Whew.  I just woke up from a horrible nightmare, you know the kind where you scream and run but you seem to be running in molasses and there's something behind you in the dark?  You know that kind?  Yeah, you do, I can see it in your eyes.  Well, let me tell you, this one I just had was maybe the worst I've EVER had.  I dreamed I woke up one morning to find I was living in a country that had elected Hillary Clinton to the Presidency!  I dreamed I was running a fever as well, so I got out of my bed and called my doctor to make an appointment.  His nurse told me "Yes sir, we can see you on...ummm...September 20th."  I thought "that's not too bad".  But then she said "2008".  I said WHAT??  She said "Yes sir, I'm sorry but due to the new healthcare program institued by the President, we have to see everybody that calls, and we're booked up for the next year."  I said to her "But I'm sick TODAY!  I'm running a fever!"  She said "I understand that sir, but it just doesn't make a difference.  The medical field today is first come, first serve.  Plus, due to the fact that we are now told how much we can charge for everything, we've pretty much stopped doing ANYTHING.  We may prescribe you an antibiotic to help with your fever, or we may not, just depends on how we feel that day.  We still get our 20 bucks for your visit whether we actually do anything for you or not."  This is when I came awake screaming.  I've got to try and help stop this disaster I thought.  So here I am again, pontificating.
    When Bill Clinton was President, Hillary tried slipping her socialized medicine idea by the American people and was soundly and roundly defeated on it.  She's been aching to try it again ever since.  I think she believes she can hoodwink us into going along with her plan on a "trial" basis that will allow her to show how wonderful her plan really is.  Well, we're not going to go along with that, are we?  I mean, if you want to know about socialized medicine, look at how many Canadians come to the U.S. to see a doctor.  Why?  Because the waiting time to see a doctor in Canada can be as much as 8 to 10 months!!!  The average from what I hear from a couple of Canadian friends is about 6 to 8 weeks.  That is totally ridiculous.  Now I'm sure she'll say that some sort of "compromise" or "arrangement" can be reached between the doctor and the patient if the patient is truly sick.  DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!  What will happen is, clinics will be set up to see you if you are ill.  In other words, your Minor Emergency Centers and your CareNow offices will become so overcrowded with sick people you won't be able to get in there either!!  So lots and lots of folks, who with a doctor's care would have been just fine, will die waiting to get in to see one.  We CAN NOT LET THIS HAPPEN!
    I believe this next election will determine the course of this country over the next half-century, and the course cannot be one toward socialism.  Not in anything!  Not medicine, not farming, not manufacturing, nothing!  One step toward socialism is a step down a very slippery slope and not one we need to take.  I believe that our health care system is broken, but this IS NOT the way to fix it.  Check out Russia, East Germany and the rest of the old Soviet-bloc nations.  How'd that little socialism experiment work for them?  And yes, I know!  They were communists, not socialists.  Well, you can split that hair if you want to, I don't.  No matter whether you call a potato, a potato, a spud, or whatever, in the end it's still just a potato.  And Hillary is still just a political hack, with some very very dangerous ideas.  So if her name is on the ballot when you go to the polls,  try to follow the advice you give to your own kids.....  JUST SAY NO!!

      I make no apologies for the thoughts expressed in this blog.  I'm just trying to get my reader (cause one is usually all there is, lol) to think about the issues I raise here.


      Having been born and raised in Texas, Mexico, and the wonderful folks who hail from that great country, have always been a big part of my life.  Those "Texicans" I grew up with were generally of the hard working, hard-playing, family oriented type and I counted myself lucky, and still do, to call a whole passel of them my friends.  But we who were born in this country, and those of us who worked hard and followed all the rules to become citizens, now have a huge and nasty problem.  Yes, I'll say it out loud, even though it's completely frowned upon to do so.  Illegal aliens.  Now don't get me wrong here.  I know that even though the vast majority of the illegals now in this country come from south of the border, there are still some here illegally from all parts of the globe.  The scariest thing about this problem is, of course, the possibility that some of these people are terrorists, or are working FOR terrorists.  But that's not the major issue.  The major issue is that all of these folks, whether they be from Mexico or Guatamala, or Poland or Timbuktu, are breaking the laws of the country they profess to want to live in.
    Now I understand completely the urge to provide your family with a better way of life, who DOESN'T understand that?  But that brings us right down to the central issue of this debate as far as I am concerned....if my family needs food, and I go down to the local A & P or to Mom and Pop's Grocery and load up a cart and just walk out with it without paying, what's going to happen to me?  You know damn well what's going to happen.  I'm going to be spending my next vacation in the Crossbar Hilton.  But wait a second!!  How is this right??  Why is it any different for me to take food my family needs, break the law to improve their lot in life so to speak, than it is for people to come to this country illegally and live here without permission to better their family?  It's all breaking the law isn't it?  You're damned right it is.  And now they're wanting to pass some sort of idiotic law providing medical care and an education for the children of these people, these, well lets just say it, these criminals.  Hey, why stop with the illegals??  Why not extend this plan to the kids of all the murderers, rapists, car thieves and muggers that are in prison right now?  Hey, a criminal is a criminal.  You can try to justify it by saying "Oh, they aren't hurting anybody though...what they're doing isn't really breaking the law."  Horse poop!  They are breaking the law just as surely as a person would be if he up and decided one morning to take his deer rifle out to one of the overpasses over I-35 for a little target practice on the passing motorists.  I won't even enter into a meaningful discussion on this problem with the folks I know until they first admit that these people are breaking the immigration laws.  And one thing I know for sure, in the United States of America, a law is a law is a law.  
    The people who are in this country illegally should be arrested, and if it's their first offense, sent back to wherever they came from with a stern warning about breaking our laws.  If they are caught again, it should be a MANDATORY six to twelve months in jail with an appropriate fine, and if they are caught a third time, it should be a mandatory 2 to 5 years in prison.  Oh my!!  You say that's being too hard on these poor poor people?  Hey, why don't you try going into THEIR country illegally, and it doesn't matter what country that happens to be, and see what happens to YOU.  Yeah, there are some countries around the world that if you get caught within their borders without proper papers, you won't see the light of day again for TEN FREAKIN' YEARS, and that's if you're lucky.  If you're not born with luck of the Irish, you could wind up being blindfolded and smoking your last cigarette.  Think about that for a minute.  And then ask yourself this...how do the naturalized citizens of our country, those who have come here, followed the rules and have had the thrill of taking the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the greatest country in the world, how do they feel about these people now getting the same rights and privileges simply by being here.  That is a travesty, not to mention an injustice.  It's high time we start taking care of Americans, and let the rest of the world take care of itself.

    As a general rule, I'm about as politically incorrect as anyone you'll ever meet.  I believe in calling a spade a spade, even if it sometimes has the tendency to offend a particular person or group of people.  Sometimes, you just have to tell it like it is, as they say.  Well, that's what I'm about today, telling it like it is, and was, and even like I wish it would be on this sixth anniversary of one of the most cowardly and insidious acts in the history of man.
    On Sept. 11, 2001, I was recuperating at home from two major surgeries in less than 30 days.  I didn't have the television on, or the radio, I was actually on the Internet just surfin' around, when the telephone rang.  It was my youngest daughter just checking up on me, and during the conversation, she asked me if I had heard that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.  Having not had the TV on, I of course had not heard.  After we hung up, I turned it on and just minutes later, witnessed the 2nd plane crashing into the other tower.  Up until that point, I, like a lot of my fellow countrymen, assumed the first plane that struck was just a horrilble accident.  There was a reason why the thought that this was an attack on us never crossed our  minds, at least until the second strike.  And that is that we, and by we I mean Americans, could not conceive of someone so evil, so vile, so twisted, that he would use planes as guided missiles against the innocent civilians in the towers, not to mention those poor souls on the aircraft themselves.  This was so far beyond any evil we had ever experienced that we couldn't even comprehend it.  But by the end of that awful day, we did for sure.
    I will tell you this much...the anger and rage I felt that day was far beyond anything I had ever experienced in my 48 years of life.  I wanted so badly to strike back at the people who had perpetrated this unspeakable crime (and no matter what they say, that was exactly what it was, a CRIME!) that I think I went a little bit nuts for a few minutes.  After I had finally managed to get hold of myself, I wept a little for the victims, prayed a LOT for them, and thought about what we as a nation should do in reply.  Say what you want about President Bush, during that time of national grief he was a strong and capable leader.  I haven't always agreed with him on everything he's done, but during the months and years since that day, I've always been thankful he was in the White House that fall morning as opposed to the other guy who might have been there.  The President moved swiftly and decisively on the issue, and God bless him for his actions in those trying days and months.
    Back at the start of this little rant, I said I was about as politically incorrect as anyone you'll ever meet.  Well, this is where the politically incorrect part starts, so if you are offended by political incorrectness, or if you are easily offended, it might be best for you to stop reading now, because some of what I'm going to say isn't very nice.  If you proceed, please don't mark my blog as offensive, because you were forewarned.
    Isn't it funny, in a horrible sort of way, that so many times in the history of the world, some coward has justified his acts of violence by claiming they were done for his God?  Osama Bin Laden, or Usama if you prefer, is one of these people, if not the worst one ever.  He bastardizes a perfectly legitimate religion and uses it to further his own aims.  Oh, OBL says all the right Islamic buzzwords, the old "Praise Allah", "Allah is Great, Allah is Good", and my personal favorite "All Praise be to Allah".  I've got a feeling that if there IS an Allah, that Osama better hope like hell he never meets him because I've got a hunch ol' Allah ain't gonna be too happy about some of the crap that OBL has done in his name.  Osama sits in his war room(can you call a section of a cave a room????) and makes his little videos and preaches his brand of Islam to the masses like some kind of make-believe Saudi mystic.  It's way past time someone did for him.  We need to find this man, this creature, and remove him from the equation in any way we have to.  I don't care what we have to do to get him, GET HIM.  KILL HIM.  Assassinate him, cruise missile him, NUKE THE WHOLE AREA WHERE HE IS HIDING  LIKE A RAT DOWN A HOLE!!!   Remember, if you cut off the snake's head, the body will die.  And that is true as well, I believe, for Al Qaida.  Without bin laden to direct it, and to provide it's impetus with the force of his personality, Al Qaida will whip ineffectually back and forth a couple of times, and then die, just like the snake.  You are going to hell Osama, Allah wants nothing to do with you.  You are to Allah as a 4 year old who has filled his pants is to his parents, an embarrassment plain and simple.  And it must just kill you inside to know that once you are dead, (and we'll get you sooner or later), but once you are dead, your glorious Al Qaida (and your glorious "jihad") will become nothing more than a footnote in the page of some dusty old history textbook. 

    Where's that danged Sadam when  you really need him?  Why do I need Sadam?  I want to give him back his little piece of crap country for 6 months or so, just so he can remind those people of why they hung him, because a whole bunch of them seem to have forgotten.
     Why am I all revved up today?  There was a poll taken of 2200 Iraqis recently in which one of the questions was something akin to "Do you believe America was right to invade your country"  Of the 2200, six out of every ten said "No".  (Wide-eyed)  NO??  The people that our troops rescued from a tyrannical despot say now we were wrong to SAVE THEM??  OK, now I'm confused.  We go into their God-forsaken country, paying for their freedom with American lives and they say now they didn't want to be rescued???  Ok, fine.  Let's pull all the troops out and let them kill each other off, then we go back in and turn that place into the 51st state of the union.  
    The really obvious, and most irritating, part of this fiasco, is that the Iraqi's won't stand up for themselves.  They're too busy complaining and whining to realize that this is THEIR country we're trying to save.  And yes, I know some of them have been forced to live in a less than civilized manner over the last couple of years, but is that really any different than the way they were living before??  I mean if you go back and look at some of the film clips taken back during the years of the Reagan presidency, the Iran-Iraq war, and the first Gulf War, most of them were living like homeless people anyway.  And at least now they don't have to worry about being picked up by Sadam's secret police and being "interrogated", so to speak.  And yes, I know that Islamic radicals, and some of the Iraqi's themselves, are blowing things, and people, up constantly, but there again this is a sign of the unwillingness of the general population to stand up for themselves.  The radicals are a small minority of the population of that country, but right now they are imposing their will on the majority.  And until that changes, nothing the U.S. can do is going to be truly effective in stopping the bloodshed.