Make America Great Again? You Bet!

Lots of people of the “left” persuasion like Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, etcetera call this a racist or even fascist slogan. They always point to all the negatives in our distant past like slavery, segregation and the days before women’s suffrage and cynically ask, “Is this when America was great?” The answer is: OF COURSE NOT!

So, what are President Trump and his followers talking about when they repeat the MAGA slogan?

Well, America was great when… 

• Mom & Dad were together. (The government provided no incentive for fatherless homes.)
• Mom & Dad didn’t need two or three jobs to make ends meet.
• Government health insurance wasn’t needed because mom or dad’s employer provided insurance as an incentive to hire and keep their valued employees.
• America didn’t waste its wealth and the precious lives of soldiers on pointless, endless wars.
• Foreign countries weren’t allowed to steal our industry.
• Immigrants entered our country legally and assimilated into OUR culture.
• We weren’t dependent on foreign powers for energy.
• Our military was so powerful, NO ONE dared test our resolve.
• There was ONE definition for justice.
• Infanticide was punishable by death, not facilitated by doctors and paid for with tax dollars.
• Schools taught our kids about our Constitution, the story of our founding and how truly blessed we are to be born American.
• The media told us the truth.
• Free speech was truly protected for EVERYONE.
• “Made in the USA” was the rule, not the exception.
• Administrations didn’t weaponize the Justice Department against its political opponents.
• Purposely deleting government records was considered treason.
• No one questioned the 2^nd amendment.
• Socialism was our enemy and to suggest otherwise was political suicide.
• We didn’t apologize for our greatness. (We were proud of the success of our “Grand Experiment”) 

Some of us are old enough to remember when all the above was true. We’ve watched our government get bigger and bigger while our opportunities and freedoms have become fewer and fewer. We don’t suggest repeating any of our previous mistakes, nor do we believe this is a zero-sum game. Being intellectually honest, we know that we can have the good without the bad. We simply want our children to have the same prospects of a bright future that we enjoyed. Yes, we want to Make America Great Again before it’s too late.

Lesson 2: Government From the Bottom Up

In lesson one we learned the founders believed that all people are born with the same basic human rights and that these rights come directly from God, not some monarch. We also learned how bold and new this concept was at the time, flying in the face of King George III’s imperial rule from across the Atlantic. Today we’ll learn what they believed should be done if these basic rights are not recognized. The Declaration reads as follows:

—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

The first portion of this statement completely disavows the validity of King George’s monarchy. This belief is at the core of our “Great American Experiment”, that government gets its power from the people it governs, not by some divine right bestowed upon some king. This was completely unheard of in the 18^th century. It simply wasn’t done anywhere in the “developed” world.

--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,…

Here, a fourth right is spelled out. In addition to the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of any people to throw off a government that violates these basic human rights and create a new one that better serves their needs/interests. The founders do put a caveat on this:

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Lesson 1: Giving King George the Finger

In 1776, America was a sparsely populated settlement consisting of 13 colonies on the east coast of what is now the United States. There were only 2 ½ million people occupying these colonies from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia in the south. That’s roughly the population of Houston, Texas. Most colonists were immigrants from western Europe and their descendants with the plurality being from England.

By contrast, it’s estimated England’s population was somewhere around 7 million. More importantly, England was imperialist with colonies spanning the globe and by far the most powerful nation on Earth at the time. King George III considered America to be England’s property. Consequently, he treated America like all his subjects. He levied taxes, installed governors, appointed judges and occupied the colonies with English soldiers.

So let’s imagine for a moment...

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Filling a Vacuum

Back in July of 2009 I launched this site as a “hobby” to share my interests in and opinions of all things Apple. Yep, I jumped in with about a bazillion other Apple enthusiasts hoping to get in my “two cents”. My buddy Ken & I thought it would be a good idea to produce and publish a podcast too, so off I went to the audio sites and bought mics, mixers, web cams and a bunch of software to make the whole thing work. Man, did we have a ball. Neither Ken nor I had ever been a musician or otherwise worked with audio/video tech, so our learning curve was really steep. We spent a ton of time keeping up with “all things Apple”. We poured over media, traveled to Apple events like Macworld Expo and WWDC every year and even made a couple of pilgrimages to Cupertino and visited with a couple of Apple engineers we came to know. 

Ken and I managed to publish 36 episodes of “The MacTexan” podcast between early 2010 and mid 2012 before our thick skulls managed to absorb the fact that we were broadcasting to a loyal but very small audience. Alas, our dreams of notoriety were dashed, but boy did we have fun and learned a lot in the process.

I continued to publish articles here regularly, but even those were becoming less and less frequent. This site, which once saw over 5000 unique visits per month has now dwindled into obscurity due to my lack of new content. I chalk it up to my laziness. I’m still as enthusiastic about Apple as I ever was, but generating new content becomes problematic when my give-a-shit meter pegs out low when measuring my desire to spend a couple hours composing my normal 2000-word post. What was once a passion increasingly became a chore. I’m no good at chores, especially since I retired and moved from my beloved Texas to our beautiful new home in the resort town of Sedona, Arizona. When my friends ask what I’m up to since retiring, I give a stock answer, “I’m working really hard at being the laziest man alive!” 

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Democrats & Your Media Friends: KEEP CALLING ME A RACIST!

I guess the left is getting desperate. The “Blue Wave” they predicted just a few short months ago for next week’s mid-term elections must not be materializing the way they hoped. It must be terribly troubling for them to see Donald Trump garnering the most republican support among blacks since Abraham Lincoln. They are horrified to see Kanye West and Dennis Rodman wearing MAGA hats, visiting with President Trump in the oval office and professing their “love” for him. Seeing Candice Owens leading the Young Black Leadership Conference (with a visit and address from president Trump) has to have democrats quivering in their boots.

Why are they so scared?

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