Obama's speech on immigrants - a response

The United States went from being a British colony in the 1700s to the richest and most powerful nation in the world in about a hundred years.  It reached its peak in success as a nation probably in the early 1960s.  We had by far the best schools in the world, one of if not the lowest crime rates, highest standard of living, greatest wealth.

Now we are one of the poorest nations.  Don’t be fooled by all the material stuff you see.  The nation is bankrupt and only goes on as it has because the dollar is the world reserve currency, which could change shortly.  We owe trillions of dollars to China, Japan, Russia, Brazil.  If and when they want to collect, we could be selling them our national parks.  They already own many of our companies.

What happened?  A lot of things.  We used to be a Christian nation that taught the importance of hard work, self-reliance, and loving your neighbor.  That was officially rejected by the Supreme Court, and the government now became the supreme benefactor, provider, and protector of the American people.

Christianity was replaced by political correctness and socialism, though that had to be introduced gradually so the people wouldn’t react too strongly against it.  They had to gradually accept being dependent on the government for their security.

The country started to be flooded with immigrants, starting in 1965, from all over the world, where before that we limited immigration to basically the countries that were present so far in the history of our country, countries that shared our basic Western (Christian) values.

We now have more first generation immigrants in our country, both in actual numbers and per cent of our population, than at any time in our history.  The schools are below average in the world, crime and violence are rampant, and the country is broke.

We sent millions of jobs overseas and can’t even provide jobs for the people who are here, yet alone millions more mostly unskilled, uneducated people from around the word.      

Nobody even knows anymore what built our country.  Why did the United States achieve the success and wealth it had?  Everybody wants to come here, but without knowing and keeping the things that made us great, we have become a shadow of what we were and are falling rapidly in decline.  The whole house of cards could collapse as early as this year when it is believed the dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency.             

They try to tell you that all it takes for a country to become rich and great is for it to be a democracy, and everybody can come here and all will be wonderful.  Without a Christian foundation, governments take on the role of God becoming protector, provider, and benefactor.  The country then heads straight to poverty as the people become dependent on it, and the government takes more power to itself to control the behavior of its people. 

Obama’s speech is true up to a point, not telling the whole story.  But countries need to know who is coming in, who is here.  The country, any country, has always had the right of refusal.  We used to turn back anyone coming into our country who was sick, couldn’t read, had no skills, or was likely to become dependent on the government. 

We didn’t even have welfare in the old days when immigration was so strong.  People could come over here with $5 in their pocket and become rich.  Now they come over poor, they get on government assistance, and then they don’t want to work too hard otherwise they will lose it. 

I could go on but I’ll stop.                                          

Three Things We Need to Learn from Donald Trump - Now

Whether you like Donald Trump or not, he has certainly sparked a lot of conversation, much of which has long been needed.  But there are three conversations that we are not having that we need to have and very soon, because nobody is stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.

1)         Donald Trump is getting a lot of attention, because he is holding a commanding lead in the polls for the Republican nomination for President.  Except for one thing.  If he is getting 20 % of the votes, that could mean that 80 % of the voters don’t want him at all.  But nobody is asking.

I think most Republican voters like a number of candidates, but they are only asked to pick one.  That spreads the vote out to paper thin.  Somebody needs to ask them which candidates they like.  I like about 8 of them. 

You want the candidate with the broadest support, and nobody is trying to find out who that is.  We might find then that Donald Trump has 20% of the Republican voters, and Ben Carson could have 90% of Republican voters supporting him.  But if we don’t start asking the right questions, a lot of the Republican candidates will drop out for lack of money, but not because they couldn’t have been the best candidate.

2)         Donald Trump has been threatening to run as an independent if he doesn’t win the Republican nomination.  I understand this is meant to be leverage, to keep the Republican leadership from not being fair to him.  Of course, everyone knows that if he were to run as an independent, this would essentially give the Presidential election to the other party. 

And that’s precisely the problem.  In most of the elections that take place in our country today, if there are more than two people running, someone can win the election with far less than a majority of the votes.  That is absurd and just plain wrong. 

The good thing is that Donald Trump’s threat could be the impetus for politicians to finally correct this.  The Republicans know they will probably lose the election if Trump were to run as an independent, but if they could get the states to have runoffs, that could change everything.  More and more elections now are having for various positions, but none for the Presidential election.  Not only does this mean that we are getting more choices for the various positions, but people are voting their consciences as well. 

In elections with third party candidates, many people will not vote for that candidate, because they know they are usually giving the election to the person furthest from their own views.  But with a runoff, people will vote for the person they want the most, and even if that person loses, their vote is not wasted, because they can then vote for that person they would have voted for before.

3)         Donald Trump is a very blunt outspoken person.  Certainly this is his personality, and he would be this way under any circumstance.  But there is something else at play here.  He is financing his own Presidential run.  He doesn’t have to raise any money.  He doesn’t have to ask anybody for money.  He doesn’t have to worry about saying the right things to get the right people to turn over their money. 

When candidates need enormous amounts of money to mount a campaign, they are always very careful of what and how they say things, so they can get the most money.  How can they not become beholden to large donors which then compromises their ability to conduct themselves honestly when in office?

But candidates do need enormous amounts of money, and this is how candidates can be bought. 

But this doesn’t have to be this way. 

I blame the media here, print and television mainly.  They can be quick to criticize politicians for things they do wrong, but they are negligent when it comes to helping us get good ones. 

At the end of the political process, they will give comparative analyses of the final candidates, but they do almost nothing prior to that while the nation is trying to figure out who those final candidates should be.  They wait until a candidate does or says something embarrassing and then they won’t let it go, but they feel no responsibility to giving the candidates any meaningful exposure prior to that.  They feel it is not their job, where they are the only ones who could help curb the influence of big money on politicians.

I suppose we could publicly finance all political campaigns, but the last thing we need is another government program spending money it doesn’t have.  The media could do the job quite well if it had any sense of moral and patriotic responsibility.

A case in point here: Donald Trump is getting massive amounts of media exposure over a comment he made about a newscaster.  I can think of dozens of questions I would rather Trump deal with than what he meant by his comment.  What are his plans for bringing jobs back, for example?  Why aren’t they asking that?

Like him or not, Donald Trump’s appearance on the political stage right now can transform American politics if we only ask the right questions and do the things that his candidacy is essentially begging us to do.

answers to a questionnaire from Dr. Ben Carson on his Presidential campaign

Dr. Carson

Thank you for asking for my input.  I always have plenty to share.

I wrote once before about the need for a new way to rank candidates.  There are a lot of good people who would make good Presidents.  When we are only asked which ONE we want, too many people only get single digits.  If you were to ask, which candidates you can support, then everybody could get double digits and a number of them should be over the critical 50 % mark.  This is how we should winnow the field and how we should find our final candidate.  Nobody is talking about this. I hope you can, otherwise I think we won’t get our best person, and many candidates will drop out who really shouldn’t.

You asked two specific questions.  I gave my answers, but I think it is important to explain why I gave the answers I did.

Most important issue: [He offered five choices.]

Islamic terrorism is real and will not go away any time soon.  Our response has been tepid and timid at best.  Even if there were another 9/11 in our country, that would still be far from the most important thing for us to think about as a nation.  A big part of dealing with future threats to our country has to do with your second option: Border security and immigration reform.

Border security and immigration reform.  Our immigration system is broken in many ways, and “immigration reform” has become a tagline for changes that are not improvements.  This issue is very, very important but still number 2 on your list.  But briefly, immigration reform must include the following:

1)         Secure the border.  This must be done first without any concessions with a promise of getting to it later.  A country has a right and an obligation to know every person who enters our country and also has the right to refuse anyone as well.

2)         Birthright citizenship is wrong.  We don’t give automatic citizenship to children of diplomats or tourists, and we certainly shouldn’t give it to children of illegal immigrants.  We didn’t even give it to the American Indian without a special act of Congress in 1924.  It’s only a magnet for further illegal immigration.

3)         We need to end family reunification, or at least greatly limit it: spouse, minor children, parents.  We don’t have enough jobs for our own people, and we certainly don’t have the money to support people who don’t work.

4)         No drivers licenses, state IDs, voting, or jobs for illegals.  We have e-verify system; use it.

5)         I have no problem with any person here illegally walking into an immigration office and applying for legal status.  Subject, of course, to the traditional criteria and subject to refusal.  Sick people I believe were refused until they were healthy.  A person who did not have an employable skill I believe was also rejected.  Criminals were also rejected.  They would have the same path to citizenship as any other legal immigrant.

What I believe is a huge mistake and one that they will try to foist on the American people is a blanket program, where we don’t know who is here, where we legalize millions of people all at once.  Just plain wrong, and stupid. 

Won’t our immigration offices be flooded with people?  Of course, but that is what happens when you ignore a problem for 50 years.

Jobs and the economy

This is easily the top issue of these five.  Yes, immigrants built our country, but we had jobs for them.  Now we don’t have jobs for anybody.  We have unsustainable debt at every level of government basically because we don’t have enough jobs for people.   We sent them overseas.  And then we are killing jobs over here because of concerns over climate change.  [See my articles on globalization and climate change on my blogsite poligion1.blogspot. com. for expansion of these ideas.]

The fewer jobs we have, the more dependency on the government we incur, as well as more debt.  The ship is sinking.

The national debt        The debt can easily bury us a nation, sooner than we think.  The biggest single antidote for that for now is bringing the jobs back.

Defunding Planned Parenthood          Important but too much emphasis on this and you will be marginalized as having your priorities in the wrong place.  If you can frame the issue into one of valuing human life and show how we are showing a lack of it in the rest of society, you can have a case.  Can you link the high rate of shootings in Chicago with a general devaluing of human life in our society?

What part of my background is most important for me to address?

None of your previous experience will help you here directly.  You will meet people who will quickly point out to you that you have no relevant experience here.  I’ve heard you respond to this already where you note what experienced politicians have already given us, and we can’t take too much more of it.  If you can be specific here, it would help.  Specific examples of lies, deception, abuse of power, abuse of the public trust, uncontrolled and unsustainable debt, more government control over people’s lives.

The fact that you were a neurosurgeon means that you are not stupid, and your rise from poverty shows that people are not trapped in their circumstances and that government programs are not the answers.

I wish you well.

Larry Craig

Time to End the Two Party System

So Bernie Sanders is a Socialist and Hillary Clinton is a Democrat.  Jeb Bush is a Republican, and Ted Cruz is Tea Party.  Ron Paul, from the last election, was a Libertarian. 

So why is it when we have an election for President, we only get two choices?  Oh, there are others, names you never heard of from parties you never heard of.

But anybody who is somebody tries to run under one of the two main labels in American politics.  Why?   Because we have a two party system in the United States.  When a third major candidate runs for President, he ends up splitting the votes of one party and essentially giving the election to the other candidate, meaning that the winner has less than a majority of the vote.  In Presidential elections, the winner still needs a majority of the electoral votes to win, but he could win a state without getting a majority of the votes when there is a third party candidate.

My question is: why doesn’t anybody see a problem with this?  Whether it is the newscasters reporting on the election or the candidates or party that lost the election, nobody says a word about it.  The only time the subject comes up is before the election when a would-be candidate mentions the possibility of a third party candidacy, and he is then cautioned against it, because a) he has no chance of winning, and b) he is essentially giving the election to the person farthest from his own views.

We have a nation of 330 million people, and we can only get two people to choose from for the most important job in our country? 

Someone will say that we have a primary system that sorts through the candidates, and anybody that doesn’t win the primary surely wouldn’t win in the general election. 

What could possibly be wrong with this thinking?

The first thing is that, for example, a Socialist running in the Democratic Party faces a non-Socialist leadership and non-Socialist donor base.  If the leadership of the Party that you are running in doesn’t support you and the big Party donors don’t support you, do you really think you are going to win the primary for that Party?  Yes, people still have to vote for these candidates, but I don’t believe for a minute that anyone will win any Primary election and become the Party nominee who does not have the full support of that Party’s leadership

But wouldn’t other Socialists rally to his cause and provide the support that the Party leadership is not providing?  That would be like a Mom and Pop store trying to survive in the shadow of Walmart.  A political party in existence for 150 years is not going to let some outsider come in and ruin their party (pun intended).

The second thing wrong with the thinking that the primary process is the best place to sort through and weed out all these various Party contenders is that the Primary process strongly favors established candidates with large donors.  Many candidates drop out after the first few primaries even before most of the votes get a chance to even vote for them, because nobody knows them well enough, and their money has run out. 

There are currently 16 or 17 declared Republican candidates, and half will drop out before half of the primaries take place.  If they ran as whatever Party they wanted or even as an Independent, more people would get a chance to learn about them and money would be less of an issue.

We need to demand more choices for President and not let the Parties winnow our selection down to two.  And there is only one thing that stops this from happening, and it is something that voters should have demanded years ago.  It’s already in place in many elections that currently take place in our country, but we need to demand it for all elections, and particularly for the election of the President of the United States.

We must demand that no candidate wins an election without getting a majority of the vote.  It sounds so obvious, but in most major elections, if there are more than two candidates, a person could win the election with as little as 34 % of the vote.  Not only is this absurd, but it is also wrong.  Yet we see it happen all the time and nobody says a word, except before the election warning that third person not to run.

We need more candidates, not less.  And winners must have more than 50% of the vote to win.  In the elections that require this now, they have runoff elections, which frankly can be expensive, and for a Presidential election could be problematic.

The solution for this is a ballot that allows for a second choice.  If the first choice is for a candidate who is eliminated, the second choice becomes valid.  This would save time, money, and ensure that we get the best candidates available.  Now people often will not vote for third party candidates, because they know that if they lose, the election would probably go the candidate neither of them want. 

Don’t expect our current politicians to suggest this fix to our current election system.  This is something that people need to talk about, write letters about, get the local newspapers involved, and mention to every politician and candidate that we can. 

If I had to make a short list of actions that our country needs to take to save us from the death spiral it is currently in, this would be on it.