Life In The Banana Republic

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Tom Balek Standard Reply

Back in the day we watched action adventure movies about Americans traveling in exotic far-flung countries. It was so very foreign to our small-town Montana sensibilities – the drugs, the shady intrigue, the beautiful women. There was poverty and danger around every corner, and it seemed that nothing could be accomplished in these mysterious places without paying off some government official.

We called them “banana republics” – countries where life was tough, the government was corrupt, and only those with connections, wit, and maybe weapons avoided an unhappy fate.

We were enthralled with tense scenes from places where the government was all about secrets and raw, cold power; where ordinary citizens hid behind gray walls and doors, afraid of making some political “hit” list. Everyone was poor – except those who worked for the government or had connections. Personal success was just a distant dream, as winners and losers were chosen by the powerful.

It could never happen here. We have checks and balances, and a president couldn’t just make laws, seize property and control businesses without the consent of the legislature. This is America. There’s no corruption here. Our government leaders would never lie to us, or hide the truth. Besides, our news people will always tell us what’s really going on, right? And we have fair elections, where legal citizens get to choose how the government will affect their lives.

Drugs are illegal here. Aren’t they? I mean, I think they used to be.

And we don’t have to worry about people here being dirt poor, relying on scraps and handouts from the government. Most of our people have jobs, and own their own homes, right? We still manufacture stuff, and have plenty of our own cheap energy for our cars and houses, and everybody has a bright future here. We still go to church on Sunday and take care of our neighbors and families. Don’t we?

I’m sure glad we live in America, and not in one of those banana republics. We have nothing to worry about here, let’s just party on. Let’s have another joint. Wanna dance?

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

They’re pickin’ up the prisoners
And puttin em in a pen
And all she wants to do is dance, dance
Rebels been rebels
Since I don’t know when
And all she wants to do is dance

All She Wants To Do Is Dance – Don Henley

I Marked Dozens of Ballots

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Tom Balek Standard 4

On election night, I worked at the vote tabulator machine in our county courthouse for ten hours. The machine was a total disaster.

I was supposed to be an election “watcher”, keeping an eye on how things were working as part of our voter integrity project. But our county’s ES&S 650 tabulator machine was so dysfunctional that I, and two other election “judges” (one Democrat, one Republican), ended up manhandling the machine and the ballots until 2 am just to get the vote count for our county done.

Our tabulator machine jammed and rejected ballots continually. Our election official had to mark hundreds of ballots with a sharpie just to get the machine to recognize them as ballots. For a while we had bipartisan remediation teams who negotiated and fixed ballots that were poorly marked or had overvotes. When they left, we had to fix them at the machine on the fly. I personally marked dozens of ballots to make them acceptable to our tabulating machine – darkening circles, fixing cross-outs, whiting-out overvotes, etc.

Phones were ringing – our secretary of state and news media wanted final counts. Pressure mounted. Ballots flew all over. Scans and re-scans and more re-scans. By the time we finished at 2 am, we were exhausted.

We unpaid volunteers worked our butts off, and without us the count would never have been completed. Did I see any corruption? Absolutely not. Was there opportunity for corruption? Hell yes! Do I have confidence in the quality of the count? Not much. Who knows how many ballots were not counted, or were duplicate counted?

Earlier in the week, we ran a test batch of ballots through our tabulator in which nearly half the candidates and issues on the ballots were miscounted by the machine, according to triple-checked manual audits.

This year there was much attention paid to voter integrity before the election, and competing claims about whether or how much chicanery was happening at the polls. What many of us learned is that the problems are not in the front of the house. They are in the back, where the ballots are counted.

While I did not see any evidence of intentional fraud at our county, in our small town, where friends and neighbors treat each other with respect and honesty, I can’t vouch for the many other counties nationwide using the same dysfunctional ES&S 650 tabulator system. And with or without intentional vote fraud, the integrity of the process and count results is not good.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

If you need someone to count on, count me in
Someone you can rely on through thick and thin
When you start to count the ones that you might ever doubt
If you think of counting me, count me out

Count Me In – Gary Lewis and the Playboys

If Obama Wins – Then What, Montana?

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Tom Balek Standard Reply

courtesy ConsumerBoomer.com

No fracking, drilling, or pipelines – guess what that does to our Montana and US economies – and our future?
No coal plants in the US – if we are allowed to mine coal at all, we will probably not be allowed to ship it to the coast by train to meet the huge demand for Asian coal. Coal dust blows off the train cars, you see.
Energy prices will double within a year – (see above). We will continue to subsidize wind and solar energy companies, electric car manufacturers, and other chosen “winners”, many of whom will not survive economically.
$8 per gallon gasoline within two years. Remember, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said he wants our gas price to be the same as Europe.
At least two more far-left Supreme Court Justices take the bench.
Severe restrictions on gun ownership and use (see above – Sotomayor says “the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right.”) Hunting on government land is forbidden, and is severely restricted on private land.
Health care will be expensive and rare.
Government employee unions will rule with impugnity.
Inflation will skyrocket as national debt soars and the Fed continues to print funny money.
Conservative talk radio, free speech, free internet, and Fox News are toast. The first amendment fades in our memories, like most Constitutional freedoms.
Our government will never again write a budget – as Harry Reid said, “There’s no need to have a Democratic budget in my opinion.” Budget, schmudget. They can always print more money and spend it however they want.
Obama and his administration will make life hell for everyone who opposed them. Listen to Valerie Jarrett:

…Valerie Jarrett is letting it be known that if Barack Obama secures election victory next week, there may be, quite literally, hell to pay for those who opposed him…

…Jarrett told (staff members) ‘After we win this election, it’s our turn. Payback time.

Everyone not with us is against us and they better be ready because we don’t forget. The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve.

There is going to be hell to pay. Congress won’t be a problem for us this time. No election to worry about after this is over and we have two judges ready to go.’

She was talking directly to about three of them. Sr. staff. And she wasn’t trying to be quiet about it at all. And they were all listening and shaking their heads and smiling while she said it…

Obama has promised revenge too. If you ever spoke out against the left, watch your back.

I could go on, but it’s more than I can bear on the night before the most important, and the closest, political race of the modern political era. There is so much at stake. We can only pray for God’s mercy at this point. It may be our last chance before prayer is outlawed.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

So let’s bow our heads and pray –
with the unbelievable ZZ TOP

Have Mercy – and – Jesus Has Left Chicago

Now I’m Pissed

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Tom Balek Standard 9

I try to be civil in my discourse. I try to avoid hyperbole, or vitriol, or coarse criticism of those with whom I disagree. But this is personal.

Today, President Obama’s Special Assistant for Disability Policy, Kareem Dale, made a public statement that has me spitting nails. Dale said the president would “protect the disabled” and declared that ”people with disabilities are going to be absolutely killed under Mitt Romney’s plan.”

His rallying cry to the Democrat faithful was “Let’s win this motherfucker.”

Here’s the truth. I have a son who is totally blind. He lives fairly independently in his own condo in Charlotte, North Carolina. After he busted his butt to graduate from college, he moved to Charlotte in the hope of getting a job with the school district there as a teacher’s aide. After volunteering for two years teaching braille and computer skills to blind elementary students, without pay and trying to get a foot in the door, he learned that the teachers’ union would not allow any aides to be hired, because they were not required to be union members. Thanks to the union, he is one of Obama’s 8% unemployed.

At this point I want to add that my son has never asked for or received a penny from the government, aside from disability services while at school.

Until a few years ago, my son had access to the federally funded handicapped bus system in Charlotte, NC. This network of small buses enabled handicapped citizens to live independently, by providing door-to-door service (for a fee) to go shopping, to work, to a restaurant, etc.

Then Obama happened, along with a Democrat sweep of power in Charlotte.

Suddenly the handicapped bus program was gutted. Service was completely cut off to the majority of clients in Charlotte, including my son. Why? Was it the result of a budget cut because of mean conservatives? No, the funding which was previously available to the disabled community was re-directed to fund a $1.6 billion expansion to the urban light rail system, which was, and continues to be, severely underutilized and bleeding cash. The few who do ride the light rail usually don’t even pay their fares – payment is expected to be voluntary, and with no enforcement, guess what? Nobody volunteers to pay.

The authorities admitted that, because riders don’t pay what it costs to transport them, they are subsidizing light rail passengers to the tune of $7 per trip. Coincidentally, the cost of transporting a handicapped citizen (who does pay a fee) to the grocery store is . . . $7 per trip.

The Obama administration is all about picking winners and losers when it comes to federal dollars. And the losers in this case were those least able to defend themselves – the non-union, unorganized, and few-in-numbers handicapped community. The winners? Yup. Obama lobbyists and contributors, locked-in urban Democrat voters, and Agenda 21 advocates.

You will never find any conservative – citizen or leader – who would withhold services from the truly needy or the handicapped. But our so-called “liberal” friends? Give me a break. They would sell their mothers for a vote.

Today, thousands of handicapped citizens of Charlotte have lost a good portion of their independence thanks to Obama and the Democrats.

So, Mr. Partially-Blind Kareem Dale, Mr. Hot Shot Obama Administration Lackey, Mr. Foul-Mouthed Over-paid Affirmative Action Government Employee, don’t give me one more word about how ”people with disabilities are going to be absolutely killed under Mitt Romney’s plan.”

Things were great until your boy took the reins.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Too damned mad for a song today

Are You One of “Them”?

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Tom Balek Standard 2

This election is reported to be close. Razor close.

If Romney loses, will we see conservatives rioting in the streets? Will Republicans burn cars and smash out windows? No, that won’t happen.

But already Democrats are promising civil unrest and outright violence if Obama loses (apologies for the coarse language).

Of course there are nutballs in every large group, and I tend to dismiss them. Still, predictions like the following by Bryan Fischer, spokesperson and Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association, become more common by the day:

“I think there’s going to be unrest. I think there will be blood.”

And it is pretty common knowledge that it’s unwise to put a conservative bumper sticker or decal on a vehicle – there is a likelihood that the vehicle will get “keyed” (paint scratched) by an upset liberal.

“Townhall.com columnist and best-selling author, Katie Pavlich, took to Twitter to report on typical vicious intolerance from the Left. Her brother, a college student, put a Romney bumper sticker on his car. Unhinged libs then vandalized his car, keying it and ripping all stickers off of it. They also damaged and ripped off his license plate.” – via Twitchy.com

Even Obama supporters should beware the wrath of their fellow libs – this week vandals keyed “Obama” into the trunks and slashed seats on two cars parked near a home in Los Angeles with Romney signs in the yard. It turns out the cars belonged to a young couple who are Obama volunteers and supporters. Because they are unemployed, they are staying with the wife’s parents, who happen to be conservatives.

At a Tea Party rally in Racine, Wisconsin, liberals dumped roofing nails throughout the parking lot.

Liberals even smeared feces on a Romney sign in Virginia.

I could still write all of this off as the work of a few isolated left-wing whacko nutballs.

But last night I had dinner with a very connected, well-traveled and knowledgeable national political leader (sorry, I won’t reveal the name for obvious reasons) who is genuinely and seriously worried.

“If Obama loses a close election, there will be riots in cities all across the country,” she said. “I am certain of it.” And she convincingly described the evidence she sees in her travels.

Now I’m starting to take this seriously. I will never understand the motivations of these people. Or how half the citizens in our once-great nation can continue to identify with them.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Hey! said my name is called disturbance
Ill shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants
Well, what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock n roll band
Cause in sleepy London town
There’s just no place for a street fighting man