The Day’s top political news:
House nears vote on $550.4 billion defense bill
The U.S. House of Representatives is poised to approve a $550.4 billion defense authorization bill for fiscal 2010 that has drawn a veto threat from President Barack Obama because it contains money for fighter jets he does not want. The F-22 Raptor jet would assure the US os air superiority for decades.
The bill also authorizes $130 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the fiscal year that begins October 1.
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said it supported the overall bill but the president's senior advisers would recommend a veto unless some provisions were dropped. Liberal Democrats never support viable national defense.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090625/pl_nm/us_congress_defense_1
CBO Paints Dire Portrait of Long-Term Revenue, Spending
The nation's long-term budget outlook has darkened considerably over the past six months, and President Obama's plan to extend an array of tax cuts and other policies adopted during the Bush administration has the potential to "create an explosive fiscal situation," congressional budget analysts reported yesterday.
In a new report, the Congressional Budget Office found that extending the Bush administration tax cuts, reining in the alternative minimum tax and canceling a scheduled reduction in payments to Medicare doctors would dramatically slash tax collections at a time when federal spending would be "sharply rising." The resulting budget gap would drive the nation's debt over 100 percent of gross domestic product by 2023, the report says, and past 200 percent of GDP by the late 2030s.
Democratic lawmakers generally agree, and the budget resolution they adopted earlier this year assumes that many of the Bush tax cuts will be extended and future deficits will rise. Yesterday's CBO report highlights the cost of that trade-off.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/25/AR2009062504299.htm
Carville: GOP Could Come Back Big in 2010
Democratic strategist James Carville has sent out an e-mail for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee warning Democrats that the GOP could rebound in 2010 and take over the Senate just as they did in 1994.
In 1994, Carville writes, "things were a lot like they are today. A young, exciting president. Big majorities in Congress. We figured we'd have plenty of time to build the America we wanted.
"Republicans are hoping 2010 is the new 1994. But heck, they don't need eight new senators. If they gain just one or two, it's going to be that much easier for them to scuttle vital legislation."
Opinion:
“Cap and Trade” another Democrat scam aimed at taxing us then lying out of it.
Make no mistake about it – the so-called “Cap and Trade” legislation that will be voted on shortly, is nothing more than a hidden tax. If passed, you and I will be forced to pay from somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 a year more, up to $3,000 a year more.
Democrats deny it’s a tax, but they are being disingenuous. It IS a tax by any fair measure.
I failed to mention the reason Democrats are using to justify this new tax – Al Gore’s “Global Warming” scam. Seems to me credible scientists have shot that farce full of holes. Naturally, Obama and others are shouting we need to pass this bill right now.
The fact the measure is sponsored by Henry Waxman, the loud little man with the stupid looking mustache from California, and Ed Markey, the liberal idiot from (where else) Massachusetts. Would you even buy a used car from that pair? Now they are demanding passage of a bill so large no one has read it. (Sound familiar?)
I think Neal Boortz scored the quotation of the month in his blog this morning:
“QUICK QUESTION
When is it not going to be "the moment" for Democrat legislation? I'm getting sick of being reminded by Barack Obama that if we don't seize this moment, these opportunities will be lost forever.
"Now is the time to pass climate change legislation ..."
"This is the moment to seize our chance to pass healthcare reform ..."
"This is the moment when the seas begin to subside ..."
"We cannot miss this opportunity to stimulate our economy ..."
I'll tell you when the moment passes. It's when (if ever) the American people wake up to see what's being done to them, their country and their freedoms.”
I think that sums up the challenge in today’s Congress. It should inspire normal Americans everywhere to rise up and end the madness on Capitol Hill.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
A dangerous solution
Politicians have no business deciding what's 'excessive' pay
Rep. Tom Price
Our commitment to market principles has created our nation's storied success. Yet some in Washington are disturbingly willing to abandon liberty and principle, and inject government control into private markets.
Perhaps nowhere is this desertion of principle more appalling than in the proposed limits and regulations on compensation for private citizens. Like most plans from this administration and Congress, this "solution" only compounds the problem.
(NOTE: When Republicans assail Democrat extremism in legislation, the defense mechanism of “what’s your alternative” kicks in. Democrats and their lap dog media challenge Republicans to provide another option. Let’s speak plainly. Given the extremism of many, if not most Democrat proposals today, the best answer, the obligatory response, is a simple “NO”.)
In our mature corporate market place, new rules to empower shareholders regarding executive pay are superfluous. Those investing in companies already possess the ability to weigh in on the salaries of executives. In addition to their vote for board members, most powerfully, shareholders retain the power to register their disapproval by moving their investment to a competitor.
Some suggest that firms bailed out by Washington have an obligation to limit pay. Perhaps if our goal is to exact retribution on employees of bailout firms, this may be so. Yet if our goal is to provide the most urgent economic growth possible, reining in pay from Washington dangerously confirms that America has traded in a market economy for an economy in which politicians wield unparalleled power.
Many compensation packages in the private sector might, in fact, be "excessive." But many are not. And who should decide? Politicians or people? Like all markets, the mechanism for determining compensation is self-correcting. The danger lies in replacing markets with politicians. Are we not but one step away from Washington regulating all private sector pay?
As with the ongoing demagoguery against capitalism, efforts to limit private sector pay have more to do with populist fervor than economic recovery. If Washington finds the compensation packages of bailout firms so atrocious, the solution is to return the bailout funds to their rightful owners: taxpayers.
This new found zeal for governmental intervention into every aspect of our lives and commerce is very dangerous. The debate is a stark reminder of the slippery slope of governmental intrusion into the private sector. Without principle, we are left with ever-changing rules and uncertainty that prolongs our economic despair.
Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., is a member of the House Financial Services Committee and chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the caucus of House conservatives.
2.
Waxman-Markey: Man-Made Disaster
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Fiscal Policy: The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump.
Not since that misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey.
The 1,000-plus-page American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is being rushed to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi before anyone can seriously object to this economic suicide pact.
It's what Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, might call a "man-caused disaster," a phrase she coined to replace the politically incorrect "terrorist attack." But no terrorist could ever dream of inflicting as much damage as this bill.
Its centerpiece is a "cap and trade" provision that has been rightfully derided as "cap and tax." It is in fact a tax on energy everywhere it is consumed on everything it is used to make or provide.
It is the largest tax increase in American history — a tax on all Americans — even the 95% that President Obama pledged would never see a tax increase.
(NOTE stating this truth drives Democrats up the wall. On Fox and Friends this morning, designated cover man for this Cap and Trade bill was the hapless Steny Hoyer. When asked if this is really a tax, Hoyer acted as if someone was dropping obscenities into the conversation. Hoyer left the question unanswered – is he really that stupid, or is he simply doing Pelosi’s bidding and lying his head off to the American public?)
It's a political bill that could come to a vote now that a deal was struck with farm-state legislators concerned about the taxation of even bovine flatulence.
As part of the agreement reached Tuesday night and announced by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Beverly Hills, agricultural oversight for cap-and-trade was transferred from the Environmental Protection Agency to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Farmers hope the USDA will be less intrusive. The EPA has been tasked by a Supreme Court ruling to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from your nostrils to your lawn mower. This even covers the emissions of barnyard animals, including the methane from cows.
The American Farm Bureau warns that cap and trade would cost the average farmer $175 on every dairy cow and $80 for beef cattle. So farm-state politics trumped climate change.
We all know about farmers paid not to grow food. But now, American taxpayers apparently will be paying companies not to chop down trees. The Washington Times reports that as part of the legislation, the House will also be voting Friday on a plan to pay domestic and international companies around the world not to cut down trees.
Such offsets "would be a transfer of wealth overseas," said William Kovacs, vice president for environmental affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
So if a tree falls in a Brazilian forest, does a U.S. taxpayer make a sound?
As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million.
Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family's annual energy bill by $1,500.
Hit hardest by all this would be the "95% of working families" Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they'll be hit by this draconian energy tax.
And what would we get for all this pain?
According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050 — the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill — would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.
President Obama has called on the U.S. to "lead by example" on global warming. During the campaign, he said: "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK."
Soon we may not be able to. Other countries can just sit back and watch us destroy ourselves. Where will you be when the lights go out?
3.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/when_did_the_lowbrows_take_ove.html
When did the lowbrows take over the culture?
James Lewis
I've been trying to grasp for a truth that is so obvious that all of us know it. But it's not a polite truth, so we don't talk about it. Yet I think it's important to say it out loud, because it is a truth that haunts our national discourse.
As a nation we are under the thumb of idiots. Not just indoctrinated, or wrong-thinking, or power-hungry, or manipulative, or even malevolent people. No, I mean real lowbrows, people who constantly fall for really stupid ideas. Neanderthals. (Look at the Governor of California just running the state budget into the ground. See what I mean? That's not just incompetence. It takes special stupidity, almost a deliberate, willful absence of real thinking.)
(NOTE: What else can we expect from liberals? They even take the idiocy of political correctness seriously. That alone marks them as fools. They judge education by the degree of “diversity” involved. Huh? With liberals in charge, up is down, wrong is right, and left makes sense. Nuff said.)
The Federal EPA is about to officially declare carbon dioxide to be a pollutant. That's not just false and unscientific; it's not just an excuse for taxing everything in sight, including breathing. It's not merely wrong. It's idiotic. It marks a low point in our national conversation. Scientists or engineers with a grain of sense shouldn't be taking the EPA seriously for a second. Forget the "climate experts," with their grossly inadequate computer models. Normally intelligent people should boggle at the EPA. They are bizarre. Only the truly ignorant could fall for this level of ignorance. Or those who just can't think.
Or look at Obama's unbelievable spending spree. No sane and sensible taxpayer could possibly believe that spending trillions and trillions of dollars on blue-sky fantasies makes any sense at all; the only reason Americans aren't in open rebellion yet is that half of them can't believe it's happening, and the other half are idiots. We haven't seen the effect (yet) on our pocketbooks. There's food in the stores still, and housing has gotten cheaper. But let Obama's budget affect our wallets directly and just watch the voters explode with rage.
The Democrats in Congress are trying desperately to put the brakes on Obama's egomaniacal ambitions because they can see themselves going over the edge in 2010. In a self-respecting, intelligent culture, the Obama budget would be dead on arrival. It's an insult to our national intelligence. (His foreign policy is more of the same.)
Or look at the global warming farce, still hotly pursued by the political classes in Europe and this country, although the Australians seem to be coming to their senses. China now has more millionaires than the UK, because they use all their resources, like coal, to fire their industrial plants. They will never sacrifice a single luxury car to the cap and trade fraud. Neither will India. China and India have been under the thumb of egomaniacal socialists (in the case of India) and communists (in the case of China). They've been there, done that, seen the suffering.
No wonder those Chinese college students fell all over themselves with laughter when Timothy Geithner assured them that Obama would never spend the United States into debt. What an idiot! They laughed because Geithner's stupidity or mendacity was too obvious for words.
That's how we should all react to the miserable frauds who are now in national office.
You have to dull your senses with drugs or endless propaganda to fall for it. I've sometimes wondered how many people must have killed off their critical thinking with alcohol and drugs. I know a walking few drug casualties myself, people who just burned out their brains. I'm sure they voted for Obama.
Or maybe there's such a thing as learned stupidity. How else can so many people be so idiotic? Our national IQ has dropped to about 75: Several standard deviations below normal.
Well, we have now voted in a President for the lowbrows. Yes, Obama himself is smart enough; even smart enough to say a few years ago that he didn't feel ready for the presidency. Well, now we can see why he said that.
But legions of idiots voted for a man who was plainly unqualified, even by his own estimation, and surrounded by a bunch of malignant sociopaths like Wright and Ayers and all the rest. How could he possibly win? Well, Obama cynically appealed to the idiots -- the young, the stupid, the naive, the silly, the rock idol worshippers, and probably the drug-addled masses, all the lowbrows in the land.
That includes the idiot savants of academia. Academics have a very narrow band of intelligence, something that satirists since Aristophanes have noticed and poked fun at.
The first philosopher in Western history was Thales of Elea; Thales featured in Greek folklore as a man who walked around at night gazing at the stars only to fall into a ditch. That's probably a folksy giggle at the absent-minded professor who is constantly bumping into walls. But there's a big element of truth in it. Academics can be incredibly ignorant and dumb outside of their small areas of expertise. Professors and media scribblers generally lack human smarts. They are sure suckers for all the con artists of the day.
Obama is a smooth-talking hustler who has specialized in charming academic liberals, like a smart graduate student who needs to impress his teachers with every word. They just dote on him, like a proud parent smiling on a favorite child. He's their dream, a black man who sounds so smart.
In his press conferences he hypnotizes all the ink-stained wretches of the media. It's a sight to behold. The man swats a fly and the suck-ups of the media go ga-ga with applause, and go back and write articles about it. That's not just a reflection on their (lack of) character and judgment. It's not just their childish immaturity. It's a reflection on their brains, or rather, on all that empty space between their ears. Our media stars are just not very bright. They're idiots. That single fact explains a lot. (And yes, they are also corrupt, easily seduced, haunted by deadlines, decadent in their values, and very prone to mob thinking. But if they had any brains it might be harder to manipulate them like this. The White House just pulls their strings and they dance.)
Obama's 22 White House czars. That's really stupid. As well as a violation of the Constitution. But it's a Chinese laugh line. It's so obviously wrong and power-mad that it's not worth debating.
Legalizing drugs. That's really stupid.
Obama's power-grab over the medical sector of the economy? It's profoundly stupid.
We can insure all the uninsured people in the country for a tiny fraction of all that money. We just need to fix the tire on our national car, and this guy tries to sell us a brand-new O-mobile, it can practically fly off the lot, all on credit, long-term payments, no money down. It's gonna be free! So what if you have to mortgage your wife and children? Even if we already have two national lemons in our garage, Medicare and Medicaid, which nobody likes. Now Obee is trying to sell us on a really, really expensive dream mobile that will fix our problems forever, plus it'll be cheaper than what we have now!
Can you believe it?
That sales pitch only works for idiots.
The rise to power and fame of the real lowbrows explains a lot. It even points to an answer of sorts. Because we've all been intimidated by the Cult of Nice not to contradict anybody who comes out with a really stupid, destructive idea. We can no longer call a really stupid idea what it is. I know that I censor myself all the time. We have been taught to keep our mouths shut when a word in time might make a real difference. We have allowed the national conversation to be dumbed down.
Here's my resolution for July Fourth: From now on I'm going to call idiocy idiotic. Not nastily, but as clearly as I can. It is high time for normal, intelligent common sense to become acceptable again. I'm happy to have a respectful argument with anyone who disagrees with me. But I'm going to start saying the magic words:
That's really dumb! That's really ignorant! You haven't thought about that much, have you? Have you ever considered another side of that batty idea?
I promise to be nice.
But honest.
Pass the word.
If we all start doing it we can change the world.
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