Trump’s Prerogative – Cut the Red Tape

Posted on December 16, 2017 by Tom Balek Standard Reply

Trump cuts red tape

ObamaCare has not been repealed or replaced. As of this writing Tax Reform is stalled. Planned Parenthood abortions are still being funded with tax dollars and there are no bricks in The Wall.

Crooked Hillary escaped without a scratch. We don’t have a budget and Congress will soon pass yet another bloated continuing resolution to avoid shutting down the government when it busts the debt ceiling. Again.

Appointments for judicial, state, and agency officials languish on desks as buildings full of holdover Obama appointees and Clinton devotees spend their workdays plotting new coups against the president.

With Republicans holding both houses of Congress and the White House for almost a year now, it appears that conservative voters have little to show for their 2016 trifecta victory at the polls. But there is a bright spot. A very bright spot.

While Congress sits on its thumbs, President Trump has used his executive prerogative to cut red tape and waste in the federal bureaucracy. He threw down the gauntlet last March when his perfectly-chosen budget director Mick Mulvaney announced, “The president’s beholden to nobody but the people who elected him, and yes, I understand that every lawmaker over there has pet projects. That’s the nature of the beast.” USA Today listed the 62 agencies and programs on Trump’s chopping block at that time, and breathlessly warned that it was the tip of the iceberg.

Last week Trump and Mulvaney thoroughly enjoyed graphically comparing the mountainous volume of regulations in place today versus the small stack of the 1960’s. The Trump administration has already cut over 1500 regulations and vows to make the “stack” even smaller than it was when the Beatles topped the charts.

“By ending excessive regulations, we are defending democracy, and draining the swamp,” the president declared. “Unchecked regulation undermines our freedoms and zaps our national spirit. It destroys our economy – so many companies are destroyed by regulation. And it destroys jobs.”

Trump is just getting started. It’s hard work, but long overdue. His predecessor, Barack Obama, clobbered the US economy with an additional $122 billion dollars of red tape per year, stretching his authority or even flouting the Constitution in the process.

Trump can’t force Congress to do the right thing, or keep its promises. But as president, it is his prerogative to cut red tape and waste in the agencies under his control. It’s good news for conservatives.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Everybody’s talkin’ all this stuff about me
Why don’t they just let me live?
I don’t need permission, make my own decisions
That’s my prerogative!

My Prerogative – Bobby Brown

Think Our News Media is Bad? You Should See the UK!

Posted on February 3, 2017 by Tom Balek Standard Reply

sky-news-trump I just spent a week in the UK and was anxious to observe the political mood of the Brits. I expected their focus to be on Brexit, their new prime minister Theresa May, the impact of immigration in the UK, the pound vs. the euro – you know, British stuff.

After a long red-eye flight, and suffering a butt-dragging case of jet lag that first evening, my son and I had an early dinner and retired to our hotel room. We soon learned that British television is abysmal – mostly old American reruns and effete comedy that’s just not funny. But that’s okay, we are both news junkies, so I switched to BBC News.

To my surprise, every minute of programming on the Beeb was a non-stop assault on Donald Trump. There was no balance, no “other side”, no pretense of fairness or even any attempt at honesty. And no non-Trump news at all.

So I switched to the other news network, SkyNews. It was worse! Nothing but unbridled, hair-on-fire, heads-exploding, cobra venom spit in the eyes of Donald Trump and all the Americans who chose him to be their president. MSNBC is Mister Rogers compared to British television news. And nothing changed for the entire week of our visit. Both networks ran anti-Trump propaganda full-time, 24/7. Only passing mention was given to the fact that Parliament was engaged in a pretty significant discussion about whether they would honor the people’s vote for Brexit. The newspapers (which are free and stacked up on street corners every evening) were also fixated on all things American, with only a smattering of local news.

We were given a warm welcome in the pubs and at the football (soccer) games. Like us, British guys love beer, football, and politics and are ready to discuss all of the above, especially with a couple of Yanks. They were very curious about the Trump phenomenon, and were surprisingly up-to-speed on American politics. But then, why wouldn’t they be? That’s all they get on their news networks.

I was surprised to find that most of the Brits we met were on the conservative side, despite their hard-left news media. They understand our “drain the swamp” revolution and see parallels with their own Brexit experience. But some can’t get past our new president’s persona.

“I agree with everything that Trump is doing,” said one new friend over a couple of pints. “But I can’t support him because he hates women.” When I pressed him about what that meant, he said he just can’t tolerate a president who goes around grabbing women by the pussy. Groan.

Another conservative limey said he agrees with American conservatives right down the line, with one big exception. “Why do you all think you need guns? Your crime rate is terrible.” I had to explain that’s why we need guns.

Like American lefties, British liberals love to protest. They even feel compelled to protest about an election that took place 3,500 miles across the pond. There are subtle differences, though. Left-wing British protesters don’t break windows and start fires, and left-wing American protesters don’t give a rat’s patootie about who is elected on the other side of the planet.

I left my British friends with this advice: don’t believe what you see and hear on the television! I guess the same advice would serve us Americans well, too.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

We don’t believe what’s on TV
Because it’s what we want to see
And what we want we know we can’t believe
We have all learned to kill our dreams

We Don’t Believe What’s On TV – Twenty One Pilots

This fun young duo is filling venues all over on their US tour and were nominated for three Grammy awards. Check ’em out!

Maybe It’s Time To Retire My Obama Phone

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Tom Balek Standard Reply

obamaphone I have had some fun over the past several years at President Obama’s expense.

Those of you who have rocked with me for a while remember that several years ago I applied for, and received, an “Obama Phone” – a free cell phone, with 250 free minutes and unlimited texts. I only got my free phone to prove that anybody can get one, and to show how ridiculous and unmanaged the whole program is. My application, and my renewals, have been completely honest – no mis-stating income or anything. Now, I’m not going to lie to you. We live a pretty fine Southern lifestyle here on the lake. But I still qualified for a free phone, and I contend that anybody who asks for a taxpayer-subsidized ObamaPhone will receive one too.

President Obama didn’t actually start the free cell phone program. It debuted under President GW Bush and his Congress as a well-intended but soon-corrupted “LifeLine” benefit for us poor folks, funded by a tax on the cell phone bills of all you rich folks. During the free-stuff-for-everybody Obama years, the profiteering cell phone providers, led by Mexican kingpin Carlos Slim, really got with the program. Soon it was Party Central, and people were dancing and singing and selling free ObamaPhones all over the place.

Here’s a fun exercise: type “Obama Phone” into any search engine. Go ahead, try it! Up pops a whole bunch of “providers” who are more than happy to set you up for a free cell phone, courtesy of the taxpayers. The really cool one is ObamaPhone.com. Here’s part of their sales pitch:

Millions of Americans have been economically devastated by the economic meltdown, by the deep recession that followed it, and by the nation’s ongoing economic struggles. Many of those needy Americans have reached the point where they consider a telephone a luxury that they cannot afford.

The Obama Phone program (also known as Lifeline Assistance) can lift that burden. More than 20 million Americans have already received a free Obama Phone and get 250 free cell phone minutes every month.

I was so grateful for my free phone that I made my own little musical thank you message to my friend Barack. The phone was free, but even though I was a Tea Party guy, he still sent me an email asking me for five dollars every day.

Well, now that President Obama is about to retire, maybe it’s time for me to retire my ObamaPhone too.

Which raises the question: Will Trump and the Republican House and Senate finally put an end to this stupid-ass, corrupt entitlement program once and for all? Or will we all be carrying Trump-a-Phones for the next eight years?

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Russians? Chinese? They Are Just Spies Like Us

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Tom Balek Standard Reply

Sadly, the glory days of Spy vs. Spy are gone. No more encrypted notes taped under park benches. Forget about secret meetings in parking garages. Throw away your fountain pen with the camera in the cap.

Was that sultry Russian babe James Bond’s friend or enemy? How did Maxwell Smart get such good phone reception in his shoe?

Today’s spies aren’t nearly as cool and clandestine as the spooks we grew up with. You won’t find them sneaking through the fog in trenchcoats with microfilm and hidden cameras, digging up tidbits to sell to the KGB or the CIA. But there are still plenty of them, and they are gainfully employed by governments all over the world. They spend their workdays in front of a computer screen, looking for an open port or a compromised password. They write worms of code that can be planted in a target computer to reveal government secrets from yesterday, today, and into the future.

Democrats and the mainstream media (sorry, redundant) have suffered ‘hair-on-fire syndrome’ this week, blaming Russian hackers for helping Donald Trump defeat their heroine Hillary in the presidential election. It’s amusing on a number of fronts. They want to impugn Trump because somebody hacked their DNC servers and emails. They assume it was the Russians, but they don’t know. They don’t seem concerned about the ugly Democrat secrets revealed. They can’t explain why Russian president Putin would prefer Trump to their golden girl. Wasn’t it Hillary who gave 20% of our strategic uranium supply to Russia?

Vladimir, when asked by a reporter about Russian hacking, said, “It wasn’t us, but thanks for the compliment.”

“There’s nothing there benefiting Russia,” Putin told the Russia Calling conference. “The hysteria is simply to distract the American people from the contents of what the hackers have posted.”

Putin doesn’t deny that his government employs hackers. He would be foolish to do so, at a time when China, the United States, and many other governments are feverishly at work trying to dig up each others’ secrets. China, in fact, is setting the bar high for other wanna-be hacker spies. They nailed the personnel records of 4 million US government workers. Oops, make that 21.5 million government workers. They busted into the White House, the US Postal Service, the State Dept., and the NOAA. They infiltrated the FDIC. It may be hard to find a government server that hasn’t been hacked by the Chinese. Several years ago the Chinese Army filled a building with hackers, and has since built a small high-tech city around it, putting a whole lot of their espionage eggs in the computer hacking basket.

And if stealing secrets isn’t bad enough, foreign hackers are developing offensive weapons that could black-out our electrical grid, bring the stock market to a screeching halt, or make our barely-functional air traffic control system totally dysfunctional. Chances are some or all of these dastardly deeds are already do-able.

As early as 2011 the US government recognized hacking as the next big thing in intelligence and intrigue, ramping up to hire its own army of geeks. Mum has been the word since then, but it would be naïve, to say the least, to think that we haven’t tried to sneak into Putin’s database.

As to the latest knots in the Democrat underwear about Trump conspiring with big, mean Putin against poor little Hillary (who got her own top-secret server hacked by lord-knows-who) – I say, fagettaboutit. It’s Spy vs. Spy all over again, and our spies had better be at least as smart as the other guys spies.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

Hey don’t feel afraid
Of an undercover raid
There’s no need to fuss
There ain’t nobody that spies like us!

Spies Like Us – Paul McCartney

Who Is The Baddest President?

Posted on November 15, 2016 by Tom Balek Standard Reply

He’s rude. He’s crude. People question his temperament and fitness to be president. He scares the bejeebers out of Europe’s wimpy leaders. He even called our own President Obama a “son of a bitch”.

Phillipine President Rodrigo Duterte

No, it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, and the baddest president on the block, at least for now. Duterte was elected last June by a landslide and commands a 76% positive performance rating.

Duterte campaigned on a platform of law and order, specifically the elimination of illicit drug trafficking and abuse. The Philippines has struggled in recent years with meth addiction, particularly among its growing numbers of poor and unemployed. As president, Duterte assumed the role of judge, jury and executioner, and has given orders for police and military personnel to kill anyone they suspect of selling drugs. The death toll is estimated at 4,000 and counting, and Philippine prisons are overstuffed with drug addicts who turned themselves in. The president has even invited the general public to join in the bloody anti-drug crusade, and has ordered 26,000 Sig Sauer rifles from the USA, over the objections of Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), who voiced human rights concerns.

Many Americans think our current president and president-elect are both endowed with ample egos. But when it comes to self-confidence, Obama and Trump are not in Duterte’s league. Responding to criticism from EU leaders, Duterte said, “I’ve read the European Union’s condemnation against me. I tell them f*** you!”, flipping the bird for emphasis.

Duterte has waffled on his relationship with the USA. Angered at Obama’s censure of his brutal policies, he called for the ouster of all American military operations in the Philippines, but later backed down, acknowledging that his nation would need US aid managing Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. And after President Obama cancelled a meeting with Duterte, the Philippine president apologized for his potty-mouthed attack. The two quietly met later before a regional summit meeting dinner in Laos.

It remains to be seen if Duterte will have a more amiable relationship with America’s new president, Donald Trump. After Trump’s election, Duterte offered congratulations and observed that “we both like to swear.” Trump holds all the cards, as the Philippines is reliant on American trade and military support.

For some time now many global leaders have demurred to their softer, more nurturing tendencies – at least publicly. Russian president Putin rode bare-chested and bareback in his bid for the title of manliest man-in-charge. Obama’s skinny jeans were an immediate disqualifier, not to mention his penchant for retreating from every foreign-policy challenge. Trump, on the other hand, showed machismo on his way to winning the presidency.

But for now, all eyes are on Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. He’s bad.

Tom Balek – Rockin’ On the Right Side

We going downtown in the middle of the night
We laughing and I’m jokin’ and we feelin’ alright.
Oh I’m bad, I’m nationwide.
Yes I’m bad, I’m nationwide

I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide – ZZ Top

Pretty good little three piece band there – git you some Top today.