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Other than in the past on a professional basis, when he wrote highly technical articles about IBM's AS/400 computer system, Brian Kelly receives no compensation for his work. Additionally, Kelly has not taken any donations or contributions other than for his US Senate Campaign of 2012. Mr. Kelly has recetly canceled his write-in campaign for the US Senate, and instead he  endorses Tom Smith for US Senator from Pennsylvania v. Robert P. Casey Jr.  If you would like to donate to the closed campaign to help defray costs, feel free to go to www.kellyforussenate.com and click the DONATE button. Your donations are most appreciated.

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When I was with IBM in its glory years, and I had a great job, an accountant in one of my technical accounts, Jimmy Slamon, gave me a lifetime of advice. With a wry smile on his face, Jimmy threw out two economic principles that I have never forgotten. He said “the best hedge against inflation is to have a job.” Continuing the salty smile, he then offered that “the best way to avoid needing financial help (being poor) is to have a job.” The common denominator on both great suggestions is to have a job. The implication of course is to have a good job.

I think that Mitt Romney was being a little like Jimmy Slamon with his comments on the 47%, though his percentages were off. What Romney said does not pertain to all of the 47% but it sure does apply to many who have lived their lives on welfare. I am not so thin skinned that I think that anything that happened to me in my life had anything to do with Mitt Romney, nor do I think Mitt Romney has any problem with the part of the 47% in which we now see the perfidious press stoking fires of discontent to help create an edge for Obama.

You and I and Romney know that with just about half of America paying for the other half, it would help to bring more people onto the paying team. That is common sense. Mitt Romney is the only presidential candidate that is offering to make the economy better by creating a better business climate and by capitalizing on our country’s natural resources. If Barack Obama were about to do that, we’d have been seeing some signs over his four years. Obama’s policies threaten the very existence of America. The economic hole we are in, that was created by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in the last two years of the Bush Administration has gotten plenty wider and plenty deeper under Obama. With Obama at the helm, the next four years will be nothing less than frightening for Americans.

When he took his recent “walking with the stars tour,” Obama found time to fan the flames even further. Rather than leading during the most recent Mideast crisis, the President chose the Letterman Show, The View, and other populous venues to join the corrupt press in attacking Romney. Mr. Obama offered these counter-thoughts: “There are not a lot of people out there who think they’re victims… “There are not a lot of people who think they’re entitled to something.”

Clearly the President is not in synch with the pulse of the neighborhoods of America. Obama and the lockstep media again are running with a narrative opposite of what the country actually believes. Seventy-five percent of Americans in a recent CNBC poll agree with Romney. We would not have a major welfare problem if recipients were actively trying to find work. Are there not a lot of people out there who are content to be dependent on the go-nowhere-in-life Obama socialist government?”

Nothing in Romney’s message to the world of the 47% was about retirees, the disabled, or the military. Yet, the unprincipled press and the Obama campaign know that admitting this will not help their faux outrage.

So, the crooked media and Obama in unison spun the message to look as if Romney hates everybody that is not rich. It makes me wonder if Obama wants Americans looking for the American dream to stop their journey short so they do not become successful. Obama loves to get the country riled with his classic class warfare games? He thinks we don’t get it. The new Obama mantra appears to be that if you become successful, you become an enemy of the state? Why should any American strive for success in such a scenario? Why should we have schools if not to give our children their greatest opportunity for success? Obama’s message on success is upside down.

Like it or not, there are an awful lot of able bodied people sucked into the welfare class, sometimes for generations at a time. Though all who receive a helping hand are immediately grateful to those who helped them, over time when things in their lives do not improve so they can make it on their own, these needy people may get sour on the status quo. When trapped into this life, they are looking for a world of Obama to give them more. And, so, Obama must then look for more from taxpayers, so that he can redistribute more to the folks who do not contribute. This is Obama’s plan for America.

Who is it that should pay for their dreams of a larger government and more handouts? Check out Obama’s personal charitable donations and you’ll know it is not Obama. He is not trying to pay for anybody–even his own half-brother George, rotting in the squalor of the Nairobi slums. Contrast the miserly charitable donations of Obama and Biden with Romney and Ryan. The Governor consistently gives twenty to thirty percent of his income to charity. Romney personally helps the welfare class to get out of the mire, get a good job, gain self respect, and contribute to their own lives, and to the betterment of the country. What is wrong with that? Only somebody trying to win an election at all costs would try to spin this notion into something bad.

Obama, a President who has enacted one business destroying regulation after another, clearly does not think the resolution to the economic mess is for businesses to be successful. It is paradoxical for sure that Obama believes that a better economy would not be a better economy. For four years Obama’s record, his policies, and Obamcare, have forced businesses to retrench rather than expand. Obama knows this for he is not dumb. However, it serves the President better for the economy to be faltering with more and more poor souls believing they must depend on his good will and a larger government. I am not one of those poor souls thankfully. However, within two years of retirement, I have become one of the 47%.

After 23 great years with IBM, I went to work in academia so that my three children would get a “free” education. That is another story that I may tell one day. In my last position as Assistant Professor at Marywood University, after I ran for Congress as a conservative Democrat and, after informally announcing to my faculty peers that I was planning to run for the US Senate against Robert P. Casey Jr., within a few weeks, I learned that the administration had canceled the renewal of my contract.

Unless you are no longer welcome as an employee, contract renewal in academia is an automatic. You get a letter of appointment and sign it, and you take the summer off and then you go back to work in the fall. After seven years of appointment letters, great evaluations, and having recently received an unprecedented promotion to Assistant Professor, I not only got the summer off, I became unemployed.

And, so, I am now officially among the 47%.

I am the person that I would hire to write this article if this were not part of my personal contribution to the conservative movement. Paid or not, I am the perfect person for the job. I have felt the negatives of losing a position, and I have the right perspective on being successful in a stagnant economy. Marywood officials wrote me great letters of recommendation. Their official excuse was that there was a departmental restructuring, and that I was an unintended victim.

My politically active friends in Scranton, PA tell me not to believe any of this very liberal institution’s excuses. They say: “You were fired because you embarrassed them when you ran for Congress and they were not about to let you embarrass them again running for the US Senate against the popular son of one of their board members.”

And so, here I am preparing to go on Medicare in a few months, with just a little time before Social Security, and so I stand very thankful that I am able to collect unemployment compensation. I will soon have a three-pack of the ways that anybody can make the grade at 47%. Yet, I know that Mitt Romney was not talking about me or any other retiree or those of us on unemployment compensation trying to ride out this long economic storm.

Like, many others assigned to the 47% team, I too am not very pleased about being an involuntary member. I don’t blame Mitt Romney and I am not upset with him at all about my plight. After all, he spoke the truth about the 47% of us who are part of the group depending on checks from government to make ends meet. Like many who are not comfortably retired, I would love to be paying big taxes on big earnings. But, like so many in the job market today, fighting upstream against a crippled economy with less and less job opportunities, it is not quite so easy as it once was to land a good job in one’s field of expertise. Obama may not have the jobs under lock and key, but with his anti-business policies, and excessive regulations, he might as well. For my vote, it is time for a new keeper of the keys.

The worst part of the Obama presidency is Obama himself. He takes credit for anything he can and takes responsibility for nothing. He is so confidant in his speaking abilities that he tries every day to have the American people see things through his eyes. But, when we look, all we see are lies.

Obama has not been on the job in the last few weeks, while the Mideast was burning and American diplomats were being killed. Instead, he has been busy sharpening his fundraising skills on Air Force One with stops in Las Vegas and the Network late-night talks shows, and even some daily shows. He had no time to meet with world leaders in the US at the beginning of last week when many were in town for UN meetings, but he had lots of time for fundraising stops. He had lots of time to attack Romney but no time to attack joblessness. He had lots of time to brag about killing bin Laden, but no time to help the US take a strong stand against terrorists.

In fact, until corrected by the European media, Obama and the contaminated US press were insisting there was no terrorist attack at all. As a friend of the Muslim Brotherhood, the President does not like to use the word terrorist to describe the thugs who kill innocent Americans at home or abroad. Yet, he has the chutzpah to blast Romney for a campaign gaffe as if it was an even bigger miscue than his failed policies. Ironically, Obama seems to be doing well this campaign, even in Pennsylvania though he has a strong belief that Pennsylvanians have a misguided notion of “clinging to their guns and religion.”

If continual campaigning alone could bring about an improved economy, it would have arrived already. For things to get better so the 47% can become 30% or less, and the 53 % can become 70% or more, the country needs great leadership, not great fundraising and truth stretching skills. I think we all know that in our hearts. Obama is a great fundraiser and a convincing orator, and nobody can tell a lie as good as our President; all with a straight face.

Isn’t Jimmy Slamon’s advice about a “job” what America is still all about? I have learned recently that it really is not a happy state of affairs to be dependent on the government for anything and for the time being, unemployment compensation is one of those dependencies for me. That’s why I know Mitt Romney was not including the able bodied who are willing to work, seniors, the disabled, the underpaid military, and the retired veterans in his discussion about the 47%.

When I lost my job on the faculty at Marywood University, they did not share their new hiring rationale with me, so when my job was re-posted, I naively applied for my position again, but I was not selected for an interview. I will not to this day admit to anybody that it took two full-time faculty members to replace me, but I sure do know how to count.

I have written numerous books and articles about illegal and legal immigrants taking America’s best jobs. Obama has not protected America from foreign nationals in the job market, and he never cites the millions of foreigners in American jobs as a source of our jobs mess. He doesn’t care.

I write from an America first perspective! While I was on the Marywood team, the university proudly showcased many of my technical books and all of my patriotic books in a trophy case in the main “Business Hall.” Ironically, the person who replaced me in the computer science area graduated from the University of Alexandria in Egypt. I have no evidence either way but it is logical for one to conclude that this scholar is a non-citizen with an H-1B Academic Professional Visa. Maybe not! But most probably!. The irony continues as after my exodus, this person assumed my technical teaching load while I was writing my recent book titled, Americans Need Not Apply. If I had read my own book, I would have known not to apply.

Like many in the 47%, I have no desire to be part of the 47%. I did not ask to lose my position. Of course I am continually soliciting my friends for teaching positions in other institutions in our area, and who knows, maybe when Governor Romney is elected, there will be a greater need for professors as well as American college graduates.

Like many, I know what it feels like to go through my own personal readjustment in terms of spending and controlling expenses. Liquidating assets was never part of my retirement plan. So, for now, I am very thankful to the unemployment compensation fund in PA for giving me enough support to get by. Mitt Romney is not responsible for my trouble or anybody else’s trouble in the inglorious 47. Romney simply pointed out a fact. He has never been Governor of Pennsylvania and he has never been President of the US; and I never lived in Massachusetts. My problems and the problems of the rest of the 47 are all because of the miserable Obama economy.

So, why is Romney taking such a rap from the media on his 47 comment? That’s simple. The media in the US has gone to the dogs (with apologies to all dogs and dog lovers); it is corrupt and will do anything, including lie or blow a small gaffe out of proportion to help their man.

Mitt Romney had a meeting with his backer’s right after his primary victory. He was surely elated about his hard fought victory just as you or I would be. He thought that he was talking with friends but obviously not all were there to help the candidate. He spoke inartfully for sure. He made a plain and simple gaffe. It was not life threatening for anybody but it was a mistake. So this contrived “crisis did not go to waste,” the debauched media exaggerated the reaction in the wake of the gaffe. Their objective was to convince everybody in America to form erroneous conclusions about Mitt Romney.

The untrustworthy progressive one-sided press in America, representing just the leaders of the Democratic Party and not the people of the United States live and breathe in the tank for Obama. Telling the truth is no longer the mission of the free press, because they are not free any more. They are bought and paid for and are very hurtful to America’s prospects for improvement.

 

About Brian Kelly

Brian Kelly is a business owner and former assistant professor at Marywood University; he and his wife, Pat live in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Kelly ran for COngress and for the US Senate in his state and he believes limited government brings liberty and freedom. Brian's 48th book is titled, Saving America, The How-To Book. It is available at www.checkoutking.com and www.itjungle.com.

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