May 7th, 2013; Love Finally Triumphs Over Hate

My friends, we are gathered here today to celebrate one of life’s greatest moments, to give recognition to the worth and beauty of committed marital love, and to add our best wishes to the words which shall unite these two people in marriage.  In the words of our Creator, what God hath brought together, let no one cut asunder.

The commitment that the two of you are about to make, is the most important commitment that two people can make; you are about to create something new, the marriage relationship, an entity that never ends.

As you stand here today, are you now prepared to begin this commitment to one another? (I am)

Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage? (I have)

I would ask that you both remember to treat yourself and each other with dignity and respect; to remind yourself often of what brought you together today. Give the highest priority to the tenderness, gentleness and kindness that your marriage deserves. When frustration and difficulty assail your marriage – as these do to every relationship at one time or another – focus on what still seems right between you, not only the part that seems wrong. This way, when clouds of trouble hide the sun in your lives and you lose sight of it for a moment, you can remember that the sun is still there. And if each of you will take responsibility for the quality of your life together, it will be marked by abundance and delight. 

Will you have this person to be your wedded partner? (I will)

Will you love and comfort then, honor and keep them, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto them as long  as you both shall live? (I will)

Will you have this person to be your wedded partner? (I will)

Will you love and comfort them, honor and keep them, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto them as long as you both shall live? (I will)

Since it is your intention to enter into marriage, join your right-hands, and declare your consent (before these witnesses) by  repeating after me: 

I, take you to be my partner, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, as long as we both shall live. Take this ring as a sign of my commitment and fidelity to you. …

I, take you to be my partner, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, as long as we both shall live.  Take this ring as a sign of my commitment and fidelity to you. 

In so much as the two of you have agreed to live together in Matrimony, have promised your commitment to each other by these vows, (and) the joining of your hands (and the giving of these rings), by the authority vested in me by the State of  Delaware, I now pronounce you a married couple.  Congratulations, you may now kiss as a married couple….

Ladies and Gentlemen here who are witnesses.  May I present to you the world’s newest couple…. 

Awwwww.  How can anyone vote against something as wonderful as that?

Delaware’s State Senator Greg Lavelle

Courtesy of Delaware Liberal

There Must Be 50 Ways To Taze A Lover

Jeff Christopher followers stage a show of force to give Sussex County an idea what will happen once a sheriff gets full power to make arrests base on his arbitrary judgment.

All three of his followers think this is what America needs more of.

Constitutional Crises

How were you taught the Federal Government worked… way, way, way back in High School physics…?

You were probably as was I, taught that two parties campaigned and all the candidates campaigned and when the votes were counted the winners went into office….. When legislation came forward, everyone voted yea or nay, and if the yea’s had it, it went forward. If the nays won, it died. But the idea was that a majority rule was sufficient to govern the body of politics. Of course there were times like impeachment we learned or treaty passage, where making a wrong move would be dangerous, and to make sure it was the correct action, the founding fathers made 2/3rds be the deciders… If that muster wasn’t reached, it died….

In 1994 this 205 year old idea died. After that group came into power, suddenly Congress was not on the debate-and-vote platform anymore. The will of the people stopped mattering. Instead, keeping one’s party values prevalent, was the new order of all that would forever more transpire in Congress.

Last November America sent a decisive message. America elected the first president since Eisenhower to be elected over 51% of the popular vote two time. And Eisenhower was just back from winning the war in Europe! Americans elected more Democratic Senators than they did Republican Senators. And in the House, far more Democrats voted for their Congress people than did Republicans….

The Americans are sending a loud and clear message that “this” is the way they want to go…. and it is getting ignored. Instead the Republicans are being anti-American by acting against all those wishes of the majority of voters, and conniving on “how can we prevent the American people from doing what they want done?”…..

The proper way would be to put up all bills, debate their merits and vote up or down. One could use arm twisting, public humility or any other personal trait to convince someone to come to your way of thinking, and if they did, that would be ok…. That is not what is happening.

What is happening is that bills passed in the Senate are not being released in the House. The House is sitting on legislation that needs to go forward because the Republicans in the House do not have enough votes to stop it.

Appointments are unfilled. Because the Republicans do not have enough votes to block, so the appointments never get voted upon.

And it is obvious to see where the problem lies. Those in Congress are saying “but this is what we have to do to save our way of life because we don’t have the votes to do so otherwise”. At worst it gets laid bare this way when they speak: “I represent the majority views of my district and in order to fully represent them, I need to use subterfuge, crafty tricks, dirty pranks, and just plain meanness to make sure changes don’t get voted over top of us….”

But you can do that by voting your conscious with each vote. After all, it is recorded. You are not constitutionally required to hold up the entire government because you have an idea that only exists in your head. That is not how Congress was designed. If you are in the minority… you lose, and America wins…. After all, if your way of thinking was so great, more people would have voted for it….

And Fox News Brings Back The Laughter Curve–Oops– Laffer Curve

Today in order to capitalize upon the fact that the fourth quarter economy sank (even though it was because of the downward pressure due to the threat of sequestration forced upon Congress by the Tea Party), they wheeled out Arthur Laughter Laffer to make a dire predictions….

He is on their short list of who-to-call-when-we(FOX News)-NEED-a-dire-prediction…..

Because….. He is well known for making “dire predictions”..

“Economist Arthur Laffer told his clients on July 26, 1982, that (Ronald Reagan’s) Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised taxes by about one percent of GDP, “will stifle economic recovery,” “retard economic growth,” and undercut “the economy’s ability to enter into a period of expansion.” On August 20, 1982, he told his clients that TEFRA, Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, “will tend to lengthen and deepen the recession.”

Instead, ….. No one could have been more wrong…

“Looking at real gross domestic product, it grew 4.5 percent in 1983 and 7.2 percent in 1984 – an exceptionally strong performance. The stock market had one of its best years ever in 1983 – both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 Index rose 35 percent. There was no increase in the rate of inflation, which was exactly the same in 1983 and 1984 as it was in 1982. The unemployment rate fell from 10.6 percent in December 1982 to 8.1 percent by December 1983 and 7.1 percent in December 1984.”

On August 20, 1993, Laffer told his clients, “Clinton’s tax bill will do about as much damage to the U.S. economy as could feasibly be done in the current political environment.” He said that interest rates would rise and the stock market would fall.

Once again, it would be hard to find a forecast that was more completely wrong….

“The unemployment rate fell from 7.1 percent in January 1993 to 5.4 percent by December 1994. Real GDP growth rose from 2.9 percent in 1993 to 4.1 percent in 1994. Stock prices rose and interest rates fell. More importantly, the 1993 tax increase and accompanying spending controls, which were opposed by every Republican in Congress, laid the foundation for the phenomenal growth of the late 1990s that actually produced budget surpluses before Republican tax cuts in the 2000s dissipated them.”

And now! Today,… well, there he goes again….

“You have the whole output of the economy shrinking. Not just expanding more slowly, it`s absolutely shrinking,” (lol, see by how little, below)… Laffer told Fox News’ Eric Bolling…

“That’s catastrophic,” the former adviser to President Ronald Reagan added. (Did anyone else catch the stupendous irony of that? Oh, Wow. You can’t make stuff like that up).

“You can explain some of that by sequestration, and defense spending was down lot and all that. But you still have a rotten economy. And it’s still too bad. We know how to fix it, by the way, a low rate flat tax, spending restraint, sound money, free trade.” (See George Bush’s Economic Record.) Laffer was responding to reports Wednesday that the U.S. economy contracted 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012…

Yes. Laffer was responding to reports Wednesday that the U.S. economy contracted 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012. Quote: “You have the whole output of the economy shrinking. Not just expanding more slowly, it`s absolutely shrinking,”

Recalling his years as one of Reagan’s top economic advisers, Laffer said Reagan actually cut the highest tax rates (From 70%-50%; they are 35% now) He said “we made a mistake” by phasing in the cuts, which he said caused the 1981-82 recession. But he said the economy took off in 1983* when the cuts (and 1%GDP tax increase) went into full effect. *

“This place just went like a rocket ship,” he said. “I think we had 7.5 percent growth in 1983 and 5.5 growth in 1984, just this boom that lasted for years and years.”* (*lol)

(Conversational excerpts provided by Newsmax)

Women Now Can Go Into Combat

So impressed was Leon Panetta with Hillary Clinton’s taking out the Republican opposition for 2014/2016, he said, “Damn! Women can sure fight good!”

Immediately thereafter, he overturned the ban on women in combat.

Rogue Wave

During the nineties there was discussion of rogue waves the sometimes show up in the Southern reaches of the Indian Ocean. As one who has studied physics knows when a wave is put upon another wave, it absorbs that wave’s energy and creates one wave the size of both. Sometimes three or four waves randomly fall in the path of each other and a giant wave, capable of swamping a tanker comes out of nowhere….

This week we have something similar….

The fiscal cliff… pressure on the economy.

The Longshoreman’s strike…. pressure on the economy.

Open war in Israel/Palestine over the new settlements announced today….

We may have dodged one end-of-the-world, to be capsized by the wave of another….

Personal

Skip this if you are looking for policy.  Or rah, rah, rah for one party or another.  This is none of those.  This is about the tragedy in Aurora, and my thoughts upon looking into details.   As usual, I have waited my three day period of silence.  It takes three days for thoughts to gel, often because the shock of the initial hearing forces us to rely upon our environmentally developed emotional safety net, instead of a rational thought process.

We need to keep gun laws as they are.

Repeat, we need to keep gun laws as they are.  Please be advised.  I in no way want to make light of what happened.  There are  12 mothers, and 12 fathers out there who just had the worst thing life can do to a person.  There are may more praying now for the recovery of a good number of people.

This is not the first such tragedy.  I remember the fear of the sniper in Texas Tower.   Recently I was reminiscing how one man scared the hell out of Washington, DC.   One person confessed he darted from tree to tree on his way to the metro.  Funny now, but it wasn’t then.  But such is the power of guns.

Bottom line:  the problem is people.  It is not guns, it has never been guns.  It has always been people.  Always.

A point made was had one person been carrying a gun in that audience, more people might be alive.  Where is a super hero when you need one, eh?

Psychologically, we are  reactive people.  We’ve been attacked, how do we fight back.   And some people turn to saying …..” well, if guns were impossible to get, that crazy couldn’t have gotten them and used them on people. ”  And since we all have respect for their firepower, we nod our heads and say, yes, yes, yes.  But we fail to see the obvious.   The obvious here, was that guns have been around all this time…. the person has been around for 24 years….. but for some reason, on this day, this person used guns to wreak violence.

Why did we not regulate this person?

Why did we not catch that this person was going to do this?

The answer is, there is no way we could have.   It is just beyond our control.  It is beyond our capacity to prevent.  No one appears to have guessed this guy was attempting this event?  He worked the system surreptitiously to make sure no one knew he was going on a killing spree.  The exact same thing happened with the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shootings.  No one could have guessed……

The only thing we can do, in preparedness for events like this, is to be well trained and respond in a very quick fashion to save lives.

It appears the police were there in minutes.  We did what we could.

Bottom line, is 12 people died in that horrible incident.  In the same weekend, 5 people died in a single car crash in New York City.  Likewise, in the same weekend a family of 3 crashed into a van outside St. Louis.  A DUI Teen killed two with his car on Long Island.  Houston just shut down all southbound lanes of the Gulf Freeway and one motorcyclist is dead.

No one jumps up to ban cars.  Why?  Well the obvious reason is that we are all familiar with cars, everyone of us has been in one, and that familiarity causes us to accept these things as something that was meant to be.  Those who are not familiar with guns, will use that  unfamiliarity to voice their fear and concern.  The opposite is true to those who know guns.  They know a gun cannot shoot a person unless a person performs at least 5 conscientious steps before firing.  We call car deaths accidents.  We label gun deaths as crimes.

Intent.

So, tell me liberals.  How does controlling guns make any dent on … intent?

He could have learned to fly, loaded his plane with explosives, and flown it right through the wall of that theater.

Guns have nothing to do with this.  It is a people problem.  Sadly,  if we had a proper medical system where regular checkups that were free at point of service, we could have channeled this youths sickness and could have done a lot more to prevent this tragedy, than passing tougher gun laws.

No.  Leave guns alone.  We are going to need them to supply the home grown militia’s we will need to fight the corporate armies that will eventually come to take away our jobs.

Our attention should instead be focused on doing anything we can for the victims families….. That is where we need to focus.

For Those Who Follow DelawarePolitics.Net

I’m trying to put all your ideas together into one package. So, let me get this right… All you are asking is for, is a country where:

1) There is no universal healthcare.
2) Few entitlement programs.
3) Low Flat Tax System.
4) Faith based Government.
5) A deep reverence for God.
6) Extremely strict rules against abortion.
7) Marriage has already been strictly defined as between man and woman.
8) Homosexuality is a sin, and illegal.
9) Dress Codes are strictly enforced.
10) Tattoos, piercings, baggy pants, are banned.
11) Has the Death Penalty which they aren’t shy about using.
12) Strong private school system with religious focus.
13) Widespread dependency on oil and natural gas drilling.
14) Growing nuclear program
15) Nonexistent environmental nuisances
16) Culture that promotes family and stereotyped roles for men and women.

I’ve endeavored to put all your values on one page. I share your frustration because today, ever since 2008, it seems like America is moving further and further away from these values.

But you don’t have to be frustrated anymore. I have looked far and wide and have discovered a place already in existence that has those values in place, and more. If you sorely long for those values above, it is sincerely a place where you and your family would be very happy.

It is Iran.

You don’t have to pay me. I don’t need any commission. Just glad to help a fellow Delawarean out…. No problem.

Republicans As Just Another Third Party

I’m borrowing this line quoted on Steve’s Blog: Delaware Libertarian to support my claim, that Republicans are no longer the viable force in politics people think..

This statement says it all….

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, has more political executive experience than Mitt Romney, a one-term governor, and Sarah Palin, a half-term governor, combined.

I need to add nothing more. If you are a Republican disgusted with where your party has gone, embarrassing you over women’s bodies, making you blush with statements that counter evolution, made you vomit with disbelief over claims that global warming is a hoax,… then this is the party for you… This is why you became a Republican in the first place. Not to co-mingle with nuts…

Check Gary out. Hell, he’s one of our most successful governors, and at least in New Mexico, he did it as a full fledged Republican…

This is your answer, Republicans. This is where you need to send your financial support… Read and Rejoice…