Tag: Free Will

School Boards Still Don’t Get It: S.B.5 Empowers them to Control Their Costs!

Doc Thompson covers how the “rich Hollywood types and politicians hide their money from tax collectors, gaming the system. These are the same people who proclaim that we should pay increased taxes in order to fund public sector jobs. Doc has an argument with a guy that claims he’s willing to send in a $20,000 check to pay his “fair share.” Also, Doc covers a UC administrator that received over $900,000 in severance upon being released from his contract. Have a listen:

Meanwhile, local school systems, are still asking for more money claiming to be broke when in fact they are already receiving generous tax dollars from the communities. Public union leaders are somehow oblivious to why there isn’t enough money to pay them. How they don’t connect the dots is amazing. They insist that we should cut salaries in the governor’s administration before we cut teachers salaries, which sounds foolish. It’s not so much the amount of money individuals make, as it is that way too many in public office make it. That is where the socialist tendency differs from the capitalist. The socialist wants the increases across the board, as they are in step increases. The capitalist pays based on merit. That means fewer will receive “top pay” instead of a majority regardless of job performance as the system is now.

On the eve of Governor Kasich’s budget revelation it is interesting that Lebanon City Schools and Fairfield City Schools are not looking at using S.B.5 to control their costs on a broad scale, but are still playing the same game of small cuts that have been the preferred method, such as busing cuts and other items that are inconvenient to parents in the district.

Taking into account that the contracts under S.B.5 will be grandfathered in, it would seem most responsible for these school districts to begin exploring how they can severely reduce their labor costs under the new law without staff reductions.

My guess however is that these current administrators won’t explore that option unfortunately, because they cannot think any other way, which is part of the problem.

Further attempts to place levies on a ballot are not needed because these school districts don’t need the money. They need to reduce their budget expectations. They need to understand how to manage the money they do have. S.B.5 will give them the tools to do so. There shouldn’t be another levy on a single ballot anywhere in Ohio during 2011 because of the passage of S.B.5. If there is, it’s because the school districts wish to continue to play games, and not make the “hard”cuts.

If school districts like these two continue to beat the same old drum, it is because they are completely inept in the skills of money management, and those administrators need to be removed so that people who are skilled at money management can help these schools operate with their excellent ratings, but at a reduced cost.

Before a single layoff is ever explored, wage reductions should be implemented. Realistic wage amounts need to be established, not the outrageous levels they currently are. Teachers of high school students and junior high students are not all worth 70K or more no matter how much schooling they have. Some may be, but not a majority. Few people are worth that much in labor and a college degree does not guarantee those wage levels, which is the assumption under the established step increases, and the fact that I even have to write it down so that administrators have to be told says they are out of touch completely with the community marketplace.

The money is not coming from the state. The money is not coming from the federal government. The money is coming from the community, and these districts and the teachers that teach in them must decide now if they want to bend a little to make the districts remain excellent and within the community budgets, or if they will continue to think selfishly and strap these communities financially. For those highly paid teachers that don’t want to work for less, there’s the door. Good luck finding a better job because every district in Ohio is going through this trouble, and they all must come to this realization sooner or later.

The longer these districts avoid the obvious, the more damage they’ll do. They now have the tools, but further tax increases are not an option.

Below are two notices, one asking people to attend the school board meeting in Lebanon. If you care about this issue at all, you should go and ask those people how they are planning to think “outside” the box to save the community money without a loss of services. Because they will no longer be able to blame the states unfunded mandates.

The other is from Arnie Engle from Fairfield who has been fighting this fight for a long time.

To one and all
FYI
The board will be voting to cut High School busing this Thursday
Are you willing to risk our children’s lives to save $300,000??
The next Board meeting is 3-17-11
6PM in the Community Room at the HS

The blackmail tactics are about to begin

 

Our community was divided over the 3 school levies the board jammed down the throats of the community in 2004. This board is knowingly driving our district into fiscal crisis and a repeat of the 2004 community divide. Why are they doing this? Because they refuse to place the community and our children before the staff with appropriate cost cutting measures.
Please attend and let your voice be heard

Please pass this on to everyone you know !

You must sign in to speak at the beginning of the meeting and you get 5 minutes.
There is also an additional chance to speak before the board votes on the cuts. 2 minutes.

On the agenda are 3 million in cuts to be voted on. The list can be viewed on the school web site. In the list is the elimination of high school busing to save $300,000.

Fact!
The schools own finance report, shows we spent 6.6 million on pupil transportation in 2010.
We are cutting 1/3 of our busing. Shouldn’t we expect a savings of 1/3 of $6,000,000????
You can view this report on the school web site.

CAFR
Comprehensive Annual Financial Report
(Page 105 schedule 6)

School busing is the safest way to transport school children. Putting our kids on the road to and from school is a disaster waiting to happen.

And for what??? $300,000???

Are you willing to risk our children’s lives to save $300,000??

I’m not!

The following is what I said about cutting busing back in 2004.
The same applies today.

From the 2004 CARE flier
WHY CUT SPORTS AND BUSING?

The recent cuts made by the Fairfield School Board do more than balance the budget. They actually punish our children and the community,

in an effort to force an unjust $9,000,000 school levy on the taxpayers of our fine city. This tax levy will definitely benefit the staff, but NOT our children.

Regarding Sports, local papers have reported that the Xenia School District “saved $183,000 by cutting extra-curriculars. However, more than 100 students left the school district and went to other schools to participate in sports. The decreased student enrollment ended up costing the school $340,000 in school funding from the state.” Our school board and administration are aware of this, but they cut our extra-curriculars anyway.

Regarding busing, our school officials say we will save $400,000 by cutting busing. According to Treasurer Scott Gooding, we have a $5,500,000 transportation budget. We are cutting more than one-third of our transportation by cutting busing for grades 9-12 and extra curricular activities. You would expect to see savings of one-third of $5,500,000 or at least $1,800,000. Also note that the state gives us $2,000,000 for transportation as reported in the ODE, SF3 report. If we loose one-third of this funding that amounts to $667,000, nullifying the $400,000 savings projected by our officials.
Therefore, it just doesn’t make good economic sense to cut busing and sports, unless it’s really an effort to punish our kids, parents, and community in order to pass the next school levy on August 3rd.

I have heard it time and time again that the district needs to move forward and forget about the past \history. The problem is that history is about to repeat itself! We can all expect that $600 pay to play and the elimination of all busing will soon follow.

This board is, knowingly, running our district right into financial crisis. The solution to their madness was spelled out in my last letter to the editor. The boards blackmail tactics will never end as long as this board continues to places the staff ahead of the community and our children

BOARDS 1-13-11 RETREAT
Letter to the Editor
February 2011
BOARD INACTION WILL LEAD TO DISTRICT FAILURE

In regard to the Fairfield school districts budget retreat it was disappointing to hear the board was still considering a new tax levy. It would be a big mistake for the board to assume the community would support any type of levy. I would hope the board would anticipate this and enact the appropriate cuts to balance the budget. Failure to do so will send our district down the same road as Little Miami. The board needs to put the box of band aids away and get down to enacting a budget void of new levies. Time is running out.

Although there was an additional 4.6 million in cuts presented at the retreat there are still millions in possible cost cutting and revenue generating ideas presented by both me and the districts own hand picked finance committee. My suggestions and the finance committee’s suggestions should be reviewed, considered and enacted or rejected with reasoning shared with the public for any rejection, before there is any discussion of a new levy. The community is entitled to know, in detail, why the board refused to enact all cost saving ideas presented by anyone.

In my opinion there needs to be a fundamental change in the way the district does business. This would include but is not limited to the following suggestions.

Getting serious about contract negotiations.

Not relying on local property taxes to fund schools

The board must be honest with the public and follow through with their board actions.

The board should vote with an understanding of how their vote will effect the budget and leave their emotions at home
.
The board needs to start placing our children and the community first.

The board needs to review the business partner relationship it holds with it’s vendors and assure the public it is receiving the best possible price for the tax dollars spent.

The board needs to have a conservative outsider to review the way the district operates

The status quo of taxing and spending is not working in Fairfield or any government agency. If this philosophy can not be reigned in it will undoubtedly lead to the financial ruin of our district.

Let me leave you with a quote from the districts own finance committee “The current system is unsustainable without the fundamental changes we are suggesting — inaction will lead to district failure.” I have been warning the district of this for years. Time is running out.

Arnie Engel
Past member Fairfield Board of Education
CARE founder
829-7840
Please pass this on to everyone you know !
and please attend the
next Board meeting on 3-17-11.
Bring your neighbors, friends and family.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Motorcycles Tell the Whole Story: The Socialist States of America

The crowds around Wisconsin on Saturday March 12, 2011 had a diseased quality about them that cannot be summed up without a philosophic journey of epic understanding. In short however, I can only offer that those poor souls marching to a socialist drum beat are lost to what it means to be an American. Without question, many of the marchers are veterans, police, firefighters and other traditional patriots, but to me they seem weak, and ill-informed, lost in a portrayal the media has given them without actually earning it. The America they want and desire is one for the soft, fragile specimens of human being that finds their life spans sickly, and always in need of assistance.

I’ve rode motorcycles for more than 20 years and always stayed away from the stereotype of what a biker is, I guess because the image has been associated with gangs and violence. It’s also associated with death. The perception is that if you ride a motorcycle, you will die. Maybe not right away, but eventually, the grim reaper is in close pursuit if you chose to ride a motorcycle.

So I’ve kept my motorcycle riding more of a private thing. I’ve always embraced a sense of freedom and a love of individuality and vehicles on two wheels were the closest thing to a horse that I could get living in a modern, suburban environment.

Cowboys to me have always been the symbol of what an American is. And cowboys rode horses when they settled the west. To modern America, highways have replaced trails, and motorcycles replaced horses. And to the motorcycle rider, the goals are the same as the cowboy.

The cowboy wanted to extend his mobility over vast distances, whether he was herding cattle or just searching for food. And where herding cattle may not be needed, and food is available at the closest McDonalds, the need to extend your reach is still needed for the hungry adventurer.

And that’s what you find in a motorcyclist, a love a freedom and a desire to extend their reach without the protection of any other vehicle. To be exposed to the road flying by below you, exposed to the elements rain, wind and heat, and to be one mistake away from death. It’s a choice millions of motorcyclist volunteer each year.
I started thinking about defining motorcyclist when I kept getting the same questions, why do you ride in the rain? And why do you ride when it’s cold?

For me, it’s about truth. Not the kind of truth that’s about right and wrong. But the kind of truth you find when you push yourself to the limit. The kind of truth mountain climbers understand, or endurance hikers. People that put comfort aside and find strength in themselves they didn’t know they had.

motorcyclist, whatever their various forms, have this yearning in common, even if they aren’t completely aware of it.

When my wife and I made a long ride to Key West I thought about these things a lot especially as we neared our destination over the inter-coastal highway US1 south of Miami in temperatures that hovered around 107 degrees Fahrenheit. I look at motorcycles the same way I look at World War II aircraft. When introduced, it was the first time in human history that an individual could extend their boundaries beyond their home territory. The automobile of course had come along but where the auto departs from the nature of flying machines is a pilot uses a stick and rudder to fly, so all parts of the human body are engaged. On a motorcycle the same holds true, one foot operates the rear brake, another shifts the gears, another operates the throttle and the right brake, and yet another operates the clutch, and all this without much protection of any kind.

Airplanes are deceptively fragile, with only a very thin skin between the pilot and the outside air. In order to operate them, a well-defined understanding of the dangers involved is needed.

It is no coincidence that motorcycles and airplanes are both associated with freedom. At first, because they tie up their operators with being fully involved in the process of flying or driving them, it is this very fact that lends to the feelings of liberation.

Make a long run on a motorcycle, and you will feel you earned every mile, and it is inescapable to feel complacent afterwards. Where the motorcycle is unique over any other mode of transportation, the cost to operate it per mile is very inexpensive. And that makes it one of the best machines around if you’re willing to trade a bit of safety and comfort for the reach a motorcycle gives you.

On our trip to Key West from Cincinnati we traveled over 3000 miles in just under 7 days and spent $167 in fuel.

Riding a motorcycle is a reliable excuse to be different, even if some of that ends up looking the same. You can dress in leather jackets in the heat of an August afternoon and it’s OK. It’s a reason to dress outrageously and proclaim your individuality. A motorcycle invites adventure to what would otherwise be just a simple trip down the road. In hard weather, it forces you to adapt taking you out of your comfort zone.

And that’s the appeal for me. Every time you get on a bike, there is an opportunity for adventure that you just don’t get in an automobile. It gives you unprecedented reach for traveling because you can do it much more economically than any other mode of transportation. And it allows you to cater your bike and riding apparel to your individual tastes.

In a car, you might just get in and start driving, and the ritual is rather short and uninvolved. On a bike, you have to dress for the ride which will probably include a jacket of some kind, gloves, boots, and durable pants. You have to keep your eye on the world around you not only the traffic and the dangers associated with that, but the weather too.

A storm can surge up in an instant. A heavy downpour on a highway at 70 MPH can cause you enormous amounts of pain if your skin is exposed. And you’ll notice when the breaks in the clouds are coming and see how the rain rolls in and drifts away as you move through it, where in a car, you may drive 20 to 50 miles and barely register what’s going on in the world around you, because inside the car, life goes on much like it would in your home.

Motorcycle riders understand pirates. The two life styles go together very well. The romance that many secretly feel toward the golden age of piracy is embodied in the fantasies of the motorcycle rider for many of the same reasons described in the long motorcycle journey. And to understand the magic of America, you have to understand one of the greatest pirates of all time, and a personal hero of mine, Captain Henry Morgan.

It is true that I have a particular fondness for the pirates that roamed the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy from 1660’s to the 1720’s. Not to imply that I honor the life of the thief. But I do credit those particular pirates as being the foundations of America, because in my view the nations of Europe were the true thieves.

Controversial, of course it is. But you have to remember what the world was at the time and why the pirates came to be. At the time that Spain claimed central and South America, they eradicated all the cultures existing at the time and stole the wealth of those cultures. Just because a nation is behind the robbery, does not make them any less a thief. And consider that at the time the English navy, would kidnap young men and employ them against their will to serve the might of their empire, and that England and France, always at war with one another, could not stand to allow the Spanish to reap all the benefits of its conquest of the Aztecs and their great capital city of Tenochtitlan.

“Tenochtitlan was a marvelous metropolis with complicated lakes that surrounded the place. The Spanish upon seeing it claimed it was so beautiful that it looked like a dream. Cortez conquered the city shortly, and had Montezuma stoned to death in front of his own people. The Aztecs had an army, but their only real focus had been to raid neighboring tribes for victims in human sacrifice to their insatiable gods, especially Quetzalcoatl. They were no match for the battle hardened Spanish and their firepower.

Cortez destroyed the city block by block and built a new city on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, a city that would become one of the largest cities in the world, Mexico City. Not only did this city go on to become one of the most dangerous places in the world, but any attempt to uncover the past of Tenochtitlan are long since destroyed. The great monument that resides in Mexico City now is the golden-winged Angel of Independence. A very strange statue for a people who were completely conquered by Spain and had their culture eradicated.

Anyway, Cortez sacked the city, destroyed the culture which was rich with gold, and proceeded to bring all that gold to Spain much to the concern of England and France. England, recruiting naval officers in the manner they had, and the rigors of their sea fairing discipline made it easy for rebellion at sea to cast off their nation and become a pirate.

Privateers were acts of piracy backed by countries, to prevent the Spanish from keeping too much gold of their newly conquered land. It didn’t take long for those privateers to cast away their nations and the burdens of their ownership in favor of freedom. So the exploits of L’Ollonais, Captain Morgan and Black Beard may have been violent and against the law, but the law makers had broken many laws as well. Those pirates wanted freedom from the heresy of nations. These very pirates were the first democracies in the world. Pirates had elections, and insurance, and were certainly the first organizations in the world to show a successful democracy and the ability of a small few to stand up to the tyranny of nations. Without question, the very popular book Buccaneers of American by Alexander O. Exquemelin which was published just shy of the 1700’s sat on the book shelves of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who at their time collected thousands of books. It is no accident that the exploits of the pirates in that book paved the way for the bold words of the founding fathers, because the pirates had managed to wreak havoc against the mighty English. Using the same basic principles as the pirate code, The Declaration of Independence was written with a bit more education behind the quill that wrote it, but with equal sincerity. In fact, in the final battle against the English during the War of 1812, Jean Lafitte helped Andrew Jackson defeat the English in New Orleans by using the pirates that ran with Lafitte to break the English will. Pirates have played an important role in the foundations of America, and I love them for it! Their descendents find themselves riding motorcycles instead of sailing ships.

Now among motorcycle riders, these modern pirates, there are two categories of which I am of the second. The first is the rider that brings out his motorcycle on the first warm day of the year and rides his bike when the sun shines. The second is the one that rides all year, rain, shine, hot or cold. I know many, many men that talk tough, but in reality are soft at heart. They may have large muscle mass, but that is usually to disguise the weakness behind their eyes.

Many of that first type is the union worker that buys a Harley because they have the expendable income, and of that group are thousands of police, firefighter and factory workers, the so-called middle class. They bring out their motorcycles when the sun shines and the weather is warm. And in the windows of their cars and trucks they place a sticker proclaiming, “Harley Davidson,” so as to let people know that they have a motorcycle at home in the garage.

This tendency says a lot about their character.

For a while, I was vice-president of the Suzuki Club of North America and I was on a long ride with them all across Ohio. My wife and I put 500 miles on our bike that day, but I had a dispute with the president because we hit rain and he wanted to stop under an overpass. He figured that because he was president of the organization that I should follow his lead, especially in front of the other members.

I quit the club that day and road in the rain alone with my wife clutched to my back. We all met at a dealership later that day for a membership drive, but that was the last day I ever spoke to those guys. The philosophic differences between us were too great.

You see, this is the fundamental trouble with our nation. America was founded on freedom and independence, bravery, valor, rugged individualism, endurance and a tendency toward isolationism. This new breed of American raised in the labor movement, which has its roots in European socialism attracts the weak, soft minds of those that are afraid to compete.

There is no question that through social legislation the life of the working poor can be improved, as is evidence in the modern union laborer. I’ve known many of those people all my life and their hearts are for the most part soft. They only have courage in groups. They rule through thuggish intimidation because alone they are weak souls that only ride their motorcycles on sunny days if at all. What they fail to understand, which is why socialism fails 100% of the time is that everyone’s success in this life or failure, is depended upon the “character” of the individual.

Collectivism lacks character, and that is why the same people walking around Wisconsin or Ohio with signs protesting the removal of collective bargaining legislation are terrified, because they don’t have the character to exist on their own actions, and they are un-American in my opinion. At least the America I understand.

Now to them, in the Socialist States of America they are American, and they’ll fly their flags proudly. I know them well. Because they lack character and individual strength they are easily mislead since they don’t know their own history, they have allowed others to rewrite it for their convenience.

This is why they believe collective bargaining is their “right.” They have allowed themselves to be soft, and psychologically weak. They only have strength in mass swarms which isn’t strength at all. They are a spreading cancer if anything that will trade freedom for security out of sheer lack of character.

A part of me feels sorry for those union protestors. 90,000 or even 100,000 fools can fill a stadium at a sport event, or even a rock concert. They don’t represent anything but a collective hive of insect minded creatures that can carry signs and attempt to hide their lack of character behind a mass. All they can do is make noise, scream and chant, or inflict vandalism on their opponents, because they don’t have the character to meet the majority equally in a war of ideas. I feel sorry for them because they lack the courage and character to truly be an American.

Our nation was founded by pirates, adventures, and intellectuals that dared to question the European socialism trends that Marx captured in his little pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. I know some real Americans. They are a patient group that is easily overlooked by the media because they are self-reliant. And compared to the socialist, soft-minded, left-winged, characterless, malcontents inspired to chant as a mob to achieve rights that they have no claim to are in for a sad and pathetic awakening, the real Americans will be there when everything collapses because they are always what held the nation together.

The public sector worker has always been a parasite that took far more than it gave, and received a pat on the head like a dog, by politicians just looking for a vote. Collective bargaining gave improper rights to those that didn’t deserve it, by taking from those Americans that worked hard, and taught their children to have character. Such people are what hold the nation together with the heart of those old pirates that were willing to do anything to leave behind the tyranny of Europe.Unions are European by design and that makes them disgusting and doomed to fail and here is the reason why, radicals place too much emphasis on the monotony of a day’s work. They identify themselves as a “laborer” and not person of character and that is why these people will fail at life no matter how much money we give them. They meditate on that which is depressing, those hours of the day that they sell to someone else in exchange for financial compensation. And they expect that for all time they can minimize the impact of that sale through collective bargaining. Their failure is that they lost their character and become their jobs, so thus they see nothing but that time they’ve sold away. They seek to fill that void with more financial compensation.

That’s why they are a broken people doomed to fail over and over in their lives. To hear them speak is like listening to the ghost of a depressed soul that doesn’t know that life has left it. All you can feel is pity for the poor creature.
Thugs, losers and mindless fools are bred because they traded character for socialism.

It is these characters that have turned our society into a Logothete of ineptitude, over regulated and uninventive.
And that is something that deserves to be despised.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Hagan Uses Racist Slurs, Grayson Tries to Start a Fight: The Hypocrisy of Progressives

Bob Hagan, a Democrat from Youngstown recently participated in a disgraceful exchange on Facebook with Kevin Crowther during a debate over S.B.5. Hagan did what most Democrats and union supporters do when they are intellectually challenged by facts, they called their intellectual superiors names. Hagan called Kevin“Buckwheat” on Facebook for all to see.

Here is that exchange.

Kevin is a black man, a conservative that was making some great points that Hagan couldn’t answer. So like a child on the playground at wits end, Hagan retreated into a racial slur.

Isn’t that something? I thought Democrats were all about minority rights, equality for all, and looking out for the little guy. Yet here is Hagan calling a black man, “buckwheat!”

Here is Hagan’s contact information and bio.

http://www.house.state.oh.us/index.php?option=com_displaymembers&task=detail&district=60

If you have lived under a rock for the last century, “Buckwheat” was the little black boy on “Little Rascals.” After Hagan’s comments, many people went to the press and a few websites carried the story. I learned about it during a recent Tea Party meeting. If you read this article, you can see that Hagan is sorry he “got caught” I mean sorry he slipped with the racial slur.

http://www.vindy.com/news/2011/feb/27/hagan-falls-flat-on-face-8212-book-that-/

Why is he sorry? Well, apparently he wants to run for Mayor of Youngstown, and that will never happen if he can’t capture the black vote. So now that he has realized that arguing with people on Facebook is a pretty stupid idea considering that people can take screen shots, like the one you see on this page. Sorry Bob, but you revealed your true thoughts and it won’t be forgotten with double talk. Why does Hagan seem to have problems with black people? The event with Kevin took place on February 19th. It’s not a conservative conspiracy to take his seat, because a year prior to this “buckwheat” incident Hagan was in the way of another man trying to view belly dancers on a stage and Bob wouldn’t get out-of-the-way. The two men had some words, and Bob was knocked out cold, the man who punched Hagan in the face caused a gash in his chin needing 11 stitches. The man who struck Hagan was a black man. However, according to Hagan, all these things that keep happening to him are the fault of some conservatives from Southern Ohio.

Now, you’d think that this would be a big national story. But it’s not. For the most part, the papers and TV stations have given Hagan a pass. After all, he’s one of them, he’s a progressive, so his answers that he didn’t mean “buckwheat” in a racial way, is accepted.

Now here is another one of those liberals that just doesn’t seem to connect the dots in his mind, listen to Alan Grayson talking about the “hate” and “racism” from Republicans.

But this is the same Alan Grayson that sent this letter to a friend of mine. Have a read and see of those two people match up.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Dear XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX:

On May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square in Chicago, the public rallied peacefully in support of 40,000 workers in Chicago who had gone on strike, to win the right to organize. The police attacked, and eight died.

On July 6, 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, 3800 workers went on strike, to win the right to organize. Three hundred hired and armed goons attacked them. Five people died.

On April 20, 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado, 1200 coal miners went on strike, to win the right to organize. The Colorado National Guard attacked their shantytown, and burned it to the ground. Nineteen people died. Two women and 11 children were asphyxiated, and they burned to death.

Here and around the world, many people have fought and died, so that you and I would have the right to organize.
And so that 250,000 public workers in Wisconsin would have that right, too.

This is not exactly a new idea. Six months after the Ludlow Massacre, President Wilson signed the Clayton Act, prohibiting the prosecution of union members under Antitrust Law. That was almost a century ago.

Two decades later, during the Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as President, he signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. It protects the right to organize. That was over 75 years ago.

The right to organize also is a fundamental principle of international law. Over 150 countries have ratified the “Right to Organize” Convention, an international treaty. It was adopted in 1949, over 60 years ago.
So why are we even talking about this, 11 years into the 21st Century?

Because the teabaggers want to “take back America.” They want to take it back, all right – take it all the way back to the 19th century. When there was no right to organize. When people worked for a dollar a day. When grown men competed against children for jobs. When women were barred from most jobs entirely. When you worked until you died.
Not to mention slavery.

I want to see an America that is healthy and wealthy.

They want an America that provides cheap labor to our corporate overlords. An America where the middle class is chained by debt.

We didn’t ask for this fight. But we have no choice except to fight back. For the survival of the middle class in America. For us, for our children, and for our grandchildren. And so that the victims in Haymarket, in Homestead and in Ludlow did not die in vain.

As Cardinal Spellman said 45 years ago, “it is a war thrust upon us, and we cannot yield to tyranny.”
I’m ready to fight for what’s right. What about you?

Courage,
Alan Grayson

______________________________________________________________________

Here Alan is calling Tea Party supporters “teabaggers” and calling for a fight. Also, included in his email is this emblem of a “fist.” Isn’t that kind of violent?

Let me give Mr. Grayson a history lesson: Slavery was ended by a Republican, Abraham Lincoln. That’s the really tall guy who had a beard for you MTV viewers. He was a conservative.

The labor movement was started by another Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who fought during the first decade of the 20th century to break down anti-trusts and corporate power in machine politics. And you know what, I agree with what Teddy was trying to do. But………after his presidency, Roosevelt went on a grand safari hunt in Africa for an entire year, and every country he visited touted him as a king. Somewhere out there in the Serengeti Teddy became a bleeding heart progressive. Maybe it was his age, maybe it was a form of madness, who knows, but if Teddy had a fault it was that he craved power, and suddenly he didn’t have any power after the presidency. Before returning home, he toured all the nations of Europe dining with kings, queens, princes and Emperors. Everyone wanted to eat from his hand, and it went to his head.

The final blow came when Teddy came back to the United States and saw that his good friend President Taft had allowed machine politics to retake the Republican Party so Teddy decided to run for a third term of president. But the Republicans wouldn’t let him run on their tickets because Teddy had become, too progressive and had lost touch with his conservative principles. So they pushed him out of the party hoping he’d just retire.

All it did was make Teddy angry, because deep down inside, Roosevelt wanted power back so he formed his opinions around the new emerging “progressive” party being formed by “rich” Republicans seeking a utopia type era in America. So while the Republicans divided over progressivism and split the vote during the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson won under a softer form of progressivism on the Democratic ticket.

Wilson adopted many of Roosevelt’s progressive reforms, especially after his wife died early in his presidency. So Roosevelt’s progressive platform filled the intellectual void of Wilson in his grief. But Wilson was an ideological academic and was not as sensible as Roosevelt and progressivism spun out of control. Wilson was a racist to the extreme, but Democrats seem to overlook that, just like they do with their current golden boy, Bob Hagan in Youngstown. Does anybody think Jessie Jackson will come to Youngstown and speak out against Hagan. Or will the Democrats denounce their affiliation with Wilson? You already know the answer.

Alan Grayson attempted to give a history of the labor movement as if to validate the union movement. The fact is, if Roosevelt had not fought hard for the worker rights against the corporate greed, they’d still be going on to this day. It took a president to provide that kind of leadership. The union movement only rode on Teddy’s coat tails and a friendly Woodrow Wilson administration that was so lost it was easy for the unions to take credit. When F.D.R came to the presidency, which was Teddy’s younger cousin, Franklin also suffered the Roosevelt tendency to elitism that came from their New York high society roots. Franklin came to power in government as a state senator when Teddy was most progressive and it seemed to have a serious influence on Franklin.

Franklin had another problem aside from being a progressive leaning young man……..he couldn’t keep his pants on, and had multiple affairs while married to Eleanor.

Eleanor forgave these imperfections, but she lost interest in sex with Franklin and buried her time into social and political causes. She wasn’t doing all that social work because she wanted to fix the world. She was trying to fix the world because she could fix her marriage.

These were psychologically messed up people, these progressives. Does Eleanor remind you of anyone? Listen to her here.

Now progressives might listen to that and think, “oh, she’s speaking my heart.” I hear something different. I hear a woman that desperately wants sex. She was well aware that her husband was sneaking his long time mistress, nicknamed Mrs. Johnson into the White House during 1941. It wasn’t revealed to the public until the 1960s. It left Eleanor drowning in jealous betrayal and a yearning for what every woman wants, and F.D.R wouldn’t give it to her. She was suffering from the same dilemma that thousands of women suffer from, an attempt to find redemption in a career of some kind only to find out much later that nothing can fix a broken heart. Such imperfections should not be followed, as they appear to be. They are to be avoided. Broken minds do not make the type of people anyone should attempt to emulate.
And here is a fan of Eleanor, they have a lot in common.

How about that deficit control and all that job creation?

It’s quite obvious what the facts are, and the days of pushing this stuff under the rug are over. Progressives are a broken people, and the labor movement is teaming with progressive influence. The name calling from Democrats and the hypocritical, divisive politics won’t fly any more. These are people who can’t even fix themselves so how can they fix anything in government.

Progressives are all about remaking the world. They don’t care how they do it. They’ll attempt to pound people out of their way if they have to, because these progressives are trying to outrun their own form of insanity.

I can speak for myself. I don’t want anything to do with progressive thought. I do want to take the nation to a period before progressive philosophy took over the American consciousness like a sickness. I would be the first to fight for worker rights against corporate greed, and I don’t need a labor union of power hungry progressives to tell me that it’s right to treat people fairly.

And I don’t want anything to do with a group of politicians that speak out of both sides of their mouths. Bob Hagan got caught using a racist slur. Alan Grayson is trying to incite violence among the union rank and file. I would suggest any financial damage caused by union radicals should be sent to Mr. Grayson for his incendiary comments and blind rhetoric, spewing half-baked historical facts to the masses that look to him for the truth, which he fails to offer. Instead he panders to the mob providing viability to his progressive philosophy, which has set America on a path of the pathetic as Republicans spend half their time defending themselves for far less impositions than what these Democrats have committed, recently.

If we follow the progressive path, we will continue to fail. If we continue to listen to the double talk of people like Hagan, Grayson, Clinton and many others, that are lost in their own personal problems and attempt to fix the world where they fail to fix themselves. We don’t need a world made in their broken images. Government is not their playground for experimental progressive politics which sends us all on a path to be second-rate in the world market place.

And unions are not a right given by government. They should absolutely be illegal. They have no place in public funding, and what Grayson fails to point out in his child like grasp of history is that his beloved F.D.R also said that no public union should ever enter the mind of any politician. But he won’t tell the mushy minded followers of his rhetoric that. He is able to mislead his flocks of sheep because it’s worked in the past, and the plan is for it to work in the future.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

“Oh What Big Teeth You Have”: How much do police and firefighters cost in West Chester?

I wondered why when the film Red Riding Hood was announced to be released, film producers were re-telling that old child hood story. Can’t they come up with anything else? Then I watched all the “collective bargaining” debates over the last couple of weeks and realized that people needed to relearn how the wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood, so the timing of the film seemed suddenly appropriate. In that story The Wolf disguised itself as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, so to take the poor little girl by surprise trying to appear as something she trusted.

I have held on to information regarding the amount that Police and Fire Departments cost their communities for several months now. When I first came across this information it was way back in October of 2010. The West Chester Police Department was putting up a levy, and many of the people who were against the Lakota Levy were of course against the police levy. I assured many of those people there was no way people would pass the Police Levy, not as strapped as the community was, and the cops were crazy for asking. After all, weren’t they already very well compensated? I had seen the numbers, where some of them were making well over 90K per year. Some people in the community had no idea that the police and fire departments made so much. Many, myself included thought that police and fire fighters should be well paid, because we ask them to do a lot in the community, and figured that a good wage was somewhere around 55K to 65K per year. 100K per year seems outrageous, but that’s what the numbers told me was going on.

Below I include that list of all police and fire department staff in West Chester, Ohio where a levy was just approved in November that are currently making over 60K per year. This is public information because they are public employees. They report to the public! Not the other way around. They chose to work for the public, so should not be upset that this information is available. The reason it’s available is so that the community can understand how their tax money is spent. In this case, when we are discussing the problems with collective bargaining it has been the police and firefighters that have been complaining that they should somehow be exempt from the debate, because as they put it, “when society runs away from danger, they run to it.”

For the convenience of protecting society, I would say they are worth something like I described above. But anything over 65K I’d be against. The median household income in West Chester, Ohio is just a bit above 90K. Some of those homes are from single income families, but vast majorities are dual income homes, or homes where two married people and a child are working, which stacks up the numbers. So the misconception that residents in the wealthy area of West Chester are all rich is just that, a misconception. Divide the median income by two and that gives you the average wage in West Chester of around 50K per year. Yet through collective bargaining, the police and firefighter unions, just like the teachers unions, have driven up the cost of their service to extraordinary levels. The levy in November had to be implemented for one primary reason and that was to deal with the “step increases” scheduled for the upcoming years. That means that many of the people on the list you’ll see below are scheduled for an increase just because of their tenure. It doesn’t matter if they are already at a wage level that the rest of society deems reasonable. The collective bargaining agreements don’t care about common sense. The union mentality is that they don’t care where the money comes from. They have become extraordinarily arrogant over the years and many Republicans have been soft and non-combative, and have not meant them equally on the field of battle in the arena of ideas. Republicans have routinely caved under union pressure. This left Democrats to ram through State Revised Code and collective bargaining negotiations that are quite insane if looked upon with financial eyes.

Yet this is the cause of the current financial crises being felt all across this country. And in a few locations, like Ohio and Wisconsin a new type of conservative is being put into political positions by people who are sick of the game. These conservatives, driven by the Tea Party are expected to actually do the job, not cut deals with machine politics. And that’s part of what everyone is confused by. The United States is a Republic, not a democracy. If you don’t like what the representatives in government do, dump them on the next election. But what these Republicans are doing, they aren’t doing it for the Koch brothers, or any other corporate interest. They are doing it because it has been noticed, first by the Tea Party people all across the nation, that we need government to operate more like a business, in order to achieve a smaller government with more fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, public sector jobs, like fireman, police officers and teachers who have used emotion to negotiate great wages are going to be the first to endure this scrutiny, which must happen.

Those three public sector unions, teachers, firemen, and police have used emotion for a long time to pass tax increases that their union leaders clearly understand must happen in order to sustain the contracts they’ve negotiated with school boards, trustees and city councils. In the case of West Chester, which is no different from any place else, signs went up all over our community in November reminding us how important police are to our safety, and we must pass a levy to keep our families safe.

We hear the same thing from firemen when they need to increase their funding, and we all know that’s what happens in schools. It’s all about the kids, right!

But when you understand that at some point someone in the union leadership should have recognized that they were maxing out their wage levels, someone should have put on the wage brakes, but nobody did. They seem to really think that wages can continue to climb at a proportional rate regardless of productivity or actual job skills.

One of the questions I asked of several public officials is who regulates how much overtime firemen and police apply to their jobs? Who decides if it’s needed or not, because what’s happening is many of the senior officers are logging more OT hours closer to their retirement so they can have a greater retirement payout. But why? Who is protecting the tax payer from such cost overruns? Because that job isn’t being done.

I can say that in companies that I’ve worked for; overtime is something that we always watched carefully. We look at labor hours each week and determine what any OT gave us in relation to product output. Who’s doing that for the public sector, because the costs according to the list below appear to be extremely high! If such payrolls as listed below were submitted in the private sector to a careful business owner, heads would roll in a major way at such obvious waste. But in the public sector, such costs over runs are just part of the way business is done. This is why these organizations are afraid of S.B.5. They know in their hearts they’ve been gaming the system for a long time, and they are being exposed. The manipulative marketing techniques are losing their appeal, especially when America has the opportunity to see these public sector workers in action during these protests.

Many of these public workers have buried themselves in debt, and their lifestyle dictates such high levels of income, even though it’s always been unsustainable. Nobody told them that though. Their union leaders just encouraged them to continue buying luxuries without question so long as their union dues were paid on time.

Now they are worried because they see the public anger headed in their direction. The old tricks aren’t working, so now their union leaders are resorting to violence and the kind of threats that got us into all this trouble to begin with.

You see, the reason I don’t want to support unions is because of the radicals behind the movement. It’s nothing against the members themselves, but I despise bullies and there have been a lot of bullies emerging lately. I have two examples below.

These public workers have not been so well compensated because of their incredible value. They’ve been so well compensated because of the strong-armed tactics of the unions, and the weakness of our public officials we put into office that did not stand up to them over the years. This allowed for the incredible budget problems we have today. There is not an infinite amount of money being held at the end of a rainbow by some rich leprechaun, like the Koch brothers or anybody else, that if released would save everyone. Those types of fantasies are the rhetoric of the economic illiterate. The rich will always be rich. If you go after them, they’ll just move to another country and take their jobs with them. In fact, that’s exactly what’s happened. Where are the jobs? Mexico, India, China, Europe, and why? They don’t want to deal with union thugs. So what’s the response from SEIU? “We have to become global.” Good luck with that in China. Such a thought shows the vast ignorance of union leadership and their understanding of economics.

One such extreme example of this union mentality is the below letter sent to the senate in Wisconsin just after they voted to strip away collective bargaining. This isn’t a new strategy by the union radicals. This went on in the 60’s and 70’s to great effect. I see them no different from an organized crime element. The sole purpose of this letter is to strike fear in the minds of these politicians and discourage any courageous union reforms in the future. This letter is complete as written minus the senders email address; misspellings are left as they were written. The source of this letter is 620 WTMJ Wisconsin News Radio. They are pushing for a police investigation which appears to be not happening, which in itself should be shocking! This letter was signed. I would expect to see this on the front page of every newspaper and this person should be immediately taken into custody for his terrorist’s threat. But I can find no place where this has happened as of this writing.

http://www.620wtmj.com/shows/charliesykes/117726263.html?blog=y

____________________________________________________________________________________________

From: XXXX
Sent: Wed 3/9/2011 9:18 PM
To: Sen.Kapanke; Sen.Darling; Sen.Cowles; Sen.Ellis; Sen.Fitzgerald; Sen.Galloway; Sen.Grothman; Sen.Harsdorf; Sen.Hopper; Sen.Kedzie; Sen.Lasee; Sen.Lazich; Sen.Leibham; Sen.Moulton; Sen.Olsen
Subject: Atten: Death threat!!!! Bomb!!!!
Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes
will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain
to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it
will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit
that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for
more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.
WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in
the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me
have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that
support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing
with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand
for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many
others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records.
We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a
nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave
it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the
message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are
now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a
demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed
in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent.
This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t
tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are
not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided
to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s
necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making
them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families
and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you. Please
understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked
everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel
that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives
of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and
say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The second event occurred at the Liberty Twp Tea Party meeting on Monday March 7, 2011. That meeting focused on excessive costs and red tape that business must endure to do business. Much of that discussion centered on the effects of the “CAT Tax,” prevailing wages, unemployment rate increases, and problems centering on the 1099 forms. Roger Reynolds spoke about the ridiculous regulations in the government building in Hamilton where if mail is delivered to the wrong floor, the mail cannot be just walked up to the next floor, but must be resent through the post office, which defies common sense. The gist of the discussion was that most of the regulations in place were simply to preserve jobs, which has a noble intent, but has directly contributed to the budget problems all across the State of Ohio, and the nation of the United States.

Things became exciting as the meeting was closing. A teacher and a fireman, crashed our Tea Party to protest S.B.5. Being good Tea Party people, there was no anger at this imposition, but a lively discussion erupted as the two public workers stood before the crowd of approximately 250 people and pleaded to us not to support the S.B.5 Bill. The argument centered on the usual stuff, “S.B.5 will put us out of work. It’s not fair to ask us to work for less. Who’s going to pay our pension fund?”

They spoke for about 15 minutes then started repeating themselves. The Tea Party people had been very patient asking hard questions, but never getting divisive. Since the building we were renting had it’s time expire some of us starting folding up the chairs to put them away and let the two public workers know that the meeting was over, as politely as possible. Before they left, I approached the two workers and asked them, “So what do you propose to do? How do we pay for you? Raise taxes even more?”

We shook hands and parted disagreeing, but not hateful to each other. They didn’t have an answer on how to pay for their work. Especially when you realize how much we are spending on public workers. For those workers, I found out the teacher was only making 52K and he had a Master’s Degree. That didn’t seem unreasonable, but I know of many more public workers out there that have allowed “collective bargaining” to give them wages that would be unheard of in the private sector. Many of these so-called middle-class jobs that police, firefighters, and teachers are engaging in are at the top of the pay scale for any job, and when they argue that they are just simple middle-class citizens that are sacrificing themselves for the good of our nation and our future, it leaves you scratching your head when you find out how much they make, because in a lot of house holds, their income makes them considerably wealthy compared to the other 83% of the state that is not a part of “collective bargaining.”

I thought about the Tea Party crashers for a good part of the week and considered their audacity of coming to that group uninvited to make a personal emotional plea. They felt empowered to do so. Their action demonstrates their mentality which truly believes they are entitled to the benefits they’ve become accustom to.

Because of these two actions I decided to put the information I had been holding for so long onto these pages for others to see, because if we’re ever going to fix these problems, we all need to understand what we’re dealing with. So here is that list I mentioned of the police and fire officers and support staff of West Chester Twp. It’s not to put a specific light on them, because the problem is statewide, even nationwide. But because they just passed a levy a few months ago and are in my community, so I already had these numbers. They make a good example of how much these services cost. It becomes clear when looking over this list that the police and fire department unions are trying to protect this very lucrative compensation that collective bargaining has yielded them. This is why they are protesting S.B.5 so furiously, and this is why they are already planning to put the issue on a referendum for the November ballot, hoping to return to the “good ol’ days” that they are currently enjoying once S.B.5 becomes law by the end of March.

From a management side, it is also clear why our taxes are so out of control. The reason for S.B.5 is to put local communities back in control of these types of costs, which of course the unions don’t want. They want chaos so they can continue to push up the costs of their members. To give you an idea how much the union is relied upon among the people listed above I can report that there are two police captains on that list that are not in the union, because their positions are a bit like a superintendent of a school system. They currently have appeals filed where a judge struck down their attempts to re-join the union on grounds that they would not be impartial to negotiate contracts if they were a part of the union. This says everything about where those captains’ loyalties are. A judge’s opinion wasn’t good enough so the appeals were filed. This is the game we’re playing and what they are protecting.

And who could blame them? These people are being paid “extremely” well, and they know it. What is disappointing is that they aren’t putting the good of the community in their thoughts. Further taxation among a public that is making 30% to 45% less in most cases is the only option they are interested in exploring.

My mind on this issue is open because danger doesn’t impress me. Many are not comfortable looking at firefighters and police officers, or even teachers with scrutiny because there is an inner guilt that is built into all of us not to question these professions. It’s considered un-patriotic. For many, many years the media has pandered to these groups in order to get their support in exchange for stories. Talk show hosts claiming to wrap themselves in the American flag hang themselves to police and firefighters particularly after 911 in order to associate their image with justice. And for year’s police, judges, lawyers and many others in the legal profession have formed a brotherhood of nepotism that cannot be ignored as they share in the defense of that thin blue line. But worst of all has been politicians looking for the FOP vote. Those politicians are just as guilty of pandering to bloc voting with police and fireman as those accused of doing the same with immigrants and other minorities.

As I look at the wage rate numbers and watch the protests on TV about collective bargaining, I now understand how, Little Red Riding Hood ended up in the stomach of the wolf. “Oh Grandma, what big eyes you have.”

“The better to see you with.”

The enemy that seeks to eat us comes to us as a trusted representative in order to lure us close enough to eat. It’s a classic story that we teach our young to avoid these very types of pitfalls. Is the wolf evil for wanting to eat Little Red Riding Hood? No. It’s just a wolf. It eats to fill its belly. That’s all it understands.

The dark side to the pandering of police officers and fire departments by politicians for such a long time is the same as the reason many people appease a bully. Nobody wants to be on the bad side of the police, because there are plenty of stories of retaliation from “the brotherhood.” Massaging the ego of someone more powerful is the most effective way to avoid trouble, and politicians and other media personalities are very guilty of doing just that. The cost of that pandering can be seen in the wages which are in my opinion way out of control. In organized crime they might call it a “paying for protection.” In our communities, we call it a “tax increase.”

Now that S.B.5 has been put on the table, I’m sure it’s shocking to many of these unions to see that a great number of people see through the game they’ve been playing for such a long time. I’m sure many of them are hurt, because most of the employees in the public sector believe in what they are doing. Like most people they put on blinders to the negatives around them. We all know of trouble in our work places, improprieties that we choose to overlook because that’s how we get up and go to work every day. Most of the public workers are no different, and aren’t openly plotting to bankrupt the communities they work in. They see themselves as heroes, because they’ve been told that by so many over the years. It is difficult for them to suddenly see themselves as the “big bad wolf.” But the reality is that’s how people really feel deep down inside. Appeasement is confused with respect.

To me, a hero is someone who acts out of sacrifice. Running into danger when the rest of society runs away is what the tax payers pay those people for, so they do it for money, which is fine, but don’t pretend that doing a job that’s dangerous makes someone heroic with danger being the qualifier of heroism. The real heroes are those that do good deeds without any compensation, not even a pat on the back, because it’s the right thing to do. Paying over 90K for police and firefighters doesn’t qualify as heroism. It qualifies as an expensive employee for the community.

When the threats and intimidation strategies come into play we see what these people we thought were heroes are really about. A hero would admit that they have been taking too much from the community and would come to the table and put themselves in line with the rest of the community because they are public servants. They wouldn’t seek to send threatening letters to senators, call people names, or crash local Tea Parties to plead to the emotions of the good public just trying to do the right thing and afford our tax burdens.

The Big Bad Wolf only thinks of filling its belly even if it means eating the innocent.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Space Race is Just Beginning: As the Space Shuttles End.

Darryl Parks of 700 WLW hit on something sensitive with me on his March 10, 2011 show. He was reminiscing about the recent Space Shuttle landing with just two more shuttle missions to go. Listen to that broadcast here.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think NASA in Florida and Epcot Center also in Florida are two of my favorite places on Earth. I am very supportive of massive cuts to the federal budget. But of all the programs that I think the government has done right it’s the work done at NASA that is the best. For NASA, I do not regret the tax money spent at all. It gives me a tremendous amount of pride to walk the NASA facility.

The work done at NASA directly propels our science and does create jobs making America much of what it has been regarding a technological powerhouse in the world marketplace. And it is a sign of the times that funding to our space work was one of the first things cut, well before the entitlement culture, which is a terrible shame. It will be a sad day when over 6,000 NASA employees are laid-off in the Florida facility and I will be deeply touched to watch one of the next two space shuttles land at Wright Patterson Air Force Base within the next couple of months.

So the obvious question that Darryl asks, and I’m asking and tens of thousands of aviation enthusiasts are asking is, “What’s next? What’s the plan?”

Well, the government is getting out of the space business and is turning it over to the private sector, which is the same thing many of us that are education reformers want to see happen with education regarding School Choice. I believe that once the government is out of the space business, private industry will suddenly find the chains cut and a technological leap will ensue.

So to give hope to that possibility read the below article from www.Space.com. This is the future, like School Choice is the future of education. While I am sad to see the great organization of NASA coming to an end as we know it, I am excited to see the unlimited possibilities that the private sector can unleash upon our civilization.

It looks to be a very exciting time. Many of the jobs at NASA should find work within the private industry within the next few years. It may not be as secure as the employment they had at NASA, but it will be filled with adventure!

Link for the below article: http://www.space.com/10548-private-spaceflight-ready-2011.html

The private space industry has long been viewed as fledgling. But this once-pejorative term has taken on new meaning this year, as a roster of successes and fast-paced growth throughout 2010 suggests private spaceflight is ready to take off in 2011.

This year saw the very first launch of commercial space company SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster, and later the first liftoff of the firm’s Dragon spacecraft, which launched atop a Falcon 9 to Earth orbit and then was recovered from the Pacific Ocean. Another company, Virgin Galactic, achieved some major milestones, including the first glide test of its suborbital spaceliner, SpaceShipTwo. [Gallery: First Solo Flight of SpaceShipTwo]
Multiple private-sector space firms are moving into full power, going well beyond powerpoints and hand-waving. Still, the coming year, according to experts and analysts contacted by SPACE.com, is likely to feature battles between “same old space” and the ascension of “new space.”
Commercial landscape
“The space industry has never seen such a rich and varied commercial landscape,” said Carissa Bryce Christensen, managing partner of consulting firm The Tauri Group in Alexandria, Va. “New markets are emerging and established ones are changing.”
Christensen said that entrepreneurs are testing new launch and on-orbit capabilities in the real world, trying to move beyond development and demonstration and into sustainable, profitable operation. Large firms are changing their game plans in response.
“The successes and setbacks of 2011 are going to make it the most interesting year in the history of commercial space,” Christensen predicted.

Commercial space is finally coming into its own, and 2011 represents a year of enormous potential for this developing industry, said David Livingston, founder and host of the radio/Internet talk show “The Space Show.”

“The key will be to systematically move forward, building success upon success,” Livingston said. “I believe the coming year will reward patience, achievable goals, business fundamentals, reasonable business risks and a safety mindset.”
In terms of trends for the space industry, Livingston foresees a move away from big government programs in favor of economically managed and leaner commercial space ventures and projects.

“I believe this trend will continue through 2011 and beyond. That said, I do not think our space program should be one or the other, government or private,” Livingston said.”I believe we can now, more than ever, effectively create public/private partnerships to guide us into space and our future.”
Squarely in the spotlight

The scheduled retirement of NASA’s three-orbiter space shuttle fleet next year will also likely affect the landscape.
“I think the environment for 2011, although much improved from the religious war in 2010, will still see continued debate about the future direction of NASA with shuttle retirement,” said Brett Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group that includes commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers and service providers.

Alexander said he thinks commercial space will be “squarely in the spotlight” with an expected ramp-up of both suborbital flight testing and multiple orbital launches and re-entries under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) partnership agreements with U.S. industry.

NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program is investing financial and technical resources to stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate safe, reliable and cost-effective space transportation capabilities.
“So, with steady progress on the technical front, it should help to solidify NASA’s new direction to develop commercial capabilities,” Alexander said. Battleground “2010 was the year that war broke out between commercial and cost-plus space,” observed Jim Muncy, president and founder of PoliSpace, an independent space policy consultancy based in Alexandria, Va.

“A rational White House, which nobody can accuse of having an ideological bias in favor of commercial business and privatization, decided that the nation couldn’t do much, let alone everything, the ‘traditional’ way,” Muncy said. “To actually use the International Space Station and explore space, the private sector needed to play a greater role in both.”

Muncy said that as nasty and counterintuitive as the long debate of 2010 was, next year — especially in the context of the new Congress, which has vowed to cut government spending — will see “the rubber hit the road” in several fronts of this war.

For 2011, Muncy forecasts:
• At least two companies that operate suborbital reusable launch vehicles will fly science payloads for NASA, and piloted vehicles will have their first flight tests.
• A SpaceX Dragon will carry a mammal to low Earth orbit and possibly to the International Space Station.
• The effort to build a commercial crew spacecraft will move forward, while overall budget pressure on NASA will slow down Florida Senator Bill Nelson’s grand compromise (which, among other things, gave money to commercial companies and NASA to develop and build new rockets).
• The Commercial Space Launch Amendment Act’s “informed consent” regime for Federal Aviation Administration regulation of commercial human spaceflight will clash with some politicians’ desire to kill commercial crew efforts.
• The fight over human-rating of commercial crew will get heated, as will a scrap for control over this rating between NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the agency’s Kennedy Space Center.
“Not a prediction but a hope,” Muncy said, is that “Republicans will remember they like the private sector and stop mindlessly bashing commercial.”
Fiscal meltdown

Rand Simberg, a space policy and technology consultant and a former aerospace engineer, isn’t optimistic that Republicans will get fully behind commercial space.

“Despite the growing confidence in the ability of the commercial sector to do human spaceflight, the incoming Republicans may continue to wage war on the new NASA direction, in opposition to their usual stated principles of free enterprise and competition, for no reason other than it came from a weakened Obama White House,” Simberg said.
Overall, next year “may be the year that business-as-usual collides with budgetary reality,” he predicted.

Simberg said that “even the most pork-devoted politicians will have to recognize that the only way for NASA to have a viable human spaceflight program going forward is to rely on fixed-price launch contracts from new, more cost-effective providers for the now-mundane task of simply getting astronauts to orbit and back.”

On the suborbital front, Simberg said that 2011 may be the year that regular flights of fully reusable vehicles — both horizontal- and vertical-landing — will take off.

That being the case, Simberg added, such suborbital flights “will start to develop the experience in high-tempo launch operations that will inform the eventual development of cost-effective space transport all the way to orbit.”
Availability and schedule

Likely to be a nexus of private sector space action is Spaceport America, now under construction near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic will run commercial operations from Spaceport America, with billionaire founder Sir Richard Branson recently setting his sights beyond suborbital passenger takeoffs.

“Virgin Galactic has shown in the past few years how private sector investment and innovation can lead to a rapid transformation of stagnant technologies,” Branson said. “We are now very close to making the dream of suborbital space a reality for thousands of people at a cost and level of safety unimaginable even in the recent past.

“We know that many of those same people, including myself, would also love to take an orbital space trip in the future,” Branson added, “so we are putting our weight behind new technologies that could deliver that safely whilst driving down the enormous current costs of manned orbital flight by millions of dollars.”

Earlier this month, Branson revealed that Virgin Galactic will be supporting work done by Sierra Nevada Space Systems (SNC) and Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) on commercial space vehicles for NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Program.
Both SNC and OSC are pursuing vehicle designs featuring reusable lifting-wing bodies and runway landings, which Virgin Galactic sees as possibly revolutionizing orbital space flight.

Rick Homans, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, said that the pace of activity continues to pick up throughout the industry — and Spaceport America is no exception.

“In 2011, we expect to be in the midst of our pre-operations phase — hiring contractors, developing policies and procedures and conducting all kinds of tests and drills to ensure we are ready to go operational in 2012,” Homans said.
Homans said that from the inquiries they have received, he anticipates Spaceport America’s vertical launch area should be very busy in 2011. Other companies such as UP Aerospace, Armadillo and other operators have already inquired about availability and schedule, he added.

“I see 2011 as the year to get ready for 2012, when I predict we will have our first commercial launches from Spaceport America,” Homans said.
• Gallery: Photos of the Dragon Space Capsule, Dragon Video
• Top 10 Private Spaceships Becoming Reality
• Photos: SpaceShipTwo’s First Solo Test Flight, Video of the Flight
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society’s Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

_____________________________________________________________________

For those of us that want to see this grand adventure take place, we must support the commercialization of space with the same enthusiasm that we are pushing government budget controls and education reform, because the future is in front of us, if only we can muster the courage to embrace it.

Now, listen to Richard Branson talk about Virgin Galactic.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Jim Tressel, John Kasich Speak From the Fires of Columbus

The nation’s eyes were on Columbus, Ohio March 8th, 2011 for more than one reason, but shared a common sickness.Here is a clip from Governor Kasich’s State of the State speech and the reaction from those that don’t agree with S.B.5. Of note is the teacher upset that she is about to lose her retirement.

One thing that we must wonder is where did those people riding the system with such wonderful benefits think the money was coming from? With all their education didn’t they do the math? Did they think the system could grow and grow and grow without the revenue running out at some point?

The answer is, no, they didn’t. Because such realities are ugly truths that school administrations and other tax payer funded organizations seek at every opportunity not to consider.

For Police and Firefighters, they use a perceived “danger” to justify their extraordinary costs. “We run to danger when others run away.” It takes an argument away from logic and places it in emotion, so the people who fund the whole business don’t think about the reality, because most people want to run away from danger and will gladly throw any amount of money at a situation to “feel” safe.

But in schools, the way they disguise their perils is through sports. Sports are a wonderful unifying factor that virtually everyone can sympathize with and it keeps people entertained and from prying too deeply into the secrets that are pushed under the carpet.

This is why when it was discovered that Jim Tressel, head coach of the OSU Football Program had covered up improprieties at Ohio State University that many on the inside were well aware of, or had plausible deniability, but on the outside Ohio State is marketed as a beacon of academic and athletic excellence. So to appease the growing anger at having been caught attempting to cover up improper behavior from players on the football team, the school imposed a two game suspension and fined Tressel $250,000 of his $3.5 million annual salary.

For details of those improprieties listen to this exchange between Bill Cunningham and Lance McAlister of 700 WLW.

Ohio State hopes that the NCAA will be appeased and not implement further punishment to the football program. After all, Ohio State is one of the largest universities in the country. Its football team is nationally recognized and in the end, this is wonderful advertisement for the school that sells a tremendous amount of merchandise to former alumni and potential students. It’s big business.

To understand that business a bit I refer to the great film, The Program staring James Caan which came out in 1993. Caan reminds me a lot of Jim Tressel in that film so if you want to understand the situation of college football, and how it is used to sell the university system to millions of fans, have a look at this clip.

Improprieties are routinely overlooked because it’s a competitive world especially in sports, and the difference between winning and losing for a university is millions of dollars. But why? Because if the public perception can be built around a “program” and the public feels their money is going to produce a winner, people have shown time and time again that they are willing to look the other way to have victory.

Much of the film The Program, James Caan’s character is putting out fires from his players that are constantly getting in trouble. But as Caan said in a review board considering suspension of the star quarterback, “70,000 people don’t come out on a Saturday to see other students do math! They come out to see a star!”

Ohio State and it’s fans will seek quickly to put this whole issue behind them, and on opening day it will be forgotten, except for Tressel’s absence and the suspension of the other suspended players, because everyone wants to look the other way, because the fans, students, administration, even the sports world want to discuss a winner.

How does all this apply to John Kasich’s speech, which occurred just hours before the Tressel press conference? Well, because tax payers are finally out of money to throw at police and firefighters that run into danger while the rest of us run away. Many of us, me included, are saying “I’ll be happy to run into danger if it will save me some money.” Danger doesn’t impress me as something to avoid.

And the whole teaching profession has hidden carefully behind the marketing machine of sports. Even small schools have sports programs that communities will seek to attend on an autumn Friday evening. The dirty little secret is that when people look back on their education days, they usually remember the things they did, the games they played and the events they did with their friends as opposed to what they learned on a Thursday in February during history class. Most of the teachers in student’s lives come and go as a montage of faces. Occasionally a teacher here and there jumps out as exceptional, but for the most part the education process is viewed as something to be endured, not embraced and because of that little fact, the education finance system has placed band-aid after band-aid on the situation. Administrators attempt to whisk improper sex cases and other improprieties between students and teachers under the carpet behind public relations consultants and friendly newspapers in the trade-off for sports information. After all, sports pages occupy whole sections of newspapers and reporters need content to fill those pages. And for some households, the sports page offers entertainment that their own child may actually be a part of, and that’s exciting.

Discussion of the blurred lines between education and sports must occur in order to discuss the revenue needs of those institutions. This is something that will come under increasing scrutiny, especially when it comes to School Choice as a spotlight on academics will become the focus with less attention applied to sports programs.

The battles that our society normally regulated to football players on a football field are now migrating into finance and politics, because the real fight has been discovered to be there, not in an entertainment venue between the hash marks. The world is changing because of that shift and those that cling to the old model will find their eyes filled with tears because in this game there will be winners and losers, just like in football. And we can no longer hide those tears with the cheers of football, and the sins that are committed all in the name of winning, because that ethical approach has bankrupted us both financially and morally.

Just look at Jim Tressel, the poster boy of both finance and ethics at Ohio State University to understand what Kasich is trying to protect Ohio from.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Please Save Us Young People: Only The Mindless Will Follow!

There is without question a social engineering strategy behind the political left. Their ideas taken on their own merit are flimsy, and cannot withstand the test of time, they must, must recruit members of their rank from people who have difficulty reading, foreign immigrants trying to get the rest of their families into the country which creates an effective and loyal voting bloc, minorities that have been carefully nurtured into the welfare addiction, and the youth which aren’t old enough to know much because they don’t have the benefit of experience.

That’s why Van Jones below is pandering to the youth. He knows deep down inside that thinking people who can actually reason out the type of rhetoric he utters and won’t follow him. So he needs ground troops that are in a natural state of rebellion from their parent’s conservative ways that are seeking to create their own orbits with insubordinate behavior that provides the escape velocity from their childhoods to do so.

Such rhetoric is seductive to the weak mind, and most youth have not yet acquired strength.

What does it speak of a movement that requires mindless acceptance, or the sole benefit of a charismatic speaker? How deep are the roots of a movement that must capitalize on ignorance and naïveté? We can see the effect of this brain washing ability as thousands of idolizing media students studied Walter Lippmann in college and set them on a course which is obvious to this day.

Lippmann believed that the“governing class” must rise to face the new challenges. He saw the public as Plato did: a great beast or a bewildered herd – floundering in the “chaos of local opinions.” Thousands of those same media students, who now work for CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times and many others carry out what they learned in their youthful drunkenness of the university. Lippmann’s philosophy has been eagerly embraced by left leaning professors to shape the minds of those young people in much the same way that Van Jones is attempting in the above clip.

But not everyone bought into the Lippmann idea. Some journalist approached the profession with an open mind, and formed their own opinion, and never lost the ability to think “critically.” Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your position, Fox News attracts those types of “critical” reporters, and the success of that network says everything. The public sees through the smoke.

Want proof? Have a look at this clip from the 9/12 Rally on Washington in September of 2009. Look how many people were there. Yet only Fox was covering it.

Even if Fox put the rally on, which they didn’t, so many people gathered in one place in Washington D.C. was news. Big news! But the networks and newspapers virtually ignored it, as if they hoped to wipe the incident from the minds of the public. Such an act is a form of collective censorship and this is right out in the open. The media was caught with their hands in the cookie jar on this.

There is a force from within our country to subvert us all and convert us into something else. Those that point it out will be labeled as “crazy” “conspiratorial” “delusional” and any number of names designed to discredit the messengers who attempt to wake up the masses.

Lucky for us all at least one media outlet attempted to hold the media role in the proper context, and for that we all have Bill O’Rielly to thank for it. As Fox News rose to power, it was Bill that set the pace with “real” journalism. And Fox built the network around his philosophy.

Now for people like Van Jones, Fox is a threat. Jones certainly isn’t the only one. But in their quest to expand the welfare state, immigration voting blocs and an ever more influential youth, people like him is ultimately doomed to fail.

Once those kids grow up and learn that everything Jones is saying is a lie, those kids will become the conservatives of their parents, and they’ll switch from MTV, to Fox News, unless they lose too many brain cells in the process to ever fully recover. For those types of people, they are lost beyond recovery. But fortunately for the human race, most of those people can be recovered from the depths of their liberal madness.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Communist Manifesto: SEIU ATTACKS OHIO SENATORS WHILE THEY EAT!

 

Isn’t this a great quote?  Guess where it’s from, The Communist Manifesto. 

My wife and I have a secret hideaway that we like to dine at, hidden from the world and its worries.  Friday March 4th, 2011 was a glorious spring like evening complete with pouring rain, as we sat together in a cantina like setting waiting for our food to arrive.

She had been reading much about quantum mechanics and the latest theories of universal theory rejecting some of the work most recently proposed by Stephen Hawking and was discussing the topic vigorously as the aroma of our food cooking in the kitchen was overtaking our senses.  My mind however was on a discussion I heard on the radio between Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones earlier in the day where they were critical of Senator Jones and Governor Kasich for their aggressive support of S.B.5.   Their position is of the old Republican guard view of “gaming” the system as greedily as the Democrats over the years ever had and it is hard for some of those guys to admit it to themselves.  They are uncomfortable with this “new conservativism” and spent much of their discussion belittling the lack of political understanding of Kasich and the aggressive nature of Senator Jones, as if they hoped that they could somehow turn the tide of anger that has been building for a long time back into some manageable form. 

My mind was also on the Easy Street Café from Wednesday night where Senator Niehaus, Senator LaRose, Senator Bacon  along with several others were harassed by members of SEIU District 1199 led by Monica Moran for passage of the S.B.5 bill just hours before.   Monica stepped into that restaurant with 10 other SEIU members and began chanting at the Senators until the police had to arrive with a helicopter to whisk away the protesters. 

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/03/03/union-supporters-disrupt-gop-senators-restaurant-meal.html?sid=101

The owner of the restaurant had to endure pushing and shoving until the police came, and Moran was not apologetic.  In fact she was quite defiant saying, “The moment of discomfort Senate Republicans may have felt as a result of my expressing my opinion pales in comparison to the extreme discomfort and financial hardships that public employees will endure as a result of SB5.”

My wife and I ate our own food I thought about Moran’s statement.  I have absolutely no tolerance for bullying, and I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone brought up in America couldn’t see that the public workers using such strong-arm tactics for nearly three decades have painted themselves in this corner they find themselves in.   I find it amazing that so many Republicans are weak kneed, including Cunningham and the Sheriff when it comes to taking a hard-line on this issue, insisting on more collaboration, more political procedures, and really more of the same behavior that has delivered our nation to the precipice of destruction.

When Nancy Pelosi and her Congress under the urging of President Obama, where former SEIU head Andy Stern visited the White House several times a week, pushed through the Health Care Bill, and Net Neutrality, and the bail outs, etc, there were many in America that decided that a push back was in order.  That the bullying that had been going on for a long time had gone on for too long, and it’s time to set things straight. 

Senator Jones and John Kasich are doing what many people, me included, want.  I don’t want any collaboration with the type of people who will barge into a restaurant and shout profanity at Senators in an attempt to scare them into “proper legislation.”  That kind of behavior has no place in the American landscape.  It will take the bold actions of Kasich and Senator Jones to do the job. 

Senator Niehaus had to display boldness for removing Senator Sietz who was stalling the vote under the guise of “compromise” and many other measures to undo much of the damage that has already been done by the actions and influence of SEIU and the politicians they control.  The time for negotiation is long over; it’s been a one way street against the American tax payer from the inception of Executive Order 10988 under President Kennedy in 1962.  Since then, the unions functioning with authority have behaved like an organized crime element in our society.  And if politicians don’t fall in line they are intimidated and harassed until they change their views and therefore their votes.   Monica Moran was just reading from the company handbook and her followers truly believe they are wrapped in the flag of the United States fighting for worker rights. 

After the food was done, and our drinks were drained into our bellies, our date was far from over.  Check paid, tipped placed on the table, we left our cantina and proceeded to our other favorite spot, the most romantic place on the face of the planet………the book store. 

We usually spend two or three hours picking out our supply of books for the week, and my wife was intent to find more information on her quantum mechanical theories.  So I went to one of my favorite sections, philosophy.  There wasn’t anything new, I’ve read them all.  They did have the little blue book, The Coming Insurrection in stock which I read and despised as tripe from a bunch of French fools lost in their own elitism.   I saw a copy of my favorite book from Nietzche Thus Spoke Zarathustra which Hitler would distort under the assistance of Nietzche’s power hungry sister while her brother suffered from insanity shortly after the book was completed.   There was also a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, also written by someone who suffered a major intellectual breakdown enduring electro shock treatment to “cure” him of his thoughts.  Zen was written about 5 years later.  Great book, but nothing new there for me, so I headed to the Social Science section. 

In the Social Science section, again I have read many of them.  There is of course all of the Glenn Beck books.  Wonder why they are so popular?  They are right next to all the liberal books; in fact Ed Shultz’s book was right next to Glenn’s.  There was one copy of Ed’s book with 7 of Glenn’s book Broke.  I asked the attendant if the reason was because Ed’s book was selling like “hot cakes.” 

She said, “No, we’ve had that copy since August.” 

I asked her about Glenn’s book.

“We just got those in on Monday.  Can’t keep them.” 

I took a mental note and continued to look over the titles looking for something new.  There are all the Fox people, Bill O’Rielly, the Judge, Morris, Ingraham, all of them selling well.  They must be doing something right.  I saw some liberal books, The Audacity of Hope was there, the cover was torn and looked like it had been looked through a lot, but not purchased, and had experienced another lengthy shelf life.   What becomes clear when traveling through a book store when all the covers are slickly done by professional book publishers and editors is that Americans vote with their wallet.  Once the message gets out in the world of competition the better argument will win, and people will buy that product.  People bought President Obama’s Audacity of Hope when they thought they were reading the book of American’s first black president.  Not someone who was a mouth piece to powerful union interests.  They rejected the idea and the sales have dropped off.  Compare that to Glenn Beck’s An Inconvenient Book,published in 2007, a year before Obama’s book. 

“How often do you order this book?” I asked the attendant.  I noticed there were five of them on the shelf. 

“Once a month,” she said.  “We usually order about 10 at a time. 

My wife found me in the isle and informed me she was going to be a while.  She was having a tough time with her selections. 

I told her to take her time, that there wasn’t any hurry.  As she left my eyes fell on a book of evil, one I read years ago and there it was on the shelf with a new, hip cover designed to entice young hippie impersonators, The Communist Manifesto. 

This version of The Communist Manifesto was just over a hundred pages by the time you read through the forwards and introductions.  So I stood and read the book again while I waited for my wife over the next hour and a half.  And when I got to that last page I thought it was particularly revealing the line they chose to place there, “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.  Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.  They have the world to win!  Working men of all countries unite!”

Suddenly the behavior of Monica Moran doesn’t seem so out of place, if you take it in the context of The Communist Manifesto.

I put the book back on the shelf and thought about what I had just read. 

The attendant came around and asked me, “Are you going to buy it?”

I gave her a disgusted look.  “Hell, no.  I have to go home and take a shower now that I’ve touched it,” I said half-joking.  The girl was a younger girl in her early twenties.  “Tell me something, does this book have any appeal to you?”

She looked at it and said, “The cover is pretty cool.  I’ve heard it talked about by my literature professor in college.  I don’t know.  I think I probably would read it if I was pressed for time and had to do a report on a book.  It’s short and would probably get me some points with the professor because of the subject matter.”

I smiled and nodded knowingly.

The girl looked self conscious.  “Did I say the wrong thing?”

“No, you answered perfectly.” 

My wife was back with an arm full of books.  “I couldn’t make up my mind.”

I just smiled as we proceeded to the counter; my mind was on what the attendant had said. 

The Communist Manifesto is a book for fools and lazy minded youth that lack true worldliness.  It’s designed for the masses because the intent is to create an insect like response to arms, to overthrow the establishment and create a communist world draped in fairness.  It’s a naïve notion born first from Plato’s Republic then glorified in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia written in 1516.  The book has power because it does two things, it’s easy to read because it’s so short, and it appeals to the lazy. 

Capitalism is for competition, but for it to work everyone needs to have a hunger for competition.  Competition brings out the best of the best, and gives those who aren’t the best something to reach for.  It is obvious that one of the imperfections of capitalism is that it leaves behind the lazy, because the lazy do not wish to work in order to better themselves and compete.  To the lazy, the corporations will always be evil entities, because they represent difficulty in competing with others that are “competitive.”  To those lazy citizens communism will always be attractive because it is far easier to hide in the masses under a collective association than to stand as an individual which is how America was founded. 

The Tea Party shows that groups that associate themselves with individuality can come together and work as a unit and function socially as the Constitution intended.  The philosophy that produced The Constitution has produced a successful country, the United States, where we have such a rich and diverse society that it is the only place in the world where all the races of the world actually work together without tribal warfare and even our poor are well off compared to the rest of the world.  The American system works better than anywhere in the world with no exceptions. 

Communism has only produced misery everywhere it’s been implemented.  Everywhere!  It is a half cocked idea created by a mad man soaked in poverty.   He pulled together information from the British Museum to construct his theory along with Friedrich Engels study on the working class struggles.  Marx was hardly a popular person.  You can tell a lot about a person based on who comes to their funeral.  Well, Marx had 11 people at his funeral.

When unions discovered that Marx’s short little book could unite the sectors of society that didn’t read much and tended to have the hobby of drinking, eating and pursuing women, the simplicity of The Communist Manifesto had a great deal of power.   This helped give rise to the Labour Party in England by the 1920’s which destroyed England as an imperial power, which was the goal. 

It should be remembered that the United States broke away from England to avoid imperial control, and our capitalism worked were England was an imperial tyrant.  The United States never sought to become an empire, which is the system Marx studied.  There wasn’t enough data in the mid 1850s to provide any data on capitalism in the United States without empire status. 

But what did the Labour Party in England do to their country?  Well, I have friends in England so I know firsthand.  Also, my son-in-law is from England, and when he found out what kind of opportunities were available to him in American, he wasted no time coming here and working his butt off so he could provide my daughter with a good life.  In England, there weren’t any opportunities for a kid his age.   The townhouses in the country are incredibly expensive.  They aren’t creating any new jobs because nobody is locating there.  It was a big deal to him to see a McDonald’s so close to our house.  He had to go to London to see one.   But they aren’t producing anything and exporting anything.  The Democratic Socialist Party, (the Labour Party) shut down the country and created the kind of European socialism that President Obama and others want to bring to the United States. 

I don’t want that in my country.  I want NOTHING to do with it.  And I want NOTHING to do with ANY unions.  Period.  They were created with socialist intent, and socialism does not work. 

Now, for those that don’t understand how I went from talking about communism to socialism, it’s because socialism is the gateway to communism.  Here are the definitions provided by http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_socialism_and_communism

” Socialism is the idea that the working class, the class that produces the profits, the wealth, the cars, houses, planes, steel, should take over and run things collectively, democratically, for the benefit of the majority (who also “just happen” to be workers too).

Communism is the idea that society should not have classes – exploiters and exploited oppressors and oppressed, and so on. ”

  • Socialism generally refers to an economic system, while communism refers to both an economic and political system.
  • Socialism seeks to manage the economy through deliberate and collective social control.
  • Communism seeks to manage both the economy and the society by ensuring that property is owned collectively, and that control over the distribution of property is centralized in order to achieve both classlessness and statelessness.
  • Both socialism and communism are based on the principle that the goods and services produced in an economy should be owned publicly, and controlled and planned by a centralized organization. Socialism says that the distribution should take place according to the amount of an individual’s production efforts, whilst communism asserts that goods and services should be distributed among the populace according to individuals’ needs.

Collective bargaining is a form of socialism that has been perpetuated by communist sympathizers.  That’s not anybody on Fox News saying that.  It’s not Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else.  They are just stating the facts and history that is available to everyone.   For too many years we’ve allowed these parasites of philosophy to attempt“European Style” socialism to America and we’ve all just let it happen.  We haven’t taken pride in ourselves and defended our way of life properly so those groups that want to bring about socialist ideas took us for granted. 

Republicans are traditionally as I mentioned regarding Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones, conservatives that align themselves with other conservatives and built business and helped create laws.  They tended to be nice, God-fearing people.  But on their watch, these parasites which hold The Communist Manifesto in such high regard have reigned free from impunity.   Many of those Republicans are guilty of what they are accused of, being out of touch and spending too much time on the golf course, and they are partially guilty of letting these labor unions get out of control.  So it’s not just the labor unions fault.  Unions are made up of common, everyday people who are more interested in what Charlie Sheen is doing, or whether or not Lindsey Lohan has on any panties when she gets out of a car.  Such minds are easy to fool and they have been fooled by power-hungry manipulators like SEIU, and the AFL-CIO and the NEA .  Those unions made pay good through collective bargaining which allowed the lazy of our culture to continue to be lazy.  It allowed them to get what they wouldn’t get in normal competition.   And Republicans, the same Republicans that took a soft stance on S.B.5 let them do it because they didn’t want to think about the larger problem.  Those Republicans were lazy themselves taking for granted that the United States would always be here, and that threats to our way of life existed on foreign shores.  They took the labor movement as pests that had to be appeased and went back to their golf game.  So they are guilty too, and still are!

But the urgency we are seeing now comes from a new group of conservatives that are not looking at long political careers, golf games, and fancy dinners with powerful people.  In many cases like Kasich in Ohio, and Christie in New Jersey they are already successful and are not looking at being two term governors, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.  Be bold, and fix our problems.  If the people don’t like it, let them change things with a vote in the next election. 

S.B.5 is not Health Care Reform.  It’s actually the opposite.  S.B.5 is about ripping control from the state and putting it in the hands of communities where it belongs.  It’s not creating more central control like Health Care did.  If the passage of S.B.5. seems aggressive, well that’s because it is.  Time is running out.  There isn’t time to sit down with a bunch of labor leaders and “collaborate.”  That is how things were done in the past and it hasn’t worked.   The union strategy is to just stretch out the negotiation process until public opinion turns against the Republicans.  That’s how Democrats and unions have beaten the crap out of Republicans for years.  That’s why those idiots in Wisconsin fled to the border, because it’s their “mode of operation.”  By delaying the Wisconsin vote, the unions hope to turn the public against Scott Walker, only this time Scott Walker isn’t putting his finger in the air and checking the wind direction.   He’s doing what he thinks is right. 

So of course when Shannon Jones introduced S.B.5, and there was three weeks of testimony, Kasich knew he needed to implement his changes quickly so he can fix all the holes in Ohio.  Everyone played fair and by the process, but they didn’t allow themselves to get bogged down, deliberately.  And Senator Sietz, the rock solid Republican that asked Strickland to lead last year, was one of the Republicans from yesteryear that helped create the problem.  He helped legitimize the labor movement that is intent on implementing a new social order.  Not the rank and file members, they just want a pay check.  But the leadership is certainly after a larger political agenda and that is not acceptable.  So I am deeply proud of Senator Niehaus for not allowing Sietz to stall the vote and play politics with S.B.5. 

Timing is important.  All across this state school levies are threatening to break the backs of property owners everywhere, and once S.B.5 is signed into law, school boards will have a tremendous amount of ability to control their costs and take those levies off the ballots.  Schools like Little Miami can renegotiate contracts and become solvent again, and that’s just the beginning.

Kasich’s motto is moving at the speed of business, and that’s what he’s doing.  Let the unions put the issue on a ballot in November.  Because Kasich will have by then put Ohio on a successful path and if the voters decide to go backwards, so be it.  It won’t be because our Governor didn’t do the job.  It’ll be because Ohioans failed to recognize a threat and take responsibility for the condition of their state.   There won’t be any slack-jawed politicians to blame this time, only a preference for the status quo. 

My wife and I closed out our evening with details I won’t reveal on these pages.  But I personally stayed up till the small hours of the morning reading and thinking. 

This is a battle not between left and right, young and old, rich or poor, but of those that truly want the American way of life, and those that simply want a “kick back.”  And both sides are guilty of playing that game. 

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

White Blood Cells: The Mystery of the Tea Party

The budget battles are waging across the county, most recently in the states drawing a hard-line in the sand, such as Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana, trying desperately not to become the next California. The most intense battle hasn’t even arrived yet however, and that is the battle at the Federal level, where tax and spend liberals like President Obama, and Harry Reid are coming up against a new element that runs deeper than typical, placid conservative Republicans. That new element is the Tea Party, referred to by the media, and all those rampant tax and spend happy politicians, as Tea Baggers.

The Tea Party has brought an element to the political landscape that is difficult for the establishment to understand. Greta Van Susteren of Fox News recently attempted to get her mind around the Tea Party ideal and interviewed several people who tried to understand how a movement as large as the Tea Party is, can function without a leader. The left, who can’t function without a leader, is perplexed as they reach for icons like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. It’s not about them. If they were removed from the discussion there are hundreds of capable people waiting patiently if needed. The real heart behind the movement cannot be seen in such terms.

The best way to explain the Tea Party movement is that you have to consider the United States of America as a human body. It has a life of its own, eating, breathing and interacting with other nations. Now we all know what happens when a body gets sick. We don’t feel well, our temperature may increase, and we may fill chilled, weak, and have a runny nose. When we have a cold we tend to lay down for a bit, take off work and let our immune system fight off the virus. Such sicknesses might be called in America as “recessions.” Our immune system is the election process, and given time, minor illnesses can be overcome.

But there are other viruses and diseases that cannot be easily overcome by our immune system. Viruses like AIDS actually disguise themselves as healthy cells in the body till they are strong enough to attempt to take over the healthy cells in a body.

Cancer is the same kind of subversive disease that hides quietly in the body till it sees an opportunity to strike, and take over the surrounding tissue. We count on our White Blood Cells to identify a disease and to kill it, before it has an opportunity to take over and kill our body’s tissue.

Watch this video of a white blood cell chasing bacteria. Notice that the white blood Cell does not take time to watch TV, or eat at McDonalds. Such concerns are completely irrelevant to the life of a white blood cell. Yet, study the conscious movement of the cell, it is aware of the threat to the body and it is taking action to protect that body.

The United States of America, if looked at like a human body is plagued with many cancer cells attempting to destroy the tissue of the American body. To the cancer cell, this process is not a bad thing. The cancer cell just wants to live like any other cell. The quest for life is what all life shares. But the white blood cell is dedicated to protecting the body from such intrusions so a conflict is expected; we often refer to our immune systems as “fighting off a disease.” We expect it as a natural occurrence. But the cancers that we have in the American body have penetrated our education institutions, so they train the new cells of our body to duplicate the cancer cells. They have penetrated our political system, so as to infect all the cells there to become corrupt and distorted. They have penetrated our families, so the production of strong white blood cells cannot occur so there is no defense in the body to resist them.

Some white blood cells are aware of the cancer cells, and are attacking them directly now. And that is what you might call the Tea Party. The white blood cell is void of attention, concern for power, and greed. That is unless it has been corrupted by a cancer cell or other disease. We know many politicians on Capital Hill that have been corrupted in this way by the disease of “lobby influence.”

But most of the Tea Party people are as pure to a white blood cell in our society as we have to offer. They are selfless defenders of the body called America. They don’t expect financial compensation, powerful positions, or disproportionate amounts of wealth. They are unified by a common cause, and that is the preservation of the body America.

For that reason, the white blood cells called “The Tea Party” do not need a leader to tell them where to go or what to do. All they need to know is what the cancer cells look like, and to attack them the way America expects them to in order to restore the body to health.

The white blood cell is often out-numbered and must take on larger, much scarier cancer cells and bacteria, such as was seen in the video. They will often be outnumbered. But the white blood cell more often than not prevails and life continues for the healthy body. The body can only be measured by its health depending on the strength of its immune system, or otherwise, based on its ability of white blood cells to destroy attackers. This is important because a body is always under attack from foreign invaders.

In America, diseases that the white blood cells called The Tea Party are on the lookout for are socialism, which consumes healthy growth of the body’s tissue by cutting off the flow of blood in the body. Blood to America is its corporations. Other diseases are trickster cells that attempt to weaken the resolve of the white blood cell by disguising itself, such as AIDS. In America such comparisons are in the body’s lack of ability to embrace religion, social norms, and healthy living habits. Such trickster cells will attempt to kill off the white blood cell population with unhealthy pointless endeavors so the resistance is not in place for disease growth. Greed is a specific kind of disease that might be found in the union movement where those cells expect larger amounts of substance to maintain their own existence, tricked by diseased cells into behavior that puts their own lives at risk by overconsumption. This behavior takes away the body’s ability to furnish its other white blood cells with proper nourishment which inhibits healthy growth.

The Tea Party is doing the job expected by the Constitution. The spending habits of government now must be looked at as a disease. And all elements that are attempting to crush our American body must be dealt with. There is no longer time to have the type of compassion that allows cancer cells to live next to healthy cells because we now know with clarity that the cancer cells will 100% of the time attempt to take over the healthy cell.

That leaves just one question. Where do you fit in? Are you a cancer cell, or a white blood cell?

I know what I am. And I know many Tea Party people who are pure white blood cells. The goal of this site is to identify cancer cells and attack them so that we can return to a healthy body, because there is so much cancer in this body we are trusted to protect, that we need to relearn what the diseases are, and what the healthy cells look like, so that the epic battle to overcome our sickness can be resolved and our America can return to health.

Where do you stand?

That also brings up the logical question many have leveled at me. Am I a white blood cell Tea Party guy?

I name this site after a term I wrote about in 2004 called a Overmanwarrior, which was in my mind before there was a Tea Party. I am, as a person most happy in conflict. I am not a turn the other cheek, peace-loving type of person. I respect people who are, and many in the Tea Party reflect that position which I support.

Since I am one of those types that do find myself in conflict, usually under the radar, I operate as I have for many years, alone, so not to incriminate the people around me that I care about. But my best friends are just to the left of my ideas and those are the Tea Party white blood cells that understand what’s important and what to do about it when they see the threat to that importance.

I would consider myself a white blood cell that will 100% of the time take on the largest diseases without endangering my friends. And such endeavors are not the types of battles that peace-loving people are best at. So we all have our role in curing the diseases of the body. My role is different, but very similar. It is just a variation of the white blood cell role intended for the most vicious cancers.

That’s all I’ll write about that role since further revelations will reveal the strategy to the diseases who read my site every day. As I said, the Overmanwarrior role from my 2004 book is based more on fact than fiction. And that’s all I’ll say. But it is a kind of ultra-white blood cell.

The best writers write what they know about. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and I am relieved to see that there is now help which I welcome with enthusiasm.

If there is anything we’ve learned from our first 200 year history in the United States it’s that having checks and balances of elected representatives are not quite enough in this American experiment. Waiting from election to election to act is not enough. What is needed in the body of America are those interested in fighting off disease as soon as they show themselves and keeping those elected representatives honest with diligence, so those political representatives don’t buckle under the temptation of disease to become corrupt and work against the body of our nation. Such a thing should never happen again once America’s immune system kicks in and restores our health once again so the real American dream can be experienced by our descendents.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Blame the Rich: The Marketing Stategy of Socialism

As much as Senator Capri Cafaro championed herself during the S.B.5 debates in Columbus as a representative of the “working people,” she is a perfect example of the type of politician that does one thing while intending another. Here she is grabbing attention during Governor Kasich’s inauguration bragging about how “conservative” she is.

Here she is just a few weeks later pandering to a mob curtailing her political influence.

Who is Capri Cafaro? Well, Doc Thompson digs into the issue during his March 2, 2011 broadcast on 700 WLW.  He talks about her right around the 21 minute mark in the video below.

That’s right, she’s RICH, very, very rich, from a wealthy powerful family.

It is strange how she, and people like her, manage to hide that fact when they are trying to drum up support from the “working people,” who never see that “The Rich” are pretty evenly stacked on both sides of the political spectrum. Yet the way it’s presented to people who are not motivated to do their own research is all the rich are on the right, and that if they were taxed more, then all the worlds’ problems would be solved.

What these manipulators don’t tell people is that the real strategy is something else all together.

It is an easy target to point to the rich and proclaim with anger that they should pay more so those at the bottom can have more. For this reason, socialism will always be an attractive option for a certain percentage of the population that has a tendency toward laziness.

In fact, here is how the protests against S.B.5 are portrayed by Liberation News, a socialist publication that is of course adding fire to the situation in Columbus.

Here is the link to the original article listed below:
http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/victory-to-the-ohio-workers.html

___________________________
Tax the rich and corporations
Ohio corporations get away with paying one of the lowest tax rates in the country, while the people of Ohio suffer because state and local budgets lack funds to pay for needed services. The budget crisis could easily be solved by taxing the rich and the corporations.

GE is one of the largest employers in Ohio. It would have had to pay at a 22 percent tax rate in 2009, but it can deduct massive profits that they make overseas. GE has $84 billion in overseas income held outside the United States. So, it paid no federal income taxes that year and may have gotten over $1 billion as a refund.

While the right wing is trying to use the budget crisis as the excuse to batter the people providing essential services, the truth is that the working people did not cause the crisis. The budget deficits come from actions by banks and the money spent on wars for Big Oil.

—————————————————————————————————————

The problem with the whole Robin Hood Theory, “take from the rich, give to the poor, is that it is misleading.

It’s not about fairness, as it’s disguised. It is all about attempting to capitalize on a natural jealousy that exists between those that have, and those that don’t in favor of an entirely new political idea rooted in socialism.

The reality is that the left, and the socialist leaning left are heavily funded by the rich. In fact, when the Progressive Party held their convention in 1912 it was made up almost entirely of the wealthy that felt guilt and entitlement due to their wealth and desired to use their wealth to reshape the world into a more just and fair society.

People like George Soros and many other very wealthy citizens, particularly in the Hollywood left, pour millions and millions of dollars into the propaganda of socialism, and they are very aware of what they’re doing. In fact, I covered recently in another article that Soros has worked to help fund Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute which is behind the famous Sundance Institute, very popular with documentary films. In fact Soros has personally helped finance a film that attacks capitalism called Better this World.

It is ironic that such people have the audacity to point at the conservative right and blame the rich for all the worlds’ troubles. It is the communist rich that manipulates what they perceive to be the weak, mindless followers of their message, and attack their capitalist rivals, the conservatives.

Yet anybody that understands economics knows that taxing the rich and giving to the poor will only destroy the economy. Because by nature, the rich are not motivated to continue innovating and providing business expertise if there isn’t the promise of gain.


The pursuit of fairness is an audacious exercise in human manipulation. When given too much power, unions have proven to be just as corrupt as corporations ever were, so the experiment has failed both ways. The only protection against both factions is provided in the Constitution’s 10th Amendment. Through states rights, and less centralized power to the federal government, citizens can participate in their government and control much of the corruption that is inevitable.

Here is the ideologue of socialism Michael Moore. He is one of the biggest cheerleaders of this “tax the rich” idea of wealth redistribution.

Yet this is what the average person thinks about the situation in Wisconsin. It becomes obvious very quick that the normal people out there are responding to the situation not based on how issues affect them, but based on what they’ve been told to feel.

It is unfortunate that many people fall as such easy targets from the greedy shape shifters of public opinion and find themselves soldiers of an invisible army, because the intentions of those shape shifters are easy to see for anybody willing to look.

Pointing to the “rich” and fostering anger and jealously is the strategy of the deceiver intent on rebuilding the world into a new and corrupt society. That corrupt society is avoidable, but only if the participants of that society seek to do for themselves and avoid the lucrative blanket of socialism, and avoid the temptation of manipulative judgment.

Those of you that chant, “workers rights,” and “tax the rich,” are only pawns to a game you are not motivated to play, so you’ll find yourselves “played” time and time again to the detriment of American civilization.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com