Yes, friends, I admit it.  I am a Wal-Mart Shopper.  And believe me when I say unabashedly that I am a shopper extraordinaire.  I have loved shopping since I bought my first full ounce of chocolate-covered peanuts for 2 cents at Woolworth’s, using my own allowance.  I was five then.  I’m 57 now, and my shopping skills are so honed that I can literally smell a bargain at 100 yards the way a great hunter can sense his prey in a forest.  

My family has even occasionally called me the Great American Shopper.  I shop only one day each week, using a detailed list on a form that I designed myself.  I operate within a budget amount and only use cash.  I never take a credit card with me, because I simply lack the self-discipline to avoid impulse purchases.  And the way I see it, when I go shopping to fulfill the needs of my family, it’s little ole me against the savviest, shrewdest, most high-teched, highly credentialed Shopper Sharks ever to grace this planet - retail/advertising/need-creating gurus.  To me, shopping is a bit like warfare; it’s my wits against theirs.  And I always shop to win.       

I consider it a personal insult to my intelligence as an America whenever and wherever I see overpriced goods and snooty sales clerks, whether in a classy boutique or a restaurant, or just a big, full-price department store.  If a merchant wants to gratuitously give me a lot of ambience, pay designers to perfectly arrange the goods, play my favorite classical music to soothe my weary shopper’s mood or set a pristine white tablecloth under my hamburger, then that’s fine by me, and I’ll always pick his goods.  But when he tries - and does - double, triple and quadruple the markup for all of the niceties, it makes my frugal American blood boil. 

So, when my favorite store starts taking it on the chin from the union bosses, their Democratic Party pols, and the Looney-Left press, it’s high time I make this public confession as a Wal-Mart shopper and defend my store.  When someone picks a fight with Wal-Mart, they’re picking a fight with me!

I shop at Wal-Mart for very simple, down-to-earth reasons:  consistent  product availability, clerks who are there to serve me (the customer) instead of the other way around, the guaranteed-satisfaction policy and the price that simply will not be beaten.  Those are pretty good reasons, don’t you think?              

Sam Walton was a man after my very own heart.  He brought big-buyer price competition from behind the closed doors of uptown boardrooms right into the heart of small-town America.  In effect, he took the power of the merchant’s purse and handed it right over to us consumers, slashing the oversized, per-item profits of retailers and almost single-handedly tearing to shreds the old notion of the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.”  Young consumers, naturally, do not even remember the days in which it was next to impossible to purchase any item in a competitive marketplace without the ironclad price-fixing of the MSRP.

Sam Walton believed the MSRP was downright un-American, and so do I.  Certainly, I would never be one to begrudge small-town merchants a decent living, nor any other shoppers the right to pay more for the things they consider of utmost importance.  For some, personal service and ambience are things for which they are willing to pay a great deal more.  All power to them; America is big enough for us all.

So, what’s the beef the Democrats have with Wal-Mart?  It’s non-union, folks.  That’s the sum of it.  Socialists always strive to bring everything in society down to the lowest common denominator, squeeze out even the idea of individual tastes and competition between private entities.  It’s the way of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro and all the rest of this ill-begotten lot.  As Churchill so eloquently noted, the one thing that you always get with socialism is fairness, absolutely all sharing equally in “misery.”

I’ve actually spoken at length with a good many of the workers at Wal-Mart and asked them outright:  Do you want a union shop?  Do you feel unfairly treated by Wal-Mart?

“No!” is the unequivocal answer from every single one I’ve asked.

So, I confess that I love Wal-Mart even more than union corporations.  It’s the old-fashioned American way of doing business, which has resulted in a greater degree of shared prosperity than in any civilization in the history of the world.

Take that, all you Democrats following Marx, and shove it.  Wal-Mart is in the spirit of liberty and America.  And if I have a thing to say about it, Wal-Mart is here to stay.

Today is the day you’ve been waiting for!  Move America Forward has teamed up with Michelle Malkin and numerous illuminati from radio talk-show fame, as well as newspapers, community groups and just about every other American entity under the sun to offer us the opportunity to say “Thank You!” to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our Independence Day celebrations are nearly here.  July 4^th is just around the corner, and our troops will still be serving in sweltering, desert temperatures, wearing all that heavy body armor, and fighting for you and me.  But we can try to put a smile on many of their faces as we band together and send the biggest one-time shipment of goodie packages to our troops in the field.

So, please visit the all-day webathon, live-streaming here:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/from-the-frontlines

Watch, enjoy and join in our Nation’s war effort.  Say “Thank You” with a contribution for our Troops.   And put a smile on the face of a soldier or marine this July 4^th.

The satisfaction will be better than any fireworks displays we can imagine!

I’ll be on air beginning at 9:51 PM Eastern Daylight time, and I hope all of you will be there too!

World, watch out.  The Americans are coming!

Especially since 9/11, our own generation’s Day of Infamy, our American troops have given us all they have to give.  They’ve gone wherever we’ve sent them and done with honor all that we’ve asked of them.  They’ve put their lives and limbs on the line every day for our Constitutional liberties and way of life.

Like many in America today, no one in my family is currently in the armed forces.  My father was a marine, but never saw combat.   My brother enlisted in the army during the Vietnam era, but was sent to Germany instead of to war.  My husband was on college deferment during the Vietnam War, and by the time he graduated, the war was scaling down and his high lottery number took him to the end of conscription without his ever being called to duty.  Our one son is profoundly deaf and ineligible for military service.

So the only contact I have with military men and women is stateside and cursory.  Perhaps this is one reason why I so highly esteem every soldier, marine, sailor and member of the Air Force, as well as every single member of their families.  I am daily reminded that without their willingness to serve with self-sacrificial love, I would not continue to enjoy the liberties for which they are willing to give all.

This would be true even in peacetime, but it is all the more so in wartime.  We owe every freedom we enjoy, yesterday, today and tomorrow, to the brave men and women, who freely abandon the comforts of home to serve wherever the fight beckons.

That is why I will not permit the words, “war weary,” to enter my spoiled, pampered, home-front vocabulary.  I refuse to give in to the naysayers who dominate our mainstream press.

I refuse to join in with those who whine in the age-old coward’s laments:  “Give appeasement a chance!”  “We’re tired of the fight!”  “It’s an unwinnable war!”  “Liberty is too expensive!”

What a heap of yellow-bellied poppycock!

Somehow it never seems to dawn upon the loony leftists that when evil threatens to have its sway, those who do nothing to stop it are every bit as guilty as the perpetrators.  I thank God every day on my knees for those who refuse to give up, stalwartly fight the temptation to go home and cower in their warm, snugly beds — our fighting forces.  They are the Americans most worthy of the name, and it is to them and their families that we owe all that we have to give - and then some.

I thank God, too, that there are so many civilians this Country over who share my spirit of gratitude.  The efforts to aid our troops with moral support from home and with various, small material comforts are as myriad as American ingenuity.

A great many, though, are fiddling and nay saying while America is at war for our very survival with Islamo Fascist barbarians who intend to end life as we know it.  If we aren’t vigilant and determined, it will be the naysayers who have the last word.

That’s why whenever an opportunity arises to support our troops —  the Americans doing the actual fighting on behalf of the rest of us — then I take it.  And I’m urging every patriotic American to support one such valiant effort by Move America Forward and conservative voices all over the Land.

From the Front Lines will be an all day webathon event, co-sponsored by Move America Forward’s Melanie Morgan and Blogger extraordinaire, Michelle Malkin.  Joining them will be a host of conservative talk radio giants, even the great el Rushbo himself.  The date to mark is June 26.

Of course, the end result will be sending our troops in harm’s way the biggest shipment of morale-building goodies packages to date.  But the extra reward is to each citizen who takes part, in knowing his efforts are part and parcel of winning this war.

As one of my new heroes, Lt. Col. (ret) Steve Russell says, “We cannot afford to allow our home front to become our exposed flank in the War on Terror.”  Every time we take part in an effort to support our troops, we take up arms on the home front flank and help defeat our enemies wherever they try to stand against us.

Americans are not wimps and sissies.  Let’s make sure we prove it by supporting our troops and Move America Forward in this brave new effort on the home front.

June 26!  I’ll be there!  Will you?

Politics makes strange bedfellows. And when you try the straighten the sheets afterward, stubborn telltale lumps remain. Before highfalutin’ pomposity went mainstream in America, we provincial folks on this side of the pond — across the big water from old Europe — were down to earth and downright contemptuous of in-the-clouds intellectualism.
In former times, when […]

Old Left rhetoric meets New Media networking.
Most of us are wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits. We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims, and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the name of power, expedience, greed, or intolerance. - Barack Obama, The […]