News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
By William W. Lawrence Sr
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Answer to yesterday’s puzzle: Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?
Babe Ruth
The world’s oldest piece of chewing gum is over 9000 years old!
–William W. Lawrence Sr.
James J. Fitzpatrick, the Southeast Pa. regional manager for Sen. Pat Toomey, has sent the following response to Mary Ellen Jones of the Delaware County Patriots regarding proposed firearm background check legislation that Toomey and Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) are supporting.
On the gun issue, first I think we have come a long way. When it started out they were talking about bans, registries, and magazine limits. When the back and forth debate is whether or not to slightly expand background checks I think it is a win either way with this President.
Second, on the background check issue. We were approached by Sen. Machin’s office to potentially broker a deal on certain private sales and transfers. Right now in PA if you wanted to sell me a handgun/pistol, I would need to go to a federally licensed dealer to receive a background check. If, however, you wanted to sell me a rifle, or any other type of long gun, I would not need to do that. We think there is a potential room for a deal in that space given that many gun owners already require individuals to whom they are selling long guns or rifles to go through a background check. I think Pat’s thinking on it is at the very least on these transactions, the check would reduce the likelihood that someone would be selling to a felon, someone with a past of substance abuse, or someone that has a past of mental illness. It would also in turn protect the seller from liability on the back end if anything were to happen with the gun they sold.
With that said, these are simply conversations at this point between Manchin and Pat. No bill has been written and one will not be on the floor until next week at the earliest.
Ed note: The above message was sent April 9. A vote to start debate on the measure passed cloture in the U.S. Senate the afternoon of April 11 by a 68-31 margin preventing a filibuster. The Toomey-Manchin amendment has yet to be added.
By William W. Lawrence Sr
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Answer to yesterday’s puzzle: Who loves me will love my dog also.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Matt Brouillette of Commonwealth Foundation gave an upbeat but realistic talk to the Delaware County Patriots, this evening, April 10 about solving Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s problems.
Brouillette said that it wasn’t a matter of Republicans versus Democrats but rather of David versus Goliath that was pushing us to fiscal disaster and poverty. Pennsylvania, he said, had a State House in which the GOP held the largest majority either party has had in decades and that the Republicans controlled the state Senate here by a greater margin than their counterparts in Texas.
Unlike in Texas, though, it is Goliath that rules. Many of the state Republican legislators have joined against the taxpayer who is David.
He noted though that one uses a slingshot to beat Goliath and not another giant. In Texas, where the union dues of state workers are voluntary, state unions dump about $12 million in political campaigns. In Pennsylvania, they spend $50 million. Pennsylvania, remember, has half the population.
He said the stones for the slingshot are new laws to allow union workers to pay their dues voluntarily. He cited Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana as having gotten very positive results for average citizens with such laws. He said that in 2012 when Obama was handily winning Michigan an amendment was overwhelmingly voted down — which obviously required the support of a lot of Obama voters — that would have made the mandatory collection of union wages part of the state constitution. It was that, he said, that set things up for the entire state going right-to-work, an event the possibility of which would have been laughed at just a few short months ago.
He noted that unlike Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who initially said he would not sign a right-to-work bill, our own Tom Corbett has expressed a willingness to do so from the beginning if one would reach his desk.
Brouillette had generally nice things to say about Corbett, albeit he slammed his unwillingness to get before the public and said he would fire a lot of staffers, who he thought to be encouraging this, if he were running things.
He said the privatization of Pennsylvania’s state store system is not a done deal and is being held up by Sen. Chuck McIlhinney, the Bucks County Republican with strong ties to the existing system, who chairs the Senate’s Law and Justice Committee. He noted that privatizing the state stores would cut about $1.5 million from union political contributions.
Brouillette, a former history teacher, said that the conventional Tea Party message is compassion-based. He noted that each of his four children is going to start his or her working lives with $60,000 government debt. He said that one of his neighbors, a retiree, has to work an extra job selling tickets to pay his property tax. He said another neighbor has laid off his seven employees from his small building company and has become a one-man business. All this suffering is related to existing governmental policies.
The next meeting of the Delaware County Patriots is tentatively scheduled for May 20. The topic will be Common Core Standards in Education.
Chuck Martini of Upper Providence has informed me that Peter Campanelli is pulling down $2,876,700 as CED of Institute for Community Living in Manhattan which provides Medicare-funded services for New Yorkers. He also notes that Dennis Verzi, who is vice president of continuing care at Maryhaven Center of Hope on Long Island, which also provides Medicare-funded services for the Empire State, pulls down $1,003,980. And just a vice president mind you. Why Verzi makes more than his CEO Lewis Grossman who gets a measly $643,484.
If you can’t take $2,876,700 to the bank, here’s something you can — one-percenters who support government social programs because they claim to “care”, don’t. At least about others.
You can also bet your bippy this crowd supported Obama and his fellow Democrat thieves.
On the other hand, some actually think babies are punishment.
Smith, Perry To Be CAP Speakers — Tom Smith and Congressman Scott Perry will be the speakers at a reception sponsored by Citizens Alliance Pennsylvania, 2-3:30 p.m., April 19 at the Governors Ballroom, Radisson Penn Harris Hotel, 1150 Camp Hill Bypass, Camp Hill, Pa. 17011.
Smith was last year’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania. Perry, who has a Bronze Star for service in Iraq, represents Pennsylvania’s 4th District in Congress.
For tickets or information call Leo Knepper at 570-617-2994 or email him at leo@empowerpa.org
By William W. Lawrence Sr
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Answer to yesterday’s puzzle:If you can’t read, it’s going to be hard to realize dreams.
Booker T. Washington
Obama Torpedoes Economy
Forbes, FOX, Bloomberg, Congress – anyone? Do you see the pattern? America’s economy is not self-destructing, it is being dismantled. Amid bad unemployment numbers, high food and fuel prices, a devalued dollar, the already devastating impact of Obamacare on businesses and hiring, President Barack Obama is again pressuring banks to make bad housing loans to people with weak credit. Obama’s new push for substandard loans portends a repeat of the housing loan disaster that led to the 2008 crash that tanked the economy when the Democrats held full control of both the House and the Senate.
Obama’s policy of coercing banks to make questionable loans under-minds a still fragile U.S. economy and sabotages potential recovery. Zachary A. Goldfarb reports in the Washington Post that “…critics say encouraging banks to lend as broadly as the administration hopes will sow the seeds of another housing disaster and endanger taxpayer dollars.” Ed Pinto, of the American Enterprise Institute and former Fannie Mae executive is quoted as saying: “If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from.”
To understand who and what originally sent the economy into a tailspin, details are laid-out in the article that I wrote on the topic, Bloomberg: DEMS Behind Housing Scam:
In regard to the devastating housing fraud that helped collapse the U.S. economy, a Reuter’s headline read: “U.S. Sues Bank of America for Alleged Mortgage Fraud.” According to Reuters, President Barack Obama’s Justice Department “filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit against Bank of America, accusing it of selling thousands of toxic home loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that went into default and caused more than $1 billion of losses.”
In reality, it is a prime example of President Obama and the Progressive Democrats’ adeptness at avoiding responsibility and deflecting blame. Democrats continue to elude culpability in initiating the housing collapse that thrust the economy into a nose dive. Liberals count on voters lacking enough information to connect-the-dots as they point accusingly at their partners-in-crime. Americans have been told by Obama’s sycophantic media that it was the fault of greedy bankers, mortgage brokers and Wall Street derivatives – some of which came into play once the set-up, the opportunity for greed baited the bad players into joint accountability.
The question the American people should ask is: Who were the masters of the economic collapse, the architects whose scheme worked so well that they virtually escaped the blame? Though they now deny it, Democrats led by Barney Frank (D-MA), Chris Dodd (D-CT), Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Greg Meeks, (D-NY) are on video, in effect, in support of glutting the housing market with unsustainable mortgages in the form of bad loans. Historically, it will go down as one of the liberal Democrats’ all-time big lies to the American people. In Capital, Azi Parbarah reported in 2011 that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg pointed the finger squarely at the Democrat-controlled Congress as instigating America’s financial collapse:
“If there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led to the collapse of the financial industry, it’s not the “big banks,” but Congress. [They] were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.” Bloomberg added, “It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp.”
What Bloomberg failed to mention is that Obama, himself, adamantly demanded that banks make more loans to low-income borrowers. Sub-prime loans became the great American rip-off. Obama and the Democrats strong-armed lenders to give loans to people who could not repay them. Grateful new homeowners were to then obligingly ply the Democrats with their votes.
The ugly and inevitable consequences forced the poor, mostly Hispanics and Blacks, out of their unaffordable homes through wide-scale foreclosures. Home prices fell, construction workers lost jobs, the housing industry began a free-fall and America’s AAA credit rating was downgraded for the first time since 1917. The result: The worst economy in recent memory. Today, America bears the brunt of the Democrats’ manipulation of the housing market resulting in lost homes, lost jobs, and a destabilized economy.
Obama is again pressurizing banks into questionable loans. The result will be déjà vu with a far worse ending. The administration may point to improved housing and stock markets, but both remain tenuous for the average American. The job market remains tentative and any veteran of the stock market knows that Wall Street is no longer in the hands of the Bulls and Bears, but the wolves.
Again, Forbes, FOX, Bloomberg, Congress – anyone? The captain of the Titanic did not have this much warning.