You know the story. The evil step mother and the two ugly step sisters take advantage of the beautiful and neglected Cinderella. This is a metaphor of our economic times. In my story the evil step mother is big government and the ugly step sisters are banks too big to fail and fat Wall Street companies. Obama is the cool Prince and small business is Cinderella.

Cinderella kept the household alive by doing all the filthy chores and she was constantly at the beck and call of the other 3 women. The Prince was looking for a wife and announced a grand ball. The mother went into high gear planning the wardrobe for her two invited daughters. Cinderella did the work and prepared the dresses. She wasn't invited but dreamed of attending. The sisters taunted her, saying she would never be welcome at such a high affair.

Cinderella cried after the sisters left. Her resourceful Fairy Godmother appeared and turned her rags into a gown, a pumpkin into a carriage, mice into horses, a rat into a coachman, and lizards into footmen. She went to the ball and won the Prince's heart. (The Fairy Godmother represents wisdom and common business sense.) Hopefully you remember about the clock striking midnight, the slipper, and the Prince with "The Audacity of Hope". He searched for his true love, his meaning, and answers to the fears and problems in his kingdom.

Obama has pulled out all the stops to save our economy, but he has only invited the ugly sisters (banks too big to fail and Wall Street). Small business, like Cinderella, has not been invited to the party. I bet there were not many small business owners at his recent $15,000 a plate fundraisers. Small business represents 70% of our economy. They are THE answer to the unemployment problem. Small business people are the innovators turning pumpkins into carriages and mice into workers.

Big government and Prince Obama gave GM $50 billion back in the summer to keep them in business. Since then they have closed dealerships, factories, and layed off thousands. There are 5 million small businesses in this country. Imagine how many jobs would have been created if that money had been given to them. Have a contest and give the money to the biggest and best ideas. Reward creativity for a change instead of companies skilled in trading derivatives and other sneaky financial games. Tell small businesses that if they hire new people their payroll taxes will be eliminated for one year. The unemployment rate will be gone in a month.

Barack has the slipper. It won't fit the fat feet of Wall Street. He needs to search the heartland, the rust belt, companies with 20 employees, and small towns to find what works in this country. The clock is striking midnight.

By: William H Watson
http://www.questionsbybill.com

The Democrats' health care legislation, as is or in very similar form, cannot be passed. Every choice point they encounter from this stage on leads to an internal contradiction or a dead end. To use a mathematical metaphor, their situation is overdetermined: there are too many conflicting restrictions; there is no solution to their dilemma. (To use a liberal metaphor: It's a slam dunk!)

Democratic proponents of health care reform have the following major goals:

(1) Create a federal public health insurance option to "compete with" private insurers, or

(2) Set up state cooperatives to "compete with" private insurers on a state-by-state basis;

(3) Prevent discrimination by insurance companies based on preexisting condition-i.e., forbid insurance companies from "providing insurance";

(4) Limit the ratio of high-to-low insurance premiums by age group.

Whether pursuing any of these goals is the government's business-and it isn't-Democrats need to enact some combination of these proposals in order to fulfill their aim of turning us into Canada; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this will cost about $1 trillion.

Democrats have proposed numerous bad ideas for paying for their legislation, all of which lead to intractable circumstances that they cannot tolerate politically with the general electorate, even if they were able to figure out a way to cobble together, rush through, or force the votes in Congress to pass them, including:

(1) Increase the deficit: This would violate Obama's promise that health care reform will be "dime"-neutral.

(2) Make taxpayers subsidize the public option: This would keep the government plan from having to cut costs or be efficient to attract and retain customers, as any private insurance company must. It would therefore eventually force those who are satisfied with their current plans to pay higher premiums or get less for their money.

(3) Cut $500 billion in Medicare: This would upset seniors, and anyone who plans to be a senior at some point in his life, who fear rationing of care.

(4) Tax high-cost plans at a 40% rate: This would anger emergency workers and union members, and huge numbers of people who will hit the non-insurance-adjusted premium threshold for this level of taxation in the next 10 years.

(5) Impose fees on insurance and pharmaceutical companies: These costs would simply be passed on to doctors, who would in turn dump them on to patients.

(6) Cap deductions for health savings accounts: This would increase out-of-pocket medical expenses.

(7) Force everyone to buy government-approved health insurance by charging a penalty for not having coverage: If the penalty were low, in order to avoid making it burdensome, then people would wait to get coverage until they became sick, then drop coverage after they recovered, which means the penalty would be useless. If the penalty were high, in order to make it effective, then the public would be infuriated over the imposition of a costly penalty for not buying something that should be optional.

(8) Cover fewer uninsured people: This would involve turning the nation's health care system upside down while failing to fulfill the basic aim of the plan.

In case Democrats are interested, there are provisions to which they could agree, all previously proposed in legislation by House Republicans, which would actually pay for the proposed plan. These steps should be taken anyway, and should be pursued instead of the Democrats' aims, but just for the record, they include:

(1) Medical liability tort reform: This would reduce settlement amounts and lower doctors' malpractice insurance premiums.

(2) Tax deductions for health insurance premiums, medical expenses, and prescriptions: This would allow people to decide how to allocate their earnings toward medical expenses, which they can do more efficiently than Kathleen "Jolly Roger" Sebelius.

(3) Vouchers for opting out of Medicare: This would allow people to decide how to spend their money on medical care in old age.

(4) Interstate provision of private insurance: This would allow for greater competition and cost-cutting.

Despite conservatives' nail-biting uncertainty over their ability to defeat HR 3200, they have one advantage: the truth. All the arguments conservatives have advanced against liberals' bad ideas are informed by it, whereas liberals must disguise it, distort it, downplay it, or lie about it to persuade anyone that their impossible legislative feat and fevered social engineering fantasy can be achieved. There are plenty of voters and legislators who are content to ignore the truth and stumble down dead ends, but enough may turn out to be smart and honest enough to see through these efforts and find their way out of the labyrinth.

By: Scott Spiegel
http://www.scottspiegel.com

For lots of us pre-boomers, this politically correct stuff seems contrived at best and plain stupid at worst. It has only been the past decade or so that those wanting to control what we think, by changing what we're allowed to say and do on a daily basis, have edged their way into the mainstream of American life.

Back when we pre-boomers were kids (those born between 1930 and 1945) everyone enjoyed the Christmas season. We had a Christmas play at school attended by parents. Throughout the several weeks leading up to Christmas we sang carols every day. There was always a pageant put on by the kids in the higher grades, and we were read "Christmas Story" from the bible at assembly in the auditorium. Each classroom had a tree and a party. Plus Santa made a visit to each room and every child received a small gift provided by the local merchants' association. No one complained in those days.

We celebrated Lincoln's birthday on February 12 followed less than two weeks later by Washington' birthday on the 22nd. We learned about both these great presidents in the classroom and always were entertained by a little performance attended by the entire school. It made the short month go even fasted. This was good because it would be another 6 weeks or so before we had any more time off from school.

Easter vacation was a welcomed break. The school activities were secular in nature with bunnies and egg decorating and usually a play about Peter Rabbit or the like. In the fall, we studied about Columbus but there was no show unless we did a portrayal in our classes. Thanksgiving was always celebrated with the "Story of the First Thanksgiving" with the participants playing the role of Pilgrims or Indians (there was no Native-American lobby in the '40s and '50s), and the kids wore those goofy black hats and bonnets or colorful head-dresses. It was fun as well as a learning opportunity.

Along the way the PC crowd decided our traditions are inappropriate. So the Christmas holidays are now "Winter Vacation" and the only entertainment kids are exposed to in school are symbols and songs that don't offend anyone. Carols are out because they allude to the religious aspects of Christmas, even though this is the reason behind this federal holiday. Santa, trees and decorations are banned from many schools as well.

"Spring Break" is the new name for Easter vacation. And there's talk of changing Columbus Day to "Fall Day," because the man who discovered America was harsh in the way he treated the Indians -- remember, he set out to find a new trade route to India. Unfortunately, most explorers were not gentle with the inhabitants of the places they claimed for their countries, and the natives weren't always happy to see them, but it is part of history. The PCs haven't attack Thanksgiving yet, but it's only a matter of time.

So, the only way our grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to learn about the traditions that were such a rich part of our lives is for us to tell them the stories from our childhood. They'll love it, and so will you.

By: Don Potter
Don Potter, a Philadelphia native, was born in 1936 and is a 50 year veteran of the advertising agency business. Now living in Los Angeles, he has written two novels in retirement, frequently writes on marketing issues, and has a blog dedicated to pre-boomers (those born between 1930 and 1945).

Read more articles for and about pre-boomers with thoughts, comments and opinions designed to spark thinking, foster discussion, and stimulate debate by logging on to http://www.pre-boomermusings.com

Barack Obama has made it a point to continually talk about the "mess" he inherited from the Bush administration. In August, he said "But I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."

Indeed, Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall. There are wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while terrorist groups remain a constant threat. North Korea and Iran are testing long range missiles in conjunction with the development of nuclear weapons. It's worth noting that the precarious state of the country is what got him elected in the first place. If everything was going along swimmingly, the country wouldn't have changed direction.

Liberals need a catastrophe to get elected. They use the misfortune of others, a bad economy, a war, racial tension, hurricanes, the Rachel Maddow show - anything and everything to convince others that they and only they, can come in on their white horses with shining armor to come to the rescue and save the day. Their very existence as a political force is predicated not on solving real problems but on having problems to justify the need for their policies.

It's a vicious circle. Without having to have to worry about consequences, liberals can promote the most radical policies the way that a gambler can go down double or nothing, without ever having to worry about losing. They are never held to account for their policies. No matter what the facts say, it's always someone else's fault. Hence they have a 'Heads I Win - Tales you lose' policy. If the radical policy produces results, they are heroes; if not, then there is justification for more of their policies.

Think this sounds crazy? In 1977, the Carter administration passed the Community Reinvestment Act. The goal was noble, as most liberal goals seem, but devoid of logic, as most liberal plans are. The idea was to create a situation where low income people would be able to buy homes. Banks had to prove that a certain percentage of loans went to these low income people and it forced them to make loans to people who didn't qualify. In the 1990's, in order to guarantee those loans, Freddie Mac and Fannie May promised to buy 2 trillion dollars worth of those mortgages. This took financial pressure off banks and they were able to make more of these risky loans and show what good 'corporate citizens' they were. The downfall was inevitable.

Once all this was set in place, there was speculation and trading on these loans to try to profit from it but none of that would have happened if the irresponsible policies weren't put into effect in 1977 and then increased in the 1990's. Before the inevitable collapse, President Bush tried to point out that there would be problems if the current policies continued. It was liberals such as Barney Frank who assured everyone that Fannie and Freddy were solvent. Bush didn't push the point as hard as he should have, but at least he recognized the problem while liberal democrats said there was no problem.

So Barack Obama is elected into office based on an economic downturn that was created by exactly the kind of policies that he wants to implement to solve the problem. Incidentally, Social Security is another problem that George Bush tried to deal with. They criticized him for bringing up Social Security the same way they criticized him for trying to deal with the mortgage crisis. When Social Security blows up, liberals will no doubt use the same policies that blew it up to try to fix it. At the same time, they will blame republican and conservative greed for causing it to fail even though conservatives were the only ones who tried to head off the problems before they became critical.

President Obama talks about those who 'created the mess'. How many messes has the left created and how many of those messes have they had to answer for? When you don't have to answer to your failures, when you are, in fact, rewarded for your failures, it doesn't provide any incentive to stop failing. Liberals either don't understand or don't care that there are consequences to their actions that go beyond the immediate situation at hand.

One mess created by liberals is the banning of the chemical DDT. Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" created hysteria around chemical pesticides. The manufacturers of DDT, farmers, scientists, and others tried to assure people that DDT was not harmful and had tremendous benefits. The anti DDT campaign took on a life of its own and when a liberal cause takes on that kind of momentum, there is no stopping it (See Global Warming). So DDT was banned. Since 1972, over 100 million people have died from malaria. This is a disease that was on the verge of being eradicated in the early 1960s. Millions of people died needlessly. This is a catastrophic event of monumental proportions that few people address and fewer take responsibility for. It's not an exaggeration - 100 MILLION people have lost their lives yet no one is asked to answer for this! Is it because their heart was in the right place? Their intentions were good? People continue to suffer, mostly in Africa, to this very day and some are talking about re-introducing DDT - a bit late for all those who died because of well-intentioned people. For more information on Rachel Carson and the DDT ban, a good article is "Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide" by Lisa Makson in FrontPageMagazine.com.

Another fine mess that liberals have never had to answer for was when they pressured congress to withdraw all funding from the war in Vietnam. When the US withdrew, it did so under a treaty that it would go back in if the situation got out of hand. There was so much pressure by the left to get out of Vietnam, that they constantly blamed the US and absolved the North Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge of any wrong doing. When it became obvious that mass extermination was taking place in Cambodia, the left continued to blame the US and make excuses for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They placed all the blame on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as if, even if that were true, it would absolve them of the responsibility of living up to a treaty and saving the millions of people who were being slaughtered.

The propaganda that took place then was similar to the propaganda now and there was no FOX news, talk radio, or the internet to present the other side. Movies such as "The Killing Fields" made it seem as if everything the Cambodians did was the result of the actions of the US. Just as now with Islamic terrorism, it could never be that there were purely evil people who had to be fought and stopped. Nevertheless, regardless of the cause of the Cambodian genocide, we had an obligation to stop it, not to excuse the actions of mass murderers. Two million people died in Cambodia. Not only did the left not want to stop this genocide, they actually praised the people committing the genocide! For a more complete telling of the true story of the Khmer Rouge, see the chapter called "The Bloodbath" in Mona Charen's book "Useful Idiots".

Whether it's as severe as mass extermination or a banking crisis, schools that can't educate, a war on poverty that creates more poverty, inner city programs that create crumbling cities, rent control ideas that create a lack of housing, ideas to stop crime by understanding criminal behavior, rather than punishing it - thereby causing more crime, welfare ideas that cause dependency instead of personal growth, the messes created by liberal ideas are endless. They are never held accountable for these failures. It's either because they didn't do enough of whatever their miserable idea was, or they didn't have enough money to do it correctly. It never dawns on them that maybe the ideas, themselves, are flawed.

So, we are now being forced to buy this bill of goods that has failed so miserably in the past. Apparently, we have no choice but to accept it. We're supposed to just "get out of the way and stop talking", but we have to leave our money behind of course -- they'll need that. Obama is like a vacuum cleaner salesman who is going to pour some dirt all over the floor to prove how great the vacuum cleaner will work. It won't work and we shouldn't have to pay $10,000,000,000,000 for a broken vacuum cleaner that will leave a mess on the floor.

By: Howard Jacobs
MBA Marketing Pace University
I currently work for a large financial institution.
I started the blog EndTheChange because I am outraged at the direction our country is going in. People who feel this way want to know "What can I do?" This blog is my little way of trying to set the record straight on the upside-down state of our country.
http://endthechange.blogspot.com