by Dacia Nichols

After venturing over to the dark side (The New York Times), we find that today's Times' home page boasts of an article covering lovely new budget cuts under Massachusetts' state health care plan (MassHealth). Who's up for the guillotine? Immigrants. And legal ones, mind you.

Yes, the economic plunge has affected the Mass. budget (shocker), and instead of cutting a few chunks out of some programs that might be worthy of such a cause ($420 million for "other administrative" anyone?), the land of Utopia shall now be denied to those truly pursuing the American dream. Well, most of them anyhow - in general these immigrants pay into the system that helps them rather than purely feed off of it. And we're talking about $130 million in a $32 billion dollar budget here...where's the scalpel that all these "change" candidates were supposed to come in with?

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So I said to him, 'Barack, I know Abe Lincoln, and you ain't Abe Lincoln.'

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. 
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. 
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. 
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.   
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.   
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. 
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.
-Abraham Lincoln

by Harrison Price

It seems as though when the Obama administration gets into PR trouble they pull out the Bush playbook as in “blame Bush.”  We saw it after fanning the flames of the AIG bonuses got out-of-hand (it produced the populist reaction the Democrats sought until it became counter-productive) and we’re seeing it now to distract us from North Korea/Iran/Cap and Trade/Healthcare.  The current distraction is about the wireless wiretapping under Bush (even though Obama might still be getting intel from it).

With Liberals we get into a subject, take “torture” for example.  Republicans say it produced useful intelligence.  Democrats say under “torture” people will say anything so it’s useless.  Yet actionable intelligence was produced in the example of the attempt to blow up the Library Building in L.A. (there is no library there).  So Democrats take a step back and switch gears saying: “Well we didn’t know.”  Then we learn Nancy Pelosi knew.  Democrats change their angle again and suggest the public is being lied to (so now the CIA is run by liars).  When that doesn’t stick Pelosi goes into hibernation.

In an article I found at The Patriot Room The National Review has a different take:

“Had [President Bush's Warrantless Surveillance Program" been in place before the [9/11] attacks, hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi almost certainly would have been identified and located.”   Another Friday night, another dump by the Obama administration of a report underscoring the vital importance of President Bush’s post-9/11 national security tactics.

The above quote about Midhar and Hazmi and is from Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director who was director of the NSA when that agency ran Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”  It is a bombshell mentioned in passing on page 31 of the 38-page report filed by five executive branch inspectors general (from DOJ, DOD, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) pursuant to Congress’s 2008 overhaul of FISA (the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).

There are a couple of interesting things about this.  The first thing that caught my eye was the “mentioned in passing” part.  Since the report was produced by the Obama administration they wouldn’t want to readily admit what sane people already know: good intelligence saves lives and good intelligence techniques allow for good intelligence.

The report also has more interesting revelations:

When congressional Democrats rolled their eyes, suggested that Gonzales was lying, and groused that a special prosecutor should be appointed, they well knew he wasn’t lying — but they also knew he couldn’t discuss the intellligence activities at the center of the controversy because those activities were (and remain) highly classified.

Between the time the time the collection intelligence activities that came to be known as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was first authorized after the 9/11 attacks until the warrantless surveillance aspect of the program was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005, the Bush administration briefed the bipartisan leadership of the congressional intelligence committees 17 times about the activities involved in the program.

How Democrats see Obama.

These facts once again reinforce my belief, backed up by example after example, that Democrats are very willing to play politics with matters of national security to appease their Liberal supporters.  It will be remembered that The New York Times exposed this vital and lifesaving program in 2005 gravely damaging the United States’ ability to learn what our enemies were up to.

For his entire time in office (and still to this day when Obama stumbles) Democrats blame Bush for raping the Constitution, ruining the world, wrecking the economy, and for the rising price of oil.  When the facts are analyzed, however, it is almost always the Democrats who have tofu on their faces but, like Obama’s report it appears buried in the back pages.

It may take years, but eventually we will get to the point in time when Democrats can’t blame Bush for all of the world’s ills (though we may be a few generations away from this moment).

In a way, this report is a swipe at former President Bill Clinton and his virtually complete lack of interest in fighting al Qaeda even though Osama bin Laden declared war no fewer than three times against the United States.

But that is the subject for another time.

by Harrison Price

How many trillions has President Obama doled out in the short time he’s been in office?  Looks like there’s yet another needy group of people who might win big if Cap and Trade passes: the very people it’s going to hurt.  That’s right… the Democrats are trying to pass one of the most destructive bills ever to the U.S. economy but they want to bribe the people who will be hurt most by it into submission and sock it to the taxpayers all to gain support in the energy industry:

Workers who lose their jobs if the pending climate change legislation becomes law could get a weekly paycheck for up to three years, subsidies to find new work and other generous benefits — all courtesy of Uncle Sam — under a little-noticed provision of the bill.

So let’s look at this for a moment… why the bribe (sorry I mean “assistance”)?  Basically because the Democrats know Cap and Trade will be a jobs killer robbing businesses of billions of dollars in profits every year all so they can pay Uncle Sam.  How much money are we talking about here anyway?

Adversely affected employees in oil, coal and other fossil-fuel sector jobs would qualify for a weekly check worth 70 percent of their current salary for up to three years. In addition, they would get $1,500 for job-search assistance and $1,500 for moving expenses from the bill’s “climate change worker adjustment assistance” program, which is expected to cost $4.2 billion from 2011 to 2019.

Just how many jobs are going to be lost?  Depends on who you listen to here are some estimates (low and high):

While the analysis assumes displaced workers will eventually find jobs, the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution predicts a net job loss of 0.5 percent over the first 10 years that carbon reduction legislation, called “cap-and-trade,” is in effect. The conservative Heritage Foundation found that by 2030 net job losses would top 1.1 million, while the Coalition for Affordable American Energy, an industry group, estimates that more than 3 million jobs would be lost by 2030 as a result of the cap-and-trade system.

Of course, there will be many people put out of work, companies will suffer financially, and the taxpayer (once again) will take it in the painful place as Obama racks up even more debt with the Chinese and other countries as they (for now) are willing to buy our IOUs.  The best part of the whole thing is we’ll be waiting until Obama’s term is over until we notice that giant sucking sound:

“I doubt there will be a bunch of people filing for assistance when the bill first launches because it won’t have a huge economic effect for at lease five years,” said James Heintz, associate director for the Political Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who co-authored a study on job creation under the bill.

I think the timing is pretty sweet for the president.  He can claim “victory” in “global warming” but won’t have unemployed Americans wanting to vote him out of office when he runs for re-election.

They say every time a bell rings an angel goes to heaven.  How much money does it cost us every time Obama opens his mouth?

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville

by Dacia Nichol

First they denied it, then they ridiculed it...now they admit it while dismissing its relevance altogether in favor of a progressive agenda:  Obama is not trying to fix the nation, he’s trying to destroy what’s left of American exceptionalism while using the economic disaster as his excuse and opportunity.

This week’s issue of Time Magazine boasted as its cover feature an article titled, “What Barack Obama Can Learn from FDR.”  Basically, this means that the final conclusive idolatry has been had:  Our great president is trying to emulate the man responsible for ushering in the failing socialist programs that we still fight today for financial breathing room.

The irony behind this article is that it dismisses the very myth that liberals have used as their cushion for years by stating that government spending during an economic crisis does not stimulate recovery, and using FDR’s “New Deal” as proof that it does is an absolute sham.  In the author’s own words:

“It’s old news that FDR’s New Deal did not end the depression.”

Is it though?  This author [yours truly] has been ridiculed, quite recently actually, for having made that suggestion a few articles back.  Perhaps the commenter should take his argument up with Mr. David Kennedy also, the author of the Time article in question, for even he seems to agree on this point.  If only Mr. Kennedy would have stopped there with his FDR worship fest.  Alas, such was not the case and we must continue here...

An objective view of FDR’s policies would have been more welcome - even one spun in a positive light to ignore the fiscal and constitutional issues at stake with them.  That’s expected.  Kennedy however takes his suggestions to a level that is so absurd, they make the profanity-ridden Republican hit pieces in the Rolling Stone magazine seem credible.

Here are the most outrageous claims of Mr. Kennedy: