Reaganomics Vs. Obamanomics: Facts And Figures.

from 5/5/2011, and it just keeps getting worse for #obamanomics. "Facts are stubborn things"~ John Adams.

FORBES: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/05/05/reaganomics-vs-obamanomics-facts-and-figures/  

Entertainment Stars and Starlets

watching out of the corner of my eye the personal free fall of "Hollywood/Entertainment elites" like Lindsay Lohan, Justin Beiber, Amanda Bynes (but, I should not just highlight the girls), and the late Cory Monteith; I say with pure heart and conviction. Who gives a fuck you narcissistic self centered losers. Goodbye or Heal thy-self, get grounded in reality. What you do is unimportant, thus the moniker- entertainment. Now, having said that, there are some who I respect. Of the young generation one stands out. Talented, seems grounded, well managed and classy. (Unlike "I wanna be a whore Miley Virus) This girl, if she stays true to her roots, will in my opinion, be huge someday. Victoria Justice. Has the looks and the talent.

Democracy

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. 

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

~ attributed to Professor Alexander Fraser Tytler.

David Stockman: "The Born-Again Jobs Scam"

 
Source for entire article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-11/david-stockman-born-again-jobs-scam

Stunningly clear, consise analysis of the numbers;  and depressing.  Let's look:

Submitted by David Stockman, author of The Great Deformation,
THE BORN AGAIN JOBS SCAM AND THE FED’S TERMINAL INCOHERENCE
No, last week’s jobs report was not “strong”. It was just another edition of the “born again” jobs scam that has been fueling the illusion of recovery during the entire post-crisis Bernanke Bubble. In fact, 120,000 or 62 percent of the June payroll gain consisted of part-time jobs in restaurants, bars, hotels, retail and temp agencies. The average pay check in this segment amounts to barely $20,000 per year, which is a sub-poverty level income for a family of four, and compares to upwards of $50,000 per year for goods producing jobs in the BLS survey.
Altogether, the government has reported 2.8 million of these part-time job gains since the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, accounting for a predominant share of the ballyhooed pick-up of 5.3 million total jobs.  It goes without saying, however, that the principal of one-job-one-vote does not apply in economics. What matters are aggregate dollar earnings. On that front, the Commerce Department figures for total private wage and salary income are just plain punk. Nearly six years on from the December 2007 peak, real payroll disbursements are still down by nearly 1 percent. What kind of “recovery” is that about?
Measured on an income equivalent basis, then, a majority of the big rebound in the BLS headline number has consisted of “40 percent jobs”. Granted, these fractional jobs do provide a monthly feed to headline stalking HFT algos and the gist for the moronic jobs number guessing game conducted by unemployable Wall Street executives otherwise known as “street economists”. But not by a long shot do they prove that the Fed’s money printing spree is beginning to bear fruit, as claimed by the cheerleading section of the Wall Street Journal shortly after the BLS release.  
Indeed, once upon a time financial journalists actually worked for a living by digging for facts, rather than simply re-posting the spin issued by Washington’s various ministries of truth. In this instance, even a modicum of investigation by the WSJ would have revealed that the 2.8 million part-time jobs “created” since June 2009 reflect the rebirth of the very same 2.8 million jobs that were first generated between 2000 and 2007. That this obvious fact has been completely ignored is not surprising. After all,  the reigning doctrine in the Keynesian puzzle palace inhabited by officialdom and financial journalists alike, calls for digging and refilling economic holes as the national policy of first resort.
The BLS data exhibit this syndrome with uncanny exactitude. In early 2000 there were 34.7 million jobs in the part-time economy. In response to the dotcom crash, the Fed ignited the housing and credit bubbles via Greenspan’s 1% money experiment, causing a consumption boom fueled by home ATM withdrawals and other consumer borrowings.  Accordingly, activity rates in leisure and hospitality, retail and personal services (think yoga teachers and gardeners) temporarily soared, with the part-time job count climbing by the aforesaid 2.8 million by late 2007. But this peak of 37.2 million part time jobs was pure bubble economics--- attested to by the fact that every single one of these new jobs vanished during the 18 months of bubble liquidation otherwise known as the Great Recession. Indeed, when the NBER declared the bottom in June 2009, the part-time job count stood at 34.5 million, a hair under where it started at the turn of the century.
Now, after four years of money printing madness, the Russell 20000 has been reflated from 350 to 1000, junk bond yields have dropped from 20 percent to 5 percent, bombed-out housing markets like Southern California and Phoenix are on crawling with speculators and deader-than-a-doornail Fannie Mae preferreds are the new bonanza of the month.  The con artists who run Fairholme Capital even claim to own $2.5 billion worth (face value) and are suing the Federal government to collect the vast windfall gain on these mummified securities that has been enabled by Uncle Ben’s free money casino.  Needless to say, the massive asset reflation catalyzed by the Fed in these instances and throughout the financial markets has caused the affluent classes to start spending again, thereby reflating the part time jobs bubble as well.
Right on taper time eve, in fact, the June jobs report clocked-in at 37.5 million part-time jobs, that is, virtually dead-on the prior bubble peak level of December 2007. As shown below, however, no jobs have been “created” at all. These part-time jobs have simply been born again, courtesy of the Fed’s delusional belief that its frenzied bond-buying is causing the labor market to heal.
Some kind of faith healing, that! Set aside the serial bubble pumping cycles and examine the longer-term trend in the graph.  During the last thirteen and one-half years the Fed’s balance sheet has expanded from $500 billion to $3.4 trillion, and the overwhelming rationalization for this 7X gain is that the nation’s central bank needed to prop-up the financial system and “stimulate” the GDP in order to generate new jobs.


But don’t start the drumroll on that score. On an FTE (full-time equivalent) basis, total growth in hospitality and leisure, retail, personal services and temp agencies, that is, the part-time economy, amounts to just 1.1 million job equivalents during the entirety of this century to date. That’s 7,000 per month. It’s a drop in the proverbial bucket.
The self-evident implication of this born again jobs saga is that the nation’s employment problem is structural and an enduring consequence of the end of the 30-year debt super-cycle, not a cyclical shortfall that can be fixed by juicing the speculative classes.  Indeed, a brief glance at the horrid trend in “breadwinner” jobs demonstrates in spades that the problem is structural and therefore wholly outside of the Fed’s remit---even granted its spurious claim that it is printing money with reckless abandon because its “dual mandate” requires it.
The “breadwinner jobs” category includes construction, mining, manufacturing, the white collar professions, business management and support services, financial services, information and technology, government service excluding education, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing and real estate agents, among others.  This is the heart of the Main Street economy, where the average pay-rate is upwards of $50,000 annually---just enough to support a family, at least in some lower cost regions.  Here the June BLS report clocked-in at 67.56 million jobs (50 percent of the NFP total), and there was nothing whatsoever impressive about the number. As shown below, breadwinner jobs have been shrinking at a stunning rate for the entire duration of the 21^st century.
During the second Greenspan Bubble in housing and credit, which was celebrated to the bitter end by Wall Street touts as the “goldilocks economy”, a very telling trend unfolded: On a peak-to-peak basis, not a single new breadwinner job was created, even as the Fed’s measure of household net worth (flow-of-funds report) soared from $43 trillion to $67 trillion over this seven year period. All that gain in bubble wealth, yet the count of breadwinner jobs was static at 71.9 million!
And then the real carnage began. By the bottom of the Great Recession nearly 8 percent, or 5.7 million, of these breadwinner jobs had disappeared.  Worse still, most of them are still gone, notwithstanding four years of furious money printing and month-after-month of “encouraging” headline job gains.  All told, the 1.3 million pick-up in breadwinner jobs since June 2009 amounts to just 25 percent of the recession period collapse. Stated differently, at the anemic rate of breadwinner jobs recovery during the four-year Bernanke Bubble to date, it would take until 2025 to get back to the level that existed in January 2000---a time when the nightmare of a George W. Bush presidency was only a mote in Karl Rove’s politically myopic eye.
Unfortunately, in the vocabulary of late night TV, that’s not all. About 15 percent or 11.1 million of these breadwinner jobs are accounted for by local, state and Federal payrolls outside of education. And from an income viewpoint, these are the top tier because average government payroll disbursements (excluding benefits) amount to more than $65,000 per year. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to today’s taper-time-turmoil. Through June 2009 government payrolls grew by 10 percent from the turn of the century level. Only after the fiscal stimulus frenzy of 2008-2009 finally exhausted itself did the government job count finally roll-over during the last several years and begin an inexorable long-term decline, as the nation descended into permanent fiscal insolvency.
Thus, the miserable breadwinner job trend shown below actually understates the nation’s structural employment problem---even as that cardinal reality  remains virtually unknown to our feckless monetary politburo. To be precise, there were 61.5 million full-time breadwinner jobs in the private sector during January 2000.  Setting aside the shrinking government sector jobs embedded in the graph below, there were just 56.5 million private sector breadwinner jobs contained in the allegedly “robust” report for June 2013.
Indeed, we have been losing private sector breadwinner jobs at the rate of 31,000 per months for thirteen and one-half years running. Yet the Keynesian money printers who inhabit the Eccles Building insist that the problem is cyclical and that just a few more months of lunatic bond-buying will bring the labor market back to full employment health.  If the Cramer noise machine had a “sell” button, it would be screaming at the top of its lungs.


Of course, it is no mystery as to why we have a structural employment problem and why the Fed’s monetary madness will only produce recurring cycles of boom and bust in both risk assets and born-again jobs. The fact is, two and one-half decades of Greenspan-Bernanke monetary profligacy have resulted in the off-shoring of much of America’s tradable goods sector—so the Main Street economy’s potential growth and productivity have been deeply impaired. Likewise, the Fed fueled an extended run of artificial GDP expansion via the buildup of massive credit market debt (from $10 trillion to $57 trillion during that 26-year period), but the America economy has now exhausted it capacity to take on more leverage.  And during all that time the Fed’s interest rate repression and stock market coddling policies were generating countless growth and wealth destroying deformations and malinvestments throughout the nation’s economy.
For instance, the combination of Fed interest rate repression and fiscal subsidies through the tax code and the GSEs caused massive mis-allocation of capital to new housing and the related strip-mall infrastructure. But when the housing bubble finally collapsed and the market attempted to drastically mark-down inflated asset prices and drive capital out of the sector, the Fed crushed the pricing mechanism in mortgage and real estate markets, re-ignited the housing refi machine and caused capital to once again flow up-hill.
The sight of $5,000 suits riding into Scottsdale AZ on the back of John Deere lawnmowers while carrying brief-cases full of 2 percent wholesale money in order to become buy-to-rent-and-flip single family landlords says all that is necessary about the extent of growth and job-destroying resource mis-allocation that have been enabled by the nation’s monetary central planners. Likewise, until the taper scare slightly sobered-up fixed income markets during recent weeks, the LBO strip-mining machines were back at work substituting cheap debt for payrolls, that is, implementing endless rounds of job “restructurings” in order to pay the interest. And the stock buyback machines in the corporate sector were working over-time leveraging up balance sheets, not to acquire productive assets, but to fund record share buybacks---thereby goosing stock prices and the value of executive options.
 Indeed, here the myth of deleveraging has reached its apotheosis. Business sector debt, according to the Fed’s Z1 report, is now just shy of $13 trillion. That’s up $2 trillion or nearly 20 percent from the 2007 pre-crisis peak, and represents an all-time record at 81 percent of GDP. By contrast, the fabled cash hoard of American business is up by less than $400 billion since December 2007----hardly evidence that there is massive corporate cash on the sidelines waiting for Bernanke to give the all-clear.
In short, Fed policies are mangling the Main Street economy by disabling the pricing mechanism in all financial markets, diverting capital to unproductive speculation and rent-seeking and leaving genuine entrepreneurs and businessmen adrift in a fog of financial disorder. Needless to say, the result is tepid growth of incomes and jobs----a lamentable condition that the Fed cannot fix with “moar” monetary stimulus because decades of the latter are what has caused the problem.
More importantly, the impossibility of fixing a structural problem with Keynesian cyclical medicine means that the monetary politburo will descend into an ever more incoherent babble as the “incoming data” fail to match its clueless forecasts. In this regard, not only were Wednesday’s minutes an embarrassing exercise in Washington pettifoggery, they were also self-evidently a fraud and lie-----spun well after the meeting in an attempt to undo Bernanke’s original message.  It is bad enough that the nation’s vast, infinitely complex $16 trillion economy is being run by an unelected 12-person monetary politburo. But now the commissars have completely lost both their bearings and their credibility.
Under these circumstances healthy capitalist financial markets would be afraid---very afraid.  But there are no honest markets left----just a big romper room where the boys and girls and algos endeavor to extract windfalls from central bank word clouds. Still, the magnitude of the deformation that the Fed has wrought in the financial system cannot be under-estimated:  there remain even now tens of thousands of punters, fund managers and home gamers who do not see the Fed’s desperate incoherence, believing instead that “the market is cheap” and that buying the dips is a no loose proposition.
Let’s see. At the last bubble peak in early October 2007, the S&P 500 was only 100 points (or 5%) below today’s lofty peak, and it was deemed to be cheap by the 11^th hour bulls at that moment because forward earnings were projected to be $110 per share, thereby trading at less than 16X.  As it happened, 2008 earnings ex-items came in more than a tad lower---- at $55 per share to be precise and actually at only $15 on the basis of honestly reported GAAP earnings.
In truth, at that moment in time financial bubbles---subprime, CDOs, monster LBOs, a raging Russell 2000--- were evident everywhere in the financial system. So in late 2007 the market was not cheap even on a paint by the numbers basis.  At the end of the day, the only honest and reliable earnings number in today’s deformed capital markets is 12 month trailing GAAP EPS. The billions that Washington wastes on financial cops each year policing corporate SEC filings at least accomplish that much. At the 2007 peak, therefore, the market was actually trading at 19X earnings on an honestly accounted basis.
So here we are again, and the LTM earnings number on a GAAP basis for the S&P 500 is $87.50 per share. We are back at 19X trailing profits.  Too be sure, forward earnings ex-items are exactly as before---once again at $110 per share. So the market is purportedly “cheap” but here’s the skunk in the woodpile:  honest LTM GAAP earnings have been stuck at $87 per S&P 500 share for seven quarters---since Q3 2011.  In short, true earnings are not growing, China and the BRICs are rolling over, Europe is sinking into economic somnolence, Japan is a massive financial train-wreck waiting to happen, and based on the latest data it would appear that US GDP growth will average hardly 1%  during the three-quarters thru June. That’s stall speed, yet the gambling machines which occupy Wall Street rage on because they believe that Bernanke has their back, that this business cycle will never end and that this latest and greatest financial bubble will never be allowed to collapse.
Why would they believe Bernanke when he has become so lost in his own intellectual fog that he can’t even give an honest number for the inflation rate, which he spuriously claimed to be 1 percent and therefore below target during yesterday’s conference in Boston.  Even on the preposterous assumption that PCE less food and energy actually measures the cost of living for carbon-unit inhabitants of America, there is no 1% number to be found except on a fleeting short-term basis. The inflation rate under Bubbles Ben’s preferred measure, has been 1.7 percent, 2.1 percent and 1.9 percent on a two-, seven- and thirteen-year basis.  The Fed is thus not furiously running the printing presses because it is under-shooting inflation.  It is printing because it is scared to death of the raging gambling machines it has unleashed throughout the financial system.
So Bernanke promises to keep the money market and repo rates----that is, the poker chips for the casino----at zero until  “well after” the unemployment rate drops below 6.5 percent.  But it will never get there because the jobs market and Main Street economy are structurally broken.  Indeed, measured on a consistent basis, the unemployment rate is still over 11 percent based in the labor force participation rate of late 2008 and is over 13 percent based on the labor force participation rate at the turn of the century.
And no, that can’t be explained away by the baby boomers going on Social Security.  During January 2000 there were 75 million Americans over age 16 that did not hold a job. Today there are 102 million in that category---about 27 million more. Yet the number of participants in OASI (old age social security) is up by just 6 million during the same period.  Moreover, there is no doubt about what happened the other 21 million citizens:  they are on disability, food stamps, welfare or have moved in with friends and relatives or landed on the streets in destitution.
In short, the US economy is failing and the welfare state safety net is exploding. And that means that the true headwind in front of the allegedly “cheap” stock market is an insuperable fiscal crisis that will bring steadily higher taxes, lower spending and a gale-force of permanent anti-Keynesian austerity in the GDP accounts. And for that reason, the Fed’s strategy of printing money until the jobs market has returned to effective “full employment” is completely lunatic. 
As shown in the graph below, the remaining jobs in the NFP report for June are accounted for by the HES Complex----that is, health, education and social services where the June job count clocked in at 30.8 million. The self-evident headwind here is that the HES complex is effectively a ward of our bankrupt state. Nearly all of the funding is attributable to massive tax subsidies for employer provided health insurance, the ballooning cost of Medicaid and Medicare, soaring subsidies which will soon be arriving under the Obamacare health exchanges, and the near total dependence of the education system on the public purse, most especially the runaway student loan program.

There are two powerful trends embedded in the graph that make a mockery of the labor market obsession of Fed  governors like Evans, Dudley, Yellen and Rosengreen, to say nothing of the money-printer-in-chief.  First,  as the fiscal vice tightens, the rate of job growth even in this long-time bastion of employment gains has slowed sharply. The pick-up averaged 49,000 per month during the Greenspan Bubble, fell to 40,000 per month during the Great Recession and has cooled to only 24,000 per month during the Bernanke Bubble of the last four years.
But should job growth in the HES Complex grind even lower, which is a near fiscal certainty, the proverbial naked swimmers will get full exposure.  That is to say, outside of the HES Complex, the count of non-farm payroll jobs has been shrinking on a net basis for this entire century!  There were 106.5 million non-HES Complex jobs in January 2000 but more than 13 years later last month’s “strong” report sported only 105 million!

So what is happening at bottom is that Bernanke is printing money so that Uncle Sam can keep massively borrowing, and thereby fund a simulacrum of job growth in the HES Complex.  Call it the Bed Pan Economy. 
When it finally crashes, Ben Bernanke will be more reviled than Herbert Hoover. And deservedly so.


Worried, outright terrified am I. 

Thomas Sowell - Basic Ecomomics, A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxCwJOmjp_kQLTNya3JGSWdudm8/edit?usp=sharing


  I highly recommend this read. I'm a big fan of his writing style because it's clear and concise. Basic Economics is highly informative and easily accessible. This book should be required reading, not just for economics majors or business majors, but everyone- in High School even. It's written to be understood by all. And, damit, we need all to understand what is at stake.

Big ideas:
1. Economics is about trade-offs, not solutions.
2. Every policy or law has consequences, many of which are negative and unforeseen.
3. Capitalism is the least oppressive or racist system for allocating resources; very few people will refuse to prosper because of their dislike of an ethnic group.
4. Economic efficiency is critically important to increasing standards of living and general happiness.
5. Government interference in free markets is almost always bad because it overrides millions of people's decisions and creates unintended negative consequences.
6. Transactions amongst willing, informed participants are mutually beneficial.
7. The price system conveys information more quickly and efficiently than any alternative.
8. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
9. Economics is not about money, it's about the underlying resources that money and prices represent.
10. There are only noneconomic values because economics is not a value in itself; rather, it is a system that supplies information by which decisions can be made.

A fun 1/2 hour here:

BILL COSBY HAS GONE AND DONE IT AGAIN...

They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English.
I can't even talk the way these people talk:
Why you ain't,
Where you is,
What he drive,
Where he stay,
Where he work,
Who you be...
And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk.
And then I heard the father talk.
Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.
In fact you will never get any kind of job making a decent living.

People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an Education, and now we've got these knuckleheads walking around.
The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.
These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids.
$500 sneakers for what?
And they won't spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.

I am talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit.
Where were you when he was 2?
Where were you when he was 12?
Where were you when he was 18 and how come you didn't know that he had a pistol?
And where is the father? Or who is his father?
People putting their clothes on backward:
Isn't that a sign of something gone wrong?
People with their hats on backward, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something?

Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up and got all type of needles [piercing] going through her body?
What part of Africa did this come from??
We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a thing about Africa .....

I say this all of the time. It would be like white people saying they are European-American. That is totally stupid.
I was born here, and so were my parents and grand parents and, very likely my great grandparents. I don't have any connection to Africa, no more than white Americans have to Germany , Scotland , England , Ireland , or the Netherlands . The same applies to 99 percent of all the black Americans as regards to Africa . So stop, already! ! !
With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap ......... And all of them are in jail.

Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.
We have got to take the neighborhood back.
People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' -- or men or whatever you call them now.
We have millionaire football players who cannot read.
We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.
Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.
We have to start holding each other to a higher standard..
We cannot blame the white people any longer.'

~Dr.. William Henry 'Bill' Cosby, Jr., Ed..D.

WELL SAID, BILL
It's NOT about color...
It's about behavior!!!

Simple Nutrition Reminders, in pictures for us dummies

Intermezzo

The Undocumented Immigrant’s Guide to Free Government Cell Phones

The Undocumented Immigrant’s Guide to
Free Government Cell Phones

 Unbelievable....have to see this to believe it. 

A few excerpts: 

Page 5:

"Yes. The answer is definitely yes.

If you’re an undocumented immigrant (known in some circles as an illegal alien), you are eligible to

receive a free government cell phone. A free American government cell phone.Much to our surprise, there are no regulations that prohibit undocumented immigrants from getting these phones."

Page 15: 

"Translation: No one will ask if you’re an undocumented immigrant. No one will care if you’re an

undocumented immigrant. Bottom line: You can get LIHEAP benefits and that means you can also get a free government cell phone."

 Page 24:

"We believe that the easiest way to get a free government cell phone may very well be to apply for food stamps first. "

 Source: http://www.freegovernmentcellphones.net/undocumented-immigrant-guide-to-free-government-cell-phones

Read the report, there is so much more to make you physically ill. Unbefreakinbelievalble.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxCwJOmjp_kQTFNaYlptdTVzT00/edit?usp=sharing

The Battle of Gettysburg

July 1–3, 1863: The Battle of Gettysburg, One-hundred-and-fifty years ago today! On the eve of the anniversary of our country’s birth, it is well that we recall the time, as then-President Abraham Lincoln famously put it, four-score and seven years later when it almost came undone.

.

.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  ~ Abraham Lincoln

A legendary letter written 150 years ago this week by a Civil War soldier on the eve of battle, bidding a heartbreaking farewell to his wife and children, offers a gentle reminder to all Americans of the meaning of sacrifice and love of country.

Below is the letter of Major Sullivan Ballou of the Union Army's Second Regiment, Rhode Island Volunteers, to his wife Sarah days before he was killed in the Battle of Bull Run. Ballou wrote the letter on July 14, 1861 while awaiting orders that would take him down to Manassas, Virginia where he was killed on July 28.  Ballou, 32, was a lawyer and father of two small boys, Edgar and Willie, who volunteered to fight for the Union Army. 

My very dear Sarah:
The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days -- perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.
Our movement may be one of a few days duration and full of pleasure -- and it may be one of severe conflict and death to me. Not my will, but thine O God, be done.
If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. 
I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing -- perfectly willing -- to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.
But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows -- when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children -- is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country?
I cannot describe to you my feelings on this calm summer night, when two thousand men are sleeping around me, many of them enjoying the last, perhaps, before that of death -- and I, suspicious that Death is creeping behind me with his fatal dart, am communing with God, my country, and thee.
I have sought most closely and diligently, and often in my breast, for a wrong motive in thus hazarding the happiness of those I loved and I could not find one. A pure love of my country and of the principles I have often advocated before the people and "the name of honor that I love more than I fear death" have called upon me, and I have obeyed. 
Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.
The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us.
I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me -- perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar -- that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.
Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have oftentimes been!
How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm. But I cannot. I must watch you from the spirit land and hover near you, while you buffet the storms with your precious little freight, and wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more.
But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night -- amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours -- always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.
As for my little boys, they will grow as I have done, and never know a father's love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue-eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the dimmest memories of his childhood.
Sarah, I have unlimited confidence in your maternal care and your development of their characters.
Tell my two mothers his and hers I call God's blessing upon them.
O Sarah, I wait for you there! Come to me, and lead thither my children.
Sullivan

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/07/28/major-sullivan-ballous-letter-to-wife-sarah/#ixzz2XqGvDInc

 Wow, awe-inspiring.