MADDOG10's Blog

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•   Ebola has rached our shores from Africa. Dozens of children are reportedly suffering paralysis from a deadly virus with unknown origins. Medical providers across the country have warned of a looming public health crisis as communicable diseases spread unmonitored and uncontrolled. Other countries are cracking down. But America is stuck on open-borders stupid.

The Diversity Visa (DV) program, to take just one glaring example of government insanity, is still going.

On October 1, the State Department opened the annual DV random lottery to applicants from around the world. Yes, it's completely random like a Powerball drawing. Up to 55,000 lucky winners will snag permanent residency visas (green cards), which put them on the path to American citizenship ahead of millions of other foreigners patiently waiting to come to this country.

The green card lotto winners' spouses and unmarried children under 21 all get golden tickets into the country, too, no matter where they were born.

Illegal aliens are eligible if a legal family member wins the jackpot. Applicants don't even need a high school education. No outstanding abilities, training or job skills are necessary. A handful of countries are excluded if they no longer qualify as "underrepresented." But if you come from a terror-sponsoring or terror-friendly nation -- such as Iran, Syria, Sudan, North Korea and more than a dozen officially designated terror enablers on the State Department's list -- no worries. Thousands from these breeding grounds for jihad will walk through our front doors.

This is what happens when bipartisan panderers in Washington get their way. The visa lottery was championed by left-wing social engineer Sen. Ted Kennedy and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 to admit more "underrepresented" immigrant minorities into the U.S. Although originally intended to give a leg up to Irish illegal aliens who had overstayed their visas, most of the winners now hail from non-Western terror hot spots and hostile territories.

You know who else will get in? Untold numbers of "diversity" petitioners from Liberia, Sierra Leone and other West African countries where the Ebola virus is epidemic. If you think the feds will ensure that foreign visa-seekers with communicable diseases stay out, think again. The State Department now allows applicants with HIV to apply and enter. Those who suffer from tuberculosis, leprosy or other afflictions "of public health significance" can apply for waivers.

Reports indicate that before his departure from Liberia to Texas last week, Ebola carrier Thomas Duncan lied at the airport about being in contact with someone exposed to the disease. So far, the White House refuses to impose any travel restrictions from West Africa. It's also not clear whether the U.S. has re-screened West Africans who won last year's DV game and are flying into the country now.

As I've reported for the past 12 years, enforcement and screening procedures are shoddy. The General Accounting Office deemed the DV program a national security risk in 2008, while State Department and Homeland Security officials blamed each other for reckless incompetence.

"Consular officers at six of the posts reviewed -- Accra (Ghana), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Kathmandu (Nepal), Lagos (Nigeria) and Warsaw (Poland) -- reported that the availability of fake documents, or genuine documents with false information, such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, and passports, presented significant challenges when verifying DV applicants' identities and the relationship between the principle DV applicants and their spouse and dependents," the GAO reported.

The Diversity Visa lottery program is a public health hazard and a national security risk that leaves our safety to random chance. But pleas to curtail or end the program since the 9/11 attacks have fallen on deaf ears.

In the wake of the Ebola scare (not to mention renewed jihadi threats from abroad), worried Americans are heading to the drugstore to stock up on facemasks, hand sanitizer and gloves. New vaccines are in the works for emerging global contagions.

Unfortunately, there is no antidote for our government's blind and deadly diversity worship. Political correctness is a plague on us all.

"If you like your health plan, you can keep it" was last year's Lie of the Year. When millions of cancellations stacked up, the game of make-believe was over. So the Democrats, hoping to survive another election cycle, shifted to a new mantra: they claim they want to fix the law. The facts show this is just another Obamacare lie.

The Democrat-controlled Senate has adjourned for the year without voting on any fixes.

The Senate only took up two Obamacare-related measures all year. One was a show-vote on the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision. The other was a House-passed bill called the Hire More Heroes Act that removed employer mandate penalties on companies for hiring veterans on Tricare or VA health care. That bill passed the House 406 to 1 with only Jerry Nadler of New York opposed - but Senate Democrats decided to use it as a vehicle for an unrelated package of tax changes that they later pulled from the floor.

And that's it.

No other Obamacare votes allowed in the Senate all year, because Harry Reid has the reliable support of every Senate Democrat to ruthlessly block all amendments on the Senate floor.

It's true most Republicans want to repeal the law. Good. It's a terrible law and we'd be better off if it were repealed. But House Republicans have also recognized the need to provide immediate relief to millions of people suffering lost plans, higher premiums, higher taxes, shorter hours, and lost jobs. They have acted responsibly in the House by passing more than a dozen bills that fix the worst aspects of Obamacare.

Just recently the House passed a bill authored by Rep. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana to allow people who work for small businesses to keep their health plans. Last year the House passed a similar bill for people who buy their own plans on the individual market by a robust 261-157 margin. Democrats like Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan claim to support a version of this bill in almost every stump speech, but vote with Reid to guarantee it will never actually come to the Senate floor.

The House passed a bill restoring the 40-hour workweek, hardly a partisan issue considering Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. has said that Obamacare's 30-hour workweek breaks the back of the middle class. It passed 248-179 in April, and again last week in the House jobs package. The Senate refuses to act.

The House also passed a bill in its jobs package that repeals the medical device tax, a terrible tax that undermines the medical innovation we all depend on for longer, healthier lives. The bill by Minnesota's Rep. Erik Paulsen is particularly important to his state economically because of its robust medical tech sector. Yet his Democratic Senate colleague Al Franken only pays lip service to it while voting with Harry Reid to prevent it from even getting a vote in the Senate.

The House overwhelmingly passed the Simple Fairness Act in March on a 250-160 vote to delay the Obamacare penalty tax for all Americans, as President Obama has already unilaterally done for the biggest corporations. The Senate never considered it.

The House, over opposition from many of its own staff, even passed legislation reversing the special exemption President Obama granted Members of Congress and their staff. The Senate immediately, on a party-line motion, blocked it from being considered.

Senate Democrats have unanimously helped Reid lock down the Senate floor and block votes on all of these bills because if votes were allowed the charade that they want to fix Obamacare would collapse. They would be exposed as members of a tiny, radical fringe who believe Obamacare is great exactly as it is.

Even in committee, Democrats actually canceled consideration of the appropriations bill that funds the Department of Health and Human Services. Why? The AP reported it was because Democrats on the committee "including Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska, are at risk of losing re-election."

Reasonable Americans remain divided on whether Obamacare needs to be repealed or significantly changed.

But it should be clear by now that neither of those outcomes will be possible as long as Democrats control the Senate.

Democrats convened their real presidential convention for 2016 a bit early.

In NYC.

At the U.N.

In what is becoming a proxy for what the public believes is the Democrat National Committee, the media, world government organizations and activists who think that some small, few men should decide what every other man gets to have—or not have—met in public and private in New York City this week.

They harangued and proselytized, raised money and “awareness” in a purely show-business attempt to re-set the agenda off their failed policies.If only by sheer volume of their arguments, they have tried to convince America that the laws of mathematics, physics and insider trading just don’t apply to these select few.

Nor do any other laws.

Bill Clinton, for example, a guy well known for his equal treatment of women under a law defining the word “is”, promised that in the future, companies could ignore their very real legal obligations to the shareholders who provide them capital.

“In the future,” reports CNBC, “corporations will care less about maximizing profits and more about employees and society, President Bill Clinton told listeners on Tuesday.”

That sounds more like a warning to me than it does a speech.

"I think the government can have incentives that will encourage it, but I think by and large it will happen, if it does, because of proof that markets work better that way," Clinton told those who will likely write planks in their party platforms around the world.

Clinton here is giving the slow wink to socialism; a socialism that will be encouraged by government, because, you know, accidents can happen to companies who don’t go with the way things are.

"We're going to share inequality, misery and conflict, or we're going to share prosperity, responsibilities and a sense of community," Clinton said.

When you’re done laughing Coca Cola through your nose you may resume reading.

It’s bad enough that Democrats enact their silly social theories, but must they always insist that the torchbearer for the light of enlightened Democratism be a parody of the values they claim to espouse?

Robert Kennedy Jr., for example, was also in New York, and attending the Doppelganger of the DNC.

He supported Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama in 2008.

Like all the Kennedys-- a family that I used to admire—he is reluctant to give up his own privileged position in society, just like all hypocrites are, even while he lectures the rest of us about our responsibility to the “planet.”

Most of us don’t have trust funds worth $50 million, most of us don’t have a family compound on Hyannis Port, most of us don’t have the luxury of preaching about renewable energy standards while lobbying our powerful and rich friends against applying those standards to ourselves.

Capital markets can do many things if made to. But the only things they do really well are wealth creation... if they are allowed to. That’s why we have a large body of corporation law. It is there to protect wealth—that is shareholders. Shareholders, like Clinton and RKF Jr. are the inevitable fruits of labor. Even if in RFK Jr.’s case someone labored first to allow him the luxury of his own idleness.

How to split up the labor’s contribution to the creation of wealth has been the primary focus of the twin failed science of socialism and Marxism for the last 160 years.

Most countries that have tried either variety of social economics have rejected them and instead embraced free market principles.

Leave it to the Democrats, in this great hour of national despair, to propose a system that will fail to everyone but their leaders.

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Turkey was able to close down THEIR border crossings after 70,000 refugees from Syria fled ISIS into Turkey. They used tear gas and water cannon, along with a sign that says “This Border Closed” to stop the flight into Turkey's Islamic state.

“Turkish security forces have fired water cannon and tear gas at crowds which had gathered in support of Syrian Kurdish refugees on the border,” reports the BBC.

“It comes after some 66,000 refugees poured into Turkey in 24 hours. Turkey opened its border on Friday to Syrians fleeing the town of Kobane in fear of an Islamic State attack.”

While I like the Kurds in general, I think Turkey is giving us part of the solution to our own border problems: We need to send some of our politicians to Turkey to be tear gassed too. A little water cannon wouldn’t hurt either.

While there would no doubt be civil rights implications—bad for the politicians and good for us-- don't discount the fun factor here. Tear-gassing Eric Holder and Nancy Pelosi would not only help them understand that he have the right to defend ourselves, it would also just be fun.

And you don't even have to be Turkish to enjoy that.

The highlight of navy boot camp for the NCOs at Great Lakes when I went through was when they lined up recruits and had them remove their gasmasks in a chamber filled with tear gas while reciting the Sailor’s Creed:

I am a United States Sailor.

I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America and I will obey the orders of those appointed over me.

I represent the fighting spirit of the Navy and those who have gone before me to defend freedom and democracy around the world.

I proudly serve my country's Navy combat team with Honor, Courage and Commitment.

I am committed to excellence and the fair treatment of all.

Snot ran, we cried, we did not laugh and a good time was had by men, mostly in their 20s, who had been in the Navy long enough defending freedom and democracy around the world for the event to pass as entertainment.

But think how much more fun it would be to tear-gas someone who actually deserved it like Elizabeth Warren or Hank Johnson.

So maybe we can have a similar creed made up for the cretins who decided that the proper response to Russia’s occupation of Ukraine and ISIS occupation of Iraq and Syria was to mobilize feminists in NYC via 550 union-provided buses to STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW!

You wanna combat global warming? Stop Obama from leasing union buses.

The larger issue could be addressed as well through tear-gassing.

And that larger issue is this: Many countries abandoned by Obama's so-called foreign policy—including our own--are having border problems as a direct result of the president’s Democrat-induced delusions of pander.

Let’s face it: If it weren’t for pandering Obama would have no foreign policy objectives at all.

ISIS?

Created by pandering to the Arab Street’s desire for reform, no matter what form reform takes.

The U.S. Apology tour?

Pandering to Europe and the Arab States.

The Russian Reset?

Pandering to Russia.

Our border policy with Mexico?

Pandering to Democrat pollsters who need to keep Hispanics in line for the next next election, which of course is always only one more election away.

Because while throngs gather at the United Nations this week to hear Obama try to change the topic from his own pandering and shortcomings to even more pandering followed by more Obama shortcomings, keep one thing in mind: If Obama were at the UN to get tear-gassed while reciting the Sailor’s Creed, even more people would show up to see it.

And for the right reasons too.

We wouldn’t even need buses