President Obama wants everyone to have two “free” years of junior college. In his recent “State of the Nation,” address he laid out new tax packages that includes a $320 billion hike to help pay for this plan.

But here’s what he didn’t say…

Under current law, 529-Plans work like Roth IRAs — you put money in, and the money grows tax-free for college. Distributions are tax-free provided they are to pay for college.

If Obama has his way, 529-Plans will no longer be tax-free, instead those earnings will be taxed upon withdrawal, even if it is used to pay for college.  In addition to taxing college savings plans, Obama is calling for a hike in capital gains taxes, an increase in the death tax, a bank tax and an increase in retirement plan taxes.

It’s nothing more than a redistribution system as those who are saving and planning ahead for college will have to foot the bill for those who didn’t.

 

“So, what songs reminds you of your pre-teen years?” was the question I asked on Facebook. I received a number of wonderful answers, but one really intrigued me.

That person relayed that her mother refused to let her sing the words, “Yummy, yummy, yummy — I got love in my tummy.” Not being familiar with the lyrics, I looked it up and learned they’re from a song with the same title.

Evidently, it was a hit for the group ‘Ohio Express’ in 1968. And after listening to the song, I could understand why her mother wouldn’t allow her to sing it around their house.

It also caused me to recall a situation I found myself in at about 14-years-old when my mom forbid me to listen to the song, “Season’s in the Sun,” by Terry Jacks, because she felt it was a tune about death.

“You’re only a kid – you don’t need to be listening to songs about dying!” she exclaimed.

Up to that point in my life I had never really paid much attention to the words of any song. In fact, half the time I couldn’t understand (and still don’t know) what the singer was saying.

I mean after all does anyone really understand what’s being said in Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light?”

One afternoon, I came home from school to find Mom in the kitchen blasting the song “Teen Angel,” from the eight-track player in the living room. I turned the song down and pulled the tape from the machine.

Mom exploded, “Who gave you permission to do that?!”

Holding the tape up, I calmly answered, “No one. But since Adam and the girls are home, they shouldn’t be hearing songs about death.”

That was my second mistake with my first being the removal of the tape. My third — getting within arms reach of my very angry mother.

President Obama made an unplanned trip to the French Embassy in Washington, D.C.  During the brief visit he signed a condolence book, ending the entry with “Vive la France,” honoring those killed by terrorists at Charlie Hebdo magazine.

Earlier in the day, however he zipped right passed the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Hospital to a high school where he delivered a speech on housing recovery. This is the VA where at least 40 patients died awaiting appointments for care.

His priority instead, was to lecture a partisan group of people about the need for more big government programs. And afterwards, Obama made time for an unscheduled stop at a near-by housing development for a photo-op.

As a U.S. military veteran and French-born to boot, let me exclaim — ‘Va te faire foutre, Obama!’

New York Congressman and founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus Charlie Rangel claims he saw plenty of American Army dead during the Korean War. But the deaths of black soldiers meant more to him than the deaths of whites — even if they all wore the same uniform.

“When I was in combat, and I’m telling you, I saw more dead people, but I never was moved until I saw dead people that looked like me in my uniform,” the Democrat said. “It does make a difference”.

I cannot understand how anyone can support such prejudice.

The terror attack and murder of 12 people in Paris, France can happen in the U.S. too, especially since we’re already embroiled in this mess.

In February 2006, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a series of 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. The same pictures had been featured in the Nordic daily Jyllands-Posten on September 16, 2005.

The Danish publication triggered anti-Danish protests across the Muslim world in which an estimated 130 people were killed. It also caused the French government to temporarily closed 20 embassies as a precaution.

Numerous violent plots related to the cartoons have been discovered in the years since the main protests in early 2006. These have primarily targeted editor Flemming Rose, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, the property or employees of Jyllands-Posten and other newspapers that printed the cartoons,and representatives of the Danish state.

On New Year Day 2010, police stop a would-be assassin in Westergaard’s home. In February 2011, the attacker was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Also in 2010, three men living in Norway were arrested for planning an attack against Jyllands-Posten; two were convicted. In the U.S., David Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana were convicted of planning terror attacks against Jyllands-Posten and sentenced in 2013.

As for Charlie Hebdo, the publication became a target of threats, forcing employees to be placed under police protection. But any attempt at intimidating the magazine failed.

Then in 2011, after the magazine named the Prophet Muhammad as its “editor-in-chief,” their offices were firebombed, and its website was hacked. Then in 2013 the magazine publishing what it called a “halal” comic book on the life of the Prophet Mohammad.

Now the Charlie Hebdo story has taken a deadly turn.

Meanwhile Al Jazeera America’s Arthur Goldhammer writes: “The satire that Charlie Hebdo exemplified was more blasphemous than political, and its roots lie deep in European history, dating from a time when in order to challenge authority, one had to confront divinity itself. In that one respect, the fanatics are not wrong: Charlie Hebdo was out to undermine the sacred as such.”

I don’t agree with Goldhammer, but I would never threaten him or his right to say, write or publish what he believes.

Dothan, Alabama police say Robert Lawrence, an unarmed white-man, went to an animal shelter to turn in a stray animal and became “unruly.” This after workers at the shelter demanded his government issued ID.

According to news reports, all he carried was a notarized affidavit from the state’s Motor Vehicle Administration. When they refused to accept this as identification, he got pissed and the law called.

After police arrived, a fight broke out between officers and Lawrence. This resulted in Lawrence being fatally shot in the stomach.

So far, there’ve been no DOJ actions taken by the Obama Administration to stop animal shelters from requiring ID, unlike the many lawsuits they’ve filed to halt Voter ID. And curiously, Al Sharpton has said nothing.

Maybe it’s time to create a new ‘hashtag.’

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has been in Nevada’s news cycle a lot this past year because of his company’s ‘gigafactory.’ But here is something we’re not being told by those same news sources.

Musk says the human race should “be concerned” about the computer singularity hypothesis, or idea that artificial intelligence may one day advance past human control and radically change civilization.

“The timeframe is not immediate, but we should be concerned,” Musk warns. “There needs to be a lot more work on A-I (Artificial Intelligence) safety.”

There could be more to his massive ‘battery factory,’ located in an isolated patch of the Nevada desert.

Conservatives — not only across Nevada, but all around the U.S. — have been told by their GOP Congressional delegations to “bend over and take more of the same.” Disgustingly, Nevada’s Mark Amodei, Joe Heck and Crescent Hardy are in that same boat, each having voted to keep John Boehner as the Speaker of the House for a third term.

So, lets take a glance at what Boehner has done for the American people and analyze why they voted as they have:

In 2011, Boehner signed off on the Budget Control Act, which also came to be known as “sequestration.” The sequestration deal was designed to cut $1.2 trillion from 2013 to 2021; a gang of legislators was supposed to cut a deal to avoid half of those cuts coming from the military budget, but the deal never happened, and the military took the brunt of the cuts.

In September 2011, Boehner attempted to ram through a stopgap funding measure that would have jacked up spending on disaster relief. In the end, many Republicans voted against the measure not because of the disaster relief funding, but because they did not believe the bill cut enough spending.

In December 2012, Boehner purged conservatives from leadership slots in Congress. Conservatives in Congress have routinely complained for years about Boehner’s attempts to stifle their leadership trajectories.

After Senator Ted Cruz led an effort, along with his allies in the House, to pass a budget that did not include funding for Obamacare – an action that led to a short-lived government shutdown when Democrats refused to sign off on such a budget – Boehner caved, funding Obamacare and reversing some cuts from sequestration.

In July 2013, Boehner found himself on the same side as Nancy Polesi as both had to defend their votes to maintain the spying program that lets the National Security Agency collect Americans’ phone records. Conservatives argue that the program violates basic rights to privacy and constitutional protections against illegal searches and seizures.

Finally, in December 2013, Boehner signed off on a $1.1 trillion budget deal with President Obama. The nearly 1,600-page bill provides funding for ObamaCare implementation and government-backed preschool programs.

Amodei, Heck and Hardy’s support of Boehner proves that the outcome of last November’s elections mean absolutely nothing.

UPDATE:  John Boehner is already purging from key positions, members who failed to vote for him, including Florida Congressmen Ted Yoho and Rich Nugent, Randy Weber of Texas and Tim Huelskamp from Kansas, proof that Boehner isn’t about leadership but about power.

While there were six governors sworn into office on Monday, it was California’s Jerry Brown taking the oath of office for a record fourth term that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams gushed over last night.

“Then there’s Jerry Brown, today at age 76 he was sworn today to a record fourth term. He first came into office when Jerry Ford was President his first time around,” Williams fawned. “No one has led the most populous state in the Union longer than Jerry Brown, who’s finally been able to turn around California’s troubled finances.”

My head practically exploded as I shouted at the TV, calling William’s an “effing liar.”

Even I know that Brown’s budget spikes year-over-year by over $12 billion, taking it to a high of $108 billion. If you take an honest look at California spending from all fund sources, total state spending hits a high of $230 billion.

Beyond that, last year and for the 10th year-in-a-row, CEO Magazine named California as the worst state to conduct business in, pointing out it takes two years to open a restaurant.  Furthermore, the Heritage Foundation finds that between 2003 and 2012, “a net 1.4 million people left California for other states,’ while the Cato Institute ranks Brown in last place with an ‘F’ as a governor.

If Williams’ isn’t lying, than he is dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks.

Every time I start to believe the U.S. is going to ‘hell in a handbasket,’ all I have to do is look at how ‘good’ the folk in other country’s have it. It’s a real wake-up call.

Eighty people have been publicly executed in North Korea. The State permits executions for conspiring to overthrow the government, treason, terrorism, religious activism, cell-phone use and stealing food.

The victims, their heads covered by white bags, ties to stakes, were machine-gunned to death. North Korean officials forced a crowd of over 10,000 people in seven different cities, including children, to witness the killings.

This is the first time under Kim Jong-un’s reign that public executions have taken place. State officials say the executions will stop the spread of capitalism across North Korea.

Yeah — we have it pretty good, but I also know we can do better.