Monthly Archives: October 2013

Interesting Headlines.

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I had intended to write on an different subject…then I saw the headlines. Some made me laugh like the one from the liberal rag, the National Journal:

How Crazies Are Destroying Your Party

New poll underscores public’s mad-as-hell attitude toward Republicans and Democrats.

The NJ parrots the liberal theme that the shutdown was ALL due to the ‘Pubs. That underscores their entire publication. But, now, they’re alarmed that the polls only marginally support their propaganda. Horrors! Seventy-four percent of the people say, “a pox of both your houses.”

Partisans in both parties will never admit it, but the public is putting a pox on both houses.

  • 74 percent of Americans believe Congress is contributing to problems in Washington rather than solving them.

  • Only 22 percent think the nation is headed in the right direction. Two-thirds believe that the nation is in a “state of decline.”

  • Just two of every 10 Americans think the economy will get better in the next year.

  • Only three of 10 Americans are optimistic about the future of the U.S. political system.

  • A majority of Americans don’t identify with either party.

Makes me laugh.

Then in Bloomberg Business Week, Ezra Klein, laments:

How the iPod President Crashed: Obama’s Broken Technology Promise

In the 2008 election, President Obama’s advisers talked of their boss’s belief that it was time for an “iPod government.” Obama, a technology addict who tools around on his iPad before going to sleep and who fought the U.S. Secret Service bureaucracy for the right to carry a smartphone, would be the first president truly at home in the Digital Age. That put him, he thought, in a unique position to pull the federal government into the Digital Age, too. His administration wouldn’t just be competent. It would be modern. And it would restore America’s faith that the public sector could do big things well.

Then he wails that the premier project of technocrat Obama, HEALTHCARE.GOV, is a complete, and possibly unfixable, failure.

The disastrous launch of healthcare.gov,the online portal that was supposed to be the linchpin of the Affordable Care Act, has dealt a devastating blow to Obama’s vision. In the months leading up to the Oct. 1 rollout of the site, the president rarely compared his signature policy achievement to Medicare or Social Security. Instead, he favored analogies to e-commerce sites such as Orbitz (OWW), Travelocity, and Expedia (EXPE). Obamacare was supposed to be the model for a 21st century social program, not a replica of programs built in the 20th. Now Republicans are seizing on the breakdown of the health exchange to reinforce the idea that government can’t do anything right—particularly not anything of this size. “The rollout of this law made a trip to the DMV look like a day in the park,” says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The left is slowly beginning to wake up that they’ve been duped. Nevertheless, they will continue to drink the kool-aid as dutiful liberals and democrats following Obama down the road of failure.

These two headlines are followed by this one from FOX:

Frightful poll sends Dems screaming

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CRASHES, CANCELLED POLICIES FRACTURE DEMS –As millions of Americans receive notices that their insurance policies are being cancelled because of new ObamaCare regulations, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., will offer her own bill that will allow Americans to keep their existing plans. When news broke this week that the president for years led voters to believe they could keep their coverage under his insurance overhaul despite knowing otherwise, Republicans pounced offering legislation to block the Obama rules banning low-post, bare-bones coverage.  Landrieu, facing a tough re-election fight in a Republican state, is jumping the line with a bill of her own.  “The promise was made and it should be kept,” Landrieu told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “And it was our understanding when we voted for that, that people when they have insurance, could keep what they had. So, I’m going to be working on that fix.” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., is also preparing his own legislation that would delay by a full year the imposition of ObamaCare fines for those who don’t buy insurance.

Crash drives Obama to new low – President Obama went to Boston to rally his supporters on behalf of his embattled law, but a new WSJ/NBC News poll shows that the failed launch of his signature law is proving a major drag with the public at large. His job approval rating skidded to 42 percent, the lowest-ever rating in the poll. That’s an 11-point drop from his job approval rating following his re-election and 5 points since last month.Disapproval for the health law shot up to 47 percent, 10 points ahead of approval, double the gap from earlier this month.

Scary stuff – It was a dire WSJ/NBC News poll that drove Republicans to the exits on the partial federal shutdown three weeks ago. Now it’s the Democrats turn for a fright. The president’s tanking poll numbers and the surge in concern over the beleaguered ObamaCare rollout will push more moderate Democrats to conclude that their best path is away from the president and his law. Shutdowns are temporary. ObamaCare is forever.

Taken together with the Daily Caller’s discovery that Obama and the White House is strong arming insurance carriers to not reveal the extreme costs for the large majority of Obamacare clients (I like the word clients. It’s so much more…elegant than prisoner, ward of the state or slave.) No, Obama desperately doesn’t want that fact known—nor the fact that Obamacare purposely made illegal nearly all of the existing healthcare plans now offered by insurers.

I needed a good laugh today and I got it.

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Libertarians vs the Tea Party

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I had a FB conversation with some folks earlier this week concerning the creation of third parties. My view is that forging such an alliance would be difficult because of the ‘true believers’ in each group—particularly libertarians who would not compromise, expecting others to accept their platform entirely. As I scanned across my morning inbox, I found an article who mirrored my view.

The annual American Values Survey released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, indicated that 61% of libertarians would not accept association with the Tea Party. The differences between the two groups is startling once you begin to enumerate them.

Libertarians are in favor of abortion, the Tea Party is against abortion. The Tea Party are mostly church-going Christians with a strong Bible ethic, libertarians are not generally religious nor church-going. Libertarians support legalizing drugs, the Tea Party does not.

In fact, about the only consensus between the two groups, according to the article, is the demand for smaller government and lower taxes. There is some support among the two groups for the military. The Tea Party is strongly in favor of a strong, well-equipped military, the libertarians generally do not, believing a strong military will be used for ‘foreign adventures’—like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or, perhaps, Syria. The Tea Party believes fighting our enemies on their territory instead of ours. Both, however, strongly support the troops, the soldiers, sailors, marines and airman as individuals and as groups.

Libertarians: Don’t call us tea partyers; survey finds blocs often clash

By Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times, Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, is often described as both a tea party member and a libertarian, but it turns out that most libertarians aren’t tea partyers.

In a surprising finding from one of the most sweeping surveys on the attitudes and beliefs of America’s libertarians, a majority of libertarians — 61 percent — said they did not consider themselves part of the tea party movement, according to the annual American Values Survey released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute.

“This new research reveals a libertarian constituency in America that is distinct both from the tea party and from the Christian right,” said Robert P. Jones, CEO of the institute. “While conventional wisdom has assumed that the tea party movement is fueled by libertarian convictions, most libertarians see themselves as outside of the tea party movement.”

Libertarians, it turns out, are principled but not always easy to pigeonhole: A majority of libertarians support legal marijuana but not gay marriage, they would allow doctor-assisted suicide but wouldn’t raise the minimum wage, and they really, really, really don’t like Obamacare. There also are signs that libertarians are likely to take up a bigger slice of the American political spectrum.

Mr. Jones said the survey this year represents the first time the institute has asked about libertarians, and the timing is spot-on. In some polls ahead of Virginia’s gubernatorial election Tuesday, Libertarian Party candidate Robert Sarvis is supported by a hefty 10 percent of voters, cutting into the base of Republican candidate Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II.

“I think we have a lot of growing interest in and activism among libertarians, but not a lot of data,” Mr. Jones said.

The difference between libertarians and tea partyers appears to boil down to attitudes about religion. Libertarians are about half as likely to see themselves as part of the Christian right movement as those who identify with the tea party, the survey found.

Libertarians represent about 7 percent of the Republican Party, less than the 20 percent of self-identified Republicans who consider themselves part of the tea party and barely a fifth of the 33 percent who identify with the religious right.

The survey found that the typical libertarian looks a lot like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. Nearly 94 percent of libertarians are white, two-thirds are male and 62 percent are younger than 50.

Where libertarians and tea party members agree is economic policy, including support of limited government and lower taxes and opposition of the Affordable Care Act and additional environmental regulations. The survey, in fact, found that an overwhelming 96 percent of the libertarians polled have an unfavorable view of President Obama’s national health care law.

Where they disagree is social policy. As their name suggests, libertarians aren’t thrilled with government intervention on issues such as abortion, euthanasia and marijuana legalization. Nearly six in 10 libertarians oppose making access to abortions more difficult, while seven in 10 favor allowing doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives.

Among libertarians, 71 percent support legalizing marijuana, putting them at odds with a majority of Republicans. About 61 percent of Republicans, 59 percent of tea party members and 69 percent of white evangelical Protestants oppose legalizing marijuana.

Even so, libertarians are far more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. Nearly half — 45 percent — of libertarians identify as Republicans, and 5 percent call themselves Democrats. Another 8 percent are aligned with — surprise — the Libertarian Party, while 35 percent consider themselves politically independent.

The article continues at the website.

I know a number of libertarians. I agree with many of the planks in their political platform—but not all. I’m a Tea Partier. I also know my libertarians friends will read the column above and deny its validity all the while mirroring those same differences publicly and privately. If I reach back into my psycho-therapy days, I’d call it associative blindness.

What would it take for these two groups to ally with one another? One statement in the article may contain the kernel of that alliance: Both groups really, really, really oppose Obama and Obamacare. Perhaps it will be enough. After all, it took only a single issue to unite a number of factions that created the Republican Party in 1856—slavery. Perhaps, Obamacare, will be that single issue that unites the libertarians, the Tea Party and all the myriad other conservative groups into a singular, powerful political force to change the course of the nation.

It is also interesting, according to Rasmussen, that people evenly favor the Tea Party as do those who support Obama—both at 42%. So if the numbers of Tea Partiers equal Obama supporters, does that include libertarians? No, according to the article above. That means, collectively, Tea Partiers and libertarians, outnumber Obama partisans. The remaining 16% must be the establishment GOP and we don’t know which side they would support. If we listen to Boehner, McConnell and McCain, they’d side with Obama.

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Every time I attempted to start a post this morning, I was interrupted by something—an email, a task I’d promised to do and had forgotten, interruption after interruption.

Ok, I can take a hint. No post.  Drop by tomorrow.

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Obamacare affects the liberal elite, too.

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I had almost given up finding a topic for today when I came across the article below. Now that Obamacare is about to be enforced, in January, supposedly, the real effects are being felt across the country. People are losing their employer sponsored and private healthcare in the hundreds of thousands. Three hundred thousand in Florida alone.

One group that is also being impacted is…university professors. My wife is a professor at a small college, but she has never had healthcare through that institution anyway. Some tenured professors are being affected but the majority of university professors are adjunct professors. They are the temps, the contract workers who teach those classes that no full-time, tenured professor wants to teach.

These adjunct professors are paid based on the credit hours of the courses they teach. The amount varies. Suffice to say, they are not on salary and receive few benefits of tenured professors. They have now lost one of those few benefits—healthcare.

Here’s how Obamacare makes life hell for college profs

11:06 PM 10/27/2013

Universities are cutting back on adjunct professors’ work hours to comply with Obamacare–an unfortunate wake up call for some liberal academics who supported the law.

“I understand that colleges don’t have money to throw around and there’s a larger issue here, but it is frustrating to feel like, that in the face of this legislation designed to help people, that instead it’s hurting people,” said Amy Poff, an adjunct professor who teaches art classes at various Maryland colleges, in a statement to The Baltimore Sun.

Under the president’s health care law, employees who work 30 hours each week are eligible for health benefits. Since many adjunct professors teach enough classes to meet that bar, college administrators must choose between paying extra healthcare costs or cutting back adjunct work hours.

For many universities–both public and private–the decision is an easy one: punish the adjuncts.

“Am I saying it’s the right thing to do? No,” said Robert Conlon, senior vice president at Sibson Consulting, a firm that advises colleges on employment decisions, in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “But is it the logical thing to do? Yes.”

Some 48 percent of universities–including 49 percent of public universities–have decided to place limitations on the number of hours adjunct professors can work, according to a survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed.

Adjuncts are not the only academics facing new burdens under Obamacare. Some universities are considering imposing fines on employees who smoke, or fail to get regular checkups.

Pennsylvania State University originally proposed a fine of $100 on employees who refused to submit to a battery of invasive, physical tests or answer questionnaires about their lifestyles and health habits. The policy was changed after faculty revolted; instead, those who take the test will earn a small cash reward.

Still, most university human resources officers believe Penn State’s penalizing approach was the right one, and colleges may increasingly move in that direction as Obamacare is implemented.

Thanks to Obamacare, more and more liberal professors are being kicked out of their Ivory Towers into the real world—and that is a good thing! Tenure has destroyed higher education.

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No Country for Old Moderates

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Today’s post title is taken from an article that appeared in The Daily Beast. The writer is, supposedly, conservative. However, once you wade through all of his ‘inside the beltway’ bias, you will see he’s been feeding from the establishment trough. On the other hand, he does makes some points and not, I believe, in the fashion he intended.

No Country for Old Moderates

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It’s not ‘moderates’ vs. ‘conservatives. The two opposing Republican sides, if they really are opposing, are ‘radical’ and ‘conservative.’ And only one side is fighting. The other is rolling over, says Michael Tomasky.

The more I think about this Republican “civil war,” the less it looks like war to me. It often gives the appearance of being war because these Tea Party people march into the arena with a lot of fire, brimstone, and kindred pyrotechnics that suggest conflict. But what, really, in hard policy terms, are these two sides arguing about? Practically nothing. It’s a disagreement chiefly over tactics and intensity. That’s a crucial point, and so much of the media don’t understand it. But I’m here to tell you, whenever you read an article that makes a lot of hay about this “war” and then goes on to describe the Republican factions as “moderate” and “conservative,” turn the page or click away. You are either in the hands of an idiot or someone intentionally misleading you.

This is Tomasky’s first error. The differences between the Conservatives and the establishment in the GOP is not just ‘tactics.’ It is about goals. The Conservatives want change, reforms, and a return to government as envisioned by the Founders. The establishment is interested only in maintaining their personal positions and power. Tomasky has swallowed the establishment’s pablum or is an active participant as an establishment propaganda organ.

What’s going on presents many of the outward signs of political warfare. Insurgent radical extremists are challenging already very conservative incumbents whose thought and deed crimes are that they are conservative only 80- or 90-something percent of the time instead of 100 (or 110, preferably). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), American Conservative Union 2012 rating of 92, being challenged? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell? He got 100 percent in 2012!  Hey, I was joking about that 110!

So sure, running primaries against people like this can be called warlike acts. But a real war has two sides who believe different things and are willing to fight to the death for them. In this war, that description applies only to one side.

This…skirmish, let’s call it, is between radicals and conservatives. (It certainly doesn’t involve moderates; there are roughly four moderate Republicans in Congress, depending on how you count, out of 278.) The conservatives, the more traditional conservatives such as John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and many others in the Senate, and House Speaker John Boehner, could be a force if they wanted to. But by and large, they’ve refused to be. If the GOP had two warring factions, then you might expect that on all major high-profile legislative votes, the schism would evince itself in the roll calls. But when you look back over the list of high-profile measures that have come before them while Barack Obama has been president, the conservatives and the radicals only really split on two occasions.

Now you see where Tomasky comes from. He believes McCain, McConnell, Hatch, Boehner are all conservatives. I can not imagine how more wrong he could be unless his personal views align with Marxists like Sheila Jackson Lee or he’s in the pay of Karl Rove.

After the fiasco and sellout to Obama earlier this month, these politicians, the ones Tomasky calls ‘conservative,’ and those like them, have been unmasked. No, they are not conservatives. They are not even moderates. They are democrats in disguise.

Tomasky, according to his establishment talking points, sees little difference between these “conservatives” and the “extremists and radicals” like the Tea Party, Cruz, Lee and a handful of others.

The radicals may be fighting a war. But the conservatives are executing a classic rearguard action. At best. And that’s not much of a civil war.

If, above,  you substitute “conservatives” for radicals and “the establishment” for “conservatives” in the second sentence, the quote is correct.

One was the fiscal cliff deal as 2013 started. In the House, 85 Republicans backed that deal and 151 voted against it.  In the Senate, the vote was 89-8; 40 Republicans backed and five opposed. (Three Democrats opposed it because the tax-increase threshold went too high, from the expected $250,000 per household to $400,000.) The second was the vote we just had to reopen the government and raise the debt limit. That, of course, passed the House by a comfortable margin, with the support of 87 Republicans, while 144 opposed.  The vote in the Senate was 81-18, with 27 Republicans voting aye and 18 nay. 

That’s it. Interestingly, those two votes show us a radical caucus in the Senate that grew in 10 months from five to 18, while in the House, the radicals have outnumbered the conservatives in a remarkably consistent way. But those are the only diversions from party unity.

From Tomasky’s view, the Senate votes are the only ones that matter. He writes that a growth of conservative Senators from five to eighteen is massive. It is no growth. The Obamacare vote—oh, excuse me, the unlimited debt limit vote just unmasked all those RINOs from the GOP Senators.

He refuses to examine the differences between the houses of Congress. The House members have only two-year terms. The Senate six-year terms. The political changes across the country manifest themselves more quickly in the House than in the Senate. Once a ‘moderate’, read RINO, is elected, he remains in the Senate for at least six-years. The House, however, is more responsive to the moods of the country and you will see political trends appear there well before any such change is reflected, if at all, in the Senate.

One could add one more basis of disagreement. Occasionally, the conservatives cast votes conceding that the government ought to be able to function as designed; you know, with agencies having people run them. But that happens only once about every two years.

Now is the time for them to stand up and say “enough.” An October 7 Washington Post-ABC poll found that just 52 percent of Republicans approved of how Republicans were handling the budget negotiations. That’s margin of error to 50-50. So half of the Republicans in the country disapprove of what the GOP just did.

But they might as well be zero, for they effectively have no representation. The regular conservatives—most conspicuously the craven Boehner, but all the others, too—did nothing to represent these people until the last possible second, and until the radicals demonstrated conclusively that they couldn’t pull off defunding Obamacare.

Think about that. Half of one of our major political parties, constituting many millions of citizens, barely has a voice in Washington. If they did have a voice, none of this late madness would have happened. But the legislators who ostensibly represent them are cowards, kittens, balled up in the corner. The radicals may be fighting a war. But the conservatives are executing a classic rearguard action. At best. And that’s not much of a civil war. And it says a great deal about the character of the Republican Party, and especially of the conservatives. History will remember.

Remember, when reading the text above from Tomasky, everywhere he writes, ‘conservative,’ substitute, RINO. He is correct, however, when he says that fighting a rearguard action is doomed to defeat.

There are a few nuggets of truth in Tomasky’s article. You have to do some label substitution to get there, but truth is there. Tomasky, if he is to ever be a believable political writer, must get outside the weasle-pit that is Washington, and spend some time out here in fly-over country. The nation’s political world does not solely exist only on the coasts.

If the GOP is to survive, something that is very much in doubt at the moment, it truly must become “No Country for Old Moderates”—Old RINOs. A house-cleaning is coming. It will take a few election cycles to weed them all out but that weeding will occur—if we aren’t, first, in a real civil war. Early skirmishes may have already occurred.

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Thursday’s Thoughts for October 24, 2013

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I was in the shower this morning and an item on the radio news made me think of our Pledge of Allegiance.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

I was thinking the Pledge arose in the aftermath of the Civil War when Southerners were required to swear loyalty oaths to regain citizenship. Many Southerners, did not.

After a bit of research, I was surprised to learn that our current Pledge arose in the late 19th Century. It was originally drafted by Francis Bellamy (1855-1931), a progressive—what we would call today a socialist.

You can follow the links to read about Bellamy and his socialists views. I do not subscribe to his politics, nor, if they knew of them, would many today—except for democrats.

There have been three versions of the Pledge, the original one, another from 1923 and our current version that was adopted in 1954. I can remember the controversy when the words, “under God,” was added. The atheists complained, as expected, that it violated the Constitution. When asked to provide chapter and verse, they could not. But there is one word that is common in all of the versions, the word, “indivisible.”

I attended a meeting earlier this week. The meeting opened, as are many such meetings, with a Prayer and the Pledge. As I recited the Pledge, we said, “…one nation, indivisible, with…” It struck me that we are no longer ‘indivisible’ and have not been for more than 50 years. We are a nation of factions, no longer united.

In my opinion, the trend started with FDR’s New Deal. (Most current histories of the New Deal fail to mention that large portions of it were later declared unconstitutional and the measures, instead of ending the depression, extended it for more than eight years.) The divisions accelerated with Johnson’s Great Society. Now, with Obama in office, divisive policies have been used to widen the divisions in the country to maintain political power of the administration and to lessen that of their opponents.

Is the Pledge of Allegiance still valid? I would like to believe it is, but there is that niggling thought that it is no longer valid and has not been for some time.

Look around us at the divisions that exists just within the Republican Party. The Karl Roves of the establishment plot against conservatives and the non-establishment ‘Pubs, the so-called ‘moderates’ like John McCain and Lindsey Graham vote against their fellow party members and actively support the party’s political opponents. Then, add the divisions created by partisan politics, the creation and expansion of the Welfare State that takes from those who produce and gives to those who will not. No, I believe the Pledge is no longer appropriate, no matter how much we wish it was.

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FUBAR. That is being used to describe Obamacare. The polite version of FUBAR is Fouled Up Beyond all Repair or Recognition. Of course, there are many other translations of that acronym and all are correct. I came across this article that applies the term in another venue.

The Military Has A Term (or Acronym) To Describe The ObamaCare Rollout: FUBAR

October 23rd, 2013 at 10:00 PM

With the White House now hinting agreement with the Republicans who called for a delay in penalizing individuals under the ObamaCare mandate, the disastrous rollout of Barack Obama’s singular signature piece of legislation passed during his presidency can be summed up in one military term (or acronym): FUBAR*.

Notwithstanding the fact that the mainstream media has been near-unanimously stuck on declaring that healthcare.gov’s problems were caused by a mere “glitch,” everything about ObamaCare’s rollout, thus far, has proved to be a disaster of epic proportions. It has lived down to the most dire warnings of becoming a “third-world experience.”

When critics claimed that ObamaCare would cause people to lose their employer-sponsored coverage and that prices would skyrocket, they were heckled and jeered. It turns out, though, they were right.

Despite Obama’s promises to the contrary, millions of Americans are, in fact, losing their health insurance and, based on this chart, most others are seeing their healthcare costs soar.IB-premium-exchange-by-state-table-1-600Source Report: How Will You Fare in the Obamacare Exchanges?

In addition to the Administration also trying to hide how many people have actually signed up on the healthcare.gov, CBS News has uncovered a serious pricing problem on the Obamacare site.

…A new online feature can dramatically underestimate the cost of insurance.

The administration announced it would provide a new “shop and browse” feature Sunday, but it’s not giving consumers the real picture. In some cases, people could end up paying double of what they see on the website, CBS News’ Jan Crawford reported Wednesday on “CBS This Morning.” [Emphasis added.]

To make matters worse, in addition to the Obama Administration enlisting ACORN, SEIU and other union allies to become ObamaCare “navigators” at up to $48 per hour, it turns out that many of them haven’t even been certified on how to navigate a Prius let alone ObamaCare.

This is only further complicated by the fact that “cyber squatters” are hijacking private, personal information, according to the Washington Times:

More than 700 websites have been created with names playing off of Obamacare or Healthcare.gov, making it likely that some Americans will mistakenly hand over private information to unknown third-parties.

With all that has happened in the first days of the ObamaCare rollout, it appears that the military term SNAFU will become the norm under ObamaCare.

However, it wasn’t like we didn’t know it was coming, right?

No wonder Jon Stewart is upset.

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My post for today is getting a bit long. Here’s a link to a story about the UAW’s drive to unionize a VW plant in Tennessee is being halted by employees who do not want to be unionized!  Tennessee is a Right-to-Work state.

‘Transplant’ laborers may put brakes on UAW drive in right-to-work states

By Tim Devaney, The Washington Times, Wednesday, October 23, 2013

A United Auto Workers drive to organize workers at the Volkswagen Passat plant in Tennessee is turning into a critical battle in labor’s drive to breach the wall of foreign automakers who have flocked to the American South and other right-to-work states in recent years to open nonunion plants.

But in a twist of typical labor-management game plan, the UAW fight is not with the German-owned Volkswagen, where some executives have indicated they are more willing to work with the union, but with the plant’s workers, Tennessee state officials and anti-labor advocacy groups who fear the precedent a successful organizing drive could set.

Follow the link and read the complete article. It shows why Unions fear Right-to-Work.
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Remembrances

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I attended a meeting last night with some conservative friends. The original program scheduled for the evening had to cancel due to a sick family. Instead we had a round-robin of ‘Intro and tell’, or introduce yourself and talk about…whatever took your fancy.

To say the topics varied is an understatement. We discussed national politics and conservatism, state politics and conservatism, local politics and conservatives—do you see a pattern here? Each of us had our favorite hot buttons but the discussions were friendly and informative.

During one session on education and the NEA, I mentioned my mother was a teacher and related a story about Mom when she first started teaching in 1922 at the age of 18. Times were different then. It is less than 100 years since my Mother began teaching. All-in-all, I believe people were better educated then than now. Why? Because Mom didn’t teach rote memorization. She taught her students how to teach themselves—and think for themselves as well.

Mom’s birthday is coming in a couple of weeks. If she were still alive, she’d be 109.

The session last night caused a lot of memories to resurface. It’s time to repeat the story of Mom and the Fisher Boy.

Mom and the Fisher Boy

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Today is my mother’s birthday.

Mom was the oldest of five children, four girls and one boy. She was born in 1904 and grew up on the family farm near Olive Branch, IL not too far from Thebes in the southern tip of Illinois. This area was in the southern portion of Illinois is known as “Little Egypt.”

In 1922 at the age of 18, she began teaching in a country school about five miles from the farm. The Nialls Township school was a single room building containing grades one through the first two years of high school. The youngest pupil was five and the oldest seventeen. Mom, having just completed teacher training, was hired to be the sole teacher at the school.

Attending this school were the four Fisher boys. The Fisher boys ranged in age from eight years to seventeen. The oldest boy, no longer legally required to attend, wanted nothing to do with the school. In fact, none of the Fisher boys wanted to go to school and it was only their father’s heavy hand that any attended with regularity.

Mom was a disciplinarian. She’d help raise her four siblings, as well as many of her cousins in the area. She had definite ideas on how children should behave. In short, Mom did not believe in sparing the rod (as I well remember!)

The Fisher boys did not care to attend school, nor were they interesting in learning or being quiet. The oldest stood several inches taller than Mom and outweighed her by at least 50lbs. After the first week, he decided it was time to show Mom who was boss.

The usual routine was for school to start at 8 o’clock in the morning and run through until 11 o’clock. The pupils who lived close to school would go home for lunch returning at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The remaining pupils brought their lunch. The Fisher boys lived several miles away and stayed at school. The afternoon session, starting at 1 o’clock continued until 4 o’clock when school dismissed.

On that day, all the pupils had returned and entered the school—except for the oldest Fisher boy. I don’t remember if Mom ever mentioned his name. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call him “Mose.”

Mose declared he wasn’t going to school anymore and Mom couldn’t make him. Mom’s reply was, in that case, Mose should be getting along home. He was to tell his father that Mom would be stopping by on her way home. That didn’t set well with Mose and he said that if she showed up, Mose would give her a lickin’.

Now, Mom had a brother that at that time stood over six feet tall. She had several male cousins her age, larger and heavier, and neither her brother nor any of the cousins gave Mom any lip. She had, at one time or another, licked them all. Mom might not have been a tomboy, but at that time, at that place, there were few women who couldn’t hold their own with any man.

Mom grabbed Mose by the collar and the seat of his pants, frog-marched Mose off the school grounds and tossed him out into the road. That did it. Mose came up swinging. Mom promptly decked him. Mose tried again, several times, with the same result. Since he wasn’t getting the results that he wanted, Mose finally decided that he’d enough and took off down the road. His three brothers started to follow but with one look at Mom, decided to remain at school.

At the end of the day, the children took off, primed to spread the news about the big fight. Mom spent another hour at the school, cleaning and preparing for the next school day. She was saddling her horse for the ride home when one of her pupils arrived to tell her that Mose had a gun and was coming to “fix her.”

It was not uncommon for most folks at that time to carry a gun. There were still night raiders who came up from Arkansas on the Mississippi River to raid small towns and rural homes. As was also common of the times, the law ended at the city limits and the only time the Sheriff was seen was just before Election Day to buy some votes. Mom, like many women of that time, who travel the country roads alone and often at night, was armed. Next to her horse, Mom’s prize possession was a Smith and Wesson Model 1917 .45 revolver. Grandpa Miller had bought the pistol for her as a graduation present from one of her cousins who had kept it when he was discharged from the Army at the end of WW1.

Mom had ridden about half way home when Mose stepped out from the side of the rode brandishing a shotgun. Before he could blink, Mose was staring down the bore of Mom’s forty-five. Mose promptly gave up the idea about “fixin’” Mom.

Mom marched Mose home at gunpoint and reported to Mose’s father what had happened at noon and later on the way home. The elder Fisher told her she should go ahead and shoot Mose, since Mose was a worthless SOB who couldn’t lick a little school lady and wasn’t worth the cost of the bullet to boot. Mom declined. Mose’s father then proceeded to teach Mose some manners to the extent that Mose lost several teeth.

Mose never returned to school after that day. He left the county the following week to find a job and never returned to “fix” the school teacher who wouldn’t be intimidated.

Mom died in 1967 after a long battle with cancer.

 

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