The contents of these articles are based on Fact and Truth. Challenges are invited.
The day’s top political news:
Illinois, Obama's Home State, Holds First Primary Election of 2010
Illinois is holding the first-in-the-nation 2010 primary elections today, testing whether the voter unrest which helped elect Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts reaches all the way to Obama’s home state.
"What you have here in Illinois is a very weakened Democratic Party," Rick Pearson, a veteran political reporter for the Chicago Tribune, told ABCNews.com's "Top Line" webcast Monday. "There is no doubt that the White House is very concerned."
Voters will choose the Democratic and Republican candidates who will face off in November for governor and for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Obama. It's the first gubernatorial primary since ex-Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich was removed from office.
Backdoor taxes to hit middle class
The Obama administration's plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.
While the administration is focusing its proposal on eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn $250,000 a year or more, middle-class families will face a slew of these backdoor increases.
Millions of middle-class households already may be facing higher taxes in 2010 because Congress has failed to extend tax breaks that expired on January 1, most notably a "patch" that limited the impact of the alternative minimum tax. The AMT, initially designed to prevent the very rich from avoiding income taxes, was never indexed for inflation. Now the tax is affecting millions of middle-income households, but lawmakers have been reluctant to repeal it because it has become a key source of revenue.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100201/bs_nm/us_budget_backdoortaxes
Barack Obama’s former mentor criticizes ‘complacent Administration’
As Mr Obama prepared to release his $3.8 trillion budget, an assessment of his first year in office came from one of his most respected mentors — his former professor at Harvard Law School, Chris Edley.
President Obama’s self-confidence borders on complacency. He is ill served by senior staff, especially his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. He does not appear to be learning on the job as he did when campaigning for the White House. His Administration is too deferential to Congress, too reliant on the President’s personal charm, and as a result is regarded by its enemies as weak and ineffectual.
Professor Edley, who worked in the Clinton and Carter Administrations and is now Dean of the Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, added: “I wouldn’t give [Obama] as high a grade as President as I gave him when he was my student. I know he can do better.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7010392.ece
Opinion:
Odds and ends -- Dems in disarray…a sampling of recent headlines:
Jan. 27: White House Rejects Pelosi's Push to Freeze Defense Spending
Jan. 29: Congress to back Obama spending freeze: Hoyer
Feb. 1: Clyburn: “We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession”
Checking groundhogs today wont hide the fact Democrats are probably facing long, dark, cold days. The above headlines offer only a limited overview. Deeper probing shows a trickle of incumbent Democrat retirements on Capitol Hill that could quickly erode things and become a flood.
Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina – the third ranking Democrat, offers the incredible observation that more spending is needed to escape the current recession and address job issues. Clyburn is oblivious to the growing outrage – demonstrated in the tea party movement – of normal Americans regarding the irresponsible spending of Washington. Of course Clyburn is among liberal extremists whose lack of regard for fiscal responsibility is quite well known.
For all his fiscal problems, Obama is also burdened by a supporting cast that is doing him no favors.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi heads a list of Democrats who nettle normal Americans more and more. Most recently, word of her arrogant exploitation of her position in order to lavishly entertain those she invites aboard a huge USAF jet to travel back and forth between her home base in extreme liberal Frisco – a haunt of far left political activities – and her DC position. FOI information recently obtained by a conservative blog, reveals more than $2 million in travel and entertainment by the Speaker – over $100,000 in booze and snacks alone.
Of course, Pelosi fell apart a few months back during a news conference in which she accused the CIA of lying to Congress. The accusations have never been specified and a lid has been put on the story.
Just last week, Pelosi offered another rant, concluding with a rabid pledge to pass the Democrat health care take over scheme – even if she has to “parachute in” to carry the day.
Number two Democrat, Congressman Steney Hoyer of Maryland, was quick to support the Obama spending freeze – a clear political prank – that will have minimal impact in confronting the excessive spending of the current administration.
By the way, not much has been heard from Democrat Majority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, since he was last seen yawning and struggling mightily to remain awake during Obama’s State of the Union Address.
Today, Illinois voters will brave falling snow to vote in the first primary of the year. Democrats and Republicans will choose candidates to replace Obama. (The winner will inherit a seat barely warmed. Obama only spent about 145 days working on Senate business before heading off the begin campaigning for President.)
The probable Democrat winner – no doubt one with the nod of the Chicago Democrat Machine – is having increasing problems regarding questions involving a bank owned and operated by his family. But, what the heck? This is Chicago and the Machine can fix anything but a dead man.
Polling suggests the Illinois Senate seat is likely another pick up for the GOP.
Stay tuned…by all means.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
Republicans should take on Tax Reform
Tho Bishop
The Republican Party, fresh returned from political exile, has inherited a prime position for any political faction. They have enough votes to matter, yet have too few to actually do anything for themselves; they win by simply becoming a party of “no”, frustrating the President, his supporters and allowing the Democratic Party eat itself from within. This luxury, however, looks to be short lived – in 2010 the GOP has a possibility of taking back both the House and Senate and soon the allied Tea Parties, Neoconservatives and Independents will want the GOP to deliver their own form of “Change”.
This is why the Republican Party should issue a pre-emptive strike.
The bulk of the voting populace knows America is in big trouble right now and is desperately looking to anyone for solutions. The party that is able to bring forward solutions that make sense to the American public will control the political landscape for the near future. American political history has demonstrated the tremendous power that comes from successful populist movements and the time is ripe for another.
For this reason the Republicans should turn their sights on the trusty antagonist for every red blooded American – the IRS. The arguments that can be made against the IRS are varied, numerous and well documented – yet no one attempts to do anything. Instead of real progress being made, political parties turn the issue of taxation into a political game. Barack Obama, for example, has recently proposed tax cuts on small businesses, while at the same time allowing the Bush tax cuts (which already provided tax cuts to most small business owners) to expire.
The Republican Party should reach out and make tax reform the number one issue of the party. The GOP should open debate on the subject, bringing in expert advocates from the IRS, FairTax and flat tax taxation systems to educate Republican politicians. After deliberation, the GOP should decide which, if any, reform path the party wishes to adopt. From my own research, I believe the FairTax proposal would find the most support.
Even if the Republican Party can garner a party wide enthusiasm for tax reform, they will be unable to do anything about it until the next election cycle, which works to their advantage. Since the Democrats will either reject or ignore any proposal to look at the tax system, the Republican Party will be allowed to control the show. All of the deliberation would be controlled by the party and exploited however they saw fit. It would pit the Democratic Party in an unavoidable alliance with one of the most hated institutions in the country.
While there is much to be said about the political prowess of such a move, the practical consequences are more important and even more promising. With the American economy suffering greatly from Government intervention, a system like the FairTax would help allow business to prosper. By turning America into a country without an income tax, the country becomes a haven for the wealthy all over the world. Those that gain their wages illegally (through vice or illegal immigration) will finally pay their share of taxes and Americans have full transparency regarding their incomes.
While the Republican Party is in great shape due to the incompetence of the opposition, the party itself still lacks the strength and unity it had in 2000 and 2004. There are various factions within the GOP base, from neoconservatives to libertarians to moderate independents, and the party will need a way to unify them. The tyrannical tax system offers the common villain so vitally needed. It allows the Republican Party to point towards a single issue all Americans are effected by and gives a reason to all to not simply vote against Obama, but to vote for the party. Such a cause is in dire need.
Tho Bishop is a political science major at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He worked on campaigns for George Bush in 2004 and Mitt Romney in 2008.
2.
The Obama budget: a top Republican evaluates it
WASHINGTON – Congressman Spencer Bachus (AL-6), the top Republican on the Congressional Financial Services Committee issued the following statement on President Obama’s budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2011.
“The proposal to spend almost $4 trillion is hardly a plan to get spending under control. The American people simply afford cannot a second straight budget that spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much. While the President talked about fiscal discipline over the weekend, he has proposed the largest budget in history. We need to go through the budget line by line, keeping the interest of taxpayers first.”
3.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/global_warming_science_implode.html
Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent
The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens - yes dozens - of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the "consensus" of 2500 of the world’s climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.
We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.
Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus "science" on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :
Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest - as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.
A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heat waves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages - when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups - why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?
It's too easy to simply claim "bias." Media outlets don't pass up juicy stories that could potentially increase their readership and revenue for ideological purposes (except the New York Times - and even they could spin all of this to show skeptics to be using flawed arguments like the liberal Guardian is doing in England).
Perhaps it’s time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can't get any traction here. Blogs like Watts up with That and Climate Depot are keeping us informed of the latest from England but we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and - outside of Fox News - the cable nets.
As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people - who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his "green" plans - are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate. Until the media starts to give this story the coverage it deserves, that state of affairs will not change.
4.
How’s that PAYGO Rule Working Out for ya?
Washington, DC – In an attempt to give themselves political cover for raising the debt limit by $1.9 trillion, Democrats cut a deal to attach statutory PAYGO to the debt limit increase. PAYGO, of course, has been part of the rules of the House of Representatives since Nancy Pelosi became Speaker in January 2007. Ostensibly, this was going to rein in deficit spending. So, how’s that working out?
Great…if you like bigger deficits. The FY 2007 budget deficit (the last one under a Republican Congress) was $161 billion. The FY 2008 budget deficit (the first under the Democrats’ PAYGO rule) was $459 billion. And it gets worse from there – a $1.4 trillion deficit in FY 2009 and a projected FY 2010 deficit of between $1.4 and $1.6 trillion depending on who you listen to.
That’s right folks. PAYGO, the budget rule that was supposed to give Democrats credibility on the deficit issue, hasn’t done a thing to stop them from enacting the three largest budget deficits in history. Democrats just waive their hallowed PAYGO requirements every time they want to pass something expensive.
But statutory PAYGO will be different, right? Wrong. It’s absolutely riddled with loopholes and exemptions. Discretionary spending? Not included. That’s 40 percent of the budget right there. Exploding existing entitlements? Not included. The list goes on and on…
PAYGO isn’t the answer to the serious problem of skyrocketing deficits and debt. It’s just a sham. If Democrats were truly serious about responsible budgeting, they would make the tough choice and vote for a balanced budget. At this point, it really is that simple.
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