Peregrinating
2012

February

1 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

2 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

3 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

4 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

5 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

6 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

7 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

8 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

The political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty...
The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion. What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what "health care" must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions.
To take a small example: The HHS rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration's legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives.

9 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

10 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

Now, as then, may be daily heard among other classes, opinions just as decided and just as unwarranted. By men called educated, the old plea for extravagant expenditure, that " it is good for trade," is still continually urged with full belief in its sufficiency. Scarcely any decrease is observable in the fallacy that whatever gives employment is beneficial : no regard being had to the value for ulterior purposes of that which the labor produces : no question being asked what would have resulted had the capital which paid for the labor taken some other channel and paid for some other labor Neither criticism nor explanation appreciably modifies these beliefs. When there is again an opening for them they are expressed with undiminished confidence. Along with delusions of this kind go whole families of others. People who think that the relations between expenditure and production are so simple, naturally assume simplicity in other relations among social phenomena. Is there distress somewhere? They suppose nothing more is required than to subscribe money for relieving it. On the one and, they never trace the reactive effects which charitable donations work on bank accounts, on the surplus-capital bankers have to lend, on the productive activity which the capital now abstracted would have set up, on the number of laborers who would have received wages and who now go without wages—they do not perceive that certain necessaries of life have been withheld from one man who would have exchanged useful work for them, and given to another who perhaps persistently evades working. Nor, on the other hand, do they look beyond the immediate mitigation of misery. They deliberately shut their eyes to the fact that as fast as they increase the provision for those who live without labor, so fast do they increase the number of those who live without labor; and that with an ever-increasing distribution of alms, there comes an ever increasing outcry for more alms. Similarly throughout all their political thinking. Proximate causes and proximate results are alone contemplated. There is scarcely any consciousness that the original causes are often numerous and widely different from the apparent cause ; and that beyond each immediate result there will be multitudinous remote results, most of them quite incalculable.

11 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

Therefore: To flatter his faith-breakfast guests ( National Prayer Breakfast) and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they're doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.
The contradiction is glaring, the hypocrisy breathtaking. But that’s not why Obama offered a hasty compromise on Friday. It’s because the firestorm of protest was becoming a threat to his re-election. Sure, health care, good works and religion are important. But re-election is divine.

12 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

13 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

The White House intends to boost government subsidies for wealthy buyers of the Chevy Volt and other new-technology vehicles — to $10,000 per buyer.
That mammoth subsidy would cost taxpayers $100 million each year if it is approved by Congress, presuming only 10,000 new-technology autos are sold each year.
But the administration wants to get 1 million new-tech autos on the road by 2015. The subsidy cost of that goal could reach $10 billion.

14 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

The previous record for most deficit spending during a presidency was set by President George W. Bush. During Bush’s 8-year administration, total deficit spending was $3.402 trillion. That’s a truly extraordinary and reckless sum. It’s also $1.768 trillion less than deficit spending in just four years under Obama. Per year, deficits under Bush averaged $425 billion. Per year, deficits under Obama (according to his own numbers) will average $1.293 trillion — or more than three times as much.
Because the gross domestic product (GDP) nearly always grows from year to year, the most favorable way to view Obama’s deficit spending is as a percentage of GDP. Surely he can’t look as bad in that light, right?
Well, prior to Obama, our annual deficit spending had only exceeded 6.0 percent of GDP during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Except during those huge conflicts, our deficits had never exceeded 6.0 percent of GDP in any year — not during the Great Depression, not at the height of the Cold War defense buildup, not ever. But that’s no longer the case. During Obama’s four years in the White House (and, again, using his own numbers), annual deficit spending will average 8.4 percent of GDP.

15 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

I do write a lot about what President Obama has done, or is going to do, because that is the News of the day. Others complicit? Yes, virtually ALL the politicians that have been in office over the past 30-40 years plus the Lap Dog Media that have reported their goings on. I do not like the policies of President Obama nor do I think much of those of the Republican candidates competing for the nomination. I do like Ron Paul's fiscal positions but he does not have any chance. The last time I voted for a Presidential candidate that was either a Democrat or a Republican was in 1992; it is very doubtful that I will do so in 2012.

One breach of the law leaves a gap for numberless subsequent trespasses. If the first false step has been taken with seeming impunity, it will inevitably be followed by others. School-boy promises of—“only this once” are not to be believed. Make a hole through a principle to admit a solitary exception, and, on one pretence or other, so many other exceptions will by and by be thrust through after it, as to render the principle utterly good-for-nothing. In fact, if its consequences are closely traced, this same plea for licence in special cases turns out to be the source of nearly all the evils that afflict us. Almost every wrong doing is excused by the doer on this ground. He confesses his act is at variance with the moral law, which he admits to be, and in some sort believes to be, the best guide. He thinks, however, that his interest requires him now and then to make exceptions. All men do this;—and see the result.

16 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

America’s youth vote, which turned out in record numbers in 2008 and gave a historically high percentage of their support to President Obama, has soured on him because they are having a hard time finding work and, as a result, are putting off major decisions like getting married and starting a family.
Obama, who won 66 percent of the 24 million voters age 18-29 in 2008, has seen that support slashed. And in a new poll from Generation Opportunity, a nonprofit that seeks to engage younger voters, only 31 percent approve of Obama’s handling of youth unemployment, a number that threatens to rob him of the voter group that pushed him to victory.

This year, if it progresses as Angelou expects, will exacerbate the pattern, bringing a momentous high, but not before some sickening lows. Don't worry about Barack Obama, says the chronicler of black history. He'll be re-elected. He deserves to be re-elected. But between now and November, it's going to get nasty...
Obama has critics and doubters. Angelou, the sage of black America, now 83, has no time for them. "I think he has done a remarkable job, knowing how much he has been opposed," she says.

When Philip of Valois, King of France from 1328 until his death, swore the officers of his mint to conceal the debasement of the coinage, and to endeavor to make the merchants believe that the gold and silver pieces were of full value, he thought that although perhaps unprincipled, such a measure would be vastly profitable. And so no doubt believed the other kings, who, in the “good old times,” almost universally did the like. They overreached themselves, however, as all such schemers do. It is true that their debts were diminished “in proportion to the reduction in the value of the currency; but their revenues were at the same time reduced in the like ratio. Moreover, the loss of their reputation for honesty made them afterwards unable to borrow money, except at proportionately high rates of interest, to cover the risk ran by the lender.” So that they not only lost on the creditor side of their accounts what they gained on the debtor side, but put themselves at a great disadvantage for the future. After centuries of dearly-bought experience, the practice was reluctantly abandoned, and is now universally exploded as essentially suicidal—just as suicidal in fact as all other infringements of the rule of right.

17 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

Has anyone considered the import of this new mandate? The president of the United States has just ordered private companies to give away for free a service that his own health and human services secretary has repeatedly called a major financial burden.
On what authority? Where does it say that the president can unilaterally order a private company to provide an allegedly free-standing service at no cost to certain select beneficiaries?
This is government by presidential fiat. In Venezuela, that’s done all the time. Perhaps we should call Obama’s “accommodation” Presidential Decree No. 1.

18 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

President Barack Obama says the painful restructuring of America's manufacturing base means a lot of jobs are gone forever, but not that Americans must "settle for a lesser future."
In his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, Obama said American manufacturers are reinventing themselves with new technology and new efficiencies that have helped lead to what the administration claims are 3.7 million new jobs created over the past two years.
"Factories where people thought they'd retire have left town. Jobs that provided a decent living have been shipped overseas" and will not return, Obama said. "But that doesn't mean we have to settle for a lesser future."

19 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

20 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

21 February
Ajo Heights RV Park
Ajo, AZ

22 February
Black Rock RV Village
Brenda, AZ

In 2007, when the average national price ranged from $2.17 to $3.22, then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., demanded that the Federal Trade Commission investigate Big Oil for "price manipulation." In 2008, presidential candidate Obama urged the Justice Department "to open an investigation into whether energy traders have been engaged in illegal activities that have helped drive up the price of oil and food."
Obama also called for "a windfall profits penalty on oil selling at or over $80 per barrel." As of Christmas 2010, a barrel of oil sold at slightly above $90. What happened to the windfall profits tax? Yes, back then the average price per gallon was four bucks. But blaming "oilman" Bush for high prices began when the average price was well below today's $3.05 national average.
Where are the calls to sic Obama's Justice Department on Big Oil to hold the oil companies accountable for "market manipulation"? Why aren't we hunting down the amoral "oil speculators" responsible for repealing the law of supply-and-demand in order to line their pockets?
During President George W. Bush's administration, we constantly heard demands to hold the President accountable for "Big Oil's price gouging." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., just two years ago, knew exactly whom to blame for "skyrocketing" oil prices: "The price of oil is at the doorstep; $4-plus per gallon for oil is attributed to two oilmen in the White House and their protectors in the United States Senate."

23 February
Whiskey Pete's Casino
Primm, NV

24 February
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

25 February
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

26 February
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

27 February
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

28 February
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

29 February
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV