It was fascinating to listen to the liberal media a couple of months ago talk about the importance of this election. The head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS)  is no stranger to hyperbole. Just a few months ago, she was touting the importance of the upcoming Democratic win as the first step toward the reelection of the POTUS and the reclaiming of the Congress by the Democrats. Me thinks the lady doth spake too early.

In the two weeks preceding the election it became obvious that this entire recall election was a huge overplay by the Democrats and their loyal lap dogs in AFSME (or is it the other way around?). Not only did Scot Walker win the election, but also he was the first sitting governor put to the test of a recall who won. And he did so by taking a larger majority of the vote against the same candidate who opposed him originally.

Of course now DWS, aka the mouth from the south, insists that this election has absolutely no bearing on the November election for President, as Wisconsin is a traditional blue state. But Rachel Maddow was in barely-controlled-panic mode on her show prior to Wisconsin’s recall election, which pitted Gov. Walker against Democrat Tom Barrett, the Mayor of Wisconsin. “Democrats should be fighting like the existence of their party depends on it,” she told viewers. “Because it does.” Meanwhile the DNC failed to support the candidate with any real money, realizing a few weeks before the effort that it was likely a lost cause. And now the post election finger pointing is in high gear. Democratic leaders from Wisconsin are royally pissed off because they feel they got no support from the DNC and the best that they got from the POTUS was a tweet. Really? The best Obama could do was tweet his support for his candidate? I truly believe that this guy is clueless when it comes to being a chief executive, but I thought he was supposed to be a smart politician. And while the likelihood that Mitt Romney will take Wisconsin in the general election is not great, all of the sudden the President now needs to devote money and time to keeping Wisconsin in the blue column. Money and time that he really needed to be devoting to places like Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia, etc. etc. etc.

And while the Democrats will be spending the next few weeks trying to convince the voters, as well as themselves, that this election really didn’t matter, they are dead wrong. Had Walker lost this election it would have spelled the death knell for Governors taking on public unions. With this win, and with the successes of Governors such as John Kasich, Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, Susanna Martinez, Mitch Daniels, and Bobby Jindal just to name a few, the Republicans have a huge stable of young conservative executives with outstanding resumes ready for 2016 should Mitt Romney not be able to defeat Jimmy Carter, I mean Barack Obama. Tell me my Democratic friends, who is in the Democratic stable with successful executive experience and star power? Martin O’Malley? Are you kidding? Do you really think that ole Marty from Maryland would make a good President? They will paint him to the left of Obama if that is possible. Marty has yet to see a tax that he hasn’t wanted to raise, a political foe that is not on his “enemies list”, and frankly he is disliked by even his closest allies. He just isn’t a nice guy. He would like to style himself as Bill Clinton but he is more like Richard Nixon. He is not as smart, can not cross the aisle to craft legislation because there is no Republican presence in the state house and frankly isn’t likable once you get to really know him.

People will say that this election was about the rights of unions in terms of collective bargaining, but they would not be telling the truth. AFSCME and the teachers unions didn’t really care about losing the right to collectively bargain over non-wage benefits. This was about one thing and one thing only. Follow the money. This election was about Scott Walker putting a halt to the obligation of the state government to collect union dues as automatic deductions from paychecks.

You see, before this election, if you were a teacher or a state employee in Wisconsin your union dues were automatically deducted from your salary. You had no choice in the matter. Whether or not you wanted to be in the union, you had dues removed from your paycheck. And these dues went into union coffers where they were then doled out to Democrat politicians (at over a 98% rate) who then voted to give said unions gold plated benefits and wages that were out of proportion to similar jobs in the private sector. If this wasn’t the definition of a conflict of interest, I don’t know a better one. Even George Meany, famous head of the AFL-CIO, opined that it would be ludicrous to allow federal and state workers the right to collectively bargain because it put them across the table from the “bosses,” whose money helped elect them.

And in my opinion, I think that it is not only insane, but also unconscionable that workers did not have the “right” to opt out of the union. Think about it for a second. Would you like to have your money taken from your paycheck and donated to people who did not support your views? This is exactly what was happening. This is why 38% of union households voted AGAINST the recall of Scott Walker.

Since the passage of the new law, public employees had to sign up to have their dues collected, and many decided not to. Public employee union membership in Wisconsin has dropped like a ten-ton rock off a cliff. According to the Wall Street Journal, AFSCME has lost over half of its members statewide. Before Mr. Walker was elected, there were 62,818 AFSCME members. Since Mr. Walker’s laws were passed that number has dropped to only 28,745. The teachers union took it in the shorts as well, although not to the same degree as AFSCME. In the last fifteen months 6,000 of its 17,000 members dropped off the dues paying roles. This is a colossal loss for state unions. It deprives them of over half of their war chests which are used to support their legislative goals many of which are directly contrary to the wishes of the taxpayers who pay the salaries of these teachers and state level workers. So now, not only do these unfortunate souls have to contribute a small portion of their salaries to their health and retirements as the does the large majority of the private sector, but also their power to affect legislation by monetary donation has been severely curtailed. What a shame. I might have to shed a tear or two for them as I pay over 80% of the costs of my health insurance through the NGO, which employs my spouse and 100% of the 401K, which constitutes my retirement plan.

The unions and the DNC made a colossal mistake in gauging public opinion. The American public is inherently fair-minded. They value the work done by the men and women who teach our children, protect our streets, put out our fires, and run the bureaucracy of state and local government. But fair is fair. They see no reason that these people should not have to contribute to their health care and retirement, as do they. And the idea that money is forcibly taken from the paychecks of all employees irrespective of their own self-interest and desires strikes the public as inherently unfair. The Democrats gambled and lost, in a big way. And now they are reaping what they have sown. And for all the whistling past the graveyard about how this was local and won’t have any effect on the national November election, neither they nor the public really believes it. It may not be enough to turn Wisconsin into a red state, but this earthquake that took place in Wisconsin will have far reaching implications for public unions all over the country. And that my friends, is a good thing in my estimation.

I find it fascinating that the liberal media has had to go all the way back to Mitt Romney’s days in high school in order to dredge up something about him personally that they can exploit. Fascinating even more is the fact that the purported subject of the homophobic bullying of which Mr. Romney is accused, can neither confirm nor refute the story as he has passed on to the great beyond. His sister who is still alive states that he never told her about the incident, but then lets not keep the truth from having the desired effect of the story. We also have the sin of the windy dog, in which Mr. Romney is accused of animal cruelty because the family pet was crated (securely presumably) on the roof of the car during a family vacation. Given the size of Mitt’s family it is not surprising unless they were driving a yellow school bus.

So our liberal press is going back either years or decades in order to come up with the dirt they need to smear the Republican candidate. But conveniently, they have refused to ask Mr. Obama about his admitted cocaine use in college. They refuse to ask him about his relationship with William Ayers and Bernadine Dorn who are home bred American terrorists who have admitted to bombing a police station. Mr. Ayers only regret it seems is that more “pigs” were killed in the explosion. I won’t even go into the dog eating issue as I find it just as stupid as the dog crating issue. Mr. Obama has stated that he barely knows Ayers or Dorn, yet the facts when uncovered show that they had a fundraiser in their home for Mr. Obama. In fact, it appears that this was the first private fundraiser held for Mr. Obama. If it were not for Fox News, we would have never heard about Reverend Jeremiah Wright. You remember him don’t you? He is the man who married the Obamas. He is the man who preached hatred, vitriol, antisemitism and general anti-Americanism from his pulpit at the Trinity Church. This is no fabrication. The tapes of his sermons are available for public consumption. However, if you believe Mr. Obama, in the twenty years he spent with is “Rebbe,” he never heard him say anything of that nature. Now either Mr. Obama is a liar, he just happened NEVER to go to church during one of Rev. Wright’s diatribes, he is deaf, or like many he slept through every sermon. What do you think is the truth? I have my own opinion, but what is yours? Do you have one? Does it matter? Should it matter?

Now many of you are saying to yourselves that I am tarring the President with guilt by association. And to some degree this is true. He may not believe any of the vitriol spewed by Wright, Dorn, Ayers, Fleeger, Farakhan, or the other anti-American garbage that he chose to hang out with in college, law school or even later in life. And perhaps it is meaningless to you. But as I have quoted before in Pirkei Avot,  Nittai of Arbel says – Distance yourself from a bad neighbor and do not associate with a wicked person. It is not a stretch to argue that many friends of Obama could easily fall into these categories.

We all know, or should know, that the liberal media is totally in the tank for this failed President. What we never realized was just how far they would go to lie, obfuscate, divert attention, and frankly use the power of the press to achieve their goal of getting “their” candidate re-elected.

I guess what I am saying is this: If the supposed unbiased press is going to go after Mitt Romney for something he may or may not have done some 45 – 50 years ago, then Obama’s history is fair game as well. Personally, I would not even bother. This administration is doing it’s best to distract the electorate with nonsense, because it can not run on its failure of a record. Unemployment is over 8% and if you counted in the people who have just stopped looking for a job it is closer to 15%. Growth is anemic. We are adding less that 150,000 jobs a month, which is dismal. The stimulus was a failure. GM is alive but owes the American taxpayer over 40 billion dollars which it will never see. The Department of Injustice is headed by a man who should have never graduated law school. Obamacare is so unpopular that almost every Democrat is running away from it and from the President. Ms. Sibelius of HHS has a target painted on her for anyone who is Catholic enough to care about how his or her religion is treated by the government. We have squandered almost one trillion dollars of our taxpayers money on failed alternate energy companies. Crony capitalism is alive and well in Washington, D.C. There is so much to pick from, we don’t need to bother looking at his past. But the only way he wins this election is to convince the public that Mr. Romney, savior of the Olympics and elected as governor in the blue state of Massachusetts is a homophobic, anti-woman, anti-immigrant, pro assault weapon far right wing ideologue. And to do that, Mr. Obama needs the lame stream media. And sure enough, they are solidly in his corner.

A special report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2007 revealed that somewhere between eight and nine thousand African Americans are murdered annually in the United States of America. Of these murders, African Americans account for 93% of the perpetrators. This analysis is supported by records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation which also showed that in 2005, 49% of all homicide victims in the USA were black and that it came almost solely at the hands of people of their own race. So what we have mostly are young black men killing other young black men. Our jails are filled with young black men not only for crimes of violence but also for drug related crimes adding to another problem in the vicious cycle of black life. In the last census, over 90% of Baltimore children are born to single mothers Compounding that problem is our federal government and its wonderful welfare system, which rewards out of wedlock households and single parenthood. Finally, and saddest of all in my opinion, 50% of pregnancies belonging to black women in the city of Baltimore end up in abortion. If this were some xenophobic group subjecting African Americans to these findings we would, and rightfully should all be screaming about genocide. But because this is happening within the black community and is not directly caused by another group, this horrific treatment of an entire race of people is dismissed and not discussed in public conversation with the exception of courageous men such as Bill Cosby, Thomas Sowell, J.C. Watts, Alfonzo Rachel, and Alan West. And what do they get for sounding off about these issues? They are called Uncle Toms and tools of the right wing.

What do we know about George Zimmerman? Well, the first thing we found out is that he is not Jewish. And honestly speaking, how many of you reading the Jewish Times right now breathed a collective sigh of relief as I did, because his name sure sounds like he is one of our tribe. We know that Mr. Zimmerman has a white father and a Hispanic mother, which makes him a White-Hispanic in the eyes of the New York Times. (As an aside, I wonder if the New York times has ever referred to Barack Obama as a White-African male.) We know that he cares enough about his neighborhood that he volunteers for the community watch. We know that his neighborhood is a majority of minorities. Caucasians account for less than 50% of the neighborhood. The rest is split between Hispanic and African American. We know that on weekends he has tutored underprivileged black children. We know that the son of a Sanford police officer beat a black homeless man named Sherman Ware on December 4, 2010. George Zimmerman stepped up and tried to organize the community into action, because the son of the police officer was neither arrested nor tried despite the videotape evidence of the beating. As best as I can tell, there is no evidence that George Zimmerman is a racist. And while that does not mean that he did not kill Trayvon Martin, it does say a lot about the rush to judgment from the liberal media and charlatans like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who circle around the body of this dead young man looking for another way to get their names and pictures in the newspapers.

So why am I going off on this tangent? Had a black youth or older black male killed Trayvon Martin, no one would have cared because black people killing black people just aren’t important stories. It is the rule rather than the exception. Jesse Jackson would not have come down to hold his mother’s hand. Al Sharpton would not be on TV talking about the terrible problem of racism in the United States of America. The New Black Panther Party would have held its racist rallies in the basement of somebody’s home, planning for the day when they would rise up and kill the white man who was oppressing them since slavery. The New York Times wouldn’t have been searching for a new way to redefine racial categories. The Congressional Black Caucus wouldn’t be grandstanding and demanding more money be spent to assuage liberal white guilt. Maxine Waters and Shelia Lee Jackson would be finding other inane things to be speaking out against. And guess what America? Trayvon Martin would be just as dead. Trayvon Martin did not die because of racism. Just as surely as hypertension, diabetes, stroke, and heart disease are risk factors for death, so is being a young black male living in the inner city. And the dirty little secret is that no one wants to say anything about it. Someone has to stop this genocide before it is too late.

It was difficult to decide what topic to pick this past week. I really thought about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. But rather than jump to conclusions like so much of the media has done, or use edited audio of the encounter like MSNBC has done, I decided to wait until all the facts are known. I could have spoken about the Republican race for the nomination. I could have spoken about the Supreme Court in their deliberation about Obamacare. But the quote above, which was part of a 7-minute video clip of the POTUS, won the honors.

I have now been alive for 10 Presidencies. I distinctly remember eight of them. At the time, my favorite of all was Bill Clinton, and now in retrospect with age (and I hope wisdom) the best of them was Ronald Reagan. Even as a Democrat, I thought Jimmy Carter was terrible and possibly the worst President of the last 100 years. But for shear chutzpah, Barack Obama takes the prize.

BHO essentially gave a warning to the Supreme Court that they should skip what was their job and just approve Obamacare. That because they are an unelected body, they had no right to reverse what was a “strong majority” of the Congress in their passage of what may be the worst piece of legislation I have ever seen. I have to give it to him, the guy has brass ones.

First off, Obamacare was passed with only one Republican vote. Joseph Cao who represents a large majority African American district in Louisiana said that he voted for the legislation because his constituents supported it. Not one other Republican in the entire congress voted for this piece of garbage. And yes, I really believe that this legislation is a piece of garbage. In order for Harry Reid to pass Obamacare it took payoffs to Ben Nelson (Cornhusker Kickback), Bernie Sanders, Carl Levin, Patrick Leahy and numerous other members of the esteemed Senate of the United States of America.

Every major piece of legislation dealing with entitlements has been passed with a bipartisan vote with the notable exception of Obamacare. So for this President to say that this legislation passed with a strong majority is a downright lie. And to warn the SCOTUS that they should not do the job for which they were appointed on his say so only confirms the belief that this may be the most arrogant man to hold this office in decades. Only Franklin Roosevelt with his failed attempt to stack the SCOTUS went further than this President in hubris.

My personal belief is that this legislation is unconstitutional. If we allow the federal government to force us to buy health insurance based on the commerce clause, a Pandora’s box will be opened that can never be closed. What is to keep the Congress from deciding that we are compelled to purchase life insurance or estate insurance in order to pay the death tax. I have heard my liberal colleagues tell me that this is no different from owning a car and being compelled to purchase auto insurance. And my response is that the two are totally different. No one compels you to drive a car. You can choose not to drive and therefore not have to buy auto insurance. But this legislation would force us to purchase health insurance just on the basis of our being alive. And that my friends, is total governmental over-reach. There are so other bad things about this legislation that it would take me weeks to list them. But one that really sets bells ringing is the board of people, unelected by the populace, who have the responsibility to decide what care is effective, financially appropriate, and allowable under the law. There is no oversight over this board. They are not doctors or health professionals and what’s best is that the Democrats have written into this behemoth wording that attempts to keep these boards from being expurgated.

The majority of this country in poll after poll after poll believes that Obamacare was a mistake. The majority of this country believes that this law is unconstitutional. Personally, I believe that this President doesn’t really care about the Constitution of the United States of America. But for him to have the gall to warn the SCOTUS that they ought not to do their appointed job is beyond belief for this citizen. November can’t come soon enough for me. All you have to do is ask yourself this; “Do you believe that you or your country is better off than it was four years ago.” If you can answer that question truthfully, then Mitt Romney will win in a landslide.

But today, channeling that famous Republican turned Democrat turned public citizen Arlen Specter, Dick Durbin who is in charge of the Judiciary Committee has decided to waste Congresses time and our tax dollars convening a hearing on the NFL’s bounty gate.
For anyone who has not read a sports page for more than a month, the Commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, spanked the New Orleans Saints for paying defensive players bounty money for successfully injuring players on the other teams offense. Mr. Goodell who has a reputation for coming down hard on players for any significant infraction, suspended the head coach for a full year. He indefinitely suspended the defensive coordinator who has likely been blacklisted for life. He suspended the general manager for a half-year and another coach for a half year. In addition, he stripped the Saints of their second round draft picks for the next two years. In all, it was the most devastating punishment handed out by an NFL commissionaire since Pete Rozelle suspended Paul Horning and Alex Karras for betting on football in the 1960’s.

With all of the problems that we are facing right now, to include the worst recession since the depression, the poorest recovery in modern history, gas prices at almost four dollars a gallon, a war in Afghanistan that no one wants, and a potential war in Iran that we may be forced into, one would think that our brilliant scholars in the Senate would have better things to do with their time. But obviously, that is not the case.

This is not a Democrat vs. Republican thing. As I said, “Snarling” Arlen Specter wasted our time with hearing into steroids in baseball. But this really makes me angry. We have a political class. They get paid very good money to do their lousy job. They have benefits that are unmatched by anyone in their income class. The have a retirement system that is better than anything around. But they pass their raises in the middle of the night or find ways of giving themselves automatic cost of living adjustments. Chris Dodd gets preferred mortgages from Countrywide Financing and heads the Senate Banking Committee yet sees no conflict of interest. Barney Frank gets his pals jobs in the same finance companies he is charged to oversee when he ran the House Banking Committee. Ted Stevens (R) was in an annual race with Robert Byrd (D) to see who could procure the most pork for their state. The whole thing stinks and yet we vote again and again for the same people who basically refuse to do the job for which they were elected.

I’ll get the complaint that all I do is carp about the situation and offer no solutions. Or that I only talk about the bad people and don’t admit that there are any good politicians. That is not really true. I’ll give you two examples on different sides of the isle that I think should be models for politicians. Ron Wyden (D) from Oregon is a liberal democrat that has shown time and time again to be willing to work with the “other side,” in order to craft quality legislation. And on the Republican side, the man that I think ought to be President is congressman Paul Ryan. He is one of the only congressmen in the entire nation that is not only willing to admit out loud the truth that there is a major problem with Medicare and Social Security, but also he is willing to take on reform of entitlements. And whether or not you agree with his plan, you have to admit that he is unique. When you have demagogues like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, whose only job seems to be screaming on the TV that the Republicans are trying to kill the elderly, I can only imagine how terribly hard it is to craft any significant legislation.

So what are we left with? We are left with Dick Durbin wasting our time and our tax dollars looking into Bountygate. You have got to be kidding me…..

What really ticks me off is liberals like Joe Biden pontificating on how it is patriotic to pay taxes. Certainly for Joe it is, because he gives almost nothing away in charity. And the really funny thing is that the breakdown of charity when comparing liberals to conservatives is astonishing. Most liberals give almost nothing in charity, while most conservatives have significant charitable deductions. Joe Biden gave a grand total of just under four thousand dollars across three years on an annual wage of over 150,000 dollars a year. That is pathetic let alone not patriotic. Mitt Romney tithes 10% of his salary and with the money he makes just on investments, he certainly can afford to do so. I personally follow the 10% rule as well. I remember when my neighbor welcomed me into the Eruv from Owings Mills, he said to me something regarding charitable giving that I found to be true over and over again. The more you give away, the more G-d finds a way to give to you. And while I don’t want to go into specific instances, because they are personal, I have had at least four different times when I stretched to give more to what I thought was a worthy cause and found that for some odd reason my income went up just that amount that year from an unexpected source.

But what I really want to talk about is not charitable giving; rather it is the government’s appropriation of our income for purposes that we don’t necessarily agree upon. It has been my experience that Liberals act as if it is the G-d given right of the government to take my hard earned money. Conservatives believe that it is responsibility of the citizen to give a small percentage of what they earned for the common good. And that it is the responsibility of the federal and local governments to utilize that money effectively in the dispensation of its duties. So, the fact that Solyndra managed to procure one half billion dollars from the “stimulus” bill of which the POTUS is so proud and turn around within a year or so and go bankrupt really sets my teeth on edge. You could say the same for the other alternative energy sources that frankly stole our money only to cut jobs or transfer them overseas, or follow Solyndra into bankruptcy. But that’s OK; this President says we can’t drill our way out of dependency so let’s waste another few trillion dollars on alternative energy sources. After all, it is only the taxpayers’ money now right?

This year, almost 49% of families will not have to pay any federal income tax. What a nice voting block for the Democrats, huh? When the Israelites were in the desert and Moshe was taking a census, every person had to pay one-half shekel, no more and no less. What that teaches me at least is that everyone ought to have a stake in his or her government. Once that stops, they are no longer active participants in their governance and lose that feeling that their say matters.

I understand that there is a need for some sort of federal taxation system. And I understand that as a surgeon who makes a good living, I am going to pay more than the guy flipping hamburgers at McD’s. But at some point, it becomes too much. I am not a millionaire. I am a thousandaire. And despite the nonsense that comes out of the mouth of this President, I am going to be socked with a huge tax increase. My social security taxes, which were originally supposed to be an adjunct to retirement and have become an income redistribution Ponzi scheme, are going up. My Medicare taxes are going up. My federal income tax is going up and don’t even get me started on my state income taxes with Marty and the Looney Tunes in the legislature. Just this week, the perpetual gaffe machine, aka VP Joe Biden said “These guys don’t have a sense of the average folks out there. They don’t know what it means to be middle class.” The funny part was that our Vice Populist in Chief was speaking to an exclusive club of $10,000 per couple campaign donors gathered together at the swanky home of the Senate’s 200 million dollar man Senator John. Kerry. The bottom line is that by the time all these politicians are done; I will very likely be paying well more than half of my income to taxes. And that, my friends, is a break point. When I look at the amount of taxes I pay on a yearly basis all it does is make me want to work less as opposed to more. And therein lies the problem.

This President with his Democratic majority in his first two years in office, shoved the largest tax increase in the history of the US down our collective throats. It was all for the purpose of Obamacare. And they sold the public on the belief that it was going to save money. And they lied because they counted ten years of collections against only six years of expenditures. Now the CBO tells us that Obamacare’s price tag has doubled. I guess this is why Nancy Pelosi said that we had to pass the law to see what was in it. Had they shown us what was in it prior to its passage there would have been riots.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of my government squandering my taxes on things in which I don’t believe. I don’t believe that crony capitalism works, whether it is Solyndra or Enron. Companies like Solyndra and GM ought to sink or swim on their own merits. This administration has wasted trillions of dollars. And I know all the Bush haters out there are going to tell me that Obama had a bad hand dealt to him. But the bottom line is that he signed up for the job. And in his three years of on the job training, the unemployment rate unacceptably high, our national debt is mind numbing and the deficit he has run is triple what GWB rang up. And his response is that we need more tax money so that we can “invest in America.” If this guy were my investment adviser, I’d have fired him a couple of years ago.

People like me who were born lower middle class and have worked their way to making a good income aren’t millionaires. We send our kids to religious school and get no financial aid because we have never asked for it. We tap our home equity lines to pay for our kids colleges because our salaries are too high to get financial aid and most schools have dropped merit based aid. We tithe our net income as we have been told is the right thing to do. We turn age 50, look around, and see that despite trying our best we’ll never be “rich,” whatever that means. And then the President goes on the television and says that people like me are selfish because we don’t want to pay more taxes. After all, Joe Biden says that paying taxes is patriotic. And if he says it, it has to be true right? After all, the government would never lie to us, would they?

Just to name a few of these necessary adjustments:

1. A 66% increase in hunters’ licenses to 40 from 24 dollars.
2. A 33% increase in the game bird stamp.
3. Doubling the cost of getting a copy of a death certificate.
4. A 60-cent fee on those who use prepaid cellular phones.
5. A 200% increase in the cost of registering a motorized boat.
6. An extra $5 dollars per month for owning a septic system.
7. A $1500 dollar fee for a surgical abortion center

And the list goes on and on, and the song remains the same.

In states far away from Maryland, somewhere in the heartland of the USA, leaders have come to the realization that our problem is not one of a shortage of revenue. It is a problem in over spending. These leaders have demanded that the state employees bear their fair share of the costs of health care and retirement plans. This is no different than what faces 88% of non-unionized Americans. And so, despite the gnashing of teeth and the hundreds of million of lobbying dollars poured in by the public unions and their cronies, places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Maine, and yes even Florida have managed to balance their budgets in the time of an historic recession by learning to control their spending.

Businesses are moving into Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and the like. When was the last time we Marylanders heard about a large company moving into our state? It must have been years, because had it happened I can guarantee you that O’Malley would have been trumpeting it from Garrett County in the west to Worchester down by the ocean, Hun.

Maryland, we have a big problem. According to Forbes, we are in the middle of the pack for economic climate and growth prospects but get killed in the business costs category, finishing 49th in the country. Only Massachusetts did worse when it came to things like the cost of labor, energy, taxes etc.  If it weren’t for the large number of federal workers who live in the state but work in DC, this state would be in absolute crisis. We are already one the worst states in the Union for business costs. We have one of the highest death taxes in the United States. We have an assembly that just does not listen to its constituents. And frankly, why should they? The only reason they lose their seats is to death or scandal.

Our businesses are leaving this state. Our “rich” seniors are all moving to Florida to avoid Maryland’s death tax. Our more affluent citizens are leaving this state. Our doctors are leaving this state in droves.  It is darned near close to impossible to replace the drain of physicians who have left, because Maryland is one of the lowest Medicare reimbursing states in the USA. In most states, Medicare reimbursement is the floor and the only payor that is lower than Medicare is Medicaid. In Maryland, Medicare has become the ceiling and most insurance pays less than 100% of Medicare. This is despite the fact that Maryland is one of the highest cost of living states in the USA.

Who’s to blame? Well, almost everyone, including all of us voters. There is no real Republican Party to balance the Democrats because Maryland is a very blue state. So the Republicans are to blame for neither supporting nor fielding a good slate of candidates. The Democrats bear a large majority of the blame. This Assembly and the Governor act as if they are answerable to no one because they are never held to task. Their standard response to every monetary crisis is to raise taxes despite the fact that it drives business, the well off, and yes even the middle class away. Finally, we must blame ourselves. We march into the polling station of our choice and do the same thing over and over and over again. Albert Einstein has been attributed as saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, guess what Maryland; that is exactly what we do here. We pull that lever next to the person with a “D” behind their name without even thinking about what we are doing. And until we start voting differently and holding our politicians feet to the proverbial fire, nothing is ever going to change. Here’s a recommendation to start with. Vote for the challenger in every single race irrespective of party affiliation. If enough people do it, the message in Annapolis will be heard loud and clear. But until we, the voters, take responsibility for how we cast our vote and what we expect out of our representatives, we truly have no one to blame ourselves for the mess that we are in as a state

This column is dedicated to my good friend and mentor, Dr. Keiffer Mitchell. Keiffer is the elder statesman of the Mitchell family and has been my friend for many years. And while we have differing views on political topics, I hope that he, his patients and his family know of the deep and unwavering respect and admiration that I have for not only Dr. Mitchell, but the multitude of Mitchell’s who were responsible for much of the progress made in the name of civil rights in the state of Maryland. And while we may disagree on how to solve problems and whether the government is the best option available for problem solving, he knows that I would fight to the death for his right to have and express his opinion.

#1 Fact – Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke an inappropriate name on the radio.
#2 Fact – There are Democratic members of congress calling for people to boycott Rush Limbaugh because of these comments.

Opinion – freedom of speech, which is guaranteed in the United States allows for the stupidity of both #1 and #2.

#3 Fact – Bill Maher on multiple occasions has referred to Sarah Palin by inappropriate terms.
#4 Fact – Bill Maher has donated 1 million dollars to the President’s Super PAC.
#5 Fact – the President’s response to Mr. Limbaugh’s comment was as follows: “What I can comment on is the fact that all decent folks can agree that the remarks that were made don’t have any place in the public discourse,”
#6 Fact – I cannot find any reference on the Internet to the President calling Mr. Maher’s description of Sarah Palin inappropriate for public discourse.

Opinion – Hypocrisy is so rampant in politics that it is an hourly event. When a conservative radio talk show host says something anti-woman everyone is shocked and appalled. They are threatened with boycotts (Rush Limbaugh) or they lose their job (Don Imus). When a liberal talk show host says something anti-woman, no one seems to care. And while all of these statements fall under the heading of protected speech, I wonder why the media, the unbiased protectors of truth and justice as the 4th estate, goes to such length to highlight one and disregard the other. Perhaps they are not as unbiased as we thought. It reminds me of a very famous scene from a very famous movie made many years ago…..

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Louis: I am shocked, shocked, to find gambling going on in this establishment!
Emile: Your winnings, sir.
Louis: [Sotto voce, to Emile] Thank you. Thank you very much. [Shouting, to casino patrons] Everybody out!
— Casablanca

My plan for this blog is to speak what I consider to be the truth. Many times it will not meet with your approval and sometimes it will. I will tell you if something is fact and will tell you if what I am saying is my opinion. One of the real issues with the Baltimore Jewish Community is the perception that we speak with only one voice, and that is the voice of the Democratic Party of Maryland or the national Democratic Party. To a large degree for the secular Jewish world this is true. I was born and raised a Democrat. My maternal grandparents, may they rest in peace, were card carrying Communists. My father, may he rest in peace, pulled the Democratic lever for his entire life. I am still a registered Democrat in the city of Baltimore, but as I have aged, I have also realized that my father and mother’s Democratic Party is not the one that is present today. I voted for President Clinton twice and Al Gore once. And then, I decided that enough was enough. I did not like John Kerry and thought that what he did after the Viet Nam War was unforgivable. Having spent nine years in the military and having deployed to Kuwait for the first Gulf War, I could not understand how Kerry could do what he did to his comrades in arms. And while I can understand his aversion to and horror of war itself, his acts after he got out of Viet Nam to me were unacceptable. That, obviously, is my opinion.

In truth, at this point in my life, I am a libertarian socially and a conservative fiscally. I am appalled at the political elite that has become the ruling class of America. They do not listen to their constituents, and for good reason. They have no need to really listen. Most of these people work to get elected and then their full time job changes from being the voice of their constituency to working for re-election. One only has to look at our two senators in this state. Senator Mikulski has not sponsored one major creative piece of legislation in her twenty some odd years in the Senate, and Senator Cardin went from being a cipher as a congressman to being M.I.A., as a Senator for the State of Maryland. I find it horrifying that Senator Sam Brownback was a stauncher supporter of Israel than was our Sen. Ben Cardin. Our elected officials pass their jobs onto their children or families as if they were heirlooms to pass on to a grandchild in a will. One only has to look locally at the Sarbanes family and the Cardin family or nationally we can look at the multitude of Kennedy’s and Bush’s whose lives are dedicated to continuing their place in the ruling elite.

I am going to challenge your deeply held beliefs as mine where as I made the change from an automaton who happily ingested all of the propaganda that was fed to me by the Democrat Party. I am going to figuratively take my surgeons knife to the Republicans as well. Men like Orrin Hatch, whose raison d’etre seems to be making sure the F.D.A., doesn’t regulate the vitamin industry. Guys like Robert Byrd who was a member of the KKK, funneled billions of dollars out of our pockets so that roads could be named after him in West Virginia. But mostly, I am going to try and show you that the proverbial king has no clothes. It is time that the Democrat Party of the United States of America can no longer take for granted the votes and the money they have been receiving from Jewish America for decades. It is time for us to wake up and in the words of the late Peter Finch in the movie, “Network,”  open our windows and shout, “we are mad as hell, and we are not going to take this anymore.”

Edward K. Leventhal, MD