Ronald Reagan’s Prayer for our Country

Rock Band Madison Rising – The Star Spangled Banner – Great rendition

Has your state banned Sharia?

Time to get to work in those red states.

Obama Supporter Interviews Herself

The Federal Reserve Is Systematically Destroying Social Security And The Retirement Plans Of Millions Of Americans

Again, the results of unintended consequences, seniors are at risk.  Or are these unintended consequences.  With Obamacare, seniors are put at risk because of the “death squads”.  It appears that Obama and his henchmen do not value those over 65 years of age.

Example:  Last week the mainstream media hailed QE3 as the “quick fix” that the U.S. economy desperately needs, but the truth is that the policies that the Federal Reserve is pursuing are going to be absolutely devastating for our senior citizens.  By keeping interest rates at exceptionally low levels, the Federal Reserve is absolutely crushing savers and is systematically destroying Social Security. 

Meanwhile, the inflation that QE3 will cause is going to be absolutely crippling for the millions upon millions of retired Americans that are on a fixed income.  Sadly, most elderly Americans have no idea what the Federal Reserve is doing to their financial futures.  Most Americans that are approaching retirement age have not adequately saved for retirement, and the Social Security system that they are depending on is going to completely and totally collapse in the coming years. 

Right now, approximately 56 million Americans are collecting Social Security benefits.  By 2035, that number is projected to grow to a whopping 91 million.  By law, the Social Security trust fund must be invested in U.S. government securities.  But thanks to the low interest rate policies of the Federal Reserve, the average interest rate on those securities just keeps dropping and dropping.  The trustees of the Social Security system had projected that the Social Security trust fund would be completely gone by 2033, but because of the Fed policy of keeping interest rates exceptionally low for the foreseeable future it is now being projected by some analysts that Social Security will be bankrupt by 2023. 

Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The collapse of Social Security is inevitable, and the foolish policies of the Federal Reserve are going to make that collapse happen much more rapidly

Read full article here.

Islam : Most important video I have ever seen on Islam.

Lying is required of Muslims to further their goals.  Sounds like our current Commander in Chief, doesn't it?

Why Misinformation Sticks and Corrections Can Backfire

Now we know why Obama and his cohorts are getting away with all the lies they are telling about Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the Republicans. He must have read this research report.

Excerpt:  As a new review of past research concludes, “mud” sticks — and, worse, attempts to correct erroneous beliefs can backfire, reinforcing the very misrepresentations they aim to erase. The main problem, the research reveals, is that rejecting information takes more mental effort than accepting it, and given our social environment, most people’s default position is to believe what others tell them. “For better or worse,” the authors write, “the acceptance of information as true is favored by tacit norms of everyday conversational conduct.” Indeed, some research even suggests that in order for the brain to process incoming information at all, it must initially assume that the information is correct.

And yet, we all know that lying and deceit are commonplace. Research shows, for example, that 10% of communication between spouses includes at least some falsehood and that more than one-third of conversations between college students include lies. That means that people aren’t entirely unaware that they’re being spun — but they hold on to their false beliefs anyway.

In multiple studies included in the new review, researchers presented people with a fictitious news report about a warehouse fire that was initially thought to have been caused by negligent storage of gas cylinders and oil paints. The participants were then offered an explicit retraction of the information about the cause of the fire, but even after reading the correction, only about half of those in the study reported that the initial news account was wrong. The finding suggests that the original false belief may stick 50% of the time, despite a correction.

Why? One reason may be that the correction itself repeats the inaccurate information — and repetition is known to strengthen memory.

Read full report here.

The section of Mitt Romney’s “gaffe” tape you haven’t heard

Romney speaks out on Federal Reserve printing money and its dangers.

Charleton Heston on gun rights

Arab Winter, the rise of radical Islam

Read the full article on Examiner.com.

Excerpt:  In “2016: Obama’s America”, a documentary by Dinesh D’Souza, a map of a fictional “United States of Islam” was shown, which included all areas between Iran and Afghanistan. Other maps are more generous in their boundaries and include portions of China and Russia, in addition to the largest Muslim country of Indonesia. D’Souza points out that it is the intent of radical Islam to unite these states under one Caliphate’s rule and impose Sharia Law

No one can deny that the current administration is reaching out to the Muslim world, a world that appears to be coalescing in a way that gives credence to Dinesh D’Souza’s “United States of Islam”.

The question is whether this is a result of naivety in Obama’s foreign policy, or part of a grand scheme to level the playing field, by strengthening the Islamic nations and reducing the influence the U.S. has in international affairs, Obama’s hidden agenda that is well documented in the movie “2016: Obama’s America”.

Read the full article here.

Oversight Releases Report on Medicaid Overpayments Costing Taxpayers Billions

WASHINGTON, DC – Today House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa released a new staff report entitled, “The Federal Government’s Failure to Prevent and End Medicaid Overpayments,” which examines outrageous abuses of federal tax dollars within the Medicaid program, specifically regarding New York State developmental centers (see chart below). The report finds that over the past two decades, New York State has received billions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursements through mismanaged overpayments, and that the overpayments are continuing. Further, the report documents that as Medicaid payment rates increased, Federal officials failed to question the rising cost or implement measures that would bring the rates in line with actual costs.

Read the report here

At 2:00pm today, the Subcommittee on Health Care, District of Columbia, Census, and the National Archives will examine the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service’s (CMS) actions that resulted in New York facilities receiving billions of dollars in federal Medicaid overpayments over the past two decades, as well as CMS’s efforts to address the problem.

Key findings from the report include:

• The Committee estimates that the State-operated facilities in New York that house and treat individuals with developmental disabilities have received federal Medicaid overpayments of $15 billion over the past two decades.• The daily per patient payment rate at New York’s developmental centers rose from $348 in 1990 to $5,118 in 2011.  Medicaid’s payment rates to the developmental centers were ten times higher than Medicaid rates for similar privately-run Intermediate Care Facilities in New York.

• The daily payment rate skyrocketed because the formula governing Medicaid payment rates for the developmental centers allowed the State-operated facilities to retain nearly two-thirds of the total Medicaid reimbursement when an individual left the facility.  According to OIG, this formula feature meant taxpayers paid twice for individuals who leave the developmental centers since most of them were transitioned into settings, such as group homes, also financed by Medicaid.

• Although the federal overpayments to New York began in 1990, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was unaware of the growing payment rates until they reached $3,715 per patient per day in 2007.  Although learning of the overpayments in 2007, CMS delayed any action for three years and only acted after a local New York newspaper reported on the high overpayments received by the developmental centers.

• At a briefing with Committee staff in June 2012, CMS officials informed the Committee that CMS is negotiating on a plan that gradually reduces the overpayments but allows New York to continue to receive billions in federal overpayments over the next five years.

•  CMS’s failure to question Medicaid’s excessive payments to New York developmental centers is inexcusable given that Medicaid payments to New York State’s developmental centers exceeded the entire Medicaid budgets of 14 states during this time period.  In fact, total Medicaid’s payments to New York’s developmental centers that served about 1,700 residents in 2009 was roughly the same as total payments made on behalf of the 372,522 enrollees in Kansas’s Medicaid program.

• The overpayments violate Title XIX of the Social Security Act which mandates that state Medicaid payment rates must be consistent with “efficiency, economy and quality of care.”  The overpayments also violate Medicaid Upper Payment Limit requirements that Medicaid reimbursements not exceed what Medicare would have otherwise paid for similar services.

Today’s Hearing Witnesses: Mr. John Hagg, Director of Medicaid Audits, Office of Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services (testimony); Ms. Penny Thompson, Deputy Director, Center for Medicaid & CHIP Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (testimony)

Today’s report and hearing continue the Committee’s oversight of how the Medicaid program is misspending tens of billions of taxpayer funds each year.

Thomas Sowell: The Fallacy of Redistribution

Read the entire article.  It is a great lesson on the fallacies of Obama’s redistribution scheme, or maybe a great lesson on his plan to gain power over the masses. 

Excerpt:  The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler’s Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

Among the most valuable assets in any nation are the knowledge, skills and productive experience that economists call “human capital.” When successful people with much human capital leave the country, either voluntarily or because of hostile governments or hostile mobs whipped up by demagogues exploiting envy, lasting damage can be done to the economy they leave behind.

Barack Obama can endlessly proclaim his slogan of “Forward,” but what he is proposing is going backwards to policies that have failed repeatedly in countries around the world.

Yet, to many people who cannot be bothered to stop and think, redistribution sounds good.

Read full Thomas Sowell article here.

AARP Leftists Boo Paul Ryan For Pushing Repeal of Obamacare …(AARP to Make $1 Billion off Obamacare) | The Gateway Pundit

AARP Leftists Boo Paul Ryan For Pushing Repeal of Obamacare …(AARP to Make $1 Billion off Obamacare) | The Gateway Pundit 

Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record

The facts seem to keep getting in the way of the global warming alarmists. 

Excerpt:  Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.

NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article thatAntarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012.

Read full report here.

AARP sells out seniors for ‘Obamacare’

This is why I gave up my membership a couple of years ago. Those in charge don’t represent the majority of its members.

Excerpt:  President Barack Obama is scheduled to speak Friday via satellite to a convention sponsored by AARP. His speech will likely extol the virtues of “Obamacare,” and engage in scare tactics about conservative proposals to make Medicare sustainable. But here are five facts you’re unlikely to hear from the president, or AARP, about how each treats seniors:

First, while AARP poses as a disinterested senior advocate, it functions as an insurance conglomerate, with a liberal lobbying arm on the side. AARP depends on profits, royalties and commissions to make up more than 50 percent of its annual revenues. Membership dues from seniors account for only about 20 percent. The sums involved aren’t chump change: AARP’s $458 million in health insurance revenue in 2011 would rank it as the nation’s sixth most profitable health insurer.

Second, AARP wins when seniors lose. Because AARP receives a “royalty fee” of 4.95 percent of every premium dollar paid by seniors buying Medigap insurance from the organization, AARP earns more profit when seniors pay more in premiums. Even former AARP executives admitLINK that the billions of dollars raised from these business enterprises have compromised the organization’s mission and independence

Read Jim DeMint’s five facts in the POLITICO here.

Democrats: Let's Ban Profits!

These people have no clue as to how our economy works and they are the Democrat base. Our country is in deep trouble.

Obamacare’s $1.8 Trillion regulatory drag on jobs and the economy

It may not all be a result of Obamacare, but until all regulations are completed, no one, not even Nancy Pelosi, will really know what the effect will be. The only possible way to reverse this steady drain of regulatory abuse of the economy is to vote Republican in this Fall’s election. Too bad it is too late to even get some of those RINOs out.

Excerpt: Crews has made a working project of his “Tip of the Costberg” report which he regularly updates. In it, he compares the cost of regulations estimated by federal agencies to a much broader list of estimates from multiple federal and independent sources. And even then, he said, it doesn’t include hard-to-calculate costs associated with antitrust intervention, regulation of electricity networks, or the cost of constrained access to natural resources.

“While OMB officially reports amounts of only up to $88.6 billion in 2010 dollars,” said Crews, “the non-tax cost of government intervention in the economy, without performing a sweeping survey, appears to total up to $1.806 trillion annually.”

But, he added, “according to back of the envelope surveys and roundups, with gaps big enough to fit the beltway through, that up to $1.806 trillion annually and in many categories perhaps even considerably more, is a defensible assessment of the annual impact on the economy.”

His estimate is close to the $1.7 trillion estimate from the Small Business Administration which the White House distanced itself from. For comparison, the total U.S. GDP is $15 trillion.

The wave of Obama regulations has become a huge sore point in the business world with groups as large as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce down to the International Franchise Association crying for fewer rules. The administration, however, argues that the rules and regulations pushed out under the president have made products and workplaces safer.

Read full article here.

The Obama you don’t know – Washington Examiner series

The Washington Examiner has come out with an investigative report on Obama, one that helps you to understand how devious he can be. He is not the all-caring champion for the poor that he wants you to believe, but a master manipulator who would do anything for power.

• Introduction: The Obama you don’t know 

  Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.
  Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end…

• Chapter I: A childhood of privilege, not hardship 

  First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that “Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions.”
  It is…

• Chapter II: The myth of the ‘rock-star professor’ 

  Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama’s 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, “Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with…

• Chapter III: The 1997 speech that launched Obama 

  Few doubt that Barack Obama’s stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted him into the national limelight.
  But another, less-heralded Obama address –…

• Chapter IV: For the slumlord’s defense, Barack Obama, Esq.

  Writing in his 1995 autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama said he became “a civil rights lawyer” because “to lend meaning to a community’s suffering and take part in its healing — that…

• Chapter V: Obama’s toughest critics on the Left 

  Barack Obama’s carefully constructed image as a civil rights lawyer who wanted to heal the black community was greeted with skepticism by some Chicago activists.
  “I never drank the…

• Chapter VI: The poor people Obama left behind 

  Four years after Barack Obama’s historic election as president, little seems to have changed for the African-American communities on Chicago’s South Side.
  The lack of change — or the…

• Chapter VII: The myth of Obama as state Senate reformer 

  Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Prairie State Blue, a liberal blog, attributed his victory to the fact that Illinois’ deeply entrenched government corruption had…

• Chapter VIII: Obama’s state pension scheme

  State Sen. Barack Obama and members of an Illinois lobbying group representing politically connected minority-owned businesses launched a campaign in 2000 to pressure state pension funds to help…

• Chapter IX: The Arab-American network behind Obama 

  President Obama’s controversial relationships with radical figures like Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi have been well-publicized in recent years.
  Prior to his academic…

• Chapter X: Obama brings Chicago politics to Washington 

  Chicago has been called the home of “gangster government.” How bad is it?
  Consider the following facts about the city from which President Obama rose through the ranks of American public.

The Mayonnaise Jar

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day is not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and two cups of coffee.

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.

When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and fills it with golf balls.He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured it into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.

He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.

He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “YES”.

The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things – God, family,
children, health, friends, and favorite passions. Things, that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the things that matter like your job, house, and car. The sand is everything else — the small stuff.” he said.

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “There is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are
important to you…” he told them.

“So… pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Worship with your family. Play with your children. Take your partner out to dinner. Spend time with good friends. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the dripping tap. Take care of the golf balls first — the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.

The professor smiled and said, “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.”

Beck apologizes and has found his George Washington in Mitt Romney - Videos

Chicago teachers' union strike, a vote for charter schools

Could this be the fatal "unintended consequence" of the Chicago teachers union strike?

Excerpt: Talk about unintended consequences. Has anything ever – ever - generated more positive publicity for school choice than the teachers strike in Chicago? For charter schools especially, the strike is the gift that keeps on giving. They’re open. The traditional public schools are not. Meanwhile, the framing of the strike in the mainstream press dovetails with the parental empowerment rumble from Won’t Back Down. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the ABC News clip above and the snippets below.

New York Times: “Sharonya Simon was looking for a better fit for her son when she pulled him out of a gifted program in a traditional district school five years ago and enrolled him — and later her daughter — in Chicago International Charter School Bucktown, on the Northwest Side. At the neighborhood school, “I did not feel like he was being challenged,” she said during a parents’ meeting at the school on Wednesday. Ms. Simon also said that teachers spent too much time disciplining troubled students, and that many of her son’s classmates came from families with uninterested parents.  At the charter school, she said, “you have a different group because of what we have to go through to get our kids into a charter school. You have more involved parents here.””

Read full report here.

Obama and Clinton – study in ineptocracy

Love this article, but the call for resignation will fall on deaf ears.

Excerpt: Purported President Barack “Barry Soetoro” Hussein Obama, and so-called Secretary of State Hillary Clinton must resign immediately. No ifs, ands, or buts. Pack up their things and get the h*ll out of Washington, today. This woman, The Smartest Woman in America, and her boss, The Smartest Man in the Room, have just shown the world that they are anything but.

The unmitigated arrogance and stupidity of this pair was on display this week, for all the world to see. These two apostles of Marxist agitator Saul Alinsky clearly see themselves as leaders of an elite intelligencia, far smarter than us of the Unwashed Masses, and therefore, ordained to lead, with We, the People, as blind, sheep-like followers. Thus, they were flabbergasted to discover that Muslims have not been won over by Obama’s endless apologies and bowing a scraping before Islamic royalty. They were stunned that Libyans were not grovelingly grateful that we had “liberated” their country from Muammar Gaddafi.

“We came, we saw, he died,” gloated Clinton.

Obama, too, has made a spectacle of himself, repeatedly, publicly bragging the He, the Anointed One, killed Osama bin Laden. He bragged, too that He, and only He, was in charge of the government’s “kill list,” containing the names of Islamist terrorists that are targeted for death.

It seems never to have occurred to this pair of bungling, egotistical morons that such statements in public, by high government officials, just might “offend” a few million zealous Muslims, all over the world? Did it not occur to Ms. Clinton that half the people in Libya were loyal supporters of Gaddafi, and just might, somewhere down the road, retaliate? Apparently not.

Read full “tell it like it is” article here.

Anti-control Speech by US Senate Candidate Dan Bongino of Maryland

E15 gasoline could harm your car engine

The EPA is at it again.  I posted this as a warning that E15 could harm you car engine.

Excerpt:  In the letter, the EPA said that “in the case of E15 and E10 being dispensed from the same hose” the agency would require people to purchase “at least four gallons of fuel” in order to prevent vehicles with smaller fuel tanks from being exposed to fuel blends greater than 10 volume percent ethanol.

Automakers have heavily criticized the decision to introduce E15 fuel into the automobiles.

“Ford does not support the introduction of E15 into the marketplace for the legacy fleet.  … Fuel not approved in the owner’s manual is considered misfueling and any damage resulting from misfueling is not covered by the warranty,” the Ford Motor Company said last year.

It has been reported that the American Petroleum Institute estimates that more than five million vehicles on the road could be harmed by E15 fuel.

Read more: here.

Ron Paul: “Country Should Panic Over Fed’s Decision”

Didn’t panic, but wondered how Bernanke could be so stupid and not realize what he is doing to the dollar. But, then again, inflation is the best way of paying off the debt and not having to cut spending.

Excerpt: In an interview with Bloomberg, Paul reacted to the idea of more stimulus provided by the Federal Reserve by saying,

“It should not surprise anybody, but it is still astounding. To me, it is so astounding that it does not collapse the markets. [Bernanke] said, ‘We are in very big trouble. We are going to do something unprecedented and we believe it will not hurt the dollar.’ And yet the stocks, they say ‘we love this stuff.’ But the dollar didn’t do so well today and the real value of the dollar is measured against gold, and gold skyrocketed from its very low to its highest. It means we are weakening the dollar. We are trying to liquidate our debt through inflation. The consequence of what the Fed is doing is a lot more than just CPI. It has to do with malinvestment and people doing the wrong things at the wrong time. Believe me, there is plenty of that. The one thing that Bernanke has not achieved and it frustrates him, I can tell—is he gets no economic growth. He doesn’t do anything with the unemployment numbers. I think the country should have panicked over what the Fed is saying that we have lost control and the only thing we have left is massively creating new money out of thin air, which has not worked before, and is not going to work this time.”

Read full article here.

We the people have had enough

Democrat Politician Warns Jewish Voters: Beware of Obama

Obama: Dishonorable disclosures

Allen West to Obama: 'Take your traveling roadshow somewhere else'

Religion and civility casualties to liberalism

Excerpt:  The father of a football player at the local high school remarked that those players, who want to pray before the game, have to find an area off field to do it. It is probable that the vast majority, and maybe the entire team, has no problem with prayer, and it is only the threat of a lawsuit that has forced the school administration to adopt this rule. A more inclusive option would be, for those offended, to be able to opt out and allow the motivational prayer to take place. But as in too many cases, the most vocal and litigious among us have prevailed.

Religion is being systematically removed from all government supported institutions, much to the chagrin of those founding fathers who are looking down on us. The intent of the “separation of church and state” was never meant to eliminate religious principles from our government, as evidenced by reference to God on most of our Federal buildings, “endowed by our creator” in the Declaration of Independence, and “In God We Trust” on our money supply.

The Democrats eliminated reference to God and also to Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel from their platform prior to the convention. Because of the bad press they were getting, an amendment was proposed. The Democrat party chairman ruled the amendment approved, but only after three voice votes that appeared to reject God, This, along with President Obama’s statement that conservatives cling to guns or religion, and his war on the Catholic church’s stand against abortion and contraception, show that the Democrat Party has moved to the extreme left of the political spectrum.

Read my full article on Examiner.com here.

Related articles:

Missouri’s religious ‘prayer’ amendment could affect public school students
2012 marks 50th anniversary of Court decision regarding prayer in schools
School prayer bill passes in Florida
National Day of Prayer 2012 theme “One Nation Under God”

9/11 Bud Commercial - AIRED ONLY ONCE

Being Green

Saw this on FB today.

Being Green

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”

The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment f
or future generations.”

She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truely recycled.

But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.

But too bad we didn’t do the green thing back then.

We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?

Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smartass young person.

We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to piss us off.