Somewhat Open Letter to a "Progressive" Friend

I truly do NOT know how it happens. I take extra measures to NOT send you the political stuff I forward to like-minded thinkers. But I keep getting responses back from you.
I just don't waste my time trying to convince those who will not be convinced. On the previous email that voiced my feelings on the matter, I even said so.
You have a right to believe what you choose to, to think that socialism is "just another approach" to finance, or call it "progressive" or whatever you like. I just think it's sad that you got indoctrinated into that kind of thinking.
The Marxists approached my Dad and were willing to PAY him to read their nonsense as far back as when he was in the Marine Corps....(WWII) recent evidence proves they were embedded even then in our military when you hear the rhetoric of some so called "former" Marines. Sadly, even Marines go bad.

In April, there was an article in the NY Times that reluctantly boasted about Adolf Hitler's boosting of the German economy and how it worked. Hitler is labeled by many a "right winger" but he was a SOCIALIST, a LEFTIST who hated Jews, and gave Germany a intrusive government making all the decision.
What Obama is doing is totally unAmerican. And I know you disagree. A Czar for this, a Czar for that who answers only to Obama and was never confirmed by the House or Senate?
This so called "Earnings Czar" who will decide how much leaders of Industry can earn and put a cap on it. By who's authority? NOT the American people...they've had no voice in it. Where does it stop? Checks an ballances, out the window for Obama's power grab!

What about ball players? I think they are paid obscene amounts of money to play sports and the same for Nascar drivers riding around in circles. Elvis made millions and only sang, but he fulfilled the American dream. A sports freak would say, "Well, Roger Staubach, (or whoever) brought a lot of pleasure to those who watched the game" I understand that. Dad used to say every time I bought an Elvis record that I was "subsidising" Elvis. I was, and I'm glad I had the freedom to do so.
What these Marxist/Socialists/Statists are pulling has nothing whatsoever to do with health care and things being better for the American people. It's about POWER, pure and simple. They DO NOT have the best interest of the common man in mind. You know what? Maybe the free enterprise people don't either, but their system has worked, where socialism has failed in EVERY SINGLE instance. Name one that works. You can't. Our own "Social Security" is bankrupt as is Medicaid and Medicare.
You don't fix something by letting the pencil pushing bureaucrats take it over, I know that for sure. (Funny how they don't want to use their erasers!)

I saw these lazy blamed people in DC. Sitting back, feet propped up on their chair reading the paper and drinking coffee enjoying the plumb of a job they got for being a "good Democrat" (or Republican.)
While we're limiting pay, let's limit how much trial lawyers like hot pants John Edwards earn and the amount they can sue for, so doctor's don't have to take unnecessary tests on patients to cover their rumps. No, we have to have McDonald's sued for millions because an idiot doesn't realize coffee is supposed to be hot and if you're stupid enough to spill it, guess what? You get BURNED!

My cousin discovered a blade manufactured for a certain purpose and another blade that was way expensive and an unnecessary cost, and used his brain and repackaged the first, marked it up a bit and made a handsome profit. That's the true, American, entrepreneurial spirit. That's my America and I don't want it given away to a big government.

What's being proposed now is classic bait and switch, plain and simple!
I can't believe you buy into to Statists agenda. Usually, those who follow this are mindless, dumbed down people...not well educated ones. And if they ARE educated, they're usually some pseudo-intellectual jerk looking down their nose at anyone "without letters."
If you are one of those, no need to read further. I don't waste my time on you.

Simply put, these people, in the name of "compassion" and using a FALSE sense of EMERGENCY are planning a power grab that will destroy the greatest country on earth and the last best hope for freedom. Why, oh why are people flocking to the US for health care from countries with so called "Universal Health Care?" Why? Because ours may be expensive, but it's superior to all others. Not perfect, by any means, but we're the ones with incentives to create better techniques for saving lives and improving the human condition. We have the encentive and Socialized medicine REMOVES that incentive! The only way to "save" in that system is ultimately RATIONING!

It's difficult to not talk about these things because I believe feel passionately what I'm saying. One thing that gets me about the Democrats is this. When I first moved down here (to North Carolina) and was still pretty malleable as far as politics is concerned, I ran into a white Democrat who hated blacks and Republicans. Spoke of the Republicans putting black people in office illegitimately after the "War of Northern Aggression" and that he just couldn't trust them. Shortly thereafter, amazingly, I heard a BLACK Democrat, who said the Dems were for the "common man" the "little man" and looking out for them, while the Republicans were just about making the rich, richer. I was astonished.

When my former wife, began to take her position the State of North Carolina, she was taken in a back room and told, "I HOPE you're registered as a Democrat. Things will go much better for you if you are. And that goes for your husband, too." She came home and pleaded with me to change my registration from no party to Democrat. Reluctantly, I did so, I am ashamed to say.

Just before Jim Martin was elected Governor of NC, I quite accidentally walked up to him at the State Fair Grounds and asked if I could speak to him. I relayed what I just relayed to you and identified it as what it is...TYRANNY and an abuse of power. Mr Martin assured me that if he got in office that sort of thing would END! It did not!

By the way, when the eternal taxman, father of the "temporary" NC sales tax that outlived even him, Terry Sanford (whom I met in Chapel Hill at Dad's Class of '41 Reunion) was being sworn in as a US Senator, that hour and that day, I was in the Public Library changing my registration in protest of his taking office changing my registration. It was not until then that I was ever registered as a "Republican." I am registered that way now, but I do not consider myself a Republican. I am, proudly a CONSERVATIVE. I am for FREEDOM, for any government getting off the backs of its citizenry. I DO believe in the philosophy of the Founding Fathers of this great Nation. Government has no right to stick its nose in the freedoms GOD gave us.

Most people don't know, but my Dad was a dyed in the wool, DEMOCRAT. At one point in college he was complaining about the treatment of the "little man" and a fellow student called him a Bolshevik! Gradually, Dad reasoned and weighed all the information available to him and by the time Goldwater came around, his thinking was transformed. Dad would tell you like Misters Reagan and Helms would, that "I didn't leave my Party. My Party left ME!"

Ray Steven's has re-vamped a song he recorded in the eighties that the title is self-explanatory: "If 10%'s Enough for Jesus..."

Okay, what people are guilty of is believing that someone who disagrees with them just hasn't thought things out. That somehow they arrive at their opinions irrationally or on the spur of the moment. That's TRUE of some people, but not always.
PREJUDICE: IF someone says one bad word about a black they're called "prejudice"
Prejudice is PRE-judging. "Daddy hated n*ggers, Mama hated n*ggers, so I hate n*ggers!"
But what if someone is speaking from EXPERIENCE? "Well I've never had a black person who didn't try to mess me up." This person doesn't need to expect ALL black people to do so, but he DOES, if he has a working brain have to use the principal of "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me TWICE, shame on ME!"

The Uphill Climb for Elvis to Get His "Props"

Elvis (Presley's) career while he was alive, was really from 1956 to 1977...two years longer, if you count the Sun Records years, so that's a scant twenty-three years at most. Tomorrow marks the thirty-second anniversary of EP's passing.
In Jerry Hopkin's unofficial biography of Elvis, he made reference to a group of people he called "the hipper than thou!" These are the people who deny the real beginnings of rock music and act as if it all started with the "British Invasion." Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and most importantly, Elvis have traditionally been "dissed" in favor of the Brits who recycled their rock in the sixties.
This invasion came at a time when rock had finally gone "corporate." Machines had begun to spoon out pseudo-rock pablum, which became the birth pangs of bubble gum music.
Teens tired of the likes of Fabian, Bobby Darin, and Bobby Rydell and had begun to listen to what was labeled as "folk" music. The Kingston Trio, became popular, if you'll recall with genuine folk songs, but a young Bob Dylan began writing socially conscious songs that a growing underground was listening to mainly in Greenwich Village, New York. Dylan's style was raw and rough and not yet palatable to the masses.
Two network television shows, "Shindig" and "Hullabaloo" featured this music and I recall seeing a young Dylan appear on the show. Peter, Paul and Mary began recording songs written by him.
Meanwhile in England, groups like the Beatles were recycling Rockabilly and early rock 'n' roll and putting their own spin on the genre.After the "Fab Four" came to the US and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, suddenly rock was beginning to be looked upon by the snobs, pseudo-intellectuals and other elitists as an "art form."
You would hear people who were trying to be "with it" utter the words, "The King is Dead...(meaning Elvis) Long Live the Beatles!" If you happened to be a pre-teen at that time you were told that you had to no longer dress like a "greaser" ala Fonzie, and begin dressing "collegiate" (now called "preppy" and in my sister's day, "prep")
This was the beginnings of the people Hopkins referred to as the "hipper than thou."
By the time of Elvis' passing in 1977, some comedians with this attitude had taken up positions in such programs as Saturday Night Live and before that, Laugh-In.
Elvis, who stayed in trouble in his youth for speaking up for black people and was Southern, but never a redneck, hick and certainly not a bigot, was characterized that way. His bloating, proven later to be caused by incorrect prescriptions he was allergic to, was characterized as being "fat."
Elvis had struggled with weight his entire life, but Saturday Night Live portrayed him as something he never was. They truly deserved one of Elvis' karate chops!
There has been cause for both rejoicing and mourning in the three-decade-plus after his leaving this insane planet.
Just a few years back, I was surprised to see a three-year-old look at a jukebox in a diner and say, "LOOK, Mommy! It's ELVIS!" My own Grandaughter loves him. There were the remixes of "A Little Less Conversation" and "Rubberneckin' " that both went straight to number one on the charts. Re-releases, unretouched of some of Elvis' classics have gone to the number one position in Great Britain in recent years.
But the folks who brought us "American Idol" have taken over management of the Elvis Estate BUSINESS-wise and have prostituted his legacy, by having the likes of Celine Dion do a faux duet with Elvis on the show and have had their wannabe contestants visit Graceland as though they are somehow the torch carriers of what he started. This is sad, indeed.
People who remark that Elvis is the "easiest person to do" have heard one too many wannabe "Elvi" and too many stupid commercials where the only thing they know about him is that he'd say, "Thank ye, verr much." For Heaven's sake, they don't even get the DIALECT right! Often what you hear now, is a characterization, of an impression of a mockery of Elvis at best.
Today there is an Elvis channel on satellite radio. This is the ONLY source I know of, other than the Elvis recording library where you can hear, Rock, Country, Blues, Ballads, Crooning, Gospel and more, sounding as if it's sung by as many artists and yet, it's the work of one single man! Elvis remains, unmatched, irreplaceable, and INCREDIBLE! We miss you, EP!

Association

Now days you see celebrities hanging out together like they're madly in love with each other. Country "stars" with rockers and movie stars and hip hop "artists" including rappers. On rare occasion, I get a behind the scenes look at that world. Trust me, just because people play together doesn't mean they necessarily have any degree of respect for one another as "artists."
I really love it when I suspect that a given person in the public eye is the creep I think they are. There's one, I will refrain from giving any further publicity who goes by a stage name rather than his given one who turned out to be just as I suspected.
There are other things I've learned about certain artists that, while I've never particularly thought of them as way above average, I have gained respect knowing about his character. I won't name him, either, but a very athletic rocker has a knee replacement. Yeah. He referred to the other as a, well, shall we say, south bound end of a north bound mule!
Dead giveaways to these creeps are things like writing songs about themselves and how great they think they are. Another one of my pet peeves is the artist who yells, "Come on!" continuously to the audience like some sort of worship leader at a Charismaniac "church." Clyde, if you have to do that, you're not doing a good job with the song. If the performance is good enough, you don't have to resort to that cheap trick!
Were I recording in this environment (or any other for that matter) I would not be out clubbing and being seen with the people necessary to promote my career. (Maybe that's one of the reasons I don't have one)
Musicians, with few exceptions, are egotistical, misogynistic poor excuses for humanity. That's not a hard and fast rule. I actually have some friends who are quite talented and also have a personality.
One thing I have learned from the country singers is their innate sense of appreciating their "fan base" and showing it. In my little small world of people who seem to appreciate my vocalizing and singing, I try to always take time to show my appreciation if someone takes their time to compliment me. When my Mom used to compliment me, I took it with a grain of salt, because I figured that's kind of what her job was, and I pay a lot of attention to people who make positive comments. Granted, sometimes, later behavior indicates that they're tone deaf, when I see them compliment someone who has zero talent, and then I have to gain a lot of perspective from that.
I hope I NEVER get like a few people I know who will never be as good as they THINK they are.
Any more, I totally understand Elvis and his close circle of friends. The Beatles came to visit Elvis and they hung out at his Bellare home. They invited him to come visit them and one of his closest friends asked him if he'd reciprocate and he just said, "Nah."
I don't think that it was that he was trying to be cool (he couldn't HELP that) It was just that he'd been around swollen egos before. They're really very boring!

Yannone: Pastor Manning forecasts the Mack Daddy Revolution

Yannone: Pastor Manning forecasts the Mack Daddy Revolution

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