and, worst of all to the Obama people, black? Was this a coincidence? Hah!
Another Memphis blogger who is a Republican recently lost his domain much to his surprise. Not connected? When the government can put its fingers into your house to tell you what light bulb to use, of course they can do much else.
My own website has been attacked. A group or organization tried 1200 times overnight to get in and insert a virus. Bad luck on my part? You be the judge.
Williams Sonoma in Boston has temporarily stopped carrying pressure cookers in deference to the feelings of Boston marathon victims. Yes, terrorist would look to them to buy a very expensive, one time tool that’s going to explode anyhow. No word on what the Memphis store is doing.
David Sedaris of Salon magazine famously said last week: “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”
Why? What would that mean? Isn’t he a white American? The conservative world was shocked at that statement. The whole country should have been.
Mr. Sedaris appeared in Memphis a week ago Saturday to push his latest essay collection. When he was interviewed later by phone (either the interviewer pointedly omitted asking him about his comment or didn’t know about it or talked to him prior to the shooting) we learned a lot about Sedaris. Maybe TMI.
He had “skirmishes with obsessive compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome.” He discovered in junior high that he was gay. He describes himself as a drug using college student and drifter. He’s lived with his partner in France and now in England.
The interviewer was told how happy he and his French acquaintances were that Obama was reelected. “Pleasantly surprised that U.S. voters elected the president whom people on the Continent liked.” However, he decries our belief in the second amendment, saying “What is up with you people and your damned guns?”
Sedaris admitted to a need to get his dad’s approval. But the old man was hardly Ozzie Nelson. He liked to remove his trousers for the evening meal and hoped a Girl Scout would knock on the door so he could answer it and shock her.
Does anyone else detect a little self loathing here? Or is it the desire to shock?
Whatever it was, he looks like the ass he probably is.
The Smart Meter issue is very much alive in Memphis and at City Council meetings.
Activist Donna Bohannan shared this information provided to the Council by Cathie Auxier. She argues that the cost savings promised by smart meters will not materialize. Here’s what she said (click on document to increase size):
Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection blog (a very good one) collects pictures of bumper stickers people spot in their driving about. Bumper stickers are like the crawl on TV news shows; you can’t help yourself. You’re a captive audience. You read them.
Whenever I see the Obama ones I bristle. Surely, I think, the driver and company can’t be that stupid. In Midtown, we probably see more of them than in other parts of the city. We often see other ones with a Midtown slant such as the one I saw this morning. It read “3810green” a takeoff on the 38104 bumper sticker touting Midtown.
Green? Puhleez! There are a few assumptions in “green” that irritate. Evidently the driver believes in global warming, smart meters, conserving our “precious” resources, solar stuff. The vehicle happened to be a truck (not a business one), which makes you wonder how they feel about fuel consumption when it comes to their own driving.
Another one that caught my attention: “Binghampton is Memphis.” It’s another take off of the popular “Midtown is Memphis” meme. Only this one appears to have a sly comment. Binghampton is not exactly a cool, hip, attractive place. More like hot with crime, hip hop and rundown. Guess that conforms more to the driver’s view of the Bluff City than the old homes, tree shading streets of Midtown. Not surprising, then, that his license plate was from DeSoto County.
Then there is the ubiquitous “I Love My Rescue” bumper. Good. I love rescues, too, but also my purebred akita. He was rescued, too, from a breeder for money. In paying for him we helped the economy, didn’t we and helped the owner provide for his family and make tax money for our Uncle?
One day I hope to see some other kinds of bumper stickers. “Midtown is Republican” – that would be a nice change, wouldn’t it? How about “38104theUSA”? Or “My Dog is Smarter Than our Democrat Rep.”
Just keep a look out the back window. Shocked drivers might run into you.
Spotted on Walnut Grove near White Station, this electric Chevy Volt was the first I’ve seen in Memphis traffic. Reuters reports GM loses $49,000 on each one sold. Of course that means we the taxpayers are losing our shirts on this dud. Ouch!
The President sure has the touch, doesn’t he? Kind of the reverse Midas touch. There is the economy still going down hill, Solyndra, the Chicago Olympic attempt, funding a battery company that never made one battery; it goes on and on.
The Weekly Standard reports:
Last week, it was announced that Ray’s Hell Burger just outside Washington, D.C. would be closing its doors. A fan of the burger joint was President Obama, who had visited the location with his Russian counterpart.
Well, it’s happened again. In August, Obama visited Star Brewery in Dubuque. And now a local publication reports that the business is closing its doors.
Theonline.com reports:
Star Restaurant and Ultra Lounge apparently has closed.
A sign posted on the front door of the Port of Dubuque restaurant, at 600 Star Brewery Drive, says the business is “permanently closed.”
Owners Matt and Sarah Kluesner, who also own Crust Italian Kitchen & Bar in downtown Dubuque, did not return multiple calls seeking comment.
Star Restaurant was one of the anchor tenants in the Dubuque Star Brewery, which was renovated in recent years and became one of the major attractions in the redeveloped Port of Dubuque.
Mr. President, how about staying away from Memphis?
“In Memphis we have had an incredible supply of energy in the past 13 years,” says MLGW’s Chris Bieber. “TVA has enough resources to meet the peak,” the VP of Customer Care told me.
Bieber and his assistant talked about the state of energy in the U.S. and our city. Bieber has held his post here since 2000; longer for Mrs. King. A few years back they began to look into Shelby County’s energy use.
“Tennessee consumes about 30-36% more energy than any other state,” they found. And at the top of the list of energy hogs is Shelby County. “Shelby County is the heaviest user in the state,” Bieber says. It’s not a situation he likes.
“The rest of the world wants our lifestyle and the planet can’t take it,” Bieber says. He hopes that smart meters will solve some of the “problem.”
Bieber references the book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (also titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive)” a 2005 book by Jared M. Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles. “It describes five societies that didn’t adapt and died out,” Bieber says.
And according to Wikipedia, “Diamond’s book deals with “societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses” (p. 15). In writing the book Diamond intended that its readers should learn from history (p. 23).”
Bieber agrees. “We as a society for the good of the planet, need to keep it healthy. In North America we have 3% of the world’s people and use 30% of the world’s energy.” It is a statement repeated by Barack Obama.
He hopes the smart meter helps save us. The goal is for all of us in Shelby County to be using them by 2020.
But is the situation really that desperate? Bieber himself says that TVA has provided us with ample energy. Why wouldn’t that continue in the future? This stance also assumes that no new sources of power will emerge (even as we are finding abundant stores of natural gas in the U.S. and we have abundant coal) and that no innovations will be found. What about the Keystone pipeline able to bring us cheap energy from a friendly country? It is there waiting for us to use it. Ditto ANWAR.
Environmentalists like to frame the issue as an ethical one. Although Bieber did not say people who use too much energy are greedy, the implication is there. It is not one conservatives agree with. If there is an ethical question to ask it is why the elderly, home bound and sick should be penalized for the heat they require in the winter and the cool they need in the summer, particularly since energy sources are available. The smart meter will hit them hard as they are also usually home bound, requiring a steady amount of heat or cool. Others who are working and gone from their homes will benefit by using smart meters to control the temperature when they are gone.
People already get the idea that you use more energy, you pay more. Do we really need a smart meter to tell us that?
Next: The City Council’s role in the smart meter debate
Today at 5 p.m. a group of women in Memphis will assemble at the corner of Union and Cooper. They are part of a worldwide group called “One Billion Rising.” They say they are assembling to dance and hold a candlelight vigil to protest the rape of women that goes on throughout the world. In fact, women across the world will be doing the same thing at various locations and they purposely chose Valentine’s Day to do it.
Sounds fine because every normal, decent person is against rape. However, there is more to this movement than anger about violence to women. According to the Memphis Flyer, one of the women behind it is Allison Glass, training director at the Mid South Peace and Justice Center, home to ACORN here. What is a training director, by the way; training to do what?
Glass says of the event, “We are all about lifting up women’s voices against abuse of privilege, against all forms of oppression, against economic exploitation. And we welcome all genders and orientations to support a community of equality, empowerment, dignity, and liberation. There are a myriad of different issues that affect women. It’s well known that poverty affects women more than men, because it’s mostly women who are taking care of their families. War affects women in the same way. Issues about education, all kinds of things.
One Billion Rising was the idea of Eve Ensler on the 15th anniversary of her Vagina Monologues.” It was prompted, too, by the gang rape of a young girl in India recently, Glass says.
If this reminds you of the war on women, it should. Some of the same people pushing that are behind this, too, along with other radicals such as Leo Gerard, a union man and then some.
Take a look at this video from him. You probably haven’t heard of him, but he’s a big player.
Gerard is a radical union organizer and some say the power behind the Obama presidency. Gerard was behind the Occupy Wall street movement and, according to the Independent Sentinel:
Gerard is also a member of the AFL-CIO’s executive committee and chairman of its public policy committee. He has won an honorary college degree and attended galas in his honor – he’s quite elite and would undoubtedly never sleep in Zuccotti in a tent.
He has served on the board of the Apollo Alliance (Source: Ulsterman Report). WND describes Apollo as an organization of radicals including communist Van Jones. Apollo helped write the Obama Stimulus and served on the board of the Economic Policy Institute, a George Soros front.
Gerard heads the tony-sounding Blue-Green alliance [in which he is an investor], which links labor to wealthy environmentalists who profit from Obama’s largesse with taxpayer dollars.
He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting – the first GLOBAL labor union. They are socialists, communists, and other assorted statists who have gone worldwide (as have the OWS).
Gerard played a significant role in the WTO protests that took place in Seattle in 1999.
Gerard is a fan of communist Frances Fox Piven. Piven, a member of the Progressives (commies) for Obama group, is co-author of the Cloward–Piven strategy, which calls for overloading the U.S. economy to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty. In other words, just like the OWS, she wants a salary for everyone regardless of whether they work or not. That’s what Obama’s expanding welfare program is about.
Gerard is the appointed adviser to President Obama’s National Commission on Energy Policy and President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. Gerard is not merely “connected” – he appears to in fact be the direct link between labor unions, globalization, radical environmentalism, and the highest levels of American politics.
He IS one of the Obama socialist elite. Socialists are elitists who keep their favored members smaller and more preferential than capitalists. They eliminate the nuisance of having the lower echelon working their way up the economic ladder to prosperity. It’s a class system where everyone is dragged down into poverty except the elite.
Source: Front Page Magazine: Gerard said, “In my own naiveté I was dumb enough to assume that a Democratic Congress and a Democrat in the White House would put us on a different path,” he said. He wants more government spending on green everything for the fantasy jobs it would create.
If Obama won’t move forward with big new spending plans then it’s time to bring out the baseball bats, Gerard said. “We better face up to the fact that we have to hit the streets, kick some ass, and mobilize to do something about it,” he said.
To Gerard, it is not radical leftist agitation that leads to violence but capitalism itself. Economic “inequality,” he says, “leads to instability and violence.”
And unions are on a holy mission to combat the evils of the market, he argues. “Unions are instruments of social and economic justice, and they’re instruments of democracy.”
Gerard has close ties to the neo-communist Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and to Canada’s socialist party, the New Democratic Party (NDP).
In 2009 and 2010, Leo Gerard, the globalist, engaged in an aggressively hostile labor strike against Brazilian mining giant Vale, and its then-CEO Roger Agnelli. Within a year of that strike’s conclusion, the Brazilian government ousted Agnelli as Vale CEO, and President Barack Obama was promising billions in U.S. taxpayer-paid aid to the Brazilian government and affiliated corporations. Coincidence?
It appears Leo Gerard set off to break the back of former Vale CEO Roger Agnelli – himself a far stronger proponent of free markets than most of Brazil’s government-controlled CEO’s, and replace him with the far more cooperative and union-friendly Murilo Ferreira.
Regarding Ferreira, Gerard said the following…he’s very accessible and always ready to listen to the concerns of the union.
The one to close the deal was none other than Barack Obama – who in essence, jumped at the demand of union leader Gerard that the American president travel to Brazil post-haste with the promise of U.S. dollars – not only in the form of a multi-billion dollar loan package – but the further promise to purchase billions more of Brazil’s natural resources, all of which will further grow the power and influence of the Brazilian government and its now quickly growing labor unions – headed by none other than Leo Gerard.
The Brazil deal is yet another in a long line of examples of how American labor leaders are not in fact opponents of world free trade as they so often indicate – but are rather strong supporters of world trade that they and their unions control. No other president in the history of the United States has given so much of that control to union groups as has Barack Obama.
So, was today a heartfelt expression of sympathy for women or a calculated plan to organize more people behind the progressive movement? You decide.
