The LaGarde Family

Last night we went trick or treating out at my parents and grandparents… It was tons of fun… Here are some pictures from today

SAH-WEET!!  Enjoy this team!! Thank you – you played brilliantly, great job!!

I can’t even tell you what this means to me – It’s weird, I haven’t really been that into baseball but my dad has always loves the game and that has rubbed off on me a little. I have never realized the amount of strategy goes into baseball and I have really enjoyed watching this post season. The big deal for me has been my connection with my dad and brother – its something we can share together and its inexplainable. Especially because of my dads love and commitment to the game. He has been an umpire for as long as I can remember, always has taken us to games, celebrated our birthdays at the Vet, and his license plate is “YURROUT”. He loves the game and this has been something that I will never forget. It is one of those times that you just never forget where you were.

The other aspect of this is the philadelphia sports fan and what this will mean to the entire city and the tri-state area. When you listen to sports radio and the callers, they are so very passionate about all their sports, especially baseball and football.

As I write this, I am watching the news, and I still can’t believe they won – there are thousands of people celebrating in the streets and it is amazing.

Thanks again Phillies!

Here are some videos of the end of the game.

I believe in America, I believe in our Constitution, in the right to free speech, and the right to bear arms . . . I love our Country and that is why I have to speak up. I have hesitated to say anything public about my thoughts on this election directly. Why? Simply because I may lose clients and potential business over my thoughts – if a client or potential client reads this, I may be penalized because they may not want someone like me helping them. I may also stress friendships and other relationships I have. Hopefully, everyone who reads this can respect my right to free speech and be a mature individual.
Actually, if I am honest, I am afraid. Afraid because people with views like mine are quickly being labeled as racists, and unintellectual, “Simple, gun toting, religious clinging” simpletons. I resent that to my core. According to liberals, my wife and I are uneducated, rednecks for supporting McCain and Palin. Anyway…

But, I must speak out because I feel very strongly that our country stands at the edge of a precipice like never before with this up coming election. Don’t get me wrong – neither choice is a good one, but I feel strongly that one is definitely not the right one. And that is Obama. I can write for hours why, but most of my thoughts are already plastered through out much of the conservative media. I also want to say that if you are an Obama supporter – I don’t like you less or respect you less for your choice. It is America, and we should thank God (big “G”) that we still have that right. But, I do beg you to consider your choice VERY carefully.

I received an email with an article attached from a good friend of mine this morning. It was an article written by a gentleman by the name of Neal Boortz. He is a radio talk show host, though I am not sure where. As I read this writing, I realized I agreed with a majority of it and felt it made some very compelling points. Below is an excerpt from this article. If you would like to read the whole thing, you can click here.

“Does this reflect your philosophy?

Come on! Put the celebrity worship aside for a moment. Put skin color aside. Just think about Obama and his “spread the wealth around” tax policy.

Let’s talk heartbeats. Sounds weird, but I’m going somewhere here. A bit of Internet research led me to the fact that the average number of heartbeats in a life time for a human being is about one billion. To make this more understandable, the average human heart beats around 70 times a minute. In one eight-hour work day your heart beats around 33,600 times. This is your heart beating .. every beat subtracted from the one billion .. every beat a part of your life gone, never to be recovered. If you are a moderately successful human being Barack Obama is going to take about 13,000 (39%) of those heartbeats away from you every working day. Put your finger on your wrist and feel your pulse. Feel every heartbeat. Just count up to 100. How much of your life went by as you counted? You can’t get those beats back. They’re gone, for good. Remember, you only have a finite number of those beats of your heart left … and Obama wants 13,000 of them every working day of your life. Those heartbeats – your life – being expended creating wealth. Your heartbeats, your wealth. Obama wants them. You don’t need them. Someone else does. The police power of the state.

Taxes are a nasty little reality of life. Nobody wants anarchy. Government is a necessity. Government, though, is not supposed to create winners and losers. Government is not, as Obama intends, to be used as an instrument of plunder. Almost all Americans are perfectly willing to surrender an appropriate percentage of their earned wealth to fund the legitimate functions of government. I, for one, don’t want to see my wealth confiscated because some bureaucrat has determined I don’t “need” it, and then have to watch as that wealth is used to buy votes from someone who is simply too lazy to generate the wealth they need by themselves … or, as Obama puts it, “spread around.”

What is Obama going to do? How does he determine “need?” What data does he use to determine “fairness?” Maybe he’ll set up some bureaucracy staffed with like-minded leftists who will use data collected in the last census and from those pesky American Community Surveys to establish a basic “need” level for people living in different areas. Once it is determined how much of a person’s wealth they really don’t “need,” it will be a simple matter of confiscation and redistribution to those who do need it. After all, that would be “fair,” wouldn’t it? Come on, it’s not exactly like you worked for that money.

Listen to the rhetoric of the left. Those who are in need are called “the less fortunate.” This means that their status as needy was due to nothing but bad luck. It stands to reason, then, that those with more than they need were just lucky. The fortunate and the less fortunate. The lucky and the not so lucky. And here comes Barack Obama riding over the rainbow on his Unicorn to set everything right and make it all fair. Isn’t that the world you want to live in?

There’s a quote that’s been floating around since I began my talk radio career. This quote is most often attributed to someone named Alexander Tyler writing in 1787 about the fall of the Athenian Republic. Others have said the guy’s name was Tytler. Let’s not argue spelling right now … let’s just get to the quote, because the quote goes to the heart of this presidential election:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

Think about this, my friends. Isn’t this exactly what we’re seeing right now? In fact, hasn’t this pretty much been the theme of Democrat Party election politics for nearly as long as you can remember? Here we have Barack Obama promising that he’s only going to raise taxes on the evil rich who make over $250,000 a year while 95% of Americans will get tax cuts. Think of this in terms of votes; higher taxes for 5% of the voters, lower taxes for the other 95%. It really doesn’t take all that much brainpower to figure out how this is going to work at in an election does it? You take money away from the people whose votes you don’t need, and give it to the people whose votes you do need. So very simple. The result is that people have, in fact, discovered that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. Who is promising those wonderful goodies? That would be Barack Obama. Just what percentage of voters out there do you think are going to vote for Obama simply because he is promising them someone else’s money? My guess is that the number would be high enough to constitute the margin of victory for The Great Redistributionist.

Somehow I had this idea when I was growing up that if you wanted something bad enough, you would work hard until you got it. That was then. This is now. Now you vote for it. That’s change you can believe in.