Chip Gerdes: Larger than Life

Band of Brothers

I first met Chip Gerdes in Quincy, IL, at the 2009 9-12 Tea Party and I’m so sorry he died suddenly last week. That Tea Party rocked and Chip was a large part of that. He had secured a great line up of speakers: Andrew Breitbart, …

Sadly Prop P Passed

“Every penny taken from you in taxes is a penny someone else decides how to spend. It’s a penny you earned but forfeited to someone else’s arbitrary discretion,” said Bill Hennessy co-founder of the St Louis Tea Pary Coallition. Today is a sad day for the residents of St Louis…

Junior college candidate attacks Tea Party

Just like the Starbucks CEO’s recent declaration that opponents of same sex marriage are no longer welcome at his stores, Junior College Trustee candidate Allison Stenger’s pledge to “stand up to Joan McGivney and her Tea Party friends” makes it clear that Stenger neither wants nor deserves Tea Party votes. Tea Party supporters should back Joan McGivney because of her taxpayer advocacy and independence from special interests.

Jr. College candidate attacks Tea Party

Just like the Starbucks CEO’s recent declaration that opponents of same sex marriage are no longer welcome at his stores, Junior College Trustee candidate Allison Stenger’s pledge to “stand up to Joan McGivney and her Tea Party friends” makes it clear that Stenger neither wants nor deserves Tea Party votes. Tea Party supporters should back Joan McGivney because of her taxpayer advocacy and independence from special interests.

Missouri, We Are Taxed Enough Already

From Americans for Prosperity – Missouri: This January “Americans for Prosperity MO” launched an effort to assemble information on all types of tax increases, fee increases, bonding measures, use taxes, etc. on April ballots across Missouri. They found Missourians will vote on over 229 proposed tax increases in local elections on April 2nd. A staggering [...]

Fire District Hijinks Create Titanic Battle

It has long been the goal of 24tState to be an independent source of breaking news and information with a special focus on equipping voters with specific tactics to act civicly in their own best interest which we can do because we are insiders. Key amo…

We are raising a generation of narcisists

The unavoidable truth about our young people. The the always connected, always important, never denied, generation we have raised will become increasingly frustrated with the realities of, well real life:

All the while, these adolescents, teens and young adults are watching a Congress that can’t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending, a president that can’t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business, a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and—here no surprise—a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.

That’s really the unavoidable end, by the way. False pride can never be sustained. The bubble of narcissism is always at risk of bursting. That’s why young people are higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more, tattooed more, pierced more and having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier, raising babies before they can do it well, because it makes them feel special, for a while. They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.

Distractions, however, are temporary, and the truth is eternal. Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicidality, not to mention homicidality, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface. I see it happening and, no doubt, many of you do, too.

Are Kumbaya Conservatives Killing Grassroots And Accountability?

Here’s my latest contribution to PolitiChics.tv: Since the election, many in the grassroots movement have been analyzing, questioning, crying, wondering, “what went wrong?” Messaging, poor voter turnout, voter fraud, have all been blamed for the results of another Obama term in the white house. While all of those things may have played a part, they [...]

Government exits GM, taxpayers lose 50%

Readers of this site are well aware that I had no love for the auto bailout since it’s inception, but now another of my fears has come to fruition. (Most of my predictions came true, as I knew they would.) Today the Administration announced they would finally start to remove themselves from the auto industry and begin to sell off some of the stock purchased with taxpayer money.

The Detroit automaker said it will purchase 200 million shares of GM stock held by Treasury for $5.5 billion — or $27.50 per share — nearly $2 above the stock’s closing price on Tuesday. GM shares jumped sharply on the news and were up 7.5 percent to $27.36, or $1.90, early afternoon in very heavy trading.
The U.S. Treasury, after more than a year of refusing to say when it might start selling its remaining stake in GM, said it willannounce a written plan in January to shed its remaining 300 million shares over the next 12 to 15 months, likely in a series of small stock sales.
The Treasury’s move is intended to minimize the impact of the stock sale on the share price — and the government’s state will shrink from 26.5 percent to less than 19 percent — but the exit could be completed far more quickly.
The exit plan may prove to be a boost to GM’s lagging stock price and to some car buyers, who have avoided GM because of the “Government Motors” label.
The exit timetable signals the end of one of the most extraordinary government interventions in the U.S. economy in history — the rescue and partial nationalization of two U.S. automakers and their finance arms supported by two U.S. presidents.
Still, taxpayers will almost certainly lose billions of dollars in the $49.5 billion GM bailout – and the government would need to sell its remaining shares for about $70 each to break even. If the government sold the rest of its stock at current prices, taxpayers would lose more than $13 billion.

As we continue to live under crushing debt, spending money we do not have but continue to borrow or print, we add to that a crushing loss on GM stock. There was never any reason for the government to buy into GM-a managed bankruptcy was always a better plan-but once they did there was no doubt the only loser would be the taxpayer. The initial investment was made under the guise that there was no funding available for bankruptcy, which they ended up going through anyway, and then that the government wouldn’t lose any money on the deal, which they did. Bait and switch? Nah, we knew what we were getting.

Let’s get that pesky baby Jesus out of Christmas

According to the Today Show’s Chief Medical Editor Nancy Snyderman, if it wasn’t for that whole “religious” part of CHRISTmas, well, the holidays would be so much more pleasant.

During a panel discussion on Tuesday’s NBC Today about hiring people to do Christmas chores like decorating the tree or buying gifts, the network’s chief medical editor Nancy Snyderman suddenly broke into an anti-religious rant: “I don’t like the religion part. I think religion is what mucks the whole thing up….I think that’s what makes the holidays so stressful.”

Snyderman’s take-the-Christ-out-of-Christmas commentary was prompted by fellow panelist Star Jones explaining: “I focus on, honestly, the religion part of it. I really and truly do. So I can’t out-source that part of it. I can send you to get my tree, but I can’t help – you can’t help me pray.” When Snyderman launched into her attack on faith, Jones countered: “That’s the only reason for me to have the holiday….We wouldn’t have the holiday if it wasn’t for the religion part.”

Moments later, Jones was still giving Snyderman a quizzical look, causing Snyderman to react: “Look at you.” Jones replied: “I’m sitting here, in my head going, ‘Jesus is the reason for the season and you don’t like the religious part.’ Okay.”

Um, ok. I’m not sure what we would even be celebrating if not for the birth of Jesus. The problem is not with “the religion part” the problem is irrational, liberal fools constantly trying to re-frame everything to suit their ideas. If you don’t want to celebrate the birth of Jesus-DON’T-no one forces you to participate.
I’m not Jewish. I don’t celebrate Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur but I don’t try to turn those dates into days into something that suits me.