Retired Marine Sergeant R. Lee Ermey Tells It Like It Is (Video)

On the last day of 2010 let's throw out the old and bring in the new. Retired Marine Sergeant R. Lee Ermey does not mince any words on what needs throwing out in this country. You tell 'em Sarge! Oooooooo Raaaaahhhhhh!!

Retired drill instructor R. Lee Ermey took an opportunity to rail against the Obama administration during an appearance at a live broadcast to benefit the USO.

The retired Marine vet stressed that the Marines’ Toys 4 Tots program was working through the struggling economy to bring holiday cheer to young boys and girls, but also delivered a political punch to the Obama administration which he claimed was trying to destroy the country by imposing socialism. 

God Bless The United States Marine Corps, Sgt. Ermey, and God Bless America!!

Here's Wishing For A Happy New Year Full of Hope and Change (Not The Obama Kind Either!)

The Scary Actual U.S. Government Debt - The US is Bankrupt!

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. 

“Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. 

But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term.
This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Article by Neil Reynolds, The Globe and Mail

Want To Get Away With Murder? Become a Bank! (Video)

As the US economy continues to struggle, it seems Wall Street and big banks are doing better than ever. The income disparity gap in the United States is the largest of all the developed industrial nations. The Trends Research Institute Director Gerald Celente says the American Empire is collapsing and the banks have committed the greatest bank robbery in the history of the world.

Want to get away with murder? Become a bank!

The companies that helped create the financial meltdown that touched off the Great Recession have found yet another way to undermine the public's faith in capitalism: The Foreclosure Fiasco

GMAC and Bank of America have now resumed foreclosures in some states. By the time you see this, J.P. Morgan may have done so too.

The biggest danger to the U.S. capitalist system doesn't come from communists or community activists or left-wing academics. It comes from some of the nation's biggest financial institutions. These companies, which helped create the financial meltdown that touched off the Great Recession, have now found yet another way to undermine the public's faith in capitalism and markets: the foreclosure fiasco.

Even before the foreclosure problem appeared, the level of public distrust of our financial and political systems was approaching the pathological. It's going to get even worse when the true lesson of this episode sinks in. To wit: If you screw up big-time when you deal with a giant bank, you're toast. If the giant bank screws up when it deals with you, it gets a do-over.

Article by Allan Sloan, Fortune

Read the full story here.

Muslim Brotherhood Front Group Trains Airport Screeners

Talk about letting the foxes guard the hen house! WTF are those lunatics in Washington thinking??

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has completed training for 2,200 Transportation Safety Officers (TSOs) at the Los Angeles International Airport according to a press release found on the MPAC website.

Article courtesy of WesternJournalism.com

The MPAC release notes that the two-month training course informed officers of “the diversity of Muslims around the world from cultural dress to language to tenets. The four trainers taught the TSOs how to properly handle a Quran and discussed the different ways Muslim women and men choose to cover or dress. For example, the TSOs learned if a woman wears hijab and needs a secondary screening she should be screened in a private area by a female TSO officer.”

In 1986, MPAC was formed as a political action arm of one of the largest Wahhabi mosques in America, the Islamic Center for Southern California.

As the Center for Security Policy’s Team B II report entitled “Sharia: The Threat to America” notes, “The founders of the Islamic Center for Southern California are Hassan Hathout and his brother Maher Hathout. The late Hassan Hathout was a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement. The two brothers Maher spent time in an Egyptian prison during the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities there, led by the Brotherhood’s founder Hassan Al Banna. MPAC’s own publication, The Minaret, has proudly called Hassan a ‘companion of’ and Maher ‘a close disciple of’ Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna.”

Maher Hathout also founded and is currently a senior advisor for MPAC. He and others at MPAC also currently work for and maintain a close relationship with the Islamic Center of Southern California.

A Different Christmas Poem (Video)

A beautiful Christmas poem written by one of our men in uniform serving his country.

Whether you support US foreign policy or not, there is no excuse for not supporting our troops. 

God Bless Our Troops. God Bless Our Country

Jindal Says Congress Should Work Part-Time

Every once in a while a politician comes along who actually makes some sense. Thanks Bobby Jindal for your wisdom!

Gov. Bobby Jindal says the United States would be better off if members of Congress spent less time in Washington.

In an interview this week with Human Events, the Louisiana Republican, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said U.S. lawmakers should work part-time, be term-limited and not allowed to become lobbyists once they leave Congress.

"When they live under the same rules and laws they passed for the rest of us, maybe you'd see some more common sense coming out of Washington, D.C." he told the conservative publication. "Instead, you got a permanent governing political class."

Jindal, who once served as a congressman, cited Mark Twain in his proposal.

"We used to pay farmers not to grow crops, let's pay congressmen to stay out of Washington, D.C.," he said. "Mark Twain said that our liberty, our wallets were safest when the legislature's not in session." 

It turns out members of Congress aren't spending that much time in Washington anyway. Lawmakers work 128 days or less per year and an average of 7.4 hours per day. 

Rank-and-file members of the House and Senate make $174,000 per year. Based on the average American 52-week year, that amounts to $669 per day but calculated on Congress' 128-day year, lawmakers are taking home twice the daily pay -- $1,359 per day - for about half the working time.

Based on a normal 40-hour workweek, lawmakers make $84 per hour. But figuring on their actual 37-hour workweek, they make $90 per hour.

Jindal's proposal may not be so far-fetched given the rising cost of running Congress -- more than $5 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to Legistorm, a website that tracks congressional salaries and staffing.

Operating costs have soared 89 percent over the past decade, rising three times faster than the rate for national inflation, according to the Capitol News Connection based on data from Legistorm. The publication found that congressional salaries grew 39 percent from 2001 to 2009 and security expenses for the Capitol Police increased 860 percent in the past 10 years.

And there are plenty of part-time state legislatures that could provide a business model. In 17 states, including Utah, New Hampshire, North Dakota and South Dakota, lawmakers work part-time, making an average of $16,000 and relying on other sources of income for a living, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In 23 other states, including Alaska, Connecticut, Texas and South Carolina, lawmakers say they spend more than two-thirds of a full-time job legislating, but only make an average of $35,300, forcing them to find other sources of income, the group said. 

In the other 10 states, including California, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida, lawmakers work full-time or close to it and make an average of $68,600, or enough money without relying on outside income, the group said.

Source: FoxNews

Marine Sings 4th Verse of Star Spangled Banner at Tea Party Rally (Video)

How many Americans are even aware that there are 4 verses to our National Anthem? At a recent Tea Party rally, a United States Marine Veteran stood up and sang the 4th verse bringing the crowd to their feet and some to tears. 

The words he sang so eloquently should ring in the hearts of all Americans, as do the words of the 1st verse we are all familiar with. 

God Bless America. In God Is Our Trust.


The Star Spangled Banner Lyrics
By Francis Scott Key 1814
 



Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!