So normally, I try not to ever go more than a week without filing a new article, but I knew that Michigan was going to blow up over the Right to Work vote, so I held off to see what happened. And boy am I glad I did!  I don’t think I’ve seen a better example of union thuggery in quite a long time.  This week, we have been treated to quite the display of desperation as the unions in a last gasp effort, pushed their way into the state senate and created a mob scene in the senate chambers, attacked a reporter from Fox, tore down a tent filled with innocent women and children, showing no regard for human life. After tearing down the tent, the thugs then turned their attention on Clint Tarver’s hot dog cart, destroying it, while yelling such racial epithets at Carver, like “Ni**er,” “Uncle Tom,” etc.  Tarver, who was not there for any other reason than to sell hot dogs, properly stated, “the working people did not respect the working man. He was not there to be political; he was just there to serve.”

We can’t say we didn’t see this coming. This is the typical response that unions have been having as they continue to lose more and more power across the country.  In fact, we were warned this was what could be expected.  Michigan State Representative Douglas Geiss (D) said on the Senate floor, “there will be blood, there will be repercussions.  We will relive the battle of the overpass.”  Really?  A State Representative practically giving a call to arms to encourage violence and bloodshed over giving the people of his state a choice?  A choice, by the way, that the people of Michigan voted in favor of.

This was not even a battle that Governor Rick Snyder had planned on waging at this time, but as Tom Walsh, of the Detroit Free Press tells it:

Public employee unions opposed Snyder’s moves to put more teeth into emergency manager laws that would enable swifter action to rescue cities and school districts that bungled themselves into insolvency.

In Detroit, Mayor Dave Bing and a spineless City Council were stonewalled by employee unions at every turn, slow-walking needed reforms and cost-cutting while the city burned through cash at a frightening rate.

As a result, Snyder’s patient attempt to help fix Detroit via consent agreement instead of imposing an emergency manager has failed.
To top it off, Snyder found himself having to fight off Proposal 2, the ill-advised November ballot attempt to stuff a bag of goodies for organized labor into the Michigan Constitution.

Since Michigan has the highest unionization coupled with the highest unemployment rates, is it any wonder that this show down was all but ordained to happen?

I had planned on part two of this article to specifically cover the financial impact public sector unions have on the solvency of local, state and federal governments.  But then the California Teachers Union recently released this funny little cartoon narrated by Ed Asner and it so infuriated me, that I feel the need to incorporate it into the story.

The video, filled with blatant inaccuracies, tells the story of a Utopian society, where everyone always worked, streets were safe and taxes were all paid in a fair and equitable distribution.  In what has to be the biggest hypocrisy of the entire video, Asner claims that the rich not caring about the poor people caused the infrastructure of California to fall into decay, when the truth of the matter is, that the real reason for California and many other states inability to reinforce their infrastructure lies squarely on the shoulders of the public sector unions that have bankrupted municipalities and states from one end of the country to the other with outrageous pay, benefits packages and unsustainable pension plans.

This ridiculous attempt to further the liberal agenda of class warfare is so blatant it is laughable.  They even go so far as to show a rich man urinating on a group of poor people.  The housing bubble is blamed on the rich, completely ignoring the facts of low income loans given to people who couldn’t afford them, Dodd-Frank, unemployment, etc.

The video goes on to accuse politicians and rich of blaming teachers and fire fighters, etc., of causing the housing crash.  When did this ever happen?  Do they believe that if they just say it, then that makes it true?  When have the rich ever pointed a finger of blame at anyone?  The video ends basically by saying that we would all be happy if there were no rich people.  Could it be that public sector unions, and the teachers union specifically, are finally being held under the light and being forced to explain to the American people why we are allowing them to bankrupt our country?  Is this a last ditch effort on their part to justify why it is so necessary to pay for benefits and salaries that are unsustainable?  I, for the life of me, can find no reasonable explanation for why public sector unions are necessary.  If the government can’t uphold their own labor laws, then we need to elect leaders who will.  What we do not need are states being held hostage to union thugs who have no regard for what is in the best interest of the citizenry.

And finally, let’s not forget the California dock workers strike that brought the entire port system of Los Angeles and Long Beach to a grinding halt for 8 days, with a cost of $1 billion per day.  The reason for the strike?  Union members wanted guaranteed jobs forever for clerical workers, whether they were needed or not.  This is California we’re talking about here, so naturally, the unions were pretty much rewarded with everything they wanted, including a generous increase to their pensions.  I hold California up as a shining example of how to do everything wrong when running a state.  Someday, there will be nobody left to live there except the politicians who have made so many horrifying fiscal decisions, because its residents will have fled for their lives and livelihood to states like Texas and Oklahoma, where people can still live and afford to eat at the same time.

When witnessing all these latest acts of insanity, is it any wonder that unions are losing support in record numbers?  It’s no surprise that when given the choice to work for less money or not work for more money, that people will choose the former.

Follow me on twitter:  @Lisabucaro

Anyone who knows me knows that I am no big fan of unions, particularly public sector unions.  Mostly, I feel that they  no longer serve a purpose and that main result is that they end up eating into company’s profit margins and those losses are made up by increased costs passed down to the consumer and taxpayer.  Specifically, I have a major problem with public sector unions, such as the teachers union, police unions and fire fighter unions.  This is not 1920 and we have labor laws to protect workers today, so the only point to having a union is to take money directly from the pockets of the American citizen.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I actually live in a union household.  My husband works in a private industry that is unionized.  I will admit that because of his union, we have enjoyed excellent health benefits, a pension, a generous hourly wage, etc.  For the 25 years that he has been in his union, they have never gone on strike.  They have never failed to negotiate a contract with management, even when it has come down to the eleventh hour.  I don’t take much issue with them, mainly because they are part of the private sector and for the most part have not made unrealistic demands on employers.  His job is dangerous at times and his union does make sure that he is protected.

I have to wonder though, what is on the minds of the people running many unions today.  While most of the country is happy to be employed and hanging on to whatever pay and benefits they are getting, unions are still attempting to bully and strong arm their way into higher and higher pay and larger benefits packages, to the detriment of taxpayers and employees alike.  Considering that less than 12% of the workforce is unionized these days and union members are already known to have higher paying jobs and benefit packages, what position of power do they believe they are negotiating from?   From my view in the cheap seats, they are losing support of not only the public, but their own members who are now finding themselves out of jobs when they would have been happy to just be working and making a living wage.

The unions seem to be shooting themselves in the foot.   Let me give a few recent examples and you tell me, are unions imploding?  Do you see them becoming nothing more than a memory soon?

Let’s start with what I refer to as “the great Twinkie tragedy of 2012.”  Hostess, already laboring under poor management, a failing economy and a more health conscious consumer had been desperately trying to save their company.  In an attempt to bring down costs and produce a profit margin, the company hammered out an agreement with the Teamsters Union to lower wages.  However, the Baker’s union balked and walked.  Hostess warned them that a strike would put the company out of business, but I guess it was more important for the union thugs to make a last grab for power than it was to keep 18,000 employees in their jobs.

When you get into the details of what Hostess has been dealing with in regards to all the unions, it’s pretty mind boggling and explains a lot. They have had to deal with 372 separate collective-bargaining contracts, 80 separate health and benefits plans, and 40 different pension plans. Bread products and snack products cannot be delivered on the same trucks even if they are going to the same destinations because of union rules.  I won’t even get into who is allowed to load the trucks and who cannot.

Is it any wonder that unions have been blamed for the destruction of yet another American icon?

On Wednesday, November 21^st, the busiest travel day of the year, the SEIU decided to stage a protest at the entrances to LAX, in response to alleged violations to workers contracts and city laws regarding living wages.  The little fly in their ointment however, is that the workers had voted by a large majority to leave the SEIU, so they had no standing here.  In fact, the employees themselves appear to be happy with their wages and benefits packages, so what did this accomplish other than to further irritate already stressed out travelers trying to catch their planes?

Wal-Mart has long been a favorite target of unions because they have managed to keep unions at bay.  Their employees voted a long time ago not to become unionized and it has clearly worked to everyone’s benefit.  While other big box stores are struggling through this economy, Wal-Mart has not only survived, but they are thriving, turning record profits.  Some will argue that they are a product of corporate greed, but I have to disagree.  Their job is to turn the biggest profit possible for their shareholders.  Clearly, they have attained this goal.  But they have done it while still selling quality products to their customers at rock bottom prices and managing to employ over a million people, paying higher than average wages and better benefits than many stores that have been unionized.  In fact, Wal-Mart employees get better benefits packages and their turn over is a full 15% below the national average for similar jobs.

So having those facts, you would wonder, exactly what is it that unionizing would do to make Wal-Mart a better place to shop for its customers or a better employer to its employees.  From my perspective, absolutely nothing.  It makes you wonder then, why union organized protests were carried out at Wal-Marts across the country on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.  The protests were touted as massive employee walk-outs in response to Wal-Mart’s extended hours to accommodate holiday shoppers.  In truth, only about 50 employees across the entire country participated in the walk-out, while the rest were all brought in by the unions.  Many were probably paid participants who were not union members, but more likely just people hired by the unions to “salt” their picket lines in an attempt at a greater show of strength.  Did this “great show of strength” accomplish anything?  Nope!  Shoppers were not the least bit moved by their supposed plight and Wal-Mart reported record sales on Friday.

I have to say, this is the craziest way of winning the hearts and minds of the public that I have ever seen.  These desperate acts seem to in fact, have backfired.  When so much of the country is out of work or barely eking out a living, union heads are looking like little more than petulant children who are crying because they don’t have enough toys to play with.   It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the union model no longer works in this modern day economy.  They have outlived their usefulness and with their outlandish contract demands and have contributed greatly to the demise of this country’s economy.  I believe that private sector unions will be the cause of their own demise.  As more and more employers are forced to lay off and even shut their doors rather than meet the outrageous demands of the unions, we’re going to see less people supportive of the union cause.

In part two of this article, I’ll be taking a look at public sector unions and how they are bankrupting municipalities across the country.

Follow me on twitter @Lisabucaro

It’s not like we weren’t warned in advance.  How many companies said that if Obama won re-election that they would be forced to cut their workforce to pay for Obmacare and all the new taxes that would be imposed on their businesses?  So, it can’t come as a shock to anyone that one company after another has begun letting go of their employees with lightening speed in the week since the election.  Sadly, the companies can’t designate the layoffs to just those who voted for Obama, so here we are once again, many of us paying for someone else’s mistakes.

Let’s start with the medical equipment tax that is buried in Obamacare that is now going to cost thousands of jobs.

Welch Allyn, who manufactures diagnostic equipment announced that they will lay off 275 employees,  which equates to 10% of their workforce.  They have specifically named the new medical equipment tax as their primary reason for the job eliminations.

Stryker, One of the biggest medical device manufacturers in the world, will close their facility in Orchard Park, New York, eliminating 96 jobs in December. Worse, they plan on countering the medical device tax in Obamacare by slashing 5% of their global workforce – an estimated 1,170 positions.

Boston Scientific announced that the company would be cutting anywhere between 1,200 and 1,400 jobs, while simultaneously shifting investments and workers overseas – to China.

Medtronic, cut 500 positions over the summer, with another 500 set for the end of 2013. The layoffs have been credited directly to Obamacare.

Those layoffs are due to the tax on medical equipment, but many many other companies are laying off and cutting back hours due to the new rules under the Affordable Care Act.  Any employer with over 50 employees must provide health insurance to full time employees or pay a $2,000 fine for each employee. For this reason, Applebees and Darden Restaurants have chosen to slash hours and cut back their workforce.  If all of a restaurant’s profits are eaten up by fines and increased health insurance costs, what do we expect them to do, operate at a loss?  Of course judging by some of the comments I’ve seen regarding this story on liberal web-sites, that is exactly what the liberal logic says.

Kroger Foods, who employs approximately 350,000 people, will begin limiting hours of their part time employees to 28.  Currently, Kroger’s non-exempt employees can work as many hours as they need to, but that will all change beginning in January.  New hires will also be subject to the same limited hours.

This is obviously not a complete list of all the companies that will cut jobs and/or hours. It is rather,­­ a small sampling of what we have to look forward to due to the short sightedness of this country’s choice to re-elect Barack Obama and thereby giving up any chance of repealing this monstrosity of a job killing law.

A JP Morgan economist “points out that 8.3 million people are working in part-time jobs even though they’d prefer full-time work. Unfortunately, because of President Obama’s health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), workers in the hotel, restaurant, and retail industries could be pushed into part-time jobs working less than 30 hours per week.”

“Under the health care law, if a company has more than 50 “full time equivalent” workers, a combination of full and part-time employees, but doesn’t offer “affordable” coverage that meets the government’s minimum value standard, the company will have to pay a penalty. This penalty is determined by the number of full-time employees minus 30 full-time employees. So to reiterate a very important point: part-time workers are not part of the penalty formula. The health care law creates a perverse incentive to hire part-time versus full-time workers.”

Again, I have to point out that we have done this to ourselves!  We have shot ourselves in the foot by re-electing Obama.  I know I’ll get all kinds of comments from angry readers again who will tell me that they themselves did not vote for him and not to blame them, but as nation, we certainly did!  Whether he won by voter fraud or by real numbers, we have to accept that as a nation, we have allowed ourselves to get to this point through our complacency over the past several years and this entitlement mentality that has become so pervasive in this country.

I’m the last person to say that we didn’t need some kind of healthcare reform, but this was not the way to do it.  I have a friend who worked for many years and always had healthcare.  A few years ago, he lost his job and couldn’t find another one.  Sadly, he found out that he had cancer and needed immediate treatment.  Without health insurance, the cost of his treatment will have to come out of his own pocket.  I remember seeing a post on his page wondering why people didn’t want him to have health insurance.  It broke my heart for several reasons.  He is my friend and I want him to be healthy and get the best care possible.  It also hurt me to think that he believes that because we are opposed to Obamacare that we don’t want people to have insurance, and mostly because he will never understand that it’s about this specific law and not about a lack of empathy for his plight.  I believe that if people need or want health insurance, it should be available to them.  However, there has to be a better way to make sure my friend has proper healthcare without it costing tens of thousands of people their livelihoods.

Shoving through this law that nobody read is on Congress, re-electing the very people who did this to us is on us.  In fact, the democrats gained seats in the Senate.  Please someone explain that to me.

I initially predicted that we would have 10% unemployment within two years.  I would now like to amend that prediction.  I now believe that we will see that number by March of 2013.  I can’t imagine how Obama will pull us out of this disaster he’s created, but at least he won’t be able to blame it on Bush anymore.

Follow me on twitter:  @Lisabucaro

To say that I am disappointed by the results of the election would be a vast understatement. I would not be using hyperbole to say that I woke up Wednesday morning and literally wept at the state of our nation. To think that we will have four more years of tax and spend mentality and four more years of government pushing further and further into our private lives leaves me cold. But I think the thing that boggles my mind more than anything is the realization that WE CHOSE THIS!!!

That’s right folks, we chose this path and now we will pay for our choices. This country will get what it deserves. We can blame the media and Gary Johnson and just about anyone we want, but the truth is, we did this to ourselves. There were plenty of ways for everyone to become educated about who Obama really is. If people chose to just let MSM tell them what to think then shame on them. If people voted for a third party candidate instead of the man who could pull us out of this mess, then shame on them. Four years from now, this country will be completely transformed into a place we won’t recognize and the looters will have taken everything and earned none of it and it will be too late then to fix what is broken.

Four years from now, we will have unemployment over 10%, our debt will be over 20 trillion and entrepreneurship will be a thing of the past. Millions more people will be on food stamps, homeless, living off the government. And we will have chosen every bit of it! The decision that this country made on November 6th will have everlasting consequences that may never be able to be undone.

I never bought into the defense that people elected Obama in 2008 because we didn’t know who he was. That’s a ridiculous argument. If you don’t know anything about the man who is running for President of the United States, why are you voting for him? Because he’s half black and it makes you feel good about yourself? Because he speaks pretty words about hope and change and you seem to think that this country’s founding principles don’t fit in with your personal beliefs anymore? Those are utterly ridiculous reasons to vote for anybody. You vote for a candidate because they are going to put the country and its citizen’s needs ahead of his personal beliefs and agenda.

So, here we are 4 years later and the agenda of the Obama regime has been clearly defined and still we have re-elected him. We have chosen higher gas prices, higher unemployment, higher taxes on those who would employ us, higher health insurance premiums, and a higher deficit. I could go on, but you get the picture. We can blame the President for these choices, but we put him in that office. We gave him the green light, not once, but twice!

We are a nation of crack addicts and the government is our dealer! They have turned us into their junkies little by little just like a drug dealer does to enslave their “clientele.” They set up more and more entitlement programs and give you a free taste here and a free taste there until we’re so hooked, that we don’t believe we can survive without government handouts. We have now become a nation so enslaved on the government plantation, that we may never be free again. If you don’t believe me, sit back and watch. Remember these words if you remember nothing else about this article, “The more the government gives you, the more they can and will take from you.” And you will give up little by little, because you are afraid of being cut off from the drug that is the government entitlement agenda. We will watch as all of our liberties are taken from us; our right to free speech, then our right to worship how we wish, then our right to bear arms. One by one they have been chipped away until their meaning has been so twisted from the founder’s intent, that even they would not recognize them.

The American dream is dying and we are the ones killing it. We no longer believe in self responsibility or self reliance. We no longer have faith or the inclination that if you work hard and do your best that you have the possibility to achieve whatever you want, because this is America, land of the free and home of the brave! Instead, we are self serving, self obsessed and believe that if we sit on our butts, someone else will go out and earn the money and the government will take it away from them and give it to us and that is exactly what is happening.

We can do something about this though. We can begin now to turn this country back in the right direction so that people of all races, all creeds, all colors, all national origins and all religions who are willing to work have the opportunity to succeed. We have a mid-term election coming up in 2014 and we can begin there to right the ship! Get out there people! Start working toward getting the right people into office. It all starts at the local level. We can do this! We can save our country, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work and sacrifice! But if you aren’t part of the solution, you will be part of the problem.

Follow me on twitter: @LisaBucaro

As a follow up to my last blog post, I promised to cover a little more information on the Electoral College.  Just to sum up what we learned in our last post, the Electoral College is a process, not a place. The founding fathers established it in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.

 Each candidate running for President in your state has his or her own group of electors. The electors are generally chosen by the candidate’s political party, but state laws vary on how the electors are selected and what their responsibilities are.

 On January 6^th, each state’s electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress.  Once the votes have all been counted, the Vice President who is the President of the Senate announces the results and then declares who has been elected to the office of the Presidency and Vice Presidency.  You have to feel sorry a little bit when the incumbent team loses and then the Vice President has to announce that his competition has beat him.  Although, I will admit that when Joe Biden has to name Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as the new President and Vice President, I will be taking a little perverse pleasure.

The process for selecting Electors varies throughout the United States. Generally, the political parties nominate Electors at their State party conventions or by a vote of the party’s central committee in each State. Each candidate will have their own unique slate of potential Electors as a result of this part of the selection process.

Electors are usually chosen because they’ve shown dedication to their political party.  They can be elected officials, or people who have a relationship with the candidate.

Until recently, many Americans probably didn’t know there was an electoral college or didn’t know what their purpose was.  Truthfully, most Americans probably assumed that he who got the most votes wins.  And in point of fact, in recent history, that much turned out to be true.  In the 200+ years of our country, there has only been a handful of times when the Electoral College really had much of an impact on a Presidential election. Ordinarily, there is a winner of the popular vote who also wins the Electoral College.  But not every time…..

In 1800, when neither Thomas Jefferson nor Aaron Burr received a majority of votes cast by the Electoral College, the U.S. House of Representatives elected Jefferson by one vote, ending the impasse. Both Jefferson and Burr were running on the Democratic-Republican

In 1824, John Quincy Adams was similarly elected President in the House of Representatives, although Andrew Jackson had received the majority of the popular vote. This election, incidentally, was the first time in American history that the popular vote was actually recorded.

As in the historic election of 1800, because neither Adams nor Jackson received a majority of the Electoral College vote, the election was decided again by the popularly elected House of Representatives, which chose Adams. But history and fortune smiled on Andrew Jackson four years later, in 1828, when Old Hickory beat Adams and was elected President, this time winning both the Electoral College and the popular votes.

Thereafter, there would be only three other occasions in which Presidents and Vice Presidents were elected by a majority of the Electoral College votes, despite losing the popular vote by slim margins. These were the presidential elections of 1876, 1888 and 2000, in which Republican candidates Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison and George W. Bush were elected President, respectively.

As evidenced in the 2000 election, very close elections may require tedious recounts, which even in this age of computerized voting remain a painstaking process. Popular, direct elections require recounting individual, direct votes (including absentee and provisional ballots) rather than the defined slate of state electoral votes, creating more opportunities for clerical errors or outright ballot fraud.

So, now that I’ve told you absolutely everything there is to know about the Electoral College, have any of your opinions be changed in one direction or the other?  I for one feel the Electoral College needs to be left intact, exactly the way it was intended by the founding fathers, whether the outcome of the election is in the favor of my candidate or not.  This truly is the soundest way I have seen to ensure that all states voices are heard.

I remember the very first time I heard the term “electoral college.”  I was 9 years old and in Mrs. Stanton’s 4^th grade class.  It was never truly explained to us, but I remember thinking why does this college decide who is the President instead of us.  I don’t think that most people’s understanding of the Electoral College has become much clearer.  Many think that it’s an antiquated system that needs to be done away with and that we should stick to the popular vote system only.  Others believe that given that most of the “blue states” are on the east and west coast and most of the “red states” are in the middle, that the candidates would never focus on the voters who are in their opposing states and would thereby disenfranchise them.

I doubt that the Electoral College has ever seen more controversy than in 2000 after the Bush/Gore election, when the final count of electoral votes was decided by the Supreme Court.  So, here we are again, smack dab in the middle of another squeaker of an election and I’m thinking that the Electoral College is once again going to be put under the microscope.  So, in an effort to help all of us understand exactly who and what the Electoral College is, I decided to do a little research.

The Founding Fathers feared the direct popular election option. There were no organized national political parties yet, no structure by which to choose and limit the number of candidates. In addition, travel and communication was slow and difficult at that time. A very good candidate could be popular regionally, but remain unknown to the rest of the country. A large number of regionally popular candidates would thus divide the vote and not indicate the wishes of the nation as a whole.

 Essentially, in an effort to compromise between those who wanted congress to decide the Presidency and those who wanted the states to decide, the Electoral College was devised.  Obviously, following a parliamentary system of choosing the President would not work in a free society.  There would be no separation of powers and we’d have the Legislative branch in bed with the Executive branch.   The founders didn’t want differing factions in the country to gain too much power and thereby decide the elections, so each state was given their own set of electoral votes based on population.  This way, a union faction, for instance wouldn’t get too much power, or a minority faction or a big business faction wouldn’t be able to have all the power in deciding the elections and there would have to be some compromise among the varying groups.  These days, some would argue, and probably rightfully so, that big business decides the elections and that we as citizens have very little to say in the matter.  However, that’s a discussion for another time. 

 So, each state is given a number of electoral votes depending on the size of their population.  Each state has at least 3 electoral votes; 1 for each member of the House of Representatives and one for each member of Congress from their home state.  So, states like South Dakota that have a lot of land mass, but not a large population would be given three electoral votes.  However, a state like California which has a very large population but not as much land mass, would receive 55 electoral votes.  Now, just to complicate matters even more, constitutionally, the electors don’t have to vote for who wins the popular vote in their state.   Apparently, the founding fathers didn’t trust the masses to make up their own minds.  However, through the years, an unwritten agreement has been made that the electors would in fact cast their votes for the candidate who won the popular vote in their states.  Some states have enacted laws that prohibit electors from casting votes for the losing candidate, to ensure that only the candidate with the most popular votes receives the electoral votes.

 Currently, there are a total of 538 electoral votes available.  The first candidate to get to 270 votes wins the presidency.  But, not so fast!  What happens if nobody gets to 270, or if there’s a tie?  Well, according to the 12^th amendment, the house will vote on the Presidency. However, the senate votes on the Vice Presidency, so we could possibly see a Romney Presidency and a Biden Vice Presidency, but never fear, the chances of that happening are so slim, it’s not really worth considering. 

So, once the election results are all finalized in the November election, the Electoral College meets in December to cast their votes for the winning candidate of the election.  Why so late?  Originally, it was because it took so long to count the hand cast ballots and to travel to wherever they were meeting in order to cast their votes.   Now, it’s just done out of tradition and formality.

 For those of us who are historically challenged, like I am, you may think that the 2000 election was the first time the Electoral College caused the winner of the popular vote to lose, but the winner of the Electoral College votes to win. Not so.  We’ll talk about that in my next post.

 I’m anxious to hear your opinions on the Electoral College.  Do you think we should keep it or is it an antiquated system that needs to be disposed of? Leave your comments and let us know what you’re thinking.

 Follow me on twitter: @Lisabucaro

Coming from a long line of military men, I have a special place in my heart for our men and women in the service.  My own father was so eager to get involved in the war efforts during World War II that he lied about his age when he was only 15 and joined the merchant marines, just so he could serve his country.  While on a liberty ship in the North Atlantic, their boat was sunk by a German battle ship, called the Sharnhorst and he spent 10 days on a life boat with other survivors.  On day 10, he was so delirious from lack of food and water , that he had to be knocked out by another ship mate to keep him from jumping off the boat to “go meet his dad for a beer.”  Luckily, that was the day they were rescued, otherwise, yours truly wouldn’t be here to write this story today.  Eventually, he joined the regular army and served in the Korean War. For that, he is a true hero. All of my uncles, my oldest brother, most of my nephews have all served in the military.  All heroes in my heart!

I think it’s fair to say, that nobody who serves on a battlefield leaves it without some scars, those we can see and those we can’t.  I remember on the 50^th anniversary of D-Day, my father complaining of nightmares about the war.  50 years later, the events of that experience still haunted him.  He still lived with the emotional scars of the horrors that he witnessed.

How do we ever thank a soldier for all the sacrifices they make so that we can continue to say what we want, worship the God that we choose, vote for the political candidate that we support, go to bed feeling relatively safe that our shores will not be invaded by some foreign government wishing to do us harm and steal all those freedoms from us?    What proper way is there to thank someone who literally gives up life and limb for you?  What kind of person is willing to do that?  These people are fighting for an ideal.  They are fighting for a way of life.  The greatest way of life.  The American way of life!

Those who return, come home with battle scars visible and invisible.  They may be missing limbs, or their eye sight, or they bear deeper scars, emotional scars from all the atrocities they have witnessed.  Sadly, while the government does what they can through the Veterans Administration, they have their limitations.  Once the VA has done all they can do, who stands in the gap for our service people? That’s why programs like “The Wounded Warrior Project” is such a Godsend.

Due to greater advancements in battlefield care and enhanced body protection, we are seeing more and more service men and women survive catastrophic injuries to return home to restore their lives.  The Wounded Warrior Project offers returning service members hope that they so desperately need that their life will return to some kind of normal, a new kind of normal .  This amazing charitable organization, began when a group of veterans felt moved to help wounded soldiers as they returned from Afghanistan and Iraq.  They provide a host of services that include (but aren’t limited to) Combat Stress Recovery, Physical Health and Wellness, Family Support,  Transition Training, and their Warriors to Work program.

I urge everyone to donate to this worthy cause.  You can be assured that the majority of your donation will go to help the soldiers.  A full 82% of all moneys received go to funding programs that directly benefit our soldiers, with only 4% for administrative costs and the rest toward fundraising efforts.  Can anyone say that sacrificing a few dollars is a hardship when you compare it to all that has been sacrificed for us?

To learn more about the Wounded Warrior Project, please go to their web site:  www.woundedwarriorproject.org

Follow me on twitter:  @LisaBucaro

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m actually feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. It has become so clear that Obama and Biden decided to throw her under the proverbial bus and put all the blame for the disaster that happened in Benghazi squarely on her shoulders. I’m not saying that she doesn’t bear a huge part of the blame, but as Obama has demonstrated over the last four years, he is never responsible for anything. Not only does the buck not stop there, he’s never seen the buck, nobody has shown him the buck and he doesn’t even know what the buck is.

In what can only be described as a shocking decision, Clinton seems to have fallen on her sword and allowed herself to become the shill in the Whitehouse’s shell game over the entire Benghazi debacle. I’m completely befuddled as to why she would make this move at this time. It has never been a secret that she still holds Presidential aspirations. She could have almost been guaranteed the nomination in 2016. But in one statement made yesterday while on a state department visit to Peru she has all but destroyed any hope she had of ever getting elected to any public office again.

What could she possibly have been thinking? Why would she throw away a very successful political career for Barack Obama, a man she clearly does not like? And just what took her so long to take responsibility? Here we are a full month later and she now decides to suddenly take responsibility? I see nothing laudable in this decision and it only serves to make my spidey senses tingle even more. The lengths that people have gone to protect this man are frightening.

Clearly, decisions were made in an attempt to take the heat off of Obama in advance of his second debate against Mitt Romney. After several weeks of bad news and poor debate performances by both the President and the Vice President, this would seemingly take some of the heat off, but does it? Can the American people really respect a President who continually chooses to pass the buck? He has no clue what the American people respect. He has been worshipped for so long, he can’t conceive of a world where he is not the king. He continues to demonstrate that he has no respect for the American people. This was abundantly clear when just about everyone in his administration spent weeks pushing this ridiculous narrative that our consulate was attacked after an uprising in response to a video that nobody saw that had been on Youtube for months and months.

Regardless of who takes the blame for Benghazi, ultimately, these are people that Obama put in place to help him run the country. He made all the personnel choices and try as he might to blame everyone else for the mess we find ourselves in, the buck does in fact stop with him. The American voter will no longer allow him to pass the buck to Hillary, or an obscure film maker or anyone else.

Irrespective of the outcome of this election, it’s a safe bet that Hillary has all but destroyed any chance she had of a Presidential run in 2016 or any other year.

As we’re nearing election day, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what our politicians promised us during the last election cycle and what they’ve actually delivered.  Sadly, the president who brought so much hope for a renewed America has been the biggest failure in a President that I have seen in my lifetime.

 He promised us unity and a “post-racial” America, but never have I seen the race card played so much by any politician of any color than by this president and his supporters. 

 He promised us healthcare reform, but what we have ended up with is a monstrosity of a healthcare law that was passed without the approval of the electorate and with little knowledge of its contents by representatives who did little to represent their constituency.

 He promised it would not create new taxes on an already over-taxed nation and then argued before the Supreme Court that it was legal because it was a tax. 

 What Obamacare has in fact accomplished is to further weaken an already struggling economy, by creating uncertainty in the market place in the jobs market.  This program has increased costs to employers and employees alike.  Many small businesses have already been forced to lay off workers and in some cases close their doors in response to sky-rocketing costs of this new law.  Premiums for many have doubled and even tripled, leaving many unable to afford the insurance that we are now forced to carry.

 The country cannot afford Obamacare and we cannot afford four more years of the ever increasing socialist agenda being foist upon us.  We need leaders in Washington who will boldly oppose this type of entitlement agenda and vote to repeal Obamacare.