Category: General

I’m glad that President Trump managed to bring peace to the Gaza – Israel conflict. Overall it’s a good thing.

I’ve noticed that there are Democrats claiming President Trump is building on something someone did in the Biden Administration.

I don’t believe it and honestly don’t give a damn what they think. Or what lies they have to tell themselves to maintain their delusion that Biden was in any way good for the country.

I don’t think it will last, Hamas is already testing the boundaries and they are not to be trusted. They’re not going to willingly give away their control or power, and they’ve no doubt negotiated this peace as a survival tactic. I believe they should be hunted down and exterminated like the lying vermin they are. If Israel decides to do exactly that, I’m all for nobody noticing.

My only concern is that I don’t want America involved in it at all. It’s none of our concern.

That’s not being islamophobic, or genocidal, it’s recognizing an enemy that has for decades played the same game. Attack, get their asses kicked, sue for peace, rebuild their arsenal, attack again. 

It’s like the shampoo bottle instructions, “wash, rinse, repeat.”

“Oh Hamas did a terror attack in Israel? Again? Yawn!”

I’m really hoping President Trump holds the line regarding our involvement and that he’s able to keep the other Middle Eastern nations to their word about controlling the bullshit in Gaza.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be a lasting peace. I’m willing to enjoy Palestinian protestors being off our streets for a while.

I’ve been amused watching the media trying to acknowledge the accomplishment without choking on their own bile.

Trump’s been in office less than a year, and thus far he’s keeping campaign promises. Illegal crossings at the border are at what some reports indicate, a 50 year low.

Corporations are brining manufacturing back to America, (that’s going to be a long term improvement.) Oil drilling is allowed in US coastal waters again. I’m not sure that I’m all for that, but I am for energy independence, and if drilling is a stepping stone to that I’m good with it.

The H1B programs are under fire so maybe we’ll have the ability to call a bank, cellphone, electric, natural gas, and almost any other service oriented company and get someone that we don’t need a universal translator to understand. It would be nice to conduct business in my language without straining to understand the person.

Folks are screaming that our medical industry will be impacted. Maybe. However, since we’re deporting a substantial number of people who use hospital ERs and urgent cares like their primary care physicians because they’re getting medical services on the tax payer dime. The medical issue may sort itself out without intervention.

I for one don’t feel comfortable with the sloppy medical care that has become commonplace. Nor do I feel comfortable having to ask for a translation of the doctor’s diagnosis, then ask for a translation of the translation a nurse provided, from a janitor.

Yes, these people supposedly speak English. But it’s unintelligible.

I do enjoy the fact that when these people look at my last name, they revert to “Mr.” And my first name. 

That being said, I’ve recently had some “American” workers do the same thing because they can’t navigate saying my last name. Had our family not americanized the spelling when we came in on Ellis Island or other ports of entry, I’d probably be a whole lot more amused. Or offended… I’m not sure which.

Were it not for the expense and inconvenience, I’d consider changing my last name back to the original spelling. At least then, when someone botched it they’d have a good reason.

How is it that I, an uneducated American, can usually say someone’s first and last name from the way it is spelled? When I was answering technical support calls, I always took the time to give it a whirl, ask if I got it right, then carry on with the conversation properly using the Mr. Mrs. or Miss pronouns and the person’s last name as a sign of respect.

It’s a small thing, but I always found it made people at least more comfortable and feel that they were being heard. Referring to someone as “Mr. Steve” always felt, to me at least, disrespectful.

Then there’s the prescription pricing that President Trump is working on bringing into line. I’m super happy about that. There’s never been any excuse for being able to buy the same medication in Mexico or Canada at 1/2 or 1/4 the price just because you bought it outside the United States.

What does the drug cost to manufacture? What does it cost to package and distribute? What did it cost to develop? Add the costs up divide that by the number of people likely to use the drug during it’s patent period, add a little % of profit and that’s the freaking cost the consumer should pay no matter where they live.

If their government wants to subsidize the cost to provide the medication to the poor, that’s their business.

There’s no way that the people of the United States should have been paying higher prices for something just because someone, somewhere, decided they should pay for someone in Zimbabwe to pay less. President Trump is right in saying the American people have been ripped off for years.

I know the pharmaceutical industry is pissed off at Trump and I’m “all in” for that too. 

Even here in America, you can see the differences. Wallgreens charges 4 times the price for a generic medication I’m familiar with than Rite-Aid did. What Wallgreens charges medicare is even more.

House & Senate Democrats light their hair on fire about medicare and social security becoming insolvent but don’t have any plan except to keep pumping money into those systems, except asking why. They never get to the root cause of stopping that kind of fraud.

President Trump went to the source and attempted to put a stop to usury pricing.

The Senate Democrats are claiming that millions will lose healthcare due to the government shutdown. They neglect to say that many of those millions are getting it for free due to government subsidies. Some are flat out illegal aliens, some are people who are citizens and who truly need assistance. The latter, I’d like to see taken care of but until the former are not getting the freebies they’ll be hurt too.

Why is it better to be an illegal in America than it is to be a citizen?

I could’ve had healthcare for the previous 5 years.

I didn’t because the math just didn’t work.

Let me lay it out to you. I couldn’t pay for a bottom of the barrel Obamacare plan. It cost more than my mortgage. I could have applied for a subsidy that the state insurance folks called “Free”.

But it’s not free. It’s paid for by tax dollars, and required giving the state direct access to my banking, retirement, and pensions. Oh and since I owned a house, they’d have had the ability to put a lien on my house to cover the “Free” taxpayer subsidy.

They’d have monitored my income, so they could make sure I wasn’t getting benefits I wasn’t allowed to have. Oh, and guess what? The subsidy is taxable as earned income. 

I’d have been paying full income tax on a subsidy that did nothing but pay for a service costing $1600-$1800 a month, but over the past 5 years the actual cost of medical care cost  me a grand total of 12K out of pocket.

Plus I’d have been paying for car registration, property taxes, sales tax, gas tax, and all the wonderful little fees & taxes on my utility bills that provide “Free” utilities to people who are poorer than me.

Providing those “Free” services to the people poorer than me, in effect drives them further down the economic curve by increasing their tax burden, rather than raising them up.

Our Senate Democrats are fighting for more money to provide subsidies for a system of insurance that is clearly broken, and whether by design or implementation breaks the backs of not only the poor, but also the working individuals paying their taxes to the Federal and State governments. 

Admittedly I’m a special case. In that I have hard assets, but even a single guy in an apartment would feel the impact, if for example his employer didn’t provide health insurance.

So I’m actually all in for not raising the subsidies. I’m hoping that the Senate Democrats demand to raise more subsidies to pump into a broken system like Obamacare, casts in sharp relief just how broken and wrong Obamacare was from the start.

A functioning system shouldn’t require endless money to be poured into it in ever increasing amounts.

If you’ve got a car that costs more to maintain than the payment on a newer vehicle, you dump the broken car and buy a new one. You sure as hell don’t keep pumping money into it and at the same time let your drunken buddies keep borrowing it then returning it more broken, with an empty gas tank day after day.

That’s essentially what Obamacare is doing.

I hope that Kennedy or Trump asks how much money shows up in Politicians bank accounts or campaign funds from Obamacare insurers and pharmaceutical companies.

I think the answer would be very enlightening. Afterwards, I’d like to see those answers referred to the DOJ followed by swift indictments and punishment for any wrong doing. I don’t care how many Congressmen are utterly destroyed or which party they’re affiliated with.

Which brings me back to peace in the Middle East, and the war in Ukraine.

Trump bringing an end to the Israeli / Palestinian conflict in short order makes me question in a broader sense just how similar the flow of money is in the military industrial complex to the medical / pharmaceutical games.

For those Congressmen who’ve been feeding the conflicts through words or deeds, how much money have they made?

Could it be that’s why they hate President Trump’s policies with every fiber of their being?

I hope President Trump is able to put an end to taxation for everyone. I’d be happiest if he stopped all taxation. But I’d be willing to accept him doing away with taxation on everyone that didn’t make a million a year.

That should make the Senate Democrats happy. After all, they’ve been saying for years, “Tax the rich,” haven’t they? But they say this knowing they’re immune from taxation don’t they? Maybe the House and Senate should be taxed at 50% on every dollar they make in excess of their Congressional pay.

Yeah, I know I’ve been all over the map with this one. Sorry…

Have a great day.

Don’t know if I’m right, but I wonder.

I’ve been following with great amusement the Jimmy Kimmel affair.

I personally found the guy unwatchable and unfunny before he got his show.

Jerry & I would sometimes try to watch him if there was a guest of interest on, but we usually didn’t make it through the opening monologue before we’d look at each other and whoever had the remote would turn the TV off.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth, the screaming about freedom of speech, and all the rest of the cacophony from the leftists, and Democrats in Congress has been instructive.

The Democrats in Congress apparently have no idea how the FCC regulations work.

As a HAM Radio licensee there are a LOT of things that I can’t say on air. Saying some things would cost me my license and by the way, if someone were to use my radio to broadcast bad words, lies, damaging rhetoric, or a whole bunch of other things, that’s still on me as the license holder. If someone was offended, and reported it to the FCC, I could lose my license.

That’s in a perfect world… Truth of the matter is the FCC doesn’t have enough resources to put a stop to it. Anyone can buy a radio, licensed or not. There are too many people who have radios that for some reason love to interrupt conversations by holding their transmit button, or put tones on the air tying up repeaters for no reason other than to be a nuisance. 

Technically the FCC is supposed to track these people down and fine them. But they only have the resources to get the worst of the worst.

So maybe I have a slightly different perspective on the FCC.

All that being said, the FCC didn’t need Trump’s direction to threaten ABC’s license. Kimmel, was by any stretch, being horribly offensive.

Moreover, Kimmel’s show was pretty low rated according to Nielsen, He was also a liability because Turning Point USA could have filed a law suit that would have been pretty expensive.

The point is, Freedom of speech is limited on public broadcasts because the “Airwaves” (frequencies,) are owned by the Public, they’re regulated by the FCC. The regulations go way back, and haven’t really changed for 60+years. They were about preventing offensive language from coming into people’s homes.

This is also why you can get pornographic movies on cable, but not over the public airwaves.

If Kimmel had been on a cable only show, he could have been as offensive as he wanted to be. So long as people subscribed.

This opens a can of worms that the FCC and the government still haven’t adequately addressed regarding the internet, subscriptions, sites, etc. That’s why people like me really got bent out of shape when the Biden Administration announced their Department of Misinformation that appeared to be focused on the internet.

Especially since there had already been, as has come out in hearings, censorship directed by the Biden Administration directly aimed at specific individuals and phrases on Facebook, X, and other sites.

If the Trump Administration is doing the same thing, I’m just as opposed.

All this is kind of the background for me not thinking Kimmel has a leg to stand on. He used the public airwaves to be very insensitive and outright offensive. ABC saw him as a liability. His ratings were low. The final nail in his coffin was that he refused ABC’s directive to apologize. So, like any other employee he was fired. It’s as simple as that.

My epiphany was an article this morning talking about Sen. Jon Ossoff’s campaign. The campaign tried to paint Kimmel’s monologue as “Satire”. Yawn, whatever.

Further into the article Ossoff’s campaign painted Trump and his administration as “Authoritarian”.

That’s when it hit me.

The difference between a lot of the career politicians and the rest of us is that they may not have worked in or owned, small companies, ever.

They don’t understand that Trump, and all owners of private companies are authoritarian. It’s the nature of the beast. The company lives or dies not by committee, shareholders, or distributed decision making, but on the decisions of one person. The Owner.

It is therefore not surprising that people who’ve never worked for a solely owned company would view Trump as an authoritarian. It’s also not surprising that Trump would be quite authoritarian in the Presidency.

If, in fact the Biden administration was being run by consensus because Biden was cognitively incapable of executing the duties of The President. Trump would be one hell of a shock to their system.

This could possibly extend to a significant portion of the Democrat base as well. I’m not making excuses for either side, but I can suddenly see how both sides would be at odds.

Most Republicans I know have tried at least once to start and run a company of their own. Myself included.

That’s why the Democrat talking point of “Trump had several failed business that filed bankruptcy,” while clutching their pearls, has zero impact on so many business owners from both sides of the aisle.

It happens. You put together a company, it goes along pretty well, you try to increase business, and if you’re lucky you succeed. If you’re unlucky, the business fails.

(I can personally attest to what happens when you have a business partner that decides they need a new car instead of paying for new brakes, or starts taking cash out of the business instead of paying for supplies the business needs. Bottom line, no more business partnerships for me, ever again. I had the last laugh, though it was a Pyrrhic victory, since I had all the knowledge & technology and my business partner didn’t. The parable of the frog & the scorpion comes to mind. He also didn’t have the ability to adapt to changing conditions. But he got a new vehicle…)

People who have always been in positions where they were employees, have no understanding of why a business owner must by definition be an authoritarian.

Suddenly I understand why for example, California business taxes are so high, and why there are so many fees. Why for example, business income taxes, at least here, have to be prepaid based on an estimate of income. It’s because the people imposing the taxes & fees only see the dollars. They have no clue about good months and bad, nor do they have any idea about formerly good customers suddenly not paying bills.

They see and predicate their actions on the force of government to demand payment. That’s something that the average business owner can’t do. Sometimes, business owners will never get paid for their efforts, but they’ve paid for the materials that they supplied in good faith to their customers, and still have to prepay taxes as if they were getting paid based on their Accounts Receivable.

A business owner will cut a customer off if their bills are 30, 60, 90 days in arrears. That’s harsh but it’s business. No hard feelings, and as an authoritarian business owner you can make a decision to gamble by extending additional credit to honorable people who are going through a rough patch with their businesses.

Government will simply come in and seize assets so they always get their money. Government minions, like corporate employees, have no skin in the game at all. If a government office shuts down or a company closes, then those employees will cry and whine about finding a new job but they’ll never understand the factors that led to the closures. They’ll call it corporate greed or authoritarian policies.

Yes, I’ve complained about upper level executives getting golden parachutes while the rest of the employees got screwed. The problem there is the executives typically aren’t in the trenches doing things to make the products. They’re having long lunches with other corporate executives trying to figure out how to whip the employees to be more productive with less resources.

Translate that to people in Congress especially career politicians, and you understand why even in a bad economy the taxes keep going up. Why Newsom for example, sees no problem increasing the gas tax while his state is in a breathtaking deficit, and he has the highest unemployment rate in the country.

Career politicians don’t see the connections. They literally see a dip in tax revenue and leap to the conclusion that people are cheating on their taxes. That’s why you get laws that say over $600 in payments from an individual or company must be 1099ed. And why tips must be declared.

I’m glad Trump might be a bit of an authoritarian. I’m glad there’s someone at the top that understands what it’s like to have failed businesses and successful ones.

I think all our politicians should have those experiences because then maybe they’d be a little more careful with the balance sheets of “We the People” instead of spending money that is not theirs, like drunken sailors on shore leave.

Oh, and I’m really glad Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert are cancelled. It will be interesting to see if the vile women on The View get the message.