Illinois Review: Keats "vote with their feet and wallets" and leave for Texas

Illinois Review: Keats "vote with their feet and wallets" and leave for Texas

KEATS "VOTE WITH THEIR FEET AND WALLETS" AND LEAVE FOR TEXAS

Former State Senator and Republican Cook County Board President candidate Roger Keats and his wife Tina are leaving Illinois to live in Texas. They bid farewell to their Illinois friends in a Wilmette Beacon article and with this letter this weekend, saying they're "voting with their feet and their wallets":

GOOD BYE AND GOOD LUCK

As we leave Illinois for good, I wanted to say goodbye to my friends and wish all of you well. I am a lifelong son of the heartland and proud of it. After 60 years, I leave Illinois with a heavy heart. BUT enough is enough! The leaders of Illinois refuse to see we can’t continue going in the direction we are and expect people who have options to stay here. I remember when Illinois had 25 congressmen. In 2012 we will have 18. Compared to the rest of the country we have lost 1/4rd of our population. Don’t blame the weather, because I love 4 seasons.

Illinois just sold still more bonds and our credit rating is so bad we pay higher interest rates than junk bonds! Junk Bonds! Illinois is ranked 50th for fiscal policy; 47th in job creation; 1st in unfunded pension liabilities; 2nd largest budget deficit; 1st in failing schools; 1st in bonded indebtedness; highest sales tax in the nation; most judges indicted (Operations Greylord and Gambat); and 5 of our last 9 elected governors have been indicted. That is more than the other 49 states added together! Then add 32 Chicago Aldermen and (according to the Chicago Tribune) over 1000 state and municipal employees indicted. The corruption tax is a real cost of doing business. We are the butt of jokes for stand up comics.

We live in the most corrupt big city, in the most corrupt big county in the most corrupt state in America. I am sick and tired of subsidizing crooks. A day rarely passes without an article about the corruption and incompetence. Chicago even got caught rigging the tests to hire police and fire! Our Crook County CORPORATE property tax system is intentionally corrupt. The Democrat State Chairman who is also the Speaker of the Illinois House and the most senior alderman in Chicago each make well over a million dollars a year putting the fix in for their client’s tax assessments.

We are moving to Texas where there is no income tax while Illinois’ just went up 67%. Texas’ sales tax is ½ of ours, which is the highest in the nation. Southern states are supportive of job producers, tax payers and folks who offer opportunities to their residents. Illinois shakes them down for every penny that can be extorted from them.

In The Hill Country of Texas (near Austin and San Antonio) we bought a gracious home on almost 2 acres with a swimming pool. It is new, will cost us around 40% of what our home in Wilmette just sold for and the property taxes are 1/3rd of what they are here. Crook County’s property tax system is a disaster: Wilmette homes near ours sell for 50% more and their property taxes are ½ of ours. Our assessed home value was 50% higher than the sales price. The system is unfair and incompetent.

Our home value is down 40%, our property taxes are up 20% and our local schools have still another referendum on the ballot to increase taxes over 20% in one year. I could go on, but enough is enough. I feel as if we are standing on the deck of the Titanic and I can see the icebergs right in front of us. I will miss our friends a great deal. I have called Illinois home for essentially my entire life. But it is time to go where there is honest, competent and cost effective government. We have chosen to vote with our feet and our wallets. My best to all of you and Good luck!

Duped! Relentless Marxist Deception

March 13, 2011 | Filed Under Alan Caruba, Anti-Americanism, Budget,Business, Capitalism, Communism, Democrats/Leftists,Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Government, Government, Corruption,Liberals, President, Socialism, Taxes |

http://www.publiusforum.com/2011/03/13/duped-relentless-marxist-deception/

-By Alan Caruba

“The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Party president candidate

Those of my age—I am in my seventies—have a strong recall of the Cold War, fought from the end of World War Two in 1945 until the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We grew up knowing that the Communists—Marxists—were the enemy.

All throughout that period, American liberals—Leftists—did what they could to ridicule efforts to rid the government of Communists, attacked those like Sen. Joseph McCarthy who spoke out against them, defended the likes of Fidel Castro who turned Cuba into a prison-state, and worked to “improve” U.S.-Soviet relations.

A book I wish everyone would read, liberals and conservatives alike, Dupes by Paul Kengor, went into a second printing in January of this year (ISI Books, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, DE). Kengor, a PhD, is a professor of political science at Grove City College. His book runs just over 600 pages, all thoroughly documented, and tells the history of the effort to impose communism on America and worldwide, dating back to the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

One of the characters in the book is Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy who came to realize how evil Communism was and who revealed how the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman were shot through with spies and those cooperating with the Soviet Union, the most famous of whom was Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official. Richard M. Nixon first came to public notice as a Senator from California who ran on an anti-Communist platform.

“While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private,” wrote Chambers, “they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.”

Socialism has had a long, hard time establishing itself in America and has mostly been the gift of the Democratic Party that held control of Congress for forty years until that grip was broken in 1995. Despite that, Bill Clinton was reelected and, halfway through George W. Bush’s second term, congressional power returned to the Democrats.

Then, in 2008, a virtually unknown Senator who had not even served a full term, who had no paper trail of documentation regarding his life, who had written two memoirs that hinted at his far Left upbringing and associations, was elected President. Putting it bluntly, Americans were duped.

As Kengor points out, Americans “in poll after poll, year after year, have described themselves as ‘conservative’ over ‘liberal’ by a margin of roughly two to one, by approximately 40 percent to 20 percent.”

The political environment of America is conservative, but it has been the growing number of independent voters that have determined election outcomes. That says something about the disappointment that both political parties have created with their emphasis on enlarging the federal government, excessive spending, questionable wars, and general indifference to the voters.

The independents also reflect the sudden emergence of the Tea Party movement that occurred to protest Obamacare. They and others have swung back toward conservative candidates electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, and sent Allen West and Marco Rubio to Congress from Florida, along with a host of candidates supported by the Tea Parties.

Independents along with conservatives in America have been demonstrating a level of political resistance to senseless spending and the rough-shod imposition of leftist legislation that suggests the 2012 elections will “save” America from Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and their far Left minions.

The election of Barack Obama was the result of the greatest act of political deception in the modern era. It was aided by a news media that not only ignored all the obvious signs that Obama was a denizen of the far Left, but was surrounded, not only by Leftists, but Communists like Van Jones whose Apollo Alliance helped write Obama’s budget-bursting $800 billion ‘stimulus’ bill.

The revolutionaries of the 1960s had mostly migrated to positions in higher education where they could influence a new generation, oblivious to the carnage that has always accompanied a Communist revolution, killing millions. Younger Americans in 2008 meant that those aged 18 to 29 made up nearly one in five voters or about twenty-five million ballots. They preferred Obama by a margin of more than two to one, 66 percent to 32 percent. They had no memory of the Cold War.

Seeking to dupe Americans Obamacare was an act of raw political power that ignored the same widespread rejection that an earlier version, dubbed “Hillarycare”, had encountered. “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” said then Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Its purpose was to completely socialize healthcare in America.

Americans, old and young, must not be duped again. The very future of the nation depends on the actions of a Republican-controlled House in the years remaining as America’s first Marxist President works his way, seeking always to make dupes of us all.
____________
Alan Caruba writes a daily post athttp://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

http://www.publiusforum.com/2011/03/13/duped-relentless-marxist-deception/