by | February 19, 2014 · 7:45 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 100

EDUCATION: BETTER OR WORSE?

Teaching is a wonderful vocation. My mother taught in a small, rural school in Western Pennsylvania. My brother, his wife and two children taught in

schoolhallway

 the public school system. One is still teaching. All of them are wonderful people. With them the kids always came first. I believe the great majority of American teachers are good people, interested in educating the nation’s children. If that’s true, what then is the problem with the public schools? Something has to be. Probably more than one thing. A recent study I read made a convincing case that our kids compete well with children around the world up to the fourth grade. After four years in the public schools, American children rank lower every year after. The longer they attend public schools, the lower they rank on the international scale. No improvements are in sight.

The breakdown of the family, the violence we tolerate in our inner-city schools, the emasculation of intra-school discipline, and the sweep of political correctness across America all contribute to the state of education as it exists today. A lack of money is not the problem. Washington, D.C., has one of the highest spending rates per student in the nation and its public school system does not serve its children well. I blame two major elements. The first is the growth and power of the teacher’s union. It is now near the top ranking of unions in the wielding of political power. Look at the recent conflict between Governor Scott Walker and the teachers’ union in Wisconsin.

The teacher’s union predominately supports Democratic candidates and policies. So what! That shouldn’t result in the failure of the public schools to serve the nation’s children. Education is the primary pathway to improving social and financial status. If the teacher’s union was primarily made up of Republicans would that improve our public schools? Certainly the failure of the public school system is not because of the political orientation of its membership.

More likely, the failure is the centralization of education and the management of the union that has put political bureaucrats in charge of the nation’s education. The union now exists to grow its power and protect its members. Its number one goal is not to educate our children nor to ensure that the best teachers get rewarded for their work. The states and local school boards are supposed to be in charge of the public schools in their respective states. Schools and universities should not be pushing a political viewpoint. The school’s job is to teach students how to think, not what to think. If, like the unions believe, our public schools are successfully educating our youth, why should they be so adamant against ‘school choice’ and charter schools? This country became great because it valued education and allowed the growth of great universities. Why won’t the Democrats and the union allow the best pre-college schools to flourish? Parents and the children will exercise their freedom to chose the best schools. The result will be the education system our children deserve.

In the meantime, we have a Progressive administration led by a president who does not support school choice. The elite left never does. It goes against their basic ideology. The elite Progressive leadership knows better than you do what education your children should have. It’s a progressive nightmare to try and control a free market system of user’s choice in the field of education. School choice is not in the cards for those focused on transforming America into a socialist totalitarian society.

By the author of the Brandon novels. Like me on Facebook at facebook.com/factsandfictions.

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by | February 17, 2014 · 1:13 pm

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 99

 SEIZING DEFEAT

With the way things are going now, can the Republican Party call upon their leadership and snatch defeat from the “jaws of victory?”  You bet!  Let’s see, what issues do they have to use against the Progressives?

Well, there is Ben Ghazi.  Turning down requests for help, failing to equipped the Consulate with neither required staff nor equipment, failing to provide backup and/or rescue, making no effort to relieve the Americans struggling to defend themselves against impossible odds, and then lying for months about what happened. Oh yeah, the Administration did move decisively to arrest and imprison some poor daft film maker. In most election years, that would provide all that is needed for the party out of power to win both Houses. In some eras, Ben Ghazi would be enough to bring impeachment charges.

But the Republicans and Libertarians have more. What about the purity of the IRS? Did they not act as a partisan support force for the Progressives by sidelining dozens of opposition groups applying legally for tax-exempt status? IRS officials admitted as much. One ranking official even took the Fifth, refusing to answer questions from a Congressional committee. The IRS might have swung the election to the Obama team, but no one can provide proof of that. And now our president tells us there is not a smidgen of evidence that the IRS acted illegally. And with the FBI and the Justice Department failing to conduct a thorough and aggressive investigation, we will not see any evidence of wrongdoing. This is serious stuff. When whole agencies of the civil service fail to follow or support the law, what is our recourse?  With Harry Reid controlling the Senate there is no recourse. Winning the Senate in 2014 is more crucial that most Americans think.

Like the pitchman in a carnival or in a TV commercial, “Wait there is more.” There have been dozens of occasions where the President has made law by Executive fiat or decided which part of the law the Executive would enforce. That is a clear no, no. The Executive is sworn to uphold the law, not make law when it is politically convenient. What did President Nixon do to face impending impeachment charges? Something like an amateurish break in of a Democratic Party office in the Watergate Hotel. Illegal, yes. Impeachment justified, yes. Great national damage done to the nation? Probably not. No one died. Entire Agencies of the civil service weren’t corrupted.

Then there is the best or worst of all, Obamacare and his famous lie to the people. Which wasn’t a mistake: He knew at the time he wasn’t being true to his office responsibilities. But when the end of transforming America justifies the dishonest means used to  push the Affordable Care Act through the Senate by one vote, you lie.

Facing an opponent party with all that baggage should mean the House remains Republican and the Democrats/Progressives lose the Senate. But the leadership of the Republican Party has neither the courage nor the smarts to best the Progressives. Most of them don’t even understand what they are facing. The Republicans are playing the game by traditional rules with a willingness to compromise. Extending the debt limit against the wishes of the conservatives in the House of Representatives is an example of playing nice according to rules only your side is following. Going along to get along is a losing strategy. With the Progressive,s the “issue is never the issue.” Give your money and support to the politicians who share your values. If you do, America can avoid a coup by a thousand breaches of the Constitution.

By the author of the Jack Brandon novels, a former adviser to President Reagan.

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by | February 14, 2014 · 7:51 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 98

IRAN AND THE BOMB

Let’s begin with a few facts the Obama administration seems to overlook.

It is hard to believe any White House could assemble a more naive team that can’t even find the ball, let alone watch it. You don’t even need inside information to tell you where to start. It is all there for all of the former players now pacing on the sidelines.  Why should Iran want a nuclear weapon? Not a bad starting point. The only friends the Shia Moslem nation of Iran has are those like Russia, China, North Korea, and France who view them as a lucrative market for all their wares and as an anti-American supplier of oil. They have no friends among the Sunni Moslem nations. The Iranians fought a long and bloody war against Iraq when it was under Sunni rule. Today, decades later that bloody war is still remembered by Iraqis who lost family members in the fighting.

Iran’s exporting of terrorism through its puppets Hamas and Hezbollah has alienated Lebanon. Iran is hated by the Israelis and pays for its uneasy partnership with Syria. Iran is without loyal allies. That is a weak position from which to dominate the Middle East, unless they become a nuclear power. That’s is their number one strategic goal. How can anyone think they will negotiate away their top priority national security goal?

A military strike by Israel or the United States would destroy or set back Iran’s time table to achieve nuclear status. The sanctions, before the Obama administration eased off on them, were causing hardships in Tehran. Not all Iranians want to make sacrifices to achieve nuclear weapons. For internal political reasons the religious leaders decided to roll out a strategy of negotiating to buy time and get concessions from the West on the crippling sanctions. This strategy had worked before. Why not dial back the anti-American rhetoric and pretend to negotiate on their nuclear program?

Of course the Obama administration jumped at the bait and became the leader of the “let’s negotiate” flock. He thinks it makes sense to use all possible diplomatic endeavors before resorting to any military action. That is generally true but not when it is obvious that the other side is playing you. Iran is so confident that the Obama administration is below the paper tiger level that they have blatantly tested an ICBM capable of destroying Israel and hitting several American targets. Big clue. Yes! No nation has ever spent treasure on developing a long-range ballistic missile unless they were positive they could mate it with a nuclear weapon. There is no other rational explanation. Yet our president is resisting his own party’s effort to ready additional sanctions to ensure Iran lives up to the agreement.

Officials from the administration and learned talking heads will tell us that it will be some time before Iran can weaponize a nuclear device. Don’t believe that fairy tale. North Korea and other nations that are not admirers of the U.S. and Israel would sell the Iranians whatever they need in a heartbeat.

To sum up the administration’s position: They are confident that even though the Iranians have put much treasure and time into developing a nuclear weapon they can be talked out of completing the task. After buying hundreds of centrifuges, building underground facilities to house them, and developing long-range missiles, how can anyone believe they can stop Iran’s long, expensive effort to acquire nuclear weapons by negotiating from a weak position? The administration’s followers will point with pride to the Iranian destruction of highly enriched uranium. This not true. The Iranians didn’t destroy anything, they merely converted the enriched uranium into another form that can easily be reversed.

Don’t be surprised if the Iranians test their bomb while Secretary Kerry is having tea in Damascus.

By the author of the Jack Brandon novels.

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by | February 13, 2014 · 7:36 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 97

FEBRUARY

February is a dismal month. Winter is still hanging around. Spring is still but a hope.  If we could vote to abolish a month, I would vote to abolish February. It is only good for sleeping in and gathering strength for the rest of the year.

Politics in February are no better than the weather. The scary part is that unlike the weather,  February politics won’t give way to a political spring. February began with the echos of a dismal, grey State of the Union address by the president talking about what he has accomplished and plans to accomplish this year. Talk about shades of grey. Nothing he has done or plans to do fills the people with the strength and hope that their lives will be better this year than last.

Class warfare and income re-distribution are not subjects filled with happy thoughts. The president may think February is the beginning of spring, but the people know better. The Federal Reserve will continue with a slightly diminishing monthly printing of money that will still supply Wall Street and the investment world with wealth but do next to nothing for the vast numbers of people who do not have the money to invest. Investors have done very well under President Obama but the people have suffered. Wall Street is not the economy. The President who is constantly ranting about the widening gap between the rich and the wage earner, is the cause of the widening gap.

While it is always springtime for the rich investors, it is always February for the workers, especially the unemployed whose buying power is gets less each month the Fed prints billions of new dollars that devalue both wages and unemployment checks. Please, Mr. President, stop talking Progressivism philosophy and free up the forces of growth from your avalanche of anti business regulations.

Start with the EPA who thinks it, not Congress, makes laws. Let’s back off killing the work of coal miners and put them back to work. Approve the pipeline from Canada. Stop listening to your environmental worshiping base who all have jobs. (We’d all be better off if more of them were unemployed.) Fire the head of your EPA who is a hardcover believer in the myth that human activity causes climate change. It is not science the climate warming crowd chants as it dances around dead solar units in the dark of the night. Of course the world’s climate changes: Remember the ice age when the site Chicago now stands on was under two miles of ice? Did our ancestors, what few, if any there were at that time, have so many fires that the rising gases from burning carbon warmed the planet and freed Chicago from its icy tomb? Did the Viking settlement on Greenland circa 1100 AD stop burning carbon material and caused the temperature to drop below the mark where agriculture is no longer possible? No, while climate change occurs, the cause is not human activity. The Progressives have to believe that human activity is the cause because, while they can regulate our lives, even the Progressives recognize they cannot yet regulate the sun, celestial orbits or volcanic activity.

May the political winds of spring bring back the slightly left-of-center Democrats before the Progressives (far, far left socialists) make them extinct.

By the author of the Jack Brandon Novels.

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by | February 10, 2014 · 11:29 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 96 THE ADVISOR

THE TAKE DOWN OF AMERICA

The Advisor had been going over all his files and journals going back to the Nixon Era. He was trying to decide if he would be the first Advisor to break protocol and publish a book, anonymously, of course. After weeks of studying the Presidential Journals written by his predecessors and books published during the same time period, he concluded that some Advisors had used their knowledge of the President’s actions and policies to contribute to the open record.

He rationalized that if his sole responsibility was to advise the President for the good of the nation, it was within his authority to tell the nation what the President was planning. Nothing less than America’s future was at stake.

He sketched out a few pages, filled his pen and began to write.

The President told us when running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States that his goal was to transform America. Many of us thought that the nation could use a little transformation. We didn’t realize he meant transformation to the edge of destruction and beyond. It’s not the end of America but the end of the America that anyone over thirty years of age knew and cherished. We also did not even suspect that the transformation would be accomplished by a policy of “the end justifies the means,” an approach laid out by Saul Alinsky, an American revolutionary and former community organizer in Chicago. Alinsky preached the “issue is never the issue,” meaning anything his Progressive followers, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton,did to overthrow the existing power structure and replace it with an income distribution social order where everyone got a fair shot was moral.

False statements, deliberate misleading of the American people, using all issues as tools to destroy the Republican Party and win elections are the right things to do. Old-fashioned morals like keeping your word, being honest and open, solving problems that advance American individual liberty, promote economic power and follow the rule of law and Constitutional restrictions were relegated to a growing pile of disregarded broken pieces of the separation of powers, states’ rights and Constitutional protections of individual freedom.

To transform anything you must first destroy or replace the existing order. The Obama-led Progressives (a more acceptable label than Socialists or Communists) have prepared America for an historical take down. The first step is to destroy the opposition. The opposition is the Republican, Libertarian, and Tea Parties. Only a few of the leaders of these groups/parties understand what Obama is doing. He doesn’t care at all about solving problems, foreign or domestic. He only wants to use the issue to destroy the opposition. Health care, immigration, tax policy, economic policy, unemployment, minimum wage, the use of the military services, counter-terrorism, foreign policy, energy development, environmental concerns provide a never-ending supply of issues to use against the befuddled leadership of the Republican Party.

President Obama is not a stupid or evil politician. He just doesn’t bring the beliefs or mindset that Americans automatically assume all their leaders bring to the Oval Office. He is certainly not a free-market capitalist. Nor is he a constitutionalist. He was not born of the civil rights movement. He is not an America First politician. He is more anti-colonialist, anti-war, anti-western with very strong elitist socialist leanings. He is so insecure in his American leadership costume that he can not stand up to foreign leaders.’

The Advisor put his pen down. Mused over what he had written and thought this sounds harsh but I believe it is true. I will develop these points as I continue with the book on the take down of America.

Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.

Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.

This is a fictional account of an Advisor that doesn’t exist by the author of the Brandon novels.  The author (pictured far right) has 27 years of Government service, including two years serving President Ronald Reagan (middle left) in the 1980s as an advisor. Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.

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