The Times, They Are A Changin'

Today, this won’t be some rant against the liberal extremist. I want to talk about something else – and that’s cable TV. I remember when my parents got our first TV. In fact, it was one of the first TVs in the little community I grew up in smack dab in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a heavy metal box with a small black and white screen. For its day and age, it was high tech. Problem was we only got one channel. That was due to the mountains blocking TV signals from the ‘over the air’ antenna we had mounted on the roof of the house. (I needed to explain that should anyone under the age of 40 be reading this). Then the mid-1970s brought us Cable TV. This new technology got mixed reviews. I remember people saying, why would I pay for TV when I can get it for free over my antenna? Well, as we all know, the answer to that question is entertainment content. We only got one station on our metal box, and if the programming you wanted to watch wasn’t on NBC, which was the channel we got, you just didn’t see it. That’s why as a child, I was deprived of such classics as the Beverly Hillbillies and My Mother the Car. But eventually Cable TV matured and grew into the billion dollar industry it is today. Today, we receive more channels than we can ever watch, and consider our cable or satellite service as essential as the electricity or water coming into our homes. We could not imagine life without it. So, compared to getting one channel in the 1960s, I now pay for more content than I can ever watch, and am forced to buy what the cable or satellite sells me in ‘packages’. – Well, that’s all about to change. Even though I’m a baby boomer, and kind of stuck in my ways, I’m astute enough to notice the behavior of generations who came after me, and their attitudes about how and when they want entertainment content. And that attitude is this - I only want what I want to watch and only when I want to watch it. That pretty much describes what the internet provides. From the day that Al Gore invented the internet (I just had to say that) I always believed someday there would be a merger, for lack of a better term, between the TV screen and the PC monitor. I believe that day is soon upon us. This was reinforced to me last night when I totally turned off my DirecTV receiver and used the Smart TV option on my Samsung TV and watched ‘over the internet’ programming all evening. Now, I’m not running out and dumping DirecTV, because it does deliver content I can’t currently get through any other means – and that involves a certain NFL football team that is 1500 miles away from where I live – but that’s another story. However, for the average TV viewer, the day is very near where we will receive our entertainment content via the internet and the will be “Unhooking” from our current entertainment content companies such as Time Warner, Comcast, and DirecTV. These companies will be replaced by internet only entertainment content companies such as NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon and Crackle. The only thing holding back the entertainment content internet industry is bandwidth. You can only shove so many ones and zeros through the pipe at one time, but once that issue is resolved, through new technology or infrastructure, your days of flipping through 1000 channels of crap you never watch to find the one program you want to watch will be over. God I love technology.

Timing is Everything

Without doubt taking instruction from the White House, the steaming sack of California Crap, Diane Feinstein, released a Democrat Intelligence (there’s a contradiction in terms) Report about the horrific atrocities committed by the evil Dick Cheney and George W. Bush after the 9-11 attacks against terrorists held at GITMO to obtain information that has helped keep American safe. What no one really noticed is that there isn’t one Democrat that really gives a shit about what was done to detainees at GITMO. This heavily biased report was released yesterday for the sole purpose to over shadow Doctor Johnathan “Goober” Gruber’s testimony before a House Oversight Committee who grilled the idiot architect of Obamacare on his admitted tactics of non-transparency and the stupidity of the American public to get the failed socialist health care plan passed into law. Sadly, the Democrat’s strategy worked. All major news networks’ lead story yesterday was about the Democrat Intelligence Report on torturing terrorist instead of the House Oversight Committees grilling of Gruber - sparing the White House further embarrassment. As usual, Democrats continue to follow the Obama Doctrine of Politics First, America Second -- no matter what the cost. After all, what are a few more dead Americans? To use the words of Hillary Clinton, “what difference does it make?”

Obamaware!

Tired of those pesky Congressional subpoenas? Demands for your company emails? Requests for official correspondence? And most of all, having to lie on behalf of your President to the American public? Or worse yet, having to take the 5th when on the witness chair because you are guilty as hell? Well, now there’s an easy solution – it’s Obamaware. Obamaware is the #1 solution for busy liberal political appointees in high paying government positions who need to lie for Presidential directed programs targeting Mr. Obama’s political enemies. Once you launch Obamaware on your computer, it destroys all of your incriminating emails and launches a fatal crash of your system’s hard drive. So if you want to remain on the job, committing crimes on behalf of your President, Obamaware is for YOU! Obamaware, just $49.95 a year for three computers – make your checks out to “The Democratic National Committee” today!

Hard Choices

Obviously, Bill wasn't one of them. -- Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Failure

Only Barack Obama could pull it off. After campaigning that his administration would be the most honest, most uplifting, and most transparent in the history of America, he has brought us the economic malaise of Jimmy Carter and the contempt and criminality of Richard Nixon. At a time when the rest of the world needs the shining light of American strength, his policies and failure of leadership has left America with little credibility to influence world events. So, Iraq falls into turmoil and chaos while Alexander Putin res-erects the old Soviet Union.

The Black List

I read an article in Newsweek recently about how the Obama administration is waging financial war against certain Russian citizens to place pressure on Vladimir Putin to remove his troops from the Ukrainian border after his incursion into Crimea. What the Obama administration did was to create a financial Black List of Russian citizens -- the financial movers and shakers in the Russian economy. Being on the Black List means you can no longer conduct business using US Dollars, which is required in nearly 90 percent of foreign exchange transactions. Simply put, when foreign country ‘A’, wants to buy something from foreign country ‘B’, the common currency used between the two countries is the US Dollar – this is because the US Dollar is currently the world’s standard currency in which the value of all other countries currency is determined. Country ‘A’ converts their currency to dollars, and sends that cash to Country ‘B’ where they convert the dollars to their currency. The US Dollar has been the world standard since World War II as we were the only financial power house left at the end of the war, which is why the US Dollar is universally accepted anywhere on the globe. So in effect, being on the black list ties your hands in doing any financial transitions in a global economy. This is also why the US government, when they need more cash, just cranks up the printing presses knowing the dollars they print will be accepted worldwide. So here’s the danger in all of this. The US is no longer the only financial powerhouse in today’s global economy – and Mr. Putin is not a stupid man -- so what happens if he, and his black listed comrades, make agreements with say, China, and begin foreign transactions using the Chinese Yuan as the common currency for Russia’s foreign financial transactions? If other countries were to perceive the American economy as weak, like say we are 17 Trillion dollars in debt, they could easily follow Russia’s lead. If that happened, the US Dollar could lose its position as the world’s standard currency, and the dollars freshly printed at the US mints would be worth only what the new world’s standard currency determined. In the US, interest rates would shoot up overnight and inflation would take off like a rocket. It would make the 1970s look like a walk in the park. I don’t mean to doom and gloom here, but the Obama Administration needs to know they are playing with fire with this Black List. Putin’s no dummy, and for every action we take against him, there will be an equal and opposite action by Putin. Pushing Russians on the black list to find alternate means to conduct foreign exchange transactions could easily backfire in America’s financial face.

The Welfare President

Today, the Congressional Budget Office reported Obamacare will decrease the number of people seeking full time work by over two million. The reason is that it will be more beneficial to take part time work and receive subsidy dollars through Obamacare than work full time so you can purchase health care through your employer. Seriously, why work full time when the Welfare President will subsidize your health care cost? As I’ve stated before, Obamacare is not about health care, it’s about socialism. That’s farfetched you say? 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan warned American about socialized medicine. Check out what he had to say – it’s worth a listen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnLa1BvtaxM. Quite simply, Obamacare encourages people to go on government welfare and discourages Capitalism by punishing those who would seek full time work by taxing them to death. In Obama’s own words, it’s just his way to “Spread the wealth around”.