My dear nephew,

Rather against my will, our relatives keep sending me what you write about politics on Facebook, that invaluable aid for finding the self-obsessed, the venomous, and the ignorant.  I am concerned that you are unknowingly destroying your own reputation, and you should be concerned, also.  If you continue to write in this way (meaning both in content and in tone), you may find yourself stuck with labels that a lifetime will not enable you to shake.  I have been assured more than once that it is pointless to try to reach you with logic, as your mind has made up by your self-perception.  However, as a courtesy due to a relative, I will give it one try, and I promise to be far more polite than you have been in your published remarks.  Make no mistake, anything posted to Facebook has been published, and there is no way to erase it.

I have been informed that one of our family members gave you very sound advice, and it was "Don't be a jerk about politics."  Very sound advice and very clearly completely ignored.

If you are going to be a success at political mud slinging, you are going to have to improve in a few areas.  I have had considerable success in this field, so please consider my advice carefully.  Otherwise, you will wear that deadly label "crank".

If you are going to insult the intelligence of Republicans (like your grandparents), you need to spell and capitalize correctly.  Publishing phrases like "brain-dead republicants" will lead unkind people (some related to you) to postulate that the last brain-dead person you saw was in your mirror.

(I add here as an aside that you should give thanks every day that you never tried to debate your late grandfather on politics.  He would have done to you (speaking metaphorically) what a steamroller does to a daffodil.)

More recently, I am told that you referred to presumptive Republican (note spelling and capitalization) presidential nominee Mitt Romney as a "robot".  This is juvenile name-calling, without point or punch.  Does being neat and clean and having a ready smile make you a robot?  Readers may end up wondering about your hygienic habits, or lack of same.  Name-calling is seldom effective; it hurts your reputation more than your target's.

In your more recent posts, you accused Romney of the usual, tired litany of supposed heartless policy goals -- meaning to end Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ad nauseum.  Are you aware that your preferred candidate, Barack Obama, cuts $600 billion (that is to say, $600,000,000,000) from Medicare as part of his Obamacare program?  Can you produce one statement during the last decade by any Republican leader saying that they intend to cut the benefits of any of the three programs I mentioned earlier this paragraph?  Please note that pledging to make the programs financially sustainable or pledging to eliminate fraud and waste in the program(s) is not "cutting".  All three of these programs are going bankrupt, and they will take the country with them if something is not done quickly.  It could have been done relatively easily a decade or two ago, but now the holes are so deep that the task has grown greatly difficult.  One of the parties has consistently blocked all attempts to make the programs financially stable and self-supporting.  It isn't the Republicans.

Returning to an older post, you seemed amused by the fact that 65% of Republicans who participated in a survey in (I believe) January said they would vote for the Republican nominee no matter who it was.  Why should that surprise you?  If you were to ask registered Democrats if they are going to vote for Obama no matter whom the Republicans nominate, I predict that you would get a percentage closer to 95% than 65%.  I am depressed that only 65% of my party (if the poll is accurate, which experience tells me is not to be assumed) is unconditionally committed to voting against the most disastrous president in American history, and the first president who can be credibly accused of being a disaster for the county deliberately.

What I find most frustrating is that you proclaim your intention to vote for Obama even as you proclaim that you are pro-life.  If you were not my nephew, I would perhaps content myself with wishing you all happiness in Jews for Hitler.  Because of our family bond, I will address the subject more politely.  Hard as I try to give you the benefit of the doubt on this matter, several disquieting theories present themselves.

The most obvious and perhaps the ugliest possibility is that you are acting from supreme selfishness.  You somehow see yourself getting something from the re-election of Obama that is worth more than thousands, perhaps millions of dead babies worldwide.  Are you aware of the fact that the Obama administration spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money (at a time when inconceivably bad economic policies have already pushed our budget deficits to world-record-shattering levels) to persuade Kenya to pass a pro-abortion constitution?  At this point in his term, it seems pointless to point out that the expenditure was illegal, but I will all the same.  

The above is just one item in a frightening CV when it comes to abortion.  Keep in mind that as an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama was the only speaker against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which extended legal protection to babies who had survived an abortion attempt and were now completely outside the mother’s body.  By all precedent, that baby would not only be considered legally a person, but indeed would be a citizen of the United States, with all of the legal protections that come with citizenship.  Even radical pro-abortion groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America (who changed their name from the National Abortion Rights Action League when they discovered that that name was too honest) didn’t dare publicly oppose this act.  Barack Obama didn’t just oppose it, he stood up and spoke AGAINST extending life-saving treatment to innocent American citizen babies, gasping for breath and struggling for life.

Since that day when he voted against the BAIPA, Obama has been trying to come up with some reason for his vote that sounds at least believable.  His attempts (or ten of them, anyway) are available at http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2008/01/top-10-reasons.html.

Similarly, he opposed the national Partial-Birth Abortion bill, because he claimed that the bill did not include an exemption for the mother’s “health“.  That’s “health” instead of health, because they are not referring to physical health.  Pro-aborts like Obama want the “health” exemption included because experience shows that including such a clause in effect nullifies the law, since a pro-abort judge can always be found to grant the exemption regardless of the health effect alleged.  Certain judges (well-known to the pro-abortion groups) will vote to take a babies life if the mother (or her lawyer) says she’ll be depressed by the weight gain that comes with a full-term pregnancy.  

Now we have the $1 abortion surcharge mandate under Obamacare.  As Steven Ertelt explained in Lifenews.com on March 12th:

“Nestled within the “individual mandate” in the Obamacare act — that portion of the Act requiring every American to purchase government — approved insurance or pay a penalty — is an “abortion premium mandate.” This mandate requires all persons enrolled in insurance plans that include elective abortion coverage to pay a separate premium from their own pockets to fund abortion.  As a result, many pro-life Americans will have to decide between a plan that violates their consciences by funding abortion, or a plan that may not meet their health needs.”  (Complete article at http://www.lifenews.com/2012/03/12/obama-admin-finalizes-rules-1-abortions-in-obamacare/)

In ancient Rome, the conspirators who slew Julius Caesar all bathed their hands in his blood” so that they would all share in the guilt of the crime.  Similarly, Nazi (the radical leftist National Socialist German Workers Party) SS Chief Heinrich Himmler gave a surprise speech to his fellow Nazi leaders telling them about the Holocaust, the horrible industrialized slaughter of Europe’s Jewish population.  He did this to deprive every attendee of the “I didn’t know” alibi.  Although it never proved of any value to Himmler, the speech led to deadly consequences when the National Socialist regime collapsed and it came time for guilt to be assigned and punishments to be meted out to surviving Nazis.

What the Obama-ites are attempting is arguably worse, as they, with the $1 abortion mandate and the contraceptive mandates (which includes drugs that can cause early abortions) attempt to force all Americans to share in the financing of abortion, and thus share in the guilt for this tremendous, horrendous crime crying out to Heaven.  The Roman conspirators joined the murder conspiracy willingly, and the attendees to Himmler’s speech had joined the Nazi Party leadership.  Today, the vast majority of pro-life Americans are fighting determinedly to avoid having guilt for the abortion nightmare assigned to them.  

Since the infamous Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 (I assume you’ve heard of it), over 53,000,000 babies have been slain in this country.  (If you want to know why Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are going bankrupt today, you might consider this massacre of 53 million future wage earners and taxpayers.)  

What could you possibly gain from BO’s re-election that could possibly be worth more than the lives of all of those babies?  

A relative opines aloud (many others I’m sure opine silently) that your support for Obama is dictated by your sexual orientation.  I personally have never been able to understand why so many of those of your SO (to save typing) see every issue through that prism, and often see things darkly.  (I have some theories, which I will keep to myself because my purpose in writing is not to offend you.)  If our relative is right, those of your SO are a remarkable subset of the American population.  Consider:

They must not need jobs.  The bizarre actions of BO and his merry band of Keynesians have given us a situation unknown in our history -- a recovery that features higher unemployment than that in the recession from which we have supposedly “recovered” from.

They must not drive gasoline-powered vehicles.  When Barack Obama was inaugurated, the price of gasoline was under $1.90/gallon.  It is now at or over $3.80/gallon, and fixing to go higher, largely because BO and his environmentally radical administration has done everything they can to strangle domestic gasoline production.  From the Gulf Oil Drilling moratorium, which the administration has persisted with despite two court rulings that held that the President does not have the authority to unilaterally stop drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.  The EPA, headed by Obama-appointed radical environmentalist Lisa Jackson, pulled a filthy trick on Sunoco by allowing them to spend $2 million dollars on an off-shore oil drilling project well off the Alaska coast, and then stopping Sunoco from proceeding for a stomach-turningly spurious reason -- they claimed that Sunoco’s Environmental Impact Statement was inadequate because they had not considered the possible health impacts of a possibly necessary icebreaker on an Alaskan village 400 MILES AWAY!  They also refused to allow construction of the Keystone Oil Pipeline from our friendly neighbor Canada, supposedly for safety concerns, despite the fact that the EPA has done a risk assessment on the project and declared it safe -- SIX TIMES!

How is it safer to ship our oil from the Persian Gulf from hostile nations in tankers?  Have you ever known a pipeline to sink, run aground, or be hijacked by pirates?

Every time you put $40 in your gas tank, you are robbed of almost $20.  I resent it.  Every American should.

They must not need to buy any products, be they food, clothes, or anything else.  When fuel prices go up, transport prices go up, and inevitably retail prices go up.  The administration so far, with the assistance of a (to put it mildly) friendly media, has managed to conceal the resulting inflation by omitting food and fuel from the official inflation rate calculation.  The rest of America has been rather less successful in omitting food and fuel from their budgets.

They must not need affordable energy.  The Obama administration is clearly attempting to destroy the domestic coal industry by imposing impossible and useless standards on emissions.  Even those pushing these industry-destroying regulations can point to no benefits from the stricter standards.

The EPA is now trying to satisfy the watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) environmentalists (who will help bankroll BO’s re-election campaign) by finding some spurious reason to oppose the rapidly expanding, wealth-creating, energy-price-dropping natural gas industry.  Hydro-fracking has been used safely for over 6 decades worldwide, but now suddenly anti-fracking zealots are trying to claim that the process is dangerous.  In fact they are transparently trying to cripple the American economy by crippling the American energy industry.  

There are words that describe the people who are attempting the crippling.  “Reasonable”, “honest”, and “Patriotic” are not among them.

Just this month, the Interior Department (headed by Obama-appointed environmental radical Ken Salazar) announced that they are “locking up” 100 million acres of land in Arizona.  This land contains the richest uranium deposits in the country.  Having crippled the domestic oil industry, the administration now appear to be “focused like a laser beam” on the domestic nuclear power industry.  Salazar did not even offer a reason for the move.


When Obama made that declaration that his energy policy is “all of the above”, apparently he forgot to add “...except the ones that work.”

Most important for you, in my opinion, is Obamacare’s orientation toward the elderly, the disabled, and the brain-damaged or otherwise disabled.  Obama’s appointees have included zealots like Ezekiel Emanuel and Donald Berwick, who believe that doctors should only provide medical care to their patients if it is also good for “the system”.  While Emanuel and Berwick have left their government posts (Berwick because his views and past statements were so extreme that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid informed Obama that Berwick could not win a Senate confirmation vote), their spirit lives on in the Health and Human Services, headed by Obama radical appointee Kathleen Sebelius, who recently publicly stated that the Obamacare health care regime (implication intended) will start saving money once the population starts declining.  How cold-blooded do you have to be to see population decline as a financial goal?

Now that we know that the Obama HHS wants population to decline, we need to consider where they will try to cut what their ideological predecessors the Nazis called “useless feeders’.  The obvious targets will be the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly.  To these dehumanizers, each of these groups uses medical resources without adequately benefiting “the system”.  To the continued massacre of the babies, we will add the massacre of the disabled (like our cousin Todd), and the elderly.

So I guess those of your SO don’t have grandmothers, either, do they, nephew?

Please consider carefully what I have written.  At lot is at stake in the election in November -- both for the country and for you personally.

This would be a bad time to be wrong.

Quite sincerely,

Your Uncle

PS I can back up every assertion I made here with evidence.  Can you do the same with your assertions?

I suggest supporting organizations who are going to challenge the Health Care Hostile Takeover in court.  I've already read that the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is preparing to challenge the HCHT.  When I find out more about who's trying to stop Obamacare via the legal system, I will post the information in this space.

The $787 billion fiscal stimulus program approved in February is working pretty much as expected, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday. U.S. employment is about 600,000 to 1.6 million higher, and real gross domestic product is about 1.2% to 3.2% higher than they would have been without the stimulus, CBO said. That estimate is nearly identical to the CBO's assessment in March. The CBO based its estimates on long-standing relationships between additional spending and economic growth, rather than relying on incomplete and inaccurate reports from companies awarded federal contracts. Much of the direct government spending in the stimulus bill is yet to come.

Did we read that right? Yes, we did. Here's the actual CBO report:

Estimating the law's overall effects on employment requires a more comprehensive analysis than the recipients' reports provide. Therefore, looking at the actual amounts spent so far (where identifiable) and estimates of the other effects of ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the law's impact on employment and economic output using evidence about how previous similar policies have affected the economy and various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy. On that basis, CBO estimates that in the third quarter of calendar year 2009, an additional 600,000 to 1.6 million people were employed in the United States.

So the CBO's estimate is "nearly identical" to the one in March because it is based on exactly the same information: the cost of the stimulus and the putative effect of spending that much money. It's like a restaurant reviewer who estimates the quality of a meal by looking at the prices on the menu.

The Elk and Its Ilk
"A Swedish man who was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife has been cleared, after police decided she was probably killed by an elk," the BBC reports:

Ingemar Westlund, aged 68, found the dead body of his wife Agneta, 63, by a lake close to the village of Loftahammer in September 2008.

He was immediately arrested and held in police custody for 10 days.

Now the case has been dropped after forensic analysis found elk hair and saliva on his wife's clothes. . . .

The European elk, or moose, is usually considered to be shy and will normally run away from humans. But Swedish Radio International says the animals can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens.