Keep CHRIST in Christmas

By Jerry McConnell

Have you done your Christmas shopping yet? Neither have I. I have been waiting for some guidelines from shopper-friendly sources that monitor a business’s trends and attitudes regarding advertising using the actual word Christmas and not the avoidance word, ‘Holiday’. If the store or business won’t use the word Christmas they are practicing anti-Christianism. I won’t shop in a store that has chosen to avoid use of the word Christmas. It began many decades ago as a Christian celebration; let’s keep it that way.

Liberal Democrats are so imbued with the notion that to keep the Islamofascists happy and to save their heads from severance off their bodies, they must degrade Christians and Jews. They do this on a daily basis with assistance from the heathen organization of ACLU the Anti-Christian Loonies Union. This must stop.

The United States is a country comprised of approximate EIGHTY PERCENT Christians; it was founded and begun by Christians and it has flourished with the addition of Christian accepting Judeo believers who while celebrating their own version call Hannukah have lived in peace with the Christian celebration of the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

But over the past few years in an attempt to straddle the fence and try to be neutral many businesses have deliberately avoided the use of the word ‘Christmas’ in their advertising and store or place of business facility decorations, which sorely offends nearly eight out of every ten American citizens. This Christian celebration apparently offends a very tiny percentage of our country’s population and to placate those scant few, many businesses risk losing the loss of purchases from great numbers of Christians who reject the businesses exclusionary practices.

In recent years a non-profit organization called “Focus on the Family Action” has conducted a customer-focused ‘rate-a-retailer’ campaign by soliciting shoppers to furnish their ratings and comments online at “StandforChristmas.com”
This non-profit organization explains on their website, how in recent years ‘Focus on the Family’ has evaluated the advertising of major retailers and assigned ratings based on their level of “Christmas-friendliness” and provided these ratings in an annual shopping guide.

You can visit FocusOnFamily.com and FocusAction.org to read more about these organizations.

The businesses listed below are grouped into 3 convenient tiers of Christmas loving or Christmas ignoring company practices. There is also one tier where the businesses within are trying to placate both Christians and anti-Christians with “just a little bit of Christmas advertising and mention”.

For those of you that will be going forth soon to do your shopping, print out the names of all these business so you are able to visit the more favorable ones and, as the businesses ignore Christmas, you can ignore them.

Stores and businesses that are More than 60% Christmas Friendly:
Bass Pro Shops
Cabela’s
Dillards
JCPenney
Kmart
Kohls
Lands End
Lowes
Pier One Imports
Sears
Target
WalMart

Stores and businesses that are In the middle between FRIENDLY and IGNORES & need improvements:
Bed, Bath and Beyond
Home Depot
L.L. Bean
Macy’s
Nordstrom
Stores and businesses that are More than 60% Negligent and Offensive towards Christmas:
American Eagle Outfitters
Banana Republic
Barnes and Noble
Crate and Barrel
Dick’s Sporting Goods
Eddie Bauer
Old Navy
Toys ‘R Us
Best Buy (Business with less than 10% Christmas friendly rating)
Borders (Business with less than 10% Christmas friendly rating)
Gap (Business with less than 10% Christmas friendly rating)
Lane Bryant (Only business with a ZERO Christmas friendly rating)

Jerry McConnell is a long time New Hampshire resident, a Marine veteren of Iwo Jima, and a published novelist. He resides in Hampton New Hampshire

Cracks of transparency.

Daylight appears as Congress puts spotlight on the Fed
By Gerry McConnell

At long last and many years of effort, a light has been directed into the deep, dark secrets of the Federal Reserve; a breakthrough that could make government operations more above board and honest in future years.
As reported in the New York Times Business section on November 19, 2009, by Edmund L. Andrews, for at least the past 25 consecutive years, Ron Paul, Conservative Republican Congressman from Texas, has attempted to introduce legislation in every session of Congress to bring the Federal Reserve Bank under increased scrutiny and transparency.
Paul had been unsuccessful in all of his previous attempts to make this huge government financial operation subject to normal oversight and investigative services, the House Financial Services Committee, under the chairmanship of Massachusetts liberal Democrat Barney Frank, who has been very much opposed to any information being furnished to the public taxpayers.

Though the measure that was approved was short of what Paul had tried to bring into the light of day for all of the taxpayers information, it did provide for Congress to order audits of all the Fed’s lending programs as well as of its basic decisions to set monetary policy by raising or lowering interest rates, the Times reported.

Now don’t get your hopes up too high because of this good news. There is certainly a healthy attitude in Congress to finally rein in a maverick agency that has operated under more secrecy than the CIA for a long time. And we’re talking about a very, very large amount of taxpayer’s dollars that were being handled as if they were the personal bank accounts of the individuals within the Federal Reserve.

Also, don’t forget that the current, tax cheating Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner was the President of the Federal Reserve just prior to be named to Obama’s Cabinet. We all have heard about just how secretive that man was about his money, or rather, the taxpayers’ money that he refused to take out of his own wallet as all of the rest of us have to do.

This latest approval to bring the Fed, as it is commonly known, into the realm of public scrutiny, was merely the result of a Congressional Panel; it was not the result of a full House of Representatives vote, which will come after the bill is heard and discussed on the floor. If history is any indicator, I can foresee a majority of liberal Democrats voting to kill the measure and keep the Fed’s operations totally secret as in the past, while the conservative Democrats and Republicans sit and seethe in disgust with “more of the same” liberal deceitful trickery.

One encouraging sign is apparent in the fact that the ultra-liberal, ‘to hell with what the public wants’ New York Times had the decency for once to make public a matter that their chosen political company has usually denied to for public consumption. The fact that the panel of the House Financial Services Committee that voted for the conservative Ron Paul’s legislation contained a good number of Democrat votes of approval may have helped the Times to go along with this legislation for the public.

Whatever it was, conservatives all over the country welcome the Times to the right side of the discussion for a pleasant change.

Jerry McConnell is a long time New Hampshire resident, a Marine veteren of Iwo Jima, and a published novelist. He resides in Hampton New Hampshire

The cost of healthcare

By Lee Quandt

The battle over the new proposed government insurance program is getting heated up. In fact it does not appear to be about health insurance anymore; but, more about politics. If you support the government run health insurance do you support Obama? If you don’t support it does that make you a republican?

What is known, is it doesn’t appear that anyone in DC knows what they are doing or talking about. First of all insurance companies do not provide health care; they pay for it. The insurance rates to providers, doctor’s, hospitals, specialty etc, are negotiated with those providers. The insurance companies negotiate the lowest fee payment schedules with the providers, then tack on a decent amount for profit and charge you.

The dummies in DC are talking about the quality of health care when they should be talking about the quality of payments for that treatment plus big bonuses for insurance CEO’s; apples and oranges. Because of their apparent lack of understanding on how the system works I have serious questions as to the quality of the final work product.

If the government was serious about reducing the cost of health care delivery, they would revamp the medical malpractice laws. Secondly they would promote tax credits for health care delivery alternatives like free standing clinics for non life threatening medical issues, flu, sore throat, the dreaded ear infections for children, aches, pains etc; $50 payments vs. $800 emergency room visits.

They should not provide health care coverage to illegals. If that happens the US (that’s you and me) will be footing the bill for anyone who makes it to our shores for free health care and we will pay for it, driving up the price; bad idea.

Now looking at it politically, and deciding what poll you look at, the majority of Americans don’t want their health insurance tinkered with. The democrats say, “No we need to fix it, it is a crisis”. Everything with the Obama administration seems to be a crisis. If it is such a crisis why is it that it won’t take effect until after 2012, the next presidential election?

The best way to handle it is to leave it until the midterm elections and let the voters decide by electing candidates that will either fight it or pass it. That way it will be up to the voters to support socialized medicine that will be paid for by new taxes and ripping off Medicare to the tune of $500 million, or the old system that needs fixing.

What we do know is people do not like politicians messing around in their personal decisions such as health care or health insurance.

Can anyone count?

By Jerry McConnell
Either this current government Administration has no one who knows how to tell the truth, including its leader, or it has no one with a degree even as high as a high school graduate who can do math correctly. As reported by NewsMax.com on November 19, 2009, the GAO stated on this date that there are too many errors to know how many jobs have been created.
In spite of report after report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) showing that there has been no significant move to increase jobs, everyone speaking for the Administration including its leader, keeps insisting and trumpeting all sorts of lofty numbers and not only for jobs created but insidiously including a phantom new level of “jobs saved”; what is that?
To arrive at that figure do they take the total number of jobs in which people are employed, then subtract the total number of jobs which have been lost, and the balance becomes the number of “jobs saved”? To me, this represents just what this Administration thinks of the mentalities of the people of this country; to wit: “The people don’t know how to count, so they’ll believe anything. After all, they elected us didn’t they”?
Newsmax.com also reported that “the Administration Internet website Recovery.gov is working on errors that appeared to show hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars were spent in nonexistent congressional districts, as reported by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Arizona's page, for example, showed the state's 52nd, 15th, and 86th congressional districts received hundreds of thousands of dollars in stimulus money, according to CNN affiliate KNXV. However, no such districts exist in Arizona, which has only eight congressional districts.”
One has to wonder how many jobs were reported as gained or “saved” in those non-existent congressional districts. Apparently truth and/or good records are not important as long as they show something to cloud the overall picture of Administrative ineptness.
Since when does a government put up obscenely high numbers of tax dollars to just give away to any big business that says it is hurting and losing jobs, in order to create jobs and then in a Machiavellian way take the number of jobs that are still in existence and call them “jobs saved”? Why the slight of hand, now-you-see-‘em, now-you-don’t, routine? Don’t they remember Abe Lincoln’s admonishment: “You can fool some of the people, some of the time; but you can’t fool ALL of the people, ALL of the time?” They must think that all of us have ACORNS for brains as do many of their followers.
What ever happened to good old American honesty? Oh, I forgot; this is not a good old American Administration, so we should not expect honesty; and they won’t disappoint us. Even our Congress has caught that fever and has lied so much about health care, climate voodooism, and labor union shenanigans that they can no longer recognize the truth. It has become as routine as three-day work weeks that were promised to be up to two more days during the campaign for election in 2006.
This collection of tax cheats and anti-Americans in Congress and the Administration is without question the absolute worst bunch of misfits ever assembled to run this country. If EVER there was a more compelling argument for TERM LIMITS, I never heard it. Today the percentage of millionaires, who were not even close to that prior to getting elected to Congress, is higher than it has ever been and probably exceeds businesses and banking institutions. And the greater number of these who have become excessively wealthy on government salaries, plus whatever other means, fall among the ranks of the liberal Democrats.
In 2010, we have a chance to return to the original concept of the founding fathers of honesty in government and turn these greedy profiteers out on their backsides; then elect only those who promise to support those two words that strike fear into the hearts of the liberals, - TERM LIMITS

Jerry McConnell is a long time New Hampshire resident, a Marine veteren of Iwo Jima, and a published novelist. He resides in Hampton New Hampshire