The day’s top political news:
Gore continues selling his “Global Warming” scam.
Gore soldiers on despite growing evidence his theories are dead wrong – more and more scientists are noting the absurdity of Gore’s claims.
Recent studies even show glacier melting is back to normal.
Gore is scheduled to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, to tell lawmakers that a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions is needed if the U.S. is to play a leading role in negotiations for a new international climate treaty. Snowfall in DC may delay Gore’s appearance.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/28/snowstormhits-dc-gore-turn-heat-senate/
Obama’s massive financial bailout passes the House on a party line vote.
Another example of Democrats throwing money at a problem as if that act is a viable solution.
President Barack Obama went to Capitol Hill on to draw bipartisan support for - and tamp down criticism of - his $825 billion economic stimulus plan.
Even before the president stepped into the meeting, Republican leaders in the House asked their members during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday to oppose the recovery plan unless significant adjustments are made before the bill came up for a vote today.
Republicans say they would like the tax cuts to move more swiftly, but Obama says that $275 billion was the most he would be willing to negotiate
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/27/america/obama.4-417200.php
Democrats conspire to assault our First Amendment rights – attacking freedom of speech via their “Fairness Doctrine” scam.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has launched an online petition soliciting expressed outrage at conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for saying last week that he wanted President Barack Obama to fail.
Last Friday, Obama advised Republicans to stop listening to Limbaugh if they wanted to get along with Democrats and the administration.
DCCC Executive Director Brian Wolff, says Limbaugh has given Democrats "a preview of the outrageous Republican attacks that are on the way against President Obama and every Democrat working for change." (Translation: “Democrats will attack any who disagree with their positions, claims, and programs)
http://cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=42616
Opinion:
Does the Washington snow also obscure political judgment?
The madness continues.
Obama continues efforts to sell Congress on his plan to throw more money at the financial mess. But chinks are appearing in his armor, even from some of his fellow Democrats.
Face it. Grandiose government spending projects wont provide any instantaneous success. Given the entitlement attitudes of many in the faceless masses – most all of whom voted for Obama because they thought he was promising to give them cars as Oprah has done, or money hand outs as welfare does.
Years ago, Chicago Democrat political boss Mayor James Daley, made a habit of handing out turkeys at Christmas. Keep in mind, Obama is a direct product of that political machine – so its natural such assumptions might be made by the uninformed.
Now it’s learned Obama’s notorious scheme and scam known as ACORN is also in for a multi million dollar rip off of American tax dollars through his stimulus plan. Surprise, surprise. Different city, same old pay offs and pay outs to friends.
Republicans have leverage in opposing this bill. They can attack it at many points, and attack it they must. They cannot allow Democrats an ability of being able to say (when it all predictably fails) “they voted for it too”.
Meanwhile, Obama’s attack on Rush Limbaugh, and by extension, all talk radio, sends an ominous clue liberal outrage is about to descend on freedom of speech.
Liberals have long salivated over finding means to limit or destroy talk radio since most talk radio is conservative. It should be noted the domination of talk radio by conservatives is not a result of a conspiracy – it’s a matter of liberals having been unable to sell their product in the marketplace of ideas.
To date, NO liberal radio talk shows have succeeded or survived. The only exception to that rule is PBS, which doesn’t operate in a market place, but via government handout. PBS survives and is underwritten by ripping off unwilling taxpayers.
In the real world, people on the extreme left such as Al Franken, cannot survive because they cannot marshal necessary support. (Of course Franken may end up with the most votes in the Minnesota election – but that success would be more a matter of Democrat manipulation – not by an honest count of the ballots as cast – what else is new?)
If Democrats succeed in passing their infamous scam -- :The Fairness Doctrine” (It is NOT fair, it is a doctrine) then talk radio will disappear shortly there after. The Democrat scheme would require stations to carry an equal amount of talk radio that reflects the liberal viewpoing – a viewpoint that is a proven loser in generating an audience. It would mean a severe financial slam of radio stations and their ability to sell advertising time. Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our democracy. The Fairness Doctrine is a conspiracy designed to end that freedom. In fighting against its passage, we all have a big time stake.
Buddy
The top blogs of the day:
1.
http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2009/01/27/where_is_free_market_economics_when_we_need_it_most
Where Is Free Market Economics When We Need It Most?
Mona Charen
"Lending Drops at Big U.S. Banks," reports the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Even those banks that have just received an infusion of $148 billion in taxpayer dollars as part of the TARP saw their loans drop by 1.4 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2008, the paper reports. The economy seems to be shedding jobs like a dry fir tree losing needles. People speak of a "consensus" that only a huge stimulus plan by government can save us.
Certainly President Obama seems supremely confident that the federal government, in his own capable hands, can tackle everything from job creation to education to global warming. All that is needed is to set aside "stale" partisan arguments and salute smartly.
President Obama was a teenager when some of the smartest liberals in America (dubbed the neoconservatives) were beginning to have doubts about the power of government to do good. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Aaron Wildavksy, and many others observed the effects of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives and became sobered up. (A few, including Moynihan, returned to the liberal fold but most did not.) They noticed the waste and the ineffectiveness of huge government programs, but above all, they were chastened by the law of unintended consequences -- that the unforeseen or indirect effects of government policy were usually more damaging and more important than the desired effects.
2.
Demographic Winter: The Greatest Crisis Humanity Will Face This Century
From LifeSite News
Speech by Don Feder to the 36th Annual March for Life Rose Dinner
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m honored to be with you and grateful for the opportunity to address the 27th Annual March for Life Rose Dinner. I would like to speak to you this evening about a phenomenon that’s called Demographic Winter – an expression used to denote the worldwide decline in birthrates. Specifically, I’d like to discuss how it relates to abortion.
Besides the obvious connection (killing 44 million children a year tends to depress the birth rate), these life issues are linked in a more fundamental way.
Both are supported by a culture of selfishness – a culture which refuses to acknowledge an obligation to the past or a responsibility to the future – a cultures which views the family as optional, faith as an impediment to human happiness, and personal gratification as the only measure of a life well-lived.
How serious is our demographic problem? Very. It could result in the greatest crisis humanity will confront in this century.
All over the world, children are disappearing. Worldwide, there are six million fewer children under 6 years-of-age today than there were in 1990.
3.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/27/dynasties-dissed-in-political-decisions/
Dynasties dissed in political decisions
David R. Sands THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. didn't get the vacant Illinois Senate seat.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't get the Democratic presidential nomination, taking the job of secretary of state as a consolation prize.
And Caroline Kennedy and Andrew Cuomo lost out to an obscure two-term upstate congresswoman for the New York Senate seat once held by Mrs. Clinton.
Whatever happened to American democracy's traditional deference to political dynasties?
Call it Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton fatigue syndrome, or perhaps the new Obama meritocracy, but some of the most famous names in U.S. politics have come up empty-handed in recent days.
"I don't know how much of this you can tie to Obama, but it is a striking pattern," said Brian Flanagan, who has studied U.S. political dynasties as associate director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich.
"It's even more striking when you consider we've just completed the first presidential election since 1976 where there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton on the ticket and where the winner this time had no political pedigree whatsoever," he said.
Mr. Flanagan noted that it was not just Democrats who have failed to honor their elders. In the 2008 Republican presidential primary, Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the prize over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan and briefly a front-runner for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.
1.
http://townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2009/01/27/where_is_free_market_economics_when_we_need_it_most
Where Is Free Market Economics When We Need It Most?
Mona Charen
"Lending Drops at Big U.S. Banks," reports the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Even those banks that have just received an infusion of $148 billion in taxpayer dollars as part of the TARP saw their loans drop by 1.4 percent between the third and fourth quarters of 2008, the paper reports. The economy seems to be shedding jobs like a dry fir tree losing needles. People speak of a "consensus" that only a huge stimulus plan by government can save us.
Certainly President Obama seems supremely confident that the federal government, in his own capable hands, can tackle everything from job creation to education to global warming. All that is needed is to set aside "stale" partisan arguments and salute smartly.
President Obama was a teenager when some of the smartest liberals in America (dubbed the neoconservatives) were beginning to have doubts about the power of government to do good. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Aaron Wildavksy, and many others observed the effects of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives and became sobered up. (A few, including Moynihan, returned to the liberal fold but most did not.) They noticed the waste and the ineffectiveness of huge government programs, but above all, they were chastened by the law of unintended consequences -- that the unforeseen or indirect effects of government policy were usually more damaging and more important than the desired effects. Minimum wage laws are a good example. Intended to help the poor earn a living wage, they instead discouraged hiring of the low-skilled. Rent control was supposed to make it easier for the poor and middle class to afford apartments but wound up making low-cost housing less available.
All of that social learning is well in the past now. President Obama seems to have burst on the scene without ever having grappled with those lessons. Not even Republicans behaved in power as if they believed in free markets. One hates to pile onto President Bush, who did many things right and has received more undeserved calumny than anyone in recent memory, yet it must be said (and has been said before in this column) that President Bush, along with a sloppy and incontinent Republican majority in Congress, managed the feat of discrediting free market economics without ever practicing it. It was the Republicans who passed the Medicare prescription drug bill, and the bloated farm bill, and the transportation pork. This disqualifies most Republicans from challenging the gigantic new trough feeding that is about to begin under the Democrats.
It was, or should have been, frightening news that the United States is now $10.7 trillion in debt, sporting a $1.2 trillion deficit. As Mark Steyn noted, your pocket calculator doesn't have enough spaces to input one trillion dollars.
The Democrats' solution is to make our deficit $2 trillion with a "stimulus" package. The Congressional Budget Office (run by Democrats) reports that -- all talk of "shovel ready" projects notwithstanding -- only about 25 percent of the new spending in the package would actually be spent by 2010. And it defies common sense to believe that transferring $100 billion from the federal government to the states to help with Medicare reimbursements will stimulate economic activity. Nor will $200 million to rehabilitate the National Mall in Washington, or $500 million to install new bomb detectors at airports, or $400 million to NASA to conduct climate change research (which several other agencies are already studying), and on and on.
We are, not to put too fine a point on it, about to send another trillion dollars of our money into a rat hole.
Permanent tax cuts, for individuals and businesses, have been proven to stimulate the economy. They worked under Kennedy and Reagan. But to point this out now is like shouting into a whirlwind.
As Gordon Crovitz and other wise men have pointed out, we got into this mess because government created a housing bubble.
Until the bad assets held by banks are cleared -- and the TARP has clearly failed to do this -- all of the money shoveling will just prolong the agony. Capitalism prescribes tough medicine for mismanagement. But insolvency, bankruptcy, and recession are all necessary correctives that lay the groundwork for healthy recoveries.
The Democrats are trying to avoid the short-term pain. The result will be long-term pain.
Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist, political analyst and author of Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help .
©Creators Syndicate
2.
Demographic Winter: The Greatest Crisis Humanity Will Face This Century
From LifeSite News
Speech by Don Feder to the 36th Annual March for Life Rose Dinner
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m honored to be with you and grateful for the opportunity to address the 27th Annual March for Life Rose Dinner. I would like to speak to you this evening about a phenomenon that’s called Demographic Winter – an expression used to denote the worldwide decline in birthrates.
Specifically, I’d like to discuss how it relates to abortion.
Besides the obvious connection (killing 44 million children a year tends to depress the birth rate), these life issues are linked in a more fundamental way.
Both are supported by a culture of selfishness – a culture which refuses to acknowledge an obligation to the past or a responsibility to the future – a cultures which views the family as optional, faith as an impediment to human happiness, and personal gratification as the only measure of a life well-lived.
How serious is our demographic problem? Very. It could result in the greatest crisis humanity will confront in this century.
All over the world, children are disappearing. Worldwide, there are six million fewer children under 6 years-of-age today than there were in 1990.
Out of a population of 6.5 billion, 6 million may not seem like much. But it’s just the initial tremor of a coming earthquake. In Europe, the number of children under 5 has fallen by 36% since 1960. If present trends continue, by 2050, the earth will hold 248 million fewer children under 5 than it does now.
In the Western world, birthrates are falling and populations are aging. The consequences for your children and grandchildren could well be catastrophic. Imagine what Global Warming would be like – if Global Warming was real. Demographic Winter is very real – and very scary.
Simply put: Humanity is failing to reproduce itself in sufficient numbers to maintain our civilization.
In this regard, one number is crucial – 2.1. That’s the number of children the average woman must have in her lifetime just to maintain current population. This is known as a replacement-level birth rate.
In 30 years, worldwide, birth rates have fallen by more than 50%. In 1979, the average woman on this planet had 6 children. Today, the average is 2.9 children, and falling. According to the United Nations Population Division, by the middle of this century, worldwide fertility will be below replacement.
Most developed nations are already there. Remember, you need a birth rate of 2.1 just to maintain current population. In the countries of the European Union, the average birth rate is 1.5. In Italy and Spain, it’s 1.2. And in Russia, it’s 1.17. By 2015 – in just 6 years — there will be more deaths than births each year in the European Union. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of childless women who reached the end of their childbearing years doubled – from 10% to 20% — in the last 30 years.
To put this in perspective, demographers tell us that with a birthrate of 1.3, everything else being equal, a nation will lose half of its population every 45 years.
We have sown the wind and we will reap the whirlwind. To put it another way, there’s a flock of chickens coming home to roost that would do Frank Perdue proud.
Russia is a sneak preview of a disaster movie in the making. Through a low birth rate, abortion (in Russia today, there are more abortions than live births) and shorter life-spans, Russia is losing three-quarters of a million people a year. Its current population of 143 million is expected to shrink to 112 million and could go as low as 77 million by 2050.
Dick Cavett used to say: “If your parents didn’t have children, chances are you won’t either” – nonsensical, I know. But it alludes to a profound truth.
Those missing children I mentioned earlier, in turn won’t have children or grandchildren of their own. This will create an ever-accelerating downward spiral. We could even reach what demographers call population free-fall, where the survival of civilization is threatened.
In the developed world, fewer and fewer workers will be called on to support a growing number of elderly. In Europe today, there are four working-age people for every individual over 60. By 2050, the ratio will be two to one.
Currently, in industrialized nations, 20% of the population is over 60. By mid-point in this century, the proportion of elderly in developed nations will rise to 32%. By then, these nations will have two senior citizens for every child. Schools will be turned into nursing homes. Playgrounds will become graveyards.
The problem of paying for pensions aside, how will we even begin to care for a growing number of elderly with fewer and fewer people in their 20s and 30s? Can you say euthanasia?
Who will run our factories and farms? Where will the police, doctors, nurses and emergency personnel come from? What about the soldiers to defend our frontiers and freedoms? How will our economies deal with an ever-decreasing supply of producers and innovators?
Over the past 200 years, the world’s population grew from 980 million to 6.5 billion. That population explosion fueled every advance from the industrial revolution to the computer age. The same period witnessed a phenomenal growth in productivity, scientific advances, health and material well-being.
But what happens when populations begin to decline? We’ve built a civilization that depends on people – and lots of them. What happens when more and more becomes less and less?
Demographic Winter is the terminal stage in the suicide of the West –the culmination of a century of evil ideas and poisonous policies. Among them:
• Abortion – As I mentioned a moment ago, worldwide, we’re killing 42 million people a year. It’s as if an invading army killed every man woman and child in Italy – then repeated the process every year.
• Contraception – For the first time in history, just under half the world’s population of childbearing age uses some form of birth control. Some of us remember when births weren’t controlled and pregnancies weren’t planned. With all of wailing about man-made Global Warming, carbon footprints and the ozone layer, wouldn’t it be ironic if what did us in wasn’t the SUV but the IUD?
• Delayed marriage. People are marrying later and later After 35, it becomes progressively harder for a woman to have children.
• The decline of marriage and the rise of cohabitation. Not surprisingly, in relationships without commitment, people have fewer children. By the way, the left’s contribution to the coming population crisis is to push the one type of “marriage” (and I use the term advisedly) that can’t conceivably produce children.
• But perhaps the most important factor is a culture (including Hollywood, the news media and academia) that tells people that children are a burden, rather than a joy; that pushes an ego-driven, live-for-the-moment ethic; a culture that tells us that contentment comes from careers, love, friendship, pets, possessions, travel, personal growth – anything and everything except family and children. It’s a culture that can look at Sarah Palin and her beautiful family and ask why she had to have 5 children and why she didn’t abort her child with Downs Syndrome?
Abortion and declining birth rates are different aspects of a culture of death.
What can we do about the crisis that’s almost upon us? A good place to start is with the documentary, “Demographic Winter: the decline of the human family” – the first documentary about plummeting birth rates.
Speaking of falling birth rates, here’s a depressing thought: Maybe it’s God’s way of telling us that – having abused the privilege – we don’t deserve children. Deuteronomy 30:19: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you. I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.”
Think about it. What could be more fair? You choose life, and you get life – including descendants. You choose death – in the form of population control, contraception, abortion, alternative lifestyles (so-called), secularism, environmentalism, consumerism and materialism – and you get death, including no descendants.
Here’s a simple formula for understanding Demographic Winter: Those who have faith in the future have children. Those who don’t, don’t. Where does faith in the future come from? It comes from faith.
The pro-life position is based on the premise that each life, born and pre-born, is infinitely precious. How often have we heard the catch-phrase “the children are our future.” To put it another way, without children, there is no future?
Once people truly understand this, perhaps they’ll stop aborting their children. Perhaps they’ll stop preventing conception. Perhaps they’ll start having large families again. Perhaps they’ll give children the love they need and deserve. If humanity is to have a future, this is where it starts.
See the Demographic Winter website at http://www.demographicwinter.com/index.html
3,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/27/dynasties-dissed-in-political-decisions/
Dynasties dissed in political decisions
David R. Sands THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. didn't get the vacant Illinois Senate seat.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't get the Democratic presidential nomination, taking the job of secretary of state as a consolation prize.
And Caroline Kennedy and Andrew Cuomo lost out to an obscure two-term upstate congresswoman for the New York Senate seat once held by Mrs. Clinton.
Whatever happened to American democracy's traditional deference to political dynasties?
Call it Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton fatigue syndrome, or perhaps the new Obama meritocracy, but some of the most famous names in U.S. politics have come up empty-handed in recent days.
"I don't know how much of this you can tie to Obama, but it is a striking pattern," said Brian Flanagan, who has studied U.S. political dynasties as associate director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich.
"It's even more striking when you consider we've just completed the first presidential election since 1976 where there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton on the ticket and where the winner this time had no political pedigree whatsoever," he said.
Mr. Flanagan noted that it was not just Democrats who have failed to honor their elders. In the 2008 Republican presidential primary, Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the prize over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan and briefly a front-runner for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.
J. David Hoppe, chief of staff for former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi and now president of the Washington lobbying firm Quinn Gillespie and Associates, said Republicans are "monarchists" rather than supporters of dynasties, typically the candidate considered next in line.
In 1988, he noted, George H.W. Bush won the nomination not because he was the most dynamic candidate or the favorite of the party base but because he had been a "loyal, faithful vice president for eight years to Ronald Reagan."
Comments