Source: A rich guy’s case for higher taxes. To give you a little background on the rich guy this article talks about here is a quote introducing piece. Like Warren Buffett, David Levine — retired executive, student of the federal tax code and very rich man — is begging the government to raise his taxes. Here, he explains why. David Levine spent his life in the … Continue reading Another rich guy’s case for higher taxes
This is a continuation of a post I did in March 2009 on my blog at RedLetterLiving.net This is a continuation of the last post where I covered George Washington’s religious beliefs. I will conclude this topic by talking about Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson — Jefferson was undoubtedly the strongest advocate for religious freedom of the Founding Fathers. This was quite evident when he composed the … Continue reading The Faith of our Founding Fathers… continued
When a fellow don’t have much mind it don’t take him long to make it up. – November 3, 1935 Will Rogers As Will mentions here it doesn’t seem like many today have much mind and what they have is most often closed. They are fixated on one tunnel vision world view and absolutely nothing will shake them from that view. They have made up … Continue reading A Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Waste…..
Source: NYT: NRA gathers amid storm over gun laws – US news – The New York Times – msnbc.com. Simply put gang, when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. You will NEVER take mine. I am NOT the enemy. I stand WITH the police and have NEVER discharged my weapons. BUT if someone comes to harm me, wife or my doggie, that is a … Continue reading And The Ranting Goes On….
Some of the things we celebrate tend to be a double edged sword. I recently say a TV program celebrating the multi-million dollar restoration of a home at Newport Rhode Island. Newport was one of the areas known as a playground for the robber barons of almost one-hundred years ago. The home in particular was actually a summer home build by Edward Berwind. His wife … Continue reading Some of the Things We Celebrate….
All there is to politics is trading. That’s why politics is not as good as it was years ago. They don’t have as many old-time horse traders in there. These we got are just amateurs. They’re crude with their trades. There is really no “finesse.” You might not get that. “Finesse” is a French word and it means sneaking it over. — Will Rogers Maybe … Continue reading No Good Horse Traders…..
I just went another short round with my radical right gun totting evangelical friend on helping those less fortunate than us. Here are some of his words replying to a post I made on FaceBook. The root cause of most of our deficit problems is still those that work and produce must pay for the existence of all those that do not work or produce … Continue reading My Evangelical Friend…
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. — Thomas Jefferson These are powerful words for today and it is absolutely amazing that they were actually spoken more than two hundred years ago! It is no secret to those … Continue reading Monied Corporations…. Even Then….
Is the Republican Party insuring its own demise by it continuing to focus on a narrower and narrower core group. I want to believe this is the case as the alternative is that we as a country are now dominated by exclusion. Being against things, particularly different groups of people, is what has been driving the Republican primaries lately. It has pushed their final candidate … Continue reading Is the Republican Party Insuring Its Own Demise??
This is a post I did in March 2009 on my blog RedLetterLiving.net related to whether we are founded as a Christian nation as so many conservatives seem to say. I will finish it up next Sunday. There are a lot of different views of what the Founding Fathers of the United States believed when it came to God. Many evangelicals like to say that … Continue reading The Faiths of Our Fathers…..
Source: AT&T sheds directories, advertising business | Mobile – CNET News. The assets that AT&T is selling include the Yellow Pages directories… Things are in constant change now days. Sometime the pace is dizzying indeed. Of course telecommunications is one of those things that is probably changing the fastest. In the 1960s you could find a public telephone booth on almost any city street. In the … Continue reading The Passing of an Era…..
Source: Father: ‘My kid made a mistake’ in school – USATODAY.com. Authorities say the boy brought a .45-caliber handgun he got from his mother’s house to an elementary school in Bremerton on Wednesday, and the weapon discharged from inside his backpack just before classes let out, critically injuring Amina Kocer-Bowman. Have we come to the point in our gun laden country where we are now charging … Continue reading ‘My kid made a mistake’ …
I have been doing some investigating of what I have been posting lately and decided to re-purpose one of the blog categories. Instead of Seniors Only you will now find Wisdom of.. I have come to realize that I really don’t have a lot of advice for other senior citizens about how to live their lives. I’m pretty much muddling along like everyone else, so … Continue reading A Re-Purposed Category…
source: Try, try again: Senate ‘Gang of Six’ hatching plan on US debt reduction – CSMonitor.com. Warner and his colleagues in the Gang of Six are putting the debt-reducing plan produced by the Simpson-Bowles commission into legislative language (some 800 pages and counting, by Warner’s estimate). That legislation should be in final form within the next six to eight weeks, Warner said. The bipartisan commission, chartered … Continue reading The ‘Gang of Six’ At It Again…
Here is a rather straight forward graph showing military spending by country. Are you like me and see a very basic problem here? If we look at is per citizen it is even more skewed. No wonder our budgets are in so much trouble. No wonder the world always comes to us to solve their problems. We are taking on massive debt to be the policemen … Continue reading Military Expenditures by Country…
The Perfect Storm is generally thought to be weather related. The movie by that name came out in 2000. It was about how a number of various weather events coming together at the same time resulted in a massive storm off the New England coast. But the Perfect Storm is more generically know as shown below from Wikipedia: A perfect storm is a confluence of events that … Continue reading The Perfect Storm…..
I think everyone knows that our number one business in the U.S. is selling weapons systems and other means of destruction throughout the world. I suspect that almost every country in the world has at least a few of our $50 million military airplanes and some of our $1 million bombs to go with them. The $50 million is of course for a second-hand airplane, if … Continue reading The Number Two Business in the U.S….
Source: Letters: To spare tax filers pain, phase out deductions – USATODAY.com. I guess you could call this a guest post in that I am going to leave the words of Michael Bugg as found in the source at USA Today pretty much stand as they are. No free lunches –I am tired of the large number of Americans who want the best country in … Continue reading No Free Lunch….
Some Christians believe that each and every word in the Bible is literally true and without error. I belonged to one of those churches at one time. I often asked embarrassing questions during our weekly bible study. Questions the clergy leader really didn’t care to try to answer. Asking those questions is probably one of the reasons they tossed me out. I never got to ask the … Continue reading What Language Did Adam & Eve Speak??
To all you city bound folks out there I wanted to give you a picture of what is currently happening in America’s heartland. Continue reading The Rights of Spring
Source: Why U.S. politics devolves into good vs. evil – USATODAY.com. It is so much easier to hate someone when you are able to put the “evil” label on them. It makes everything they do wrong and everything you do somehow righteous. That seems to be what is happening so much around us today in so many categories. The most obvious of which is politics. The … Continue reading Why U.S. politics devolves into good vs. evil
I remember a cop movie years ago starring Stacy Keach. It was about an old timer cop who had rules for every situation. I can’t remember the name of the movie but I want to do likewise. I have lived quite a few years on this earth and have learned some valuable lessons from the time that I want to record for posterity so I am … Continue reading RJ’s Rules…..
The Lord split knowledge up among his subjects about equal. The so-called ignorant is happy. You think he is happy because he knows any better, maybe he is happy because he knows enough to be happy. The smart one knows a lot, that makes him unhappy because he can’t impart it to his friends. Discontent comes in proportion to knowledge. — Will Rogers Intelligence and … Continue reading Being Happy….
Source: https://news.fidelity.com/news/article.jhtml?guid=/FidelityNewsPage/pages/secrets-of-social-security-2&topic=living-in-retirement On the other hand, some people advocate drawing Social Security benefits at the first opportunity. Doug Carey, who founded the financial planning software firm WealthTrace, says Social Security doesn’t see itself as an odds maker, but it does require you to bet on your longevity. He offers this chart as proof. It graphs the break-even point for a person who earned the inflation-adjusted equivalent … Continue reading Betting against death
[War] won’t stop till there is as much brains and scientific study put to aid peace as there is to promote war. – May 31, 1928 Will Rogers Here we are one world war and dozens of other wars later and still we can’t understand what Will was saying almost one hundred years ago. Except for a brief period during the Clinton years we have … Continue reading War and Peace….
A rather boring day today. We left Omaha about 10:00am and made almost 400 miles of Interstate driving before settling down near St. Charles MO. But given that there was little walking it was good for my aching knees. Tomorrow we will visit the picture puzzle super-store and then likely make a dash for home. Since not much happened today I thought I would give … Continue reading On The Road – Omaha (Day 6) More on Boy’s Town…
It was a very interesting day today. We spent the first part of it at Father Flannigan’s Boys Home and then went to the Spirit of Nebraska Wilderness Project in the downtown area. It is nice to see that the Boys Town is still a thriving mission and that they have been welcoming girls for over thirty years. The story of the place was quite inspiring and … Continue reading On The Road – Omaha (Day 5)
The big oil companies and their backers in congress insist that we must open up everything to drilling and give them billions of dollars a year to help them search for new oil. They say if we will open up all public land to oil production we can become less dependent on foreign oil. But what they don’t say is that, as far as the … Continue reading The Price of Oil….
I want to say out front that I am very impressed with Omaha. It seems like the quint-essential city to me. It is probably the cleanest city we have visited during our twenty-six years of April road trips. Today, at least so far, we have browsed through the Old Market area and spent several hours at the Durham Museum. Here are some pictures of that. … Continue reading On The Road – Omaha/Durnam Museum (Day 4)
We in the U.S. have chosen to get our health insurance primarily through our employers. But that proves to be a very complicated process. The rest of the world has chosen their government to provide for their healthcare through their tax dollars. Employer Paid Healthcare is Complicated: If our employer is small he is likely unable to afford the going insurance rates. Therefore those employees … Continue reading Employer Paid Healthcare is Complicated…
We didn’t have much of a drive today; just across the river to Omaha and then north to our first sightseeing venture. But we did make some new friends today while visiting the Wildlife Safari Preserve. My wife being a super animal lover that she is insisted this be our first stop. We are now settled down in the Magnolia Hotel for a quick nap … Continue reading On The Road – Omaha (Day 3)
Source: Goldman Sachs culture ‘toxic’? Letter confirms suspicions about Wall Street. – CSMonitor.com. Polls show that Americans hold a very low opinion of Wall Street, and a damning public letter of resignation from a Goldman Sachs executive could only amplify that perception. I don’t understand why half or more of the country vote the Republican ticket. Isn’t that the party that wants to hand America … Continue reading Handing the Country Over to Our Corporate Structure??
Here I am sitting in our hotel room in Council Bluffs Iowa. But unlike last night I am sitting here alone. No my wife didn’t get mad and leave me; she is instead in a casino about 100 yards from our hotel room. Unknowingly I chose a hotel for the night in a casino complex. Gambling is just not my thing but Yvonne does like … Continue reading On The Road – Council Bluffs Iowa (Day 2)
It seems that the favorite hobby right now is to complain about gas prices and particularly to blame the high prices on President Obama 🙂 We all like to remember the good old days when gasoline was much cheaper. When I first started driving gasoline was $0.28 per gallon! But what if I told you that you can get gas even now for $1.75 per … Continue reading $1.75 Gasoline Just Down the Road….
I recently watched an interview of a Christian clergyman of twenty years. He was having doubts about his faith. All of us have doubts and one time or another. Even Mother Teresa was troubled by them. Having doubts is not too unusual but this particular minister’s doubts were leading him to make the leap back to an agnostic or even worse. This is sad but … Continue reading The Clubhouse Effect…..
Here we are at the end of day one; well at least the traveling end of it. We are in Quincy Illinois which is right on the Illinois/Missouri border. Today was mainly a travel day but we did take the majority of in on State roads instead of InterStates. Going the entire width of Illinois, which is about 225 miles, on local roads brought to … Continue reading On The Road – Quincy Illinois
RJ's Corner 