Tag Archives: Republicans

by Barry Kelly | October 21, 2014 · 7:30 am

INSIGHTS 167 — CONSERVATIVE VIEWS

How far apart are conservatives’ and liberals’ political beliefs? Can the two ideologies ever work together to run the country and produce bi-partisan legislation?

The core values of the liberals and conservative values are made up of a mixture of myths, traditions, interpretations of the Constitution, and views ingrained in respective cultural exposures. The respective core values of liberals and conservatives are not easily put aside. Thirty or forty years ago, I wouldn’t have thought the dividing line was so hard to cross. After all, I was once a strong Democrat, a member of the NAACP, and suspicious of capitalism.

Now that President Obama has succeeded in dividing the people into two angry camps with his income distribution, class warfare, and anti-business rhetoric, the nation is more divided than at anytime since the War for Independence and the Civil War when families, towns, and states were divided into Tories or revolutionaries, slavery or non-slavery states, and unionists or secessionists.

President Obama and his progressive party have helped me understand how members of the same family could pick up arms against each other and fight to the death. People only reach those extremes when their core beliefs are threatened. For people to feel so strongly, they have to believe their nation, way of life, freedoms, and futures will be destroyed if the opponent wins. As a conservative, I believe we are approaching that point. Two more terms of the progressive party would continue the breakdown of constitutional barriers, our two-party system, individual freedom, our national security, and national sovereignty and would certainly destroy the America I know and love.

What are the conservative core values? The starting point is that conservatives mistrust government and believe the bigger the government becomes the more it is distrusted. Why? Because it is only the government that can take away our individual and collective freedoms.

A federal government is necessary, but the difference between liberals and conservatives is how big the government should be and what it should do. Conservatives believe that the federal government should only do what the states or people (the public sector) cannot. The job of our representatives is to constantly adjust the size and scope of government to protect rather than diminish freedom. This historic distrust of government is what fathered the Second Amendment guaranteeing the people’s right to bear arms. The best explanation of this right, to me, is that slave owners had guns, slaves did not. Every totalitarian government has always taken weapons away from the people. Anyone wonder why?

Conservatives believe capitalism is the only economic system that allows people to establish and run commercial enterprises that provides growth to the national economy and jobs for the nation’s workers without endangering individual freedoms as a socialist- or communist-managed economy always has. Capitalism is not a perfect system and it needs some regulation but it is the only economic system that meshes with the power of the free market.

Another core conservative belief is that individuals are better stewards of their money than the government. Therefore, taxes should be as low as possible. Low taxes enable more savings and spending by people that feeds the growth of the economy. Everyone with an income should pay some income tax. Higher taxes on the rich are acceptable as long as they are fair and far short of confiscatory. Death taxes are unacceptable. They are clearly part of a redistribution of wealth program. No card-carrying conservative believes a government can spend its way out of a depression or recession. Government spending does not create wealth. Also, no corporation is too big to fail. Government bailouts waste the nation’s wealth.

Welfare for those who need assistance such as the very young, disabled, aged is necessary. Social Security, a program fought by conservatives during FDR’s tenure, has turned out to be a good program. It needs to be made solvent by some simple changes. In FDR’s time, 65 was old. No more. The age of qualifying for social security needs to be gradually increased. Again, that is the kind of thing our representatives are sent to Washington to work out.

Conservatives believe in a strong national defense and distrust any move toward giving any part of our sovereignty to any international organization.

For most of our brief history we have managed to govern by parties with different core beliefs working together for the good of the people. I believe we can get back there. My personal belief is that term limits on our senators and representatives would make all this much easier. Professional politicians, regardless of party affiliation, are too engrossed in their own careers and re-election politics at the expense of the nation.

Written by the author of “Insights: Transforming America — Is This What We Fought For?” available now as an ebook, in paperback or hardcover on Amazon.com or BN.com. Follow the author on Twitter @factsfictions80. If you think this message is important, please share it.

INSIGHTS 165: GOP NEEDS TO BE SHAKEN UP

It looks as if the Republican Party will gain control of the Senate in November. I believe the Republicans will not be responsible for the win. President Obama is responsible for losing the Senate. If he had stayed away from his teleprompter and especially his microphone, some of the Democrats running in red or purple states may have won. Certainly the only winning platform the Republicans had was their anti-Obama ads. It is important to be clear about what you’re against, if you also make it very clear what you are for in the positive sense.

So what will the Republican Congress do in the first six months?

I don’t think the leadership knows. The House speaker and the minority leader have not put forth an alternative to President Obama’s policies and programs. They either lack the intelligence or the courage or both to offer alternatives to the American people. That has to change. Like most changes, this one will require a change in key people. I hope the newly elected House members and the new majority in the Senate recognize their leadership while being crafty in the ways of Congressional procedures, have not shown anymore leadership than the president. You cannot run this great nation by being the party of NO.

Any political gains made this year will be lost in 2016 if the Republican leadership does not aggressively attack and solve the many issues the Democrats fumbled. Health care, tax reform, solvency of welfare programs, immigration, unemployment, national defense and myriad foreign policy issues. With Republicans, the issue is always the issue. No more whining about the president’s unwillingness to work in bi-partisan fashion or the use of his phone and pen unilaterally. You have the power. Use it. Stop worrying about getting re-elected or being out-messaged by the president. Just get the job done.

First send Mr. McConnell and Mr. Boehner back into the ranks. Then send bi-partisan bills to the president’s desk. When he vetoes, work to overturn the veto. He has less than 35 percent of the people with him. Show us Washington is not log-jammed now that the Republican congress is in town. Regain the respect of the people and foreign nations.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, Conservative views, Eight Decades of Insights, political solutions, Politics

Tagged as 2014, 2016, Congress, current-events, elections, GOP, Obamacare, Republicans, Senate

by Barry Kelly | October 3, 2014 · 7:30 am

INSIGHTS 161: ERIC HOLDER’S END GAME

theblaze.com

Where do attorney generals go when they leave office? Most just follow the path of retiring generals of our military forces and just fade away or become talking heads. I can’t see our activist AG just going quietly into semi-retired obscurity. He is not yet finished.

In the progressive’s game plan, the control of the Supreme Court is the way they protect progressive gains and carry their socialist agenda forward. What is the top rung for any AG? It is certainly not becoming a part-time player on the ‘talking heads’ bench.

The top rung of the AG ladder ends in the Supreme Court. That is where their legacies can be protected and pushed forward. Of course, there has to be a vacancy on the court. No president, not even Roosevelt or Obama, can expand the court. Several Supreme Court justices are nearing or past a retirement date.

Justices, either liberal or conservative, know the game. They only retire when a like-minded jurist can be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. If the Republicans take control of the Senate in the 2014 mid-term election, President Obama surely recognizes he would have a hard time getting an activist progressive nominee through the Senate.

I believe it was always Mr. Holder’s ambition to continue his socialist agenda on the Supreme Court after serving the president as the chief law enforcement official in the land. He has admirably protected the president from the scandals of the “Fast and Furious” gun running to drug cartels to the IRS’s flagrant partisan discrimination persecution of conservative political groups seeking legal tax exemption status.

Mr. Holder, as the protector of the president, has done an excellent job and deserves being repaid by President Obama. However, his strident partisan approach to enforcing the law of the land, selectively according to the progressive agenda, will make it nearly impossible to get any conservative votes in the Senate for him.

This reality dictated the timing of Mr. Holder’s resignation. If he is going to realize his dream of sitting on the Supreme Court, the president must nominate him while Democrats (progressives) control the Senate. It just may work. If it does, we will have a hard-core activist socialist on the high court for a few decades. Watch for the ‘going out the door’ law enforcement rules he sends out from his office such as anti-profiling.

Don’t confuse Eric Holder with real law enforcement.

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 149

THE GOP NEEDS TRANSFORMING

Is America in trouble? I think so.

How did it happen?

Well, you cannot blame President Obama for everything that’s happened under his watch. The Republican Party insider group is also guilty. The House of Representatives has the total Constitutional power to appropriate money. Everything the progressives have done with Obama’s leadership had to be funded. The government runs on money, our money. The House is supposed to be the place funding requests begin.

Where has it been? Republicans did not provide a single vote to the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Yet they funded every bit of its implementation. Obamacare couldn’t have survived just on the funds that were appropriated when it was passed. The government had to pay for all the overruns, including the rollout. Instead of providing good stewardship of our money, the Republican leadership whined and complained about President Obama’s executive orders and the greatly increased scope and power of the HHS, EPA, IRS, DOJ, and Labor Department but was afraid to use its appropriation to bring Obama’s transforming of America to a near stop.

When they did try to bring Obama’s spending under control by refusing to raise the debt limit unless the president delayed a part of the ACA, the president refused to sign the appropriations legislation with the Republican amendment to raise the debt ceiling. He then began shutting down the parts of the government that would dramatically affect citizens, parts that could have been easily funded. Congress offered to help with authorization by allowing the president to shift funds to where they were needed. He refused and cleverly and successfully passed the blame onto the Republicans for shutting down the government. Not only did the American people accept the blatant blame shift, so did the Republican leadership. Now the speaker of the House and the Senate minority leader are afraid to use their Constitutional powers to defund certain parts of federal spending. With an opposition as timid and as inept as the current Republican leadership, we cannot look to them to act as a check on the growth of the federal government and spending.

The Republican Party leadership in and out of government is afraid to rock the boat. None of them would have signed the Declaration of Independence. (That is my yardstick for judging the courage of politicians.) In my state of South Carolina, several politicians and Republican leaders would have signed. Among them are Representative Joe Wilson, Senator DeMint, now the President of the Heritage Foundation, Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Representative Trey Gowdy. It is this kind of courage that is needed.

President Reagan believed that “Government isn’t the answer. Government is the problem.” Of all the threats we face today, big government is the biggest threat to our freedom and economic growth. The Republican insider group just doesn’t believe this. While the size of government has grown spectacularly under President Obama, conservatives must remember that the eight years of President Bush saw large increases in the size and scope of government. Term limits would fix a lot of problems with the Congress.

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Filed under Barry Kelly, centralization, Conservative views, Intelligence & Politics, Obama, Obamacare, political solutions, Presidential Debate

Tagged as Bush, Congress, government, Obamacare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, president reagan, Progressive, Republicans

by Barry Kelly | July 28, 2014 · 8:20 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 133

VETS AND TRANSFORMING

There is something about duty and honor that all veterans understand. It starts with “who can I trust to have my back and who keeps their word?” Those who fail those two measurements don’t serve with duty and honor. They just do the time and collect the retirement pay.

I have to be careful here, for it has been a long time since I saw a gun fired in anger and attitudes change. I can’t get inside the head of a young veteran who is three or four decades younger than I am. But I can speculate on the issues they are facing. The big one concerns their ability to provide for themselves and their families. Thousands of well-trained, battle-savvy soldiers, sailors, Air Force personnel, and Marines will be summarily discharged by a commander-in-chief who dislikes and distrusts the American military. He has traveled the world apologizing for their actions over the last several decades.

The damage to the security of America caused by this unjustified downsizing is bad enough but the hardship this progressive ideology places on our best citizens, current and future, is a national tragedy. It is also dishonorable. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should resign rather than preside over President Obama’s ideological motivation to make American more equal to the rest of the world. Active duty troops discharged against their wishes is despicable treatment for their service. Troops facing this surprise attack must resent the leaders who betrayed them.

Where will they find employment? Medical care for them and their dependents? From a dysfunctional VA? This government-run service has been operating since the Civil War. It is an ironclad example that the no government can or should run a large medical system. Once Obamacare takes hold, we will ALL be in a VA-like system. At least we will be sharing that hardship with our veterans. The high odds of newly discharged veterans finding employment commensurate with their needs are not likely to improve under Obama’s anti-business administration. Training programs are of questionable use and unemployment compensation does end. Will our veterans discharged for a president’s ideological whim view their predicament as anything but the government’s breaking of a promise? I hope they will use their talents and skills to elect a government that will keep its promises.

The Republican Party needs to outline what it will do for these troops. The best plan would be to cancel Obama’s plans to severely cut military troop levels. Next in line would be to pass a G.I. education bill that will enable all who have kept their part of the bargain to get an education that will make them employable in the civilian economy. Unless the Senate and the White House are retaken by the Republican Party, I’m afraid we will find our young veterans turning to food stamps and other government subsidies. Having our veterans become dependent on the government is fine with the progressive ideology of the president and his closest advisers. Is it okay with you?

Read “INSIGHTS Transforming of America Is this what we fought for?”