Sarah Ingram: Head of IRS Unit In Charge of Obamacare Compliance!

Sarah Ingram who ran Obama's IRS unit that smacked down applications for tax exemptions from Tea Party and other conservative groups is now in charge of the IRS unit that will ensure that companies are in compliance with the Obamacare law.  The logic is clear: she will dog and destroy any company that leans Republican, while letting Democratic companies skate.  The strategy for Obamacare has become more clear.  It is going to be a method of policing and destroying anyone who goes against Obama's narrative, and any company that supports any other perspective.  The various narratives thus far need much more fleshing out:

1.  Where was President Obama exactly during the evening and night of September 11, 2012?  Was he ever in the Oval Office?  Did he sleep while Stevens was being murdered? 
a.  Are any of his emails among the 25,000 that circulated of which we now have 100?
b.  Did he speak to anyone about the events in Benghazi while the assassination was taking place? If so, what did he say?
c.  If he wrote or said nothing during those 24 hours -- why didn't he?
d.  Did he have a vendetta of some kind against Ambassador Stevens, or was it just that the Benghazi event conflicted with his narrative that he had pacified Libya?

2.  How close are Sarah Ingram and President Obama? Have they met?
a. Have they spoken on the phone?
b.  Are there emails or other written communications?
c.  Have they ever had lunch together privately?
d.  Are there photographs of the two of them?
e.  What other backgrounds might the two of them share?  Has she ever written and published a position paper on how to use government office to break the opposition?
f.  Are there any employees in the IRS offices who knew Sarah Ingram and might be willing to talk and share all that they know about her and the program she oversaw that disempowered Republican-leaning voters?

3.  Who ordered the seizure of the AP phone records?
a.  Someone had to have ordered that this be done.  Who was it, and what authority did they invoke?
b.  When we find out who ordered it, what relationship can be traced between this person and President Obama?

4.  How can all three of the scandals not be seen as evidence that Obama's narrative was the compelling force behind them?  What is the real agenda behind Obamacare?

These seem to be the main questions. 

SNOWING

It is snowing in the western Catskills: a victory for Conservative Thought!

Twin Towers of Freedom

Freedom to own a gun should not be limited to the musket any more than freedom of the press should be limited to writing with a quill pen.

TWO KINGDOMS POETRY CONTEST

Today is Arbor Day, but this poetry contest will actually close on Mother's Day, May 12th.  The basic idea of it is that we live in a fallen world of changes.  The world to come will be changeless.  There is this description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation:

Revelation 21:1-2 describes heaven:  “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.”  

Many Democrats apparently think the enchanting Obama is that bride, and that he has ushered in the New Jerusalem.  Most Republicans don't believe that Obama is quite the bride they have been waiting for, and that he's closer to the Fountain of Marcel Duchamp, except that it's out of order.  We live with these differences, even if we must all accept the reality of Obama under the veil of the presidency in which he's currently cloaked.  Some think that Duchamp's Fountain is itself the greatest work of art since Da Vinci.  It is to me something like a urine cake.  Let them eat urine cakes, it appears to say.

In this contest the idea is to describe our world and the world to come.  Perhaps you think they are one and the same. Perhaps you think a giant gap exists between them.  Let's give the poets a chance to speak.   There should be no more than 26 lines, but you can send in as many as you wish.  Only one vote per poet, and you can't vote for yourselves. We shall vote on the day following Mother's Day.  Winner gets bragging rights. We have about two weeks.  Here's my first entry.  It segues between the still world of Parmenides and Zeno to our own frenetic world. Part of the beauty of a poem is the spark that jumps between the worlds as lightning:

POETRY and MOTION

“Originally a goddess who supervised a cycle of organic growth, decay and rebirth, she here becomes not the effector of change but Change itself, which the Greeks considered the essence of what was wrong with the world of matter: change entails decay and growth itself is thus a kind of death-sentence” The Rotting Goddess: The Origin of the Witch in Classical Antiquity, by Jacob Rabinowitz, p. 53.

Zeno suggested
the nullity of motion,
that the arrow never hits its mark.

The croquet ball enters a wicket.
The puck slips across ice,
baseball clears a fence,
basketball hits all net.

At last, in to this rushing passing kicking world,

A noon transparency enters.  Disguised as a

          Quarterback, her football spirals

Into your outstretched hands.

 

Republican Vs. Democrat: A Dialogue

Democrat: I am greater than you because I have a bigger passion for equality.  It's true, isn't it?

Republican:  It just means that you have no understanding of history. I am greater than you because I realize where that idea went: to the guillotine, to the gulag, to the concentration camps.  It went to Robespierre, Pol Pot, to Hitler.

Democrat:  You're the Nazi.

Republican: To attain equality, the Nazis had to get rid of the Chosen Race.  Otherwise, they could never get even with them, they could only get even with them by erasing them.  You do the same with the talented entrepreneurs, and then there is no one left to grow the economy.

Democrat:  We're not going all the way this time.  We're not killing anybody. We're just centralizing their stuff in the hands of the great Obama.  You can still be rich and Democratic.  You can be Bill Gates, or Buffet.  Obama's got it under control. 

Republican: Right, just as he has the national debt under control.

Democrat:  Money means nothing.

Republican: Money means nothing when it isn't yours, you haven't worked for it, and you have a seemingly endless supply. Once it's gone, you realize what it meant. It means you live under a bridge and look for handouts.

Democrat:  America's credit's infinite!  In Obama We Trust!

Republican: He's a big zero, he's the crater at the bottom of the economy.  One day you'll see this!

Democrat:  Not today!  Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  And most of the electorate is with us!  They see us as the party of equality!  What are you the party of --?

Republican:  Lincoln.

Democrat:  You're the party of Reagan and Nixon: you're the party of the plutocrats! 

Republican:  This means that some centers of power remain against the centralizing power of government.  This is good because it provides a counter-measure, a check and balance system to the government's power.

Democrat:  We don't want a check and balance system. We want the government to be all-powerful and in the hands of BO!

Republican:  What if it's in our hands?

Democrat:  We will constantly seek new groups to enfranchize.  We will give citizenship to Mexicans who lack job skills and education, and who do not speak English. They will vote for us for their whole lives.  We will let gays marry even though they can't have children. We will give them children made in factories. They will be grateful.  We will give blacks free educations and let them all out of jail for free.  We will let in other cultures from all around the world.  Then they will love us.  They will become secular humanists.

Republican:  Like the Tsarnaev brothers?

Democrat:  An anomaly!  An anomaly! 

Republican:  Like the feller at Fort Hood?

Democrat:  Anomaly!

Republican:  God is Great!

Democrat:  America is greater.

Republican:  America is only great because we were Puritans once and followed God's rules.

Democrat:  We don't need that any longer. It's all about equality now.

Republican:  Find that concept in the Bible.

Democrat:  It says that in heaven we will all be alike.

Republican:  Is this heaven?

Democrat:  We will make it so?  What is your counteroffer.

Republican:  We will work hard and make piles of cash that you can then tax down to nothing and give to your poverty pimps.

Democrat:  I guess that's where we're at now, huh?

Republican:  Basically.

JOE DRESNOCK: An American in North Korea

Many see only evil in communist systems.

A lot depends on where you're at in the communist system. If you were a dissident, or if your family was Christian, you were often ruined. If you were a poet and wanted to write about Greek myth, or about love, or about something other than what the state had decreed, perhaps you were put in prison and tortured.

If however you were a member of the party's elite, or if you were willing to play ball with the elite, you were fine. This is quite similar to the circumstances of the old aristocracies. If you were a member of Louis XVI's immediate circle you didn't know what the complaints might have been. Why aren't they eating cake? Even in North Korea, there were Americans such as Joe Dresnock, who preferred that system to what they had been used to in the United States. Dresnock grew up poor in Virginia, and had never been taken bowling, and had had an abusive father.

Dresnock was a GI in 1962 who crossed the line into North Korea and had the life of Reilly at the expense of the state: girlfriends, an automatic income, bowling in Pyongyang, eating at the best restaurant in the country. Communism, like capitalism, is a form of capitalism. Those on top can certainly have fun. Dresnock had all kinds of fun after an initial period of interrogation. He never had to work, as he would have had to do in America.  He had many girlfriends from all over the world which he would not have had in America.  The elite even abducted women from Romania and Japan, and Dresnock had his fun with them. While millions starved all over the country in the late 90s (one of ten died in the famine) Dresnock always got 800 grams of rice per day. All he had to do was denounce America and beat up the handful of other Americans if they didn't go along with the regime. It probably beats being an assistant manager at a McDonald's.  Dresnock, according to the other Americans, enjoyed beating them up.  Dresnock was a happy man. Just as there were people who enjoyed themselves in Nazi Germany, and acclimated themselves to the regime (Mengele comes to mind but there were millions of mediocrities who were more than willing to curry favor with the state to get around their mediocre fate) there are always those who can acclimate themselves to the loss of freedoms for the many, so that they can enjoy their own pleasures. All it really requires is no conscience.  Here is a link to the 90 minute documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTZDGS0ABt8

RAND PAUL ON CSPAN

Rand Paul was on C-span last night talking with black students at Howard University. He argued that the party of Lincoln was still the same as the party of Reagan and George Bush (one and two). I noted that he skipped over Nixon.  Paul said that historically it has always been the Republicans who sought to help blacks by getting them on their own feet. He had a fair hearing. The black students applauded him and were respectful and intelligent in their questions. Rand Paul talked about Jim Crow and said that that and the KKK were entirely Democratic problems and that the original NAACP were entirely Republicans. Some students started to froth and had to be escorted out by heavy black security guards but otherwise they were cool and collected and there was excellent rapport. Paul said he knew he had a hard sell but he wanted to talk with them, and perhaps ask just a few of them to question why they were with the Democrats. He said the Democrats pander to them, and give them handouts, but this ruins the country as a whole, and destroys the business climate, and is the reason so few of their friends who aren't at Howard will find jobs. He said you are going to find jobs because you are the best of your race, and are at an elite institution. Paul also said he thought that drug crimes should be taken off the books and those incarcerated under those laws should be set free.  He claimed it was a violence-free crime, and that crimes of choice such as smoking dope or injecting heroin, should not be considered crimes. He said that Barack Obama was a drug user, but that since he was never caught in spite of smoking dope and even using harder drugs, such as inhaling cocaine and having powder all over his nose for years on end, that he could go on to become president. Had he become incarcerated, he would have found it difficult to get a job at McDonald's, much less become president.  He wanted all the incarcerated to instead have the same opportunities as the president.  Paul said the same thing would be true of Bush 2.

I liked Rand's father Ron except when he talked about Israel or Mexico. It seemed to me that Ron Paul was sympathetic toward Islam, and thought it needed to be taken into consideration, and that we should leave Israel to its own devices.  Which to me means selling out Israel in order to get along with the Muslim Brotherhood. I prefer instead to push for a moderate Islam throughout Islamic countries (women who can read and write and pluralistic societies in which it's legal and not lethal to become an apostate).  We need to be pro-Israel.  Paul didn't discuss Islam. Can we get closer to them, too?  

One older man got up and said that he wanted Farrakhan's Nation of Islam to separate, and he wanted Detroit or some other area as a separate country like the Native Americans have.  The audience hissed at this fellow, but Paul said to let him speak.  After he spoke, Paul said he wanted whites and blacks and browns to get along, and get closer as he saw no real difference. He said he had black and brown friends all through high school and beyond. No issues. He is hoping that this notion of de facto apartheid will slowly go away.  In addition to rainbow demographics papering over no real difference, can we also have multiculturalism?  It does seem to me that Islam is too violent. We helped them take over in Egypt and now they're killing Copts.  That's ungrateful.  I think the same thing will happen in Syria. If the dissidents take over, they will begin to liquidate Christians.  I rather like the Sufis, but I don't see how we can get along with 12th century Islam that doesn't allow for the double-doctrine of Averroes (which resembles Luther's two kingdoms).

Rand Paul said he had black and brown friends who believe as he does that the business environment should come first (I don't like Ayn Rand for whom he was apparently named), and that welfare and other entitlements keep blacks down in spite of the initial boost they get from freebies.  He likened it to shooting drugs in that it creates an artificial pleasure, but that real pleasure comes from doing your own work, putting your own shoulder to the wheel, and pride in taking care of your family.  Let the Democrats pander to the lowest instincts in humanity. The party of Lincoln has to be the party of higher ideals.

I liked him. He was a far cry from the way the Democrats present him as a wild-eyed lunatic.  In many ways his thoughts paralleled mine, but he was far more precise in terms of the many accomplishments within the African American community that have been achieved almost solely by Republicans from 1860-1960.  That is a history I don't know well, but which I wish I did.  Since then, Democrats have taken over the black vote, but blacks are still badly off compared to their white counterparts because they are taking door #1, which offers a freebie, or set of freebies: go ahead and live like animals and we will pay for the abortions and your free albeit substandard housing. Democratic ideas aren't working, and are hurting blacks. He argued that the Republicans offer door #2 which offers true equality rather than a condescending patronizing mentality in exchange for votes.  

I don't know if it changed anyone's mentality but Paul's views paralleled mine in surprising and sophisticated ways.  I learned a lot from him.