Finally my blood pressure calmed down and it seems to have settled into its normal range.

The spike occurred when I heard President Obama make a statement during his State of the Union address on

Wednesday evening saying, “There have been no tax increases on anyone this year…” He’s either remarkably uninformed or intentionally peddling an untruth.

The fact is, anyone who earned and is receiving a military retirement noticed an increase in their withholding tax which equates to an reduction their annual income.

I know because I, along with a number of my retired military buddies received these finance and accounting statements over the past couple of weeks reflecting this

tax increase, and we had no warning it was coming.

When we questioned the tax increase the response given was “It’s not a tax increase, it’s an accounting adjustment.”

That’s one of the most weasel-worded statements to date. And they wonder why so many people have lost trust.

Oh, excuse me, I forgot again, we simply don’t understand the message. I’ll try to be crystal clear with my message in November…

This morning I listened in disbelief as Harry Reid blamed the American people for the Democratic loss of the senate seat in Massachusetts.

He ranted about the way the American people have lost sight of the vision being offered to them by he and his constituents; that they (the voters)

may have squandered a rare opportunity to change the course of the country…

It sounds as if Harry Reid has come to the realization that he most likely squandered his opportunity to continue as the administrative shill and is lashing out in desperation.

In actuality, the voters of Massachusetts, and they’re historically and predominately Democratic, have had enough change. They truly believe that the country is heading

in the wrong direction and their vote is a clear message to the administration that enough is enough, slow down and do things openly and in the best interest of the general

populace, and listen to the people.

And we thought 2009 was an interesting year…hold on.

I’ve been wading through the House and Senate versions of the health care bill and fully understand why the odds of even one Washington politician has read it are almost nil, never mind gaining a comprehensive knowledge of it. If you haven’t seen these monstrosities just imagine going to the library and selecting ten of thickest books you can find on the shelves regardless of the subject matter, checking them out, attempting to read them cover to cover by the end of this month, providing a logical, understandable overview of them to several of your friends over lunch, and then pressing them to agree with everything you’ve said. That’s comparable to the way our government if going about hacking together a health care plan under a totally unrealistic time constraint that will allow the president to say “I signed a historic health care reform bill this morning” on the evening of his State of the Union address that is tentatively scheduled for February 2.

In the interim, democrats have thrown transparency out the window by foregoing the critical formal conference committee process for merging House and Senate versions of legislation in lieu of closely-held negotiations between hand-picked members from the two chambers–no Republicans allowed. The obvious reason is because they’re abundantly aware that the non- partisan, pork-filled bill is despised by most of Americans. Seriously, how can people sell something they haven’t seen, don’t fully understand, and don’t know how to pay for? As bits and pieces of this potentially disastrous legislation has leaked out, more and more citizens are  becaming aware of what was in the works against them rather than for them.

It seems that yet another campaign promise, transparency of government, has been jettisoned in a desperate attempt to give the appearance of taking care of the masses. Oh yeah, they’re taking us all right, to the financial cleaners.