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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Budget</title>
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		<title>The Environmentalist Eugenics of the Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-environmentalist-eugenics-of-the-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-environmentalist-eugenics-of-the-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2014 04:55:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[animal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Environmentalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[population control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220942</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Killing for "climate change." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Obama_Interior_Secretary_0f4be_image_1024w.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220943" alt="Obama_Interior_Secretary_0f4be_image_1024w" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Obama_Interior_Secretary_0f4be_image_1024w-450x346.jpg" width="270" height="208" /></a>Pick up a copy of Obama’s $3.9 trillion budget and there among the TSA fee hikes, Medicare payment cuts and the $400 million for the Department of Homeland Security to fight global warming is a curious little item.</span></p>
<p>On Page 930 of the budget that never ends is $575 million for “family planning/reproductive health” <a href="http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2014/03/06/real-question-does-obamas-budget-fund-overseas-abortions-to-protect-endangered-animals/">worldwide especially</a> in &#8220;areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.&#8221;</p>
<p>The idea that the way to protect insects, fish and animals is by preventing human beings from having children is <a href="http://www.blueventures.org/press-releases/family-planning-a-critical-consideration-for-tropical-biodiversity-conservation.html?Itemid=16">part of an approach known</a> as Population, Health and Environment (PHE) which integrates population control into environmentalist initiatives.</p>
<p>PHE dates back to the 1980s and is practiced by mainstream organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund. The Smithsonian&#8217;s Woodrow Wilson Center, which is funded partly by the US government, aggressively champions PHE eugenics and USAID funds PHE programs and <a href="https://www.blogger.com/Integrating%20Population,%20Health,%20and%20Environment%20%20Projects:%20A%20Programming%20Manual.%20Arlington">distributes PHE training manuals</a> derived in part from Wilson Center materials.</p>
<p>PHE had been baked into congressional bills such as the Global Sexual and Reproductive Health Act of 2013 co-sponsored by Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and Sheila Jackson-Lee which urged meeting United Nations Millennium Development Goals by using birth control as, among other things, a means of &#8220;ensuring environmental sustainability.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s budget is more open about its PHE eugenics agenda. While PHE backers usually claim that they want to reduce population to prevent famine and promote gender equality, the budget explicitly states that its goal is to reduce human population growth for the sake of the animals, without any of the usual misleading language about feminism and clean water.</p>
<p>The budget is a blunt assertion of post-human values by an administration that has become notorious for its fanatical environmentalism, sacrificing people on the altar of Green ideology.</p>
<p>When <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-interior-secretary-to-dying-eskimos-ive-listened-to-your-stories-now-i-have-to-listen-to-the-animals/">Obama&#8217;s Interior Secretary Sally Jewell</a> visited Alaska, she told the residents of an Eskimo village where nineteen people had died due to the difficulty of evacuating patients during medical emergencies that, &#8220;I’ve listened to your stories, now I have to listen to the animals.&#8221;</p>
<p>Jewell rejected the road that they needed to save lives because it would inconvenience the local waterfowl. When it came to choosing between the people and the ducks, Jewell chose the ducks.</p>
<p>Ducks don&#8217;t talk, but environmentalists do, and they had vocally opposed helping the people of King Cove. Jewell had received the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/">Rachel Carson</a> Award, named after an environmentalist hero <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=16987">whose fearmongering killed millions</a>. Compared to the Carson malaria graveyards of Africa, nineteen dead Eskimos slide off the post-human conscience of a fanatical environmentalist like water off a duck&#8217;s back.</p>
<p>USAID, which played a key role in the war on DDT, has openly embraced PHE. The arguments against DDT <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=16987">often focused not on saving</a> lives, but on taking them. PHE prevents children from being born, but environmentalists don&#8217;t stop with the unborn. Malaria was an even more effective tool for reducing populations.</p>
<p>Environmentalist population reduction activists originally cloaked their real agenda in claims about worldwide famine. Paul Erlich, author of &#8220;The Population Bomb,&#8221; had predicted mass starvation by the 1970s and the end of England by 2000. Today Global Warming activists set empty dates for the destruction of mankind that they themselves don&#8217;t believe in.</p>
<p>The post-human left seeks to maintain a state of perpetual crisis so that governments and corporations will be more inclined to accept even the most horrifying solutions to avoid the end of mankind. What it does not tell them is that its goal is the end of mankind.</p>
<p>In February, Population Action International and the Sierra Club sponsored a congressional briefing on PHE post-2015. Population Action International was originally founded as the Population Crisis Committee in the sixties. Its preceding organizations included the Hugh Moore Fund for International Peace which claimed that population control was necessary to defeat Communism.</p>
<p>Like the Communists, the post-human activists were adept at disguising their agenda in the concerns of the moment, shifting from national security, feminism, the coming Ice Age, mass starvation and now Global Warming.</p>
<p>Environmentalists are even attempting to shoehorn the War on Terror into their agenda as the Wilson Center&#8217;s Environmental Change and Security Program attempts to tie every terrorist conflict zone to global warming.</p>
<p>Environmentalist fearmongering has never been about saving people. Its activists, like Sally Jewell, are too busy playing duck whisperer to care about people.</p>
<p>Green programs have yet to save lives, but they do cost lives. The elderly in the United Kingdom are dying of electric poverty after facing cold winters and shocking price increases due to sustainability mandates, asthma sufferers are dying because the affordable albuterol inhalers they used were banned by the EPA, and people die in fires and floods, in natural disasters that could have been prevented, but are instead blamed on their victims by the environmentalists, who helped make them so lethal.</p>
<p>Not only do environmentalists kill, but they also profit from the deaths of their victims.</p>
<p>Elliot Morley, UK Labour&#8217;s Chairman of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, had directed that <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/flooding/10655005/The-flooding-of-the-Somerset-Levels-was-deliberately-engineered.html">flooding in Somerset should be promoted</a> because “wildlife will benefit from increased water levels.” Baroness Young, an environmental activist, who had become the chief executive of the UK&#8217;s Environment Agency, took steps to increase the possibility of flooding.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9137131/instant-wildlife-just-add-water/">she said, the formula was </a>&#8220;for ‘instant wildlife, just add water.’&#8221;</p>
<p>When the flooding came, children were trapped on buses, 7,000 homes were flooded and many residents lost everything. Environmental activists blamed global warming and &#8220;careless farming&#8221; for the floods that they themselves had engineered.</p>
<p>Survivors of the Black Saturday bushfires in Australia which killed 173 people <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/national/angry-survivors-blame-council-green-policy-20090211-83p0.html">blamed environmental regulations </a>for worsening the fires by preventing residents from clearing trees. The environmentalists blamed global warming and sent around an editorial suggesting that people &#8220;who don&#8217;t like to end up in flames&#8221; should read the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change report.</p>
<p><a href="http://naturalresources.house.gov/issues/issue/?IssueID=5921">California&#8217;s drought </a>was <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204731804574384731898375624">likewise engineered by environmental </a>activists <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/042810-531662-californias-man-made-drought.htm">who then blamed</a> their own handiwork on global warming.</p>
<p>Environmentalists wield unprecedented power over the lives of millions and yet they claim that each engineered disaster could have been averted if they had only been given even more power.</p>
<p>The left is not only becoming post-American or post-Western, but post-human, applying the same tactics that they used to target majorities in Western countries to the human race as a whole. Class war and race war are giving way to species warfare. And since the ducks cannot talk, ultimate power rests with the duck whisperers, those who speak for the animals, the fish and the trees.</p>
<p>The post-human left takes social justice to its natural conclusion, going beyond all the human categories to level mankind with the polar bear, the duck and the microbe. Total equality for the post-human left is not the equality of the rich and the poor, of men and women, of blacks and whites, or even of the First World and the Third World, but the equality of man and microbe, of a pregnant woman in a small Alaskan fishing village with a duck and a hungry California child with the Kangaroo rat.</p>
<p>The post-Human left seeks to put the species in its place. That is the final endgame of the environmentalist movement. It isn&#8217;t out to save mankind; it&#8217;s out to destroy it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<item>
		<title>Dem Senator: Cut Pay for Veterans, Not Congress</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/dem-senator-cut-pay-for-veterans-not-congress/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dem-senator-cut-pay-for-veterans-not-congress</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/dem-senator-cut-pay-for-veterans-not-congress/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 02:19:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senator Charles Schumer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[veterans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213456</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["We have taken pretty big cuts," Schumer said.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/alg-obama-schumer-jpg.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-213457" alt="alg-obama-schumer-jpg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/alg-obama-schumer-jpg-450x296.jpg" width="450" height="296" /></a></p>
<p>Who can forget the heroic sacrifices made by our congressmen and senators, the hours that they have spent downing drinks, sticking pork into bills and risking their lives in the dank and dangerous corridors of the Capitol Hill subway system.</p>
<p>We can&#8217;t ask our brave senators to take cuts. It must be those selfish greedy soldiers who should pay more. <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/schumber-veterans-budget-cuts/2013/12/16/id/542061">What they have they ever done for us</a>?</p>
<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s time for retired veterans to face cuts as the federal government looks for ways to trim expenditures, Sen. Chuck Schumer said Monday.</p>
<p>&#8220;Civilian federal employees have been cut, cut, cut. I think there was a feeling, if you&#8217;re going to cut them further, which was done, that the military retirees should have about an equal amount. It&#8217;s small,&#8221; the New York Democrat told MSNBC&#8217;s &#8220;Morning Joe.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;I think (Rep.) Paul Ryan and (Sen.) Patty Murray looked everywhere they could to try and find compromise. Everybody had to take a little,&#8221; Schumer said.</p>
<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re going to have to pay a tiny, little bit into it, which they never have,&#8221; he added.</p>
<p>But Schumer maintained members of Congress should not be forced to take a pay cut. He said they have already sacrificed, since they have not seen a pay raise &#8220;in a long time,&#8221; and explained most of them are paying more for healthcare insurance.</p>
<p>&#8220;We have taken pretty big cuts,&#8221; he said.</p></blockquote>
<p>They&#8217;re paying more for their healthcare because of a bill that they voted for. Most Americans are paying a good deal more.</p>
<p>Incidentally Senator<a href="http://apps.washingtonpost.com/politics/capitol-assets/member/charles-schumer/"> Schumer&#8217;s worth is estimated at nearly</a> a million dollars. It has gone up %79 since 2004. Few Americans could say the same.</p>
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		<title>Louie Gohmert: America Must Stop Paying Its Enemies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/louie-gohmert-government-must-stop-paying-our-enemies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=louie-gohmert-government-must-stop-paying-our-enemies</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/louie-gohmert-government-must-stop-paying-our-enemies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Mar 2013 04:37:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Defense]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[louie gohmert]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West Coast Retreat]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=182936</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can America afford to send Egypt's Islamist president F-16s? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor’s note: Below is the video of Rep. Louie Gohmert&#8217;s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. A transcript of the lecture follows.</em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/62121701" frameborder="0" width="500" height="281"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/62121701">Congressman Louie Gohmert</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> I feel like God puts things in our lives to help prepare us for the future.  And I didn&#8217;t expect to ever be a judge.  But my late mother was brilliant.  She told me all through the &#8217;80s &#8212; this was after I&#8217;d done the four years out of the army from a scholarship at Texas A&amp;M &#8212; but she&#8217;d say, you know, God meant for you to be a public servant, and you&#8217;d be a great judge.  I went &#8212; mother, I don&#8217;t want to be a judge.  I make more money than judges.  I couldn&#8217;t sit and listen to most of these guys around here.  They&#8217;re not very good.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, some are great.  But oh, my.</p>
<p>So anyway, it was after she died in &#8217;91 that I started thinking about being a judge.  Because my mother was so smart.  But a few months after she died, I get a call from the judge of a court &#8212; I had a breach of contract lawsuit coming up in about two weeks.  And the judge says &#8212; and for those of you who don&#8217;t know, it&#8217;s not appropriate to call a lawyer for one side of a lawsuit without the other being on the phone or being present.  He says &#8212; that&#8217;s a mighty fine-looking woman you had in my court the other day.  You think she&#8217;d go out with me?  And for those of you who don&#8217;t know, that&#8217;s not appropriate.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You&#8217;re really not supposed to, as a judge, date people that are coming before you for trial.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But anyway, I told him I couldn&#8217;t help him.  And then I thought &#8212; well, maybe &#8212; we obviously need a new judge.  We elect our judges.  I tried for six months to find somebody that would run against him, and nobody would.  Because people said &#8212; look, he&#8217;s the first Republican ever elected in our county, and we just kind of feel like we owe it to him to let him have whatever job he wants.  Well, nobody&#8217;s owed a public servant&#8217;s job.</p>
<p>And so anyway, I couldn&#8217;t find anybody.  I ended up &#8212; my wife and I had a piece about it, we ran it.  And it was, as I&#8217;d mentioned in one of the questions &#8212; we felt like that was our lot in life.  And so, ran for judge; judge 10 years.  And then felt like I needed to legislate, and I wasn&#8217;t going to do it from the bench.  So I left and became a congressman so I could legislate.  And then I get with some guys who are fantastic, and then some who are afraid that somebody might not like us if we really do what we promised that we would do, so that gets a little problematic.</p>
<p>But the first hearing I ever had, I&#8217;d promised &#8212; I had jurisdiction over major civil lawsuits and felonies, including death penalty cases.  And I&#8217;d promised that I was going to move this 1,000-case backlog &#8212; the longest anybody had been out on bond awaiting trial was 20 years.  I thought that was a little excessive.  And so I said &#8212; we&#8217;re going to move these cases.  So to do that, you have to set them for trial.</p>
<p>And so I had these huge hearings where the lawyer and the client had to show up.  I would call the case name, they would come up before me.  And I would say &#8212; are you the defendant?  Court reporter&#8217;s taking it all down.  And when they would acknowledge yes, I would tell them their trial date and time.  And then, if they didn&#8217;t show up, I&#8217;d revoke their bond.  And people are more quickly ready for trial if they&#8217;re in jail.  So, you know, we got the backlog moved.  I cut the backlog by over 80 percent, even though every year there were more cases filed.  So I went through thousands of cases.</p>
<p>But that first hearing, I called one case, and the guy comes up with his lawyer.  And I said &#8212; are you the defendant, so-and-so?  And before he could answer, his lawyer said &#8212; judge, my client is deaf, and we&#8217;re going to need an interpreter at the trial.  I said that&#8217;s fine, we&#8217;ll have an interpreter at the trial.  But I just need to know right now that he understands when his trial is set for.  So I looked him in the eye, and I said &#8212; can you read my lips?  And he looked me in the eye and went &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And see, I didn&#8217;t recognize at the time, but that was preparation for Congress down the road.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, when people will look you in the eye and just lie to you.  You know?  And sometimes they even smile and lie to you.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So that was preparation.</p>
<p>And in another lesson I learned, one of the judge friends I was talking to told me about a case in their court &#8212; right before a felony trial, the lawyer for the defendant jumps up, said &#8212; your honor, may I approach the bench?  Yes, what now?  And he comes up, the prosecutor comes up.  He says &#8212; I need to make a motion to withdraw as counsel.  He said &#8212; we got the jury panel sitting there, you can&#8217;t withdraw now.  He said &#8212; but I got to, judge.  He said &#8212; my client just told me, if I lose, he&#8217;s going to kill me.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And he said &#8212; I can&#8217;t &#8212; you know, I got a wife, I can&#8217;t work under that kind of pressure.  And so the judge went &#8212; oh, good grief.  So he calls the defendant up, doesn&#8217;t read him his rights or anything.  He said &#8212; look, your attorney here just told me that you said if he loses the case, you were going to kill him.  Did you say that?  And he said &#8212; yes, I did, he ought to win.  You know, I ought to be found not guilty, this is crazy.  And he said &#8212; but you understand, if I grant his motion to withdraw, and we got the jury panel here, we&#8217;re ready to go, I&#8217;ll have to delay the trial, I&#8217;ll have to appoint another attorney.  If I did all that, are you going to tell him the same thing?  And he said &#8212; well, yes I am.  No matter who the lawyer is, they ought to win.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So the judge took a deep breath and said &#8212; well, if we&#8217;re going to lose a lawyer, might as well be you, Mr. Walker.  So your motion&#8217;s denied.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So you find out, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.  You know?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And that brings me to the topic I was asked to talk about &#8212; the military and the sequester of the military.  Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.</p>
<p>But I want to remind you, all of you here &#8212; you love the Constitution, you appreciate it for what it is &#8212; the greatest founding document in the history of mankind.  And I heard somebody ask Justice Scalia once, in a little group we had &#8212; do we have the most free nation in the history of the world because of our Bill of Rights?  And he said &#8212; no!  I love the guy &#8212; well, no, of course not.  He said &#8212; the Soviet Union had a better Bill of Rights than we do.  And then I remembered, I did a college paper on that.  They did have a better Bill of Rights.  They just didn&#8217;t honor any of it, you know.  He said &#8212; no, what made us the greatest country, more freedoms than any other country in the world, is the Founders did not trust government.  That&#8217;s why.  And so they were very picky about the powers they gave government.</p>
<p>And if you look at the Preamble &#8212; we the people, in order to &#8212; and one of the specified purposes is to provide for the common defense.  You know that.  And it wasn&#8217;t enough that they used something in such general terms like that, at the beginning of the Preamble &#8212; in Article 1, Section 8, when it talks about that Congress shall have the power to provide for the common defense.  And then it goes on and sets out a whole bunch of stuff &#8212; to declare war, and one y&#8217;all talk about all the time &#8212; the granting of letters of mark and reprisal, right?  Y&#8217;all talk about that all the time &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; mark and reprisal.  Actually, a couple of us were talking about that yesterday.  And I made a mistake.  I said &#8212; Andy McCarthy and a few others &#8212; I said there were letters of reprisal granted in World War II.  And John, you said &#8212; I was thinking it was the War of 1812.  And actually, it wasn&#8217;t letters of reprisal that were granted in World War II; I went back and looked it up last night.  It was the letters of mark that were done in World War II.  The Congress granted letters of mark to Goodyear Blimp, so that they could carry guns and shoot at submarines on behalf of the government.  But anyway, not used a whole lot.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But Congress makes rules concerning captures on land and water, to raise and support armies, to provide and maintain a navy, to make regulation of the land and naval forces, to provide for calling forth the militia to execute laws of the union, suppress insurrection, repel invasions, provide for organizing, arming and disciplining of the militia; and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States.</p>
<p>Course, one of the specified duties is the power to establish tribunals, which is why when President Bush established a military tribunal, that was wrong.  He didn&#8217;t have the power to do that; that&#8217;s a congressional power under Article 1, Section 8.  And so the Supreme Court actually did the right thing &#8212; they threw it out.  And then Congress came back and set up the Military Commission Act of 2006, where it was legitimate that people who were captured could be tried in a military commission.  And that was legitimate constitutionally.</p>
<p>Now, just to do a little check &#8212; because I had to go back and check to find out for certain what the answer was &#8212; anybody here make a guess &#8212; 1962, before all of the LBJ programs, before the Great Society &#8212; what percent of our federal budget was for defense?  Anybody got a guess?  Forty for defense?  Pardon?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> 5.6?</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> 5.6?  Actually, depending on whose numbers you trust &#8212; CBO, OMB &#8212; it was between 48 to 52 percent of the federal budget was for defense.  &#8217;62.  That was before Vietnam even really got started.  We had advisors over there.  Basically half.</p>
<p>And now, right now, even before the sequester, anybody want to hazard a guess what percent of our budget is for defense?  Ten?  That&#8217;s not a bad guess, but it&#8217;s actually &#8212; depending, again, whose numbers you believe &#8212; 19 to 23 percent.  So basically, in &#8217;62, it was half.  And now it&#8217;s one fifth.  And the Great Society is the thing that&#8217;s intervening.  When we declared a war on poverty, and then got our rear ends kicked by poverty.  They didn&#8217;t even have guns, and we lost that war, you know?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>When you declare war on somebody or some thing, and 50 years later you keep getting buried every year by your enemy, it&#8217;s time to give that one up, isn&#8217;t it?  You know?  Because we&#8217;ve lost.  We were doing better before we declared the war.  But I think if we don&#8217;t get this turned around &#8212; and I&#8217;m not going to call the guy&#8217;s name, because I think he&#8217;s so wrong on so many things, but some guy called the World War II generation the greatest generation.  And they may&#8217;ve been, but I think the Founders were the greatest generation myself.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And there were great sacrifices in World War II.  But how many people would&#8217;ve had the nerve to do what the government of Virginia did, when he [said] to the artillery &#8212; why are you not firing at the headquarters of all the British officers?  And they said &#8212; sir, that&#8217;s your home.  He said &#8212; it&#8217;s where the enemy officers are; you&#8217;ve got to take it out.  They took out his home.  I mean, people would understand nowadays if &#8212; well, course, he would want to preserve his home.  Not back then &#8212; the idea was to win.  And they made those sacrifices, and they didn&#8217;t think about it.</p>
<p>So is there anybody in the history of our country, any generation, that can compete for worst generation in American history if they were so self-absorbed, so narcissistic, that they couldn&#8217;t stop spending money on their generation, even though it was for things that didn&#8217;t work and made them worse off than they were before, but they still couldn&#8217;t stop spending?</p>
<p>Can you imagine a parent going to a bank and saying &#8212; I need a loan?  For what?  I can&#8217;t stop spending money on myself, you know.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Well, I mean, we&#8217;re in the business of making loans.  What&#8217;s your collateral?  Well, I don&#8217;t really have collateral, but I brought my little children with me.  And I&#8217;m willing to sign anything you want to pledge that someday they or their children, or their children, will pay back what you loan to me.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I mean, would you consider perhaps that person was part of a really bad generation, you know?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And we&#8217;ve done it across the board.  And people who got elected for all the right reasons, and especially with the conservative wave of two years ago &#8212; the biggest conservative-wave election in our history &#8212; and they ran for the right reasons, and they got elected by people who voted for them for the right reasons.  And then, somewhere along the way, they got convinced that the only way we can really win is if we&#8217;re a team.  And we can only have one quarterback in the team, and there&#8217;s no &#8220;I&#8221; in &#8220;team.&#8221;  Somebody pointed out there is an &#8220;I&#8221; in &#8220;win,&#8221; though.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I love football, my favorite sport.  But I am sick of the football metaphors.  And as I&#8217;ve said in conference &#8212; look, I love being part of the right team.  I understand we can only have one quarterback.  But when he calls a play to run to the wrong end zone, I&#8217;m not blocking for him.  You know?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>So, a little background on the sequestration, how it came about.  Some of you remember, because you&#8217;ve mentioned to me about Cut, Cap and Balance.  We&#8217;ve had speakers brought it up.  Ron brought it up.  And that was when I first met Ron.  We had a little meeting of people that were pushing for Cut, Cap and Balance; although at that first meeting &#8212; I don&#8217;t know if you remember, Ron, but I was saying &#8212; look, this is the right thing to do.  But we need to clean it up some.  There&#8217;s not enough enforcement in here.  If we pass this thing, there&#8217;s not enough teeth for enforcement.  And it wasn&#8217;t Ron, but one of the other senators said &#8212; Louie, for heaven&#8217;s sake, this is the best we got, you got to get onboard.  And it became clear we were not going to put more teeth to make sure it was as enforceable as it should&#8217;ve been.  But it was the best thing we had.</p>
<p>And we passed it in the House.  And that was a big deal to get our Speaker to bring it to the floor.  Because it was a conservative thing to do.  And that afternoon, he was negotiating for something else.  And next day, the headlines were not that the day before we passed this fantastic concept of Cut, Cap and Balance; it was what the real negotiations were that were going on the day before.  They didn&#8217;t even talk about Cut, Cap and Balance.</p>
<p>If we want to do the right thing, we can&#8217;t just pass it in the House; we have to be willing to stand behind it, instead of saying &#8212; okay, now, that&#8217;s behind us.  Or, as our leadership did after the debt ceiling bill passed, we were actually told &#8212; well, guys, the great news is, now that we&#8217;ve got that thing passed, and the debt ceiling is off the table, now the Senate&#8217;s got all they want, so we can work on all the things we really want to work on.</p>
<p>You&#8217;re not going to pass them if you don&#8217;t have leverage to get the Senate to bring them up and vote for them.  But the good news is, now we can just work on what we want to pass.  Well, shouldn&#8217;t it be about getting it passed into law?  Is it really just about getting it through the House?  We passed a lot of great stuff, including two fixes to the sequester.</p>
<p>But when we found out what was in the sequester &#8212; and I am anal enough, I do try to read this stuff.  I read Cut, Cap and Balance before we voted on it.  I read the first 1,000-page Obamacare bill.  And that was the one voted out of committee.  And then, what came to the floor was a 2,000-page bill.  And then, the one that became Obamacare was a 2,500-page bill.  And I read all of those.  And they were a disaster.  But they were really not about healthcare; they were about the GRE &#8212; the government running everything &#8212; that&#8217;s what they were.</p>
<p>But anyway, when I found out what&#8217;s in the sequester bill &#8212; this isn&#8217;t armchair quarterbacking; this is in the fight when it&#8217;s starting &#8212; I got up &#8212; and this is one of the reasons that the only chairmanship I have is as the co-chair of the Thursday morning prayer breakfast.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Because that&#8217;s the only one the Speaker doesn&#8217;t get a voice in.  But anyway, I said &#8212; and I&#8217;m at the member mic, and Speaker&#8217;s at the front mic, and I said &#8212; in high school &#8212; I grew up in a small town in East Texas &#8212; I said &#8212; in high school, I had a friend whose father had a gambling problem.  And one night, he had almost the best hand you can have in poker at all, and he was out of chips, out of money, so he put his home on the table.  And somebody there had the one hand better, and he lost his home.  And Mr. Speaker, I&#8217;ve known since high school &#8212; I don&#8217;t care how good you think your hand is, you never put your national security or your home on the table for negotiation.  It&#8217;s non-negotiable.</p>
<p>And I was told, just calm down, Louie.  You know, the sequesters will never happen.  And I said &#8212; of course they&#8217;re going to happen.  He said &#8212; no, no, the Super Committee will reach an agreement.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And we have assurance in the sequester that it&#8217;ll reach an agreement.  Because if it doesn&#8217;t, there may be a few hundred billion dollars cut out of Medicare.  And I said &#8212; have we forgotten?  Obamacare, without a single Republican vote, cut $700 billion out of Medicare.</p>
<p>So the only way next year, in 2012, the Democrats can run a commercial condemning Republicans for caring about our rich friends, and not caring about the seniors, is if they prevent the Super Committee from reaching an agreement.  Then they can say &#8212; we cared more about our rich friends not being taxed than we did about the seniors getting healthcare, and they can run that commercial all next year.  If the Super Committee reaches agreement, they have no plausible basis to run that commercial.  So of course it&#8217;s not going to reach an agreement.  He said &#8212; it will, and you don&#8217;t have to worry about it.</p>
<p>And I think one of the reasons that the Speaker said &#8212; after I nominated Newt Gingrich for Speaker &#8212; the first words out of his mouth were &#8212; well, I love you too, Louie.  And it was heartfelt, I could tell.  But anyway &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Because in January, when we&#8217;re talking about the sequester, and the Speaker said &#8212; well, I&#8217;m going to do what I can to stop it &#8212; I got up to the microphone and reminded him what he had said in July of 2011.  I know that&#8217;s part of why he loves me so.</p>
<p>But anyway, the sequester now &#8212; after two years after the greatest conservative-wave election in American history &#8212; is now the only game in town for making any cuts.  I don&#8217;t think we got a choice.  As we&#8217;ve been told repeatedly, maybe the greatest national threat is our overspending.  We got to make some cuts.</p>
<p>But as far as the cuts to the military, let me just give you some facts.  Over the next 10 years, the 285-ship navy could decline to 230.  These are estimates made by different sources.  That&#8217;s the smallest level since 1915.  And of course, you know that&#8217;s around the time we started building our navy, and Roosevelt &#8212; Teddy &#8212; not FDR, but the other Roosevelt &#8212; sent the navy around the world, and we became and international player.</p>
<p>And by the way, it was the Democrats, as they have now admitted, that actually forced the sequester on us.  And you may&#8217;ve heard a replay, but in November of 2011 the President of the United States said &#8212; I&#8217;m quoting &#8212; already, some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts.  My message to them is simple &#8212; no.  I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending.  Was his idea.  Was his staff&#8217;s idea.  And then he comes out and condemns us repeatedly for these horrible sequesters we came up with?</p>
<p>Now, I know some of y&#8217;all have said &#8212; you guys have just got to call him for the lies.  In the Senate and in the House, the rules are the same.  And y&#8217;all got to understand, if we get up on the floor of the House, or Jeff or Ron get up, as they would like to, and say, you know, this is a lie that the President has told, then you&#8217;re the one that gets in trouble.  Because you have violated the rules of decorum of the House and Senate.  You can&#8217;t do that.</p>
<p>Now, one article awhile back said some people are getting dangerously close, like Louie Gohmert, who said &#8212; now, we know under the House rules that the Speaker cannot lie.  But whoever&#8217;s putting those words in his teleprompter sure is.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So anyway &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But the Air Force says that they will likely lose 200 or more airplanes.  The current average &#8212; so you understand &#8212; current average of our planes in the Air Force is 22 years old.  And the average for tankers is 47 years old.  The House Armed Services Committee says sequestration cuts would likely include terminating the Joint Strike Fighter &#8212; best plane we&#8217;ve come up in decades.  It could cause the scratching of the new strategic bomber, delaying new submarines, shrinking aircraft carrier fleet, and terminating our coastal combat ship program.  It is serious stuff.</p>
<p>And one of the things I think you&#8217;ll see is being talked about is that we will likely have a bill that will &#8212; and I don&#8217;t know what the Senate will do &#8212; gosh, I wish Jeff and Ron were in charge down there, wouldn&#8217;t that be awesome?  But somebody else is, who is from a place where they like to gamble.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Oh yeah, so it&#8217;s a gamble, let&#8217;s cut our military down to nothing, you know, whatever.</p>
<p>But the release statement from House Armed Services Committee is &#8212; precisely at the moment when advanced military technology is spreading around the world, sequestration would force America to make severe cutbacks eroding our technological advantage.  So we&#8217;re talking about a bill that would give the military some flexibility, so that they don&#8217;t have to leave somebody stranded somewhere.</p>
<p>Course, the military would never leave somebody stranded, say, if we had somebody hypothetically in Benghazi.  If they were left to their own devices, they would probably, if they&#8217;re left to their own devices, get a plane there in quicker than 20 hours &#8212; hypothetically.  But anyway, that may be a bill that you&#8217;ll see go through.  It could end up, hopefully, passing both houses; at least give the military some flexibility.</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;ve heard a lot of people say &#8212; but if it&#8217;s across-the-board cuts, it&#8217;s kind of dangerous to single out the military for exceptions where they don&#8217;t have to have the same cuts.  Folks, it&#8217;s not across-the-board 11 percent cut, as it is for most every department.  The military &#8212; it&#8217;s going to cut &#8212; well, let&#8217;s say, around $85 billion will be cut the first year.  That&#8217;s the first year of sequester.  Half of that is of the military.  It&#8217;s not across-the-board 11 percent.  It whacks the military harder than anybody.  So it is a very serious cut.  But again, we&#8217;ve got to make cuts.  And hopefully, we can allow them some flexibility to fix that after the cuts occur.</p>
<p>So the other thing that breaks my heart, and is so opposite common sense &#8212; and some of y&#8217;all have pointed out &#8212; but remember, in Washington, common sense isn&#8217;t common, and I get that &#8212; but we keep rewarding our enemies under this administration.</p>
<p>You know, I was real little, in elementary school, and we had a couple of bullies.  One of them was about two heads taller than me.  He had failed two or three grades.  And I learned, you can&#8217;t pay a bully to respect you.  You actually have to take your football helmet and whack him in the back of the head when he doesn&#8217;t see it coming, before he&#8217;ll leave you alone for the rest of your life.  And actually, people noticed in high school &#8212; he blocks better for you than anybody else playing quarterback.  I don&#8217;t know, we&#8217;re good friends.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But you respect each other.  But you don&#8217;t do it by paying your enemies.  And I have more and more members of Congress say &#8212; Louie, I&#8217;m quoting you, I don&#8217;t usually give you credit, but my line has been, for eight years &#8212; you don&#8217;t have to pay people to hate you; they&#8217;ll do it for free.  You know?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And we keep paying countries.  For heaven&#8217;s sake, even sending them F-16s and tanks.  And mark my words, those tanks and F-16s will someday kill Israelis and Americans.  It&#8217;s not a smart idea.  Even though there are people who are good friends, who say &#8212; look, it&#8217;s not like you think, Morsi is going to get thrown out, and we still have good connections with the military.  I said &#8212; yeah, right, but he threw out the people that were against him and put in people that could control [them].  They&#8217;re not our friend.  Oh yeah, they&#8217;re our friend.  So when Morsi goes out, we&#8217;ll have this friendly force in Egypt.  Are you kidding me?  You don&#8217;t take a chance like that.</p>
<p>And again, I don&#8217;t find that those who betray Israel will be blessed.  It&#8217;s not going to happen.  And I was asked by Dr. Bob, you know, what&#8217;s the most frustrating thing &#8212; it&#8217;s people who you&#8217;re close to who end up not doing the right thing or breaking promises.  Because you expect the Left to be who they are.  And I know, from some of the comments, there are a number of Jewish people here &#8212; I&#8217;m sick and tired of people who are Jewish feeling they&#8217;ve got to beat themselves up for some reason and beat up Israel.  That&#8217;s got to stop.  Israel is the greatest friend we&#8217;ve got.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>So it&#8217;s time to get over that.  And there is an old concept &#8212; you encourage your friends, and you go after your enemies.  Khadafi didn&#8217;t just abandon his nuclear program.  Because all of a sudden, there was newfound respect.  We invaded Iraq.  And he threw up his hands and said &#8212; what do you want to know?  You can come in, you can &#8212; you know, he was scared.  That&#8217;s how you get respect.  Another way of hitting them in the head with a football helmet when they&#8217;re not looking, you know?  You have to make sure they understand.</p>
<p>Mike [Lorren] and I have talked about this.  And he said the reason Iran is not stopping &#8212; it&#8217;s not because Israel is not a credible threat to attack them.  Everybody believes Israel is quite capable of going ahead and attacking them, but that&#8217;s not deterring them.  The reason they&#8217;re continuing is because the United States is not a credible threat to attack them.  If they honestly believed that we would attack them, they would stop today.  Immediately.  But they don&#8217;t think we will.  And I&#8217;m hearing behind the scenes that this administration has put so much pressure on the Israeli government that they &#8212; well, let&#8217;s say that they may&#8217;ve decided they can&#8217;t do anything because of the threats from this administration.</p>
<p>Now, the people that helped get Obama elected, who think Israel is a good idea, need to wake up and tell him they&#8217;re our friends, let&#8217;s preserve them.  And then it would happen.  Because that&#8217;s the only kind of thing he responds to.  But he throws our friends under the bus and rewards our enemies.  And I&#8217;ve taken all kinds of grief by saying &#8212; with what he has done in Egypt, in Libya &#8212; he has jumpstarted the new Ottoman Empire.  And I&#8217;ve been called all kinds of names.  But look at the map.  Look at what&#8217;s happening, and surrounding Israel.  And there will be a price to pay for being such an enemy, in reality, to Israel.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t know if anybody here noticed, but back in May of 2010, I read that the United States government, for the first time since Israel came back into existence, had sided with all of Israel&#8217;s enemies and demanded that they disclose any and all nuclear weapons.  You may not have noticed, if you noticed that, that it was within two days, the flotilla leaves Turkey to go challenge the Gaza Strip blockade.  It&#8217;s not an accident.  You study history, you know that a nation&#8217;s enemies, upon seeing that nation&#8217;s greatest ally moving away from them, are provoked into moving against them.  It&#8217;s just the way it works.</p>
<p>North Korea thought that South Korea &#8212; some people say it was not the cause, but it was certainly timely &#8212; when you had an administration official say South Korea is basically outside our sphere of influence, North Korea moved south.  I mean, it&#8217;s provocative.  And when we show distance between us and Israel, it provokes Israel&#8217;s enemies, who are our enemies.  So why not be a friend &#8212; even if you don&#8217;t like Israel, why not be a friend to the enemy of our enemies that want to destroy us?</p>
<p>You may not be aware, the Northern Alliance, now called war criminals by this administration, fought and defeated the Taliban completely within four months.  You remember that?  By October, we&#8217;d found out where the training occurred, where the terrorist camps were in Afghanistan.  The Taliban was involved.  We didn&#8217;t send 100,000 troops over there; we sent less than 500, around 300 embedded Special Operations, military, and some intelligence.  It&#8217;s one of their greatest victories.  Within four months, the Taliban was totally routed.</p>
<p>And then, a major mistake &#8212; and I didn&#8217;t know this until I met with the Northern Alliance officials overseas a few times, once in Afghanistan, a couple of times other places, where they felt safer.  But we told them they had to turn in all the weapons we gave them to defeat the Taliban.  Said you gave back everything?  Well, not everything.  But we also had given them aerial support.  And they defeated the Taliban without a single American being killed.  You know, there were some hurt.  Riding in a wooden saddle for 10 days caused blood blisters on some of our guys&#8217; rear ends, but nobody was killed.  And these guys, now called war criminals, that we&#8217;ve abandoned, that are going to be targeted for killing the minute we pull out &#8212; they did our bidding, and they defeated our enemy.</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;ll do this very quickly.  But we don&#8217;t have to have any more people killed in Afghanistan to win.  And I know a lot of people hadn&#8217;t thought about it.  But meeting with the Northern Alliance, there&#8217;s a number of things very clear that we could do, and we could be out sooner than the President says.  We should&#8217;ve been out years ago.  Occupiers don&#8217;t do real well in that part of the world.  Somebody that knew history said &#8212; well, Alexander the Great &#8212; he conquered that area.  He died on the way out.  I don&#8217;t count that as a big win.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But anyway, it&#8217;s a tough place to try to occupy.  And we became occupiers after we won.  And we forced this centralized government on them, when they&#8217;ve never been centralized.  And you can&#8217;t have a centralized government there unless it&#8217;s really corrupt.</p>
<p>And I didn&#8217;t know, until I really got involved &#8212; under the constitution we gave them, each region or state does not get to elect their governor.  The president, President Karzai, appoints them.  You think there are any kickbacks involved?  They don&#8217;t get to elect their mayors.  We gave them this constitution and said Sharia law is the law of the land.  The last Christian church meeting publicly has had to abandon it.  The last publicly professing Jew has had to leave.  After we gave them this government.  They don&#8217;t get to &#8212; they appoint the police chiefs &#8212; think any corruption there?  Karzai says there&#8217;s none, so I&#8217;m sure he&#8217;s right.</p>
<p>But anyway, the Northern Alliance guys say &#8212; look, if you will just help us amend our constitution, allow us to elect our governors, allow us to elect our mayors, select our own police chiefs, it&#8217;ll help end the corruption, and it will strengthen our regions.  And if you make our government more like yours, where &#8212; they don&#8217;t realize how little power the states have &#8212; but where the states have most of the power, then we can stop the Taliban.  The way it is, they can knock off the top people in the centralized government, and they&#8217;ve taken over.  But if you give the power back to the states, we can keep them from taking over.  But you got to let us elect our people in our own areas.  Why wouldn&#8217;t Americans be for that?  Why did we give them a government full of corruption?  Well, we did.</p>
<p>And I said &#8212; well, what makes you think that we could have that kind of power, to get an amendment through that would be that sweeping a change?  And Massoud, whose brother was called the Lion of [Pashtun], the great hero from the Russian fights, the one person that they believed could&#8217;ve united all of Afghanistan with America&#8217;s help &#8212; they killed him the day before 9/11.  The Taliban knew what they were doing.  We didn&#8217;t know what was going on.  They knew.  We figured out [they will unite] behind Massoud.</p>
<p>Well anyway, his brother, a smart guy &#8212; but he said &#8212; our Afghan budget in American dollars is around $12.5 billion.  He said &#8212; do you know how much of that we pay ourselves with Afghan money that we collect as a government?  No.  $1.5 billion of the $12.5 billion comes from us.  The other $11 billion comes from other countries, and that means mainly you.  You think you&#8217;ve got some leverage to help us get an amendment through our constitution?  Well gee, maybe we do.</p>
<p>Anyway, I met with Dana Rohrabacher and some Baloch officials.  They&#8217;re the largest part of Pakistan.  They have most of the natural resources in Pakistan; that&#8217;s where they get their natural resources.  And they&#8217;re tired of being terrorized.  The Pakistani government thinks the way to keep them suppressed is go through, terrorize their town, kill, rape, destroy crops, tear them up, keep them subjugated to the radical Islamic government, basically.</p>
<p>And I had a thought.  And next time we met with the Northern Alliance officials, I said &#8212; what would you think if some of us in the US government started pushing for an independent Balochistan?  And half of them didn&#8217;t speak English.  But after the interpreter interpreted, even General Dostum &#8212; all their eyes got big, and Dostum said &#8212; that would change everything.  The arrogance of Pakistan would go away overnight.  You would see them coming to you.</p>
<p>Dostum said &#8212; I was meeting with some &#8212; he&#8217;s a legend over there because of his legendary fighting.  But he said the Pakistani leaders were saying recently &#8212; we&#8217;re sick of the United States.  Now they&#8217;re offering the Taliban to buy them offices in Dubai, to let their criminals out of prison.  They ought to be buying us stuff.  We&#8217;re the ones supplying the Taliban.  They ought to be offering us bribes, not the Taliban; they&#8217;re just our puppets.  And he said &#8212; you start talking about an independent Balochistan, that attitude will change overnight.</p>
<p>So I did an op-ed.  And Dana said &#8212; you and I agree on a position.  I had one line in there that mentioned Balochistan.  I said maybe it&#8217;s time to start talking about an independent Balochistan, since the supplies are coming through the Baloch area to the Taliban, to weaken the Taliban and to take them down.</p>
<p>A week later, I get an English translation of an op-ed in Pakistan&#8217;s largest newspaper.  And they referred to this congressman from Texas named Louie Gohmert, who is now is now advocating for an independent Balochistan &#8212; that obviously being from Texas, he knows all our natural resources come from the Baloch area.  And I&#8217;m sure, being from Texas, they want &#8212; you know, Texas just wants their natural resources.  And surely, a congressman wouldn&#8217;t bring something up like that unless it was all the talk behind the scenes in Washington.</p>
<p>But anyway, they said &#8212; regardless of the motivation, maybe it is time to change the strategy of our military away from terrorizing the Baloch people, try to work out a peace with the Baloch people, and stop supplying the Taliban, and worry more about Pakistan than the Taliban in Afghanistan.  There are ways to win without killing more Americans.</p>
<p>This last thought &#8212; one of the fathers of one of the Seal Team Six members that got a target on their backs after Vice President Biden outed the seal team &#8212; they went to the briefing by the military for family members of Seal Team Six members that were killed on the Chinook, that were ambushed.  And I&#8217;ve read the C130 transcripts of the cockpit that was watching all this, was told they couldn&#8217;t fire at these people because there might be civilians in the area.  They watched them dissemble their equipment and fade back.  And they asked for permission to take them out and was denied &#8212; there might be civilians in the background.</p>
<p>And the family members didn&#8217;t even know this, but one of the fathers said &#8212; since you knew this was such a hotspot, and nobody had been able to land there recently, why didn&#8217;t you just send in a drone?  And the admiral said &#8212; because we&#8217;re trying to win the hearts and minds of their people.</p>
<p>Folks, that&#8217;s not the purpose of the military.  We give the military money, it ought to be to kick rears, break things, and come home.  And we could do that in Afghanistan without getting another American killed if we just empower the enemy of our enemies.  We should not be the worst generation in American history, but that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re headed.</p>
<p>So I thank God for you caring enough do all you do to contribute, to learn, to read, to talk to people.  Because there&#8217;s still hope.  I&#8217;m still running for Congress because I know there&#8217;s still hope.  And you&#8217;re part of that hope.  And I really believe, if we&#8217;ll keep pushing and do the right thing strategically, we don&#8217;t have to be the worst generation in history.  We can be one of the better generations.  Because on the brink of complete failure of the system that the Founders created, we brought it back and put it on the right path.</p>
<p>Thanks for letting me be here with you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> My question is about the sequestration process &#8212; what&#8217;s in store &#8212; with an eye on baseline budgeting, what the cuts really are going to be in the short term, and whether it&#8217;s a manufactured crisis that&#8217;s being peddled by Obama and, if so, is there an upside for us?</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> Well, going back to front &#8212; I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a manufactured crisis.  I mean, there&#8217;ve been plenty of those.  The Fiscal Cliff was a manufactured crisis.  We keep manufacturing these.  But it&#8217;s not &#8212; it is a manufactured crisis as far as financially for the country.  I mean, manufactured in the sense that this has been coming for a long time, it really is a problem, we can fix this &#8212; it&#8217;s not a crisis, but we got to start now.</p>
<p>But yeah, the baseline budgeting &#8212; and by the way, I filed a bill, in all four Congresses I&#8217;ve been in, to eliminate the automatic increase in every budget and go to a zero-baseline budget.  I heard Rush Limbaugh talk about it in the &#8217;90s, when I was a judge, never dreaming that I would be in a position to do something.</p>
<p>But anyway, I actually got a promise from Speaker Boehner that he would being the bill up.  I said &#8212; I don&#8217;t care whose name is on it.  If you will promise &#8212; and he promised.  He said &#8212; but all I&#8217;ll promise is if Paul Ryan brings it out of committee.  Well, I got a promise from Paul he&#8217;d bring it out of committee.  He&#8217;s been on my bill every time, and he supported it.  Back in &#8217;05 and &#8217;06, when we were in the majority, the Chairman of the Budget did not want to support it.</p>
<p>So it passed the House last year, year ago.  And I&#8217;ve got to give credit, you know, Speaker Boehner kept his word.  He brought it to the floor after Paul committee-passed it.  They had Rob Woodall, a great &#8212; well, he was freshman last year &#8212; on the Budget Committee, put his name up front on it.  And he and I are working to do that again.</p>
<p>It mainly is cutting the rate of growth.  But the trouble is, it&#8217;s more than that for the military.  It really is going to hurt the military.  The $42 billion in cuts &#8212; that is a real problem.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> (Inaudible question &#8212; microphone inaccessible)</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> Yeah.  All of that is manufactured.  Yeah, he&#8217;s asking about the long delays at the airport and all that.  Now, understand, you could very well have those.  I know when I was at the Army in Fort Benning, when President Carter was President, we had severe cuts.  And I thought some of the big perks for some of the flag officers would go away.  None of those went away.  It was all the things the public could see that got cut first.  So I think you can anticipate that.</p>
<p>And those could very well be real delays.  They could be, you know, very real problems with planes.  Because it&#8217;s likely the President will give orders so that it will at least appear he wasn&#8217;t lying about this.  But you can expect a show of problems, but I think they&#8217;ll be self-inflicted.  I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;re necessary.  It&#8217;s just a matter of priority.  But you can expect that, and you need to be ready to answer.</p>
<p>There were all kinds of fat in their budget at TSA and other places.  They just made the cuts where they would hurt people the worst to try to make the point.  And then you can point out to your Democratic friends &#8212; which is why you need to become a Republican &#8212; any party that would go about hurting the public just to make a point is not somebody you ought to be supporting in the next election.  So anyway, you&#8217;re going to feel it, but not because you have to.</p>
<p>Now, let me make this point &#8212; all of the government agencies are supposed to get an 11 percent cut.  One of the things I&#8217;ve been mad at my leadership about is not the fact that they forced us to cut our own House budgets by 11 and a half percent over last two years.  We were able to do it.  We have one less employee in my office than we used to have.  So we got nine where we had 10 in the Washington office.  So we all adjusted in the House.</p>
<p>The Senate &#8212; you know, Harry Reid was not about to cut the Senate&#8217;s budgets over the last two years.  But the thing is, that gives us the moral authority to tell every agency, every department, we did it to ourselves.  And by the way, I think that&#8217;s good politically.  People in America don&#8217;t know we cut our own budgets.  Use that for the moral authority to say to every department and agency &#8212; we did it to ourselves, now we&#8217;re doing it to you.  And you can do this.</p>
<p>Well, instead, this sequester &#8212; on top of the 11 and a half percent we cut our own budgets in the House &#8212; cuts another 11 percent.  We will have cut nearly 23 percent in three years from our own budgets.  And as my Chief of Staff has said, you know, we&#8217;re in a war here to save America, and we keep cutting our own supply line while the other side is not cutting their supply line.  But those will be real cuts in the House for our own staff.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Louie, I was really incensed when I heard that the government gave F-16 planes to Egypt and to their man, Morsi.  So I told a Democratic friend of mine &#8212; aren&#8217;t you incensed about that?  His answer was &#8212; do you want China to supply those planes?  How do you respond?</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> Actually, there is such unrest there.  If China is foolish enough to get embroiled in that, it will cost them tremendously.  That act would cost them, it would hurt them.  They might think it&#8217;s an opportunity.  But it kind of reminds me what my former preacher used to say about sin.  He says &#8212; it will keep you longer than you meant to stay and cost you more than you meant to pay.  And I think that&#8217;s what would happen if China gets involved.</p>
<p>But when I was in Israel, talking to one of the ministers, about a year ago, he said &#8212; oh, you just missed the Chinese emissaries.  They come very regularly, and especially when they think that the US has done something to snub us.  And they come by, and they say the same thing every time &#8212; are you ready to acknowledge that the US is really not your friend?  Are you ready to acknowledge that they will throw you away just like they have their other allies?  Because we know one of these days you&#8217;re going to come to that realization.  And when you do, just give us a call.  We&#8217;re ready to be your friend, and we&#8217;ll be a better friend than the United States has ever been.  They do that routinely.  They move in Africa, they move in South America.  They move where we anger people.  And it would not be &#8212; it&#8217;d be the same thing in Egypt.</p>
<p>But good grief, what a mistake for them to get &#8212; see, they&#8217;re still concerned about the Uighurs and the radical Islamists in China.  It would be very dangerous, they&#8217;d have to understand, to help give that a jumpstart again.</p>
<p><strong>John Lott:</strong> Yes, thanks very much for your great speech this morning.  My name is John Lott.</p>
<p>I was just wondering &#8212; when you&#8217;re talking about this $40 billion &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> The John Lott?</p>
<p><strong>John Lott: </strong> Right, [I guess so].</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> You and I have talked.  I appreciate so much everything you do.</p>
<p><strong>John Lott:</strong> Oh, well, likewise.  Anyway, thank you.</p>
<p>In the military right now, we&#8217;re spending like $10 billion a year on green energy type things.</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> Yeah.  You&#8217;re right.</p>
<p><strong>John Lott: </strong> There&#8217;s other things.  So why?  Is maybe part of the response just to point out the things that the President would be cutting are important, and yet he has these pet projects that are wasteful &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> That&#8217;s a great idea.  That&#8217;s a great idea.  And you&#8217;re right, we&#8217;re spending about $10 billion on green energy for the military.  That&#8217;s insane.  But even without checking, I can guarantee you that will not be something that gets cut by this administration.  So even if we pass the bill, as I hope we do, to give the military more flexibility, I&#8217;m sure that will be one of the things that won&#8217;t get cut.  So that&#8217;s something &#8212; I&#8217;m already thinking I got to get that on a poster and use it on the House floor.  So thank you for reminding &#8212; great, great comment.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Thank you for all you&#8217;re doing.  This is kind of a devil&#8217;s advocate question &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> [Lead to what?]</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> &#8212; put the brakes on spending.</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> Yeah.  It is outrageous.  The people that got elected in the bigger conservative-wave election two years ago ran on that very issue.  Most of us ran on that issue.  In fact, the Speaker of the House made us take the pledge.  I willingly took it.  And it said &#8212; and another reason I&#8217;m loved &#8212; I pulled the pledge out and read it to our leadership more than once, where it says &#8212; basically, if you&#8217;ll put us back in the majority, we will return spending to pre-bailout, pre-stimulus levels, which is fiscal year 2008.  And we will cut $100 billion in the first year.  We could&#8217;ve done that.  We could&#8217;ve kept our promise on that.</p>
<p>And you remember what happened &#8212; as soon as we won the majority, by January, our leadership was saying &#8212; now, remember we pledged $100 billion for a year, and the fiscal year starts October 1st.  So we&#8217;re not talking about a full year.  So we&#8217;re really talking about a two thirds of a year, so we&#8217;re really talking about, you know, maybe $66 billion in cuts, not $100 billion, because it&#8217;s only two thirds of a year.</p>
<p>And then we got to march, to the CR.  And we were told this is not really the place for a fight.  The debt ceiling in July &#8212; that will be the place we&#8217;ll take our stand and we&#8217;ll fight.  So we just kind of need to go along with this.  And then we got the final deal at 10 p.m. on Friday night, when things were going to shut down.  And it was, we were told, cut maybe $28 billion, $29 billion.  It&#8217;s not everything we had hoped, but at least it&#8217;s cuts.  And now we&#8217;re told that actually it didn&#8217;t cut $29 billion; it may&#8217;ve spent $5 billion more.</p>
<p>So we&#8217;ve gone two years without cutting.  We could cut.  And the Founders anticipated that we would be a line of defense, that we don&#8217;t have to worry about the Supreme Court, whether they say something is constitutional or not.  Because we&#8217;ve got Congress, and we have the power of the purse.  And all we&#8217;ve got to do is just shut off the money to something that&#8217;s unconstitutional.  They anticipated we&#8217;d do that.  And we haven&#8217;t.  And there is no way one dime can be spent unless the House agrees to it.</p>
<p>And I know that you&#8217;ve heard repeatedly &#8212; look, we&#8217;re only one half of one third.  Look, we&#8217;re the most important half of the legislative branch from which all money comes.  If we don&#8217;t agree to it, it doesn&#8217;t happen, they don&#8217;t get the money.</p>
<p>So if we just have the courage of our convictions, we could cut off spending to anything.  But as I told you earlier, we were told that &#8212; gee, now that we&#8217;ve got the debt ceiling bill behind us, and we&#8217;ve given him enough debt ceiling increase to get through the election, now we can go about passing the things we want to pass, that the Senate will never take up, which is what happened.  So it&#8217;s just a matter of having the courage of our convictions.  And we could do it.</p>
<p>Actually, I was inspired by Jim DeMint&#8217;s action.  And after hearing a number of House members saying &#8212; look, I&#8217;m under attack, and the only way I&#8217;m going to get help from the party is if I go along on this issue or that issue.  So I&#8217;m with you, but I&#8217;m not going to be back if I don’t tow the line on this so I can get help.</p>
<p>So I started a PAC, and actually trying to build a group &#8212; we need at least 20, and hopefully we&#8217;ll get 25 to 30 &#8212; of people who will be uncompromising.  We can force our party into doing the right thing.  Because if you have [enough, more] than the majority, then you have to be willing &#8212; and I think people in Washington know that I am &#8212; to bring down something important to your party if they don&#8217;t do the right thing on an entire issue.</p>
<p>And also, some of us have been meeting by camera with some senators, conservative Republican senators.  We&#8217;re starting to meet every couple of weeks.  And Rand has kind of pushed that.  But we&#8217;re trying to do just what you suggested &#8212; develop a strategy of consistency and then force our parties to stay consistent.</p>
<p>But you got to have strong leadership to do that.  And if you don&#8217;t have strong leadership, you&#8217;ve got to have enough of a stick over the heads &#8212; I mean, they were ready to kick Michele Bachmann off of Intelligence, and the Speaker had threatened that.  And we were able to delay that action long enough that enough people responded that it scared the Speaker&#8217;s office that they better not kick her off or there&#8217;d be a lot of people coming after the Speaker.</p>
<p>That makes a difference, when people make their voices heard.  It really does.  American people still have that kind of impact, and that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s going to take if we&#8217;re going to get anything done.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> Steve&#8217;s going to get the last question.</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> Okay, Steve.</p>
<p><strong>Steve:</strong> We would all like your strategy to win, your PAC to raise sufficient funds, to be able to hold the line.  But what is the realistic expectation for how this budget crisis winds its way out into the summer?  What do you really expect?</p>
<p><strong>Louie Gohmert:</strong> I think you&#8217;ll see the sequestration &#8212; I think our leaders are concerned enough that if they cave here at the last minute, they may end up out of leadership.  But I&#8217;ve heard that repeatedly for the last few years, and it hasn&#8217;t happened.  But I think you&#8217;ll see the sequester play out through the summer, as you bring up.  And there&#8217;s going to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.  And what we have got to do &#8212; and I&#8217;m hoping our leadership will be good about it, because actually this week, they&#8217;ve sent out a lot of good messages &#8212; this was the President&#8217;s idea.  And I think we need to hang it around their necks.</p>
<p>And like in California, the bad news is the Democrats control everything.  The good news is you ought to be reminding the public of that every day.  You don&#8217;t like something that&#8217;s going on?  You can&#8217;t blame the Republicans, because your people are controlling everything.  And once you realize the damage that they&#8217;ve been doing, then you come over and support us.  You&#8217;re a minority?  You&#8217;re tired of the way you&#8217;ve been taken for granted, and you&#8217;ve been lured into ruts you can&#8217;t get out of by government benefits, and it&#8217;s not enough to help you?  And you really want to do something with your life?  Support Republicans, and [we'll get this done].</p>
<p>This is the opportunity we have to keep pointing out the truth and drowning out all of those mainstream, lamestream media moguls that don&#8217;t do their jobs.  And so I think it&#8217;s a chance for us to do well.</p>
<p>I thought that we &#8212; I didn&#8217;t think &#8212; we had 21 people who had signed in writing, their own handwriting &#8212; I will not vote for John Boehner for Speaker, and sign their names.  We thought if we got it in writing, they&#8217;ll be afraid to back out.  Because they&#8217;ll know we can wave that around in the future.  But we had 13 that did not vote for the Speaker.  It fell apart, but at least a couple of our guys got chairmanships, you know, and some good things.  So it&#8217;s okay to break your word if you can get something good out of it.  But &#8212; that&#8217;s sarcasm, y&#8217;all.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>In Washington, people don&#8217;t recognize sarcasm, so they blast me for thinking I really mean something I say sarcastically.  If we stand firm in the House and do what we promise, it gives them more credibility with the public, to let them take back over the majority in the Senate, and the country will benefit.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m hoping that we can be the example that we should be.  And I thank you for all the help to do that.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>After Four Years, Dem Senate Passes a Budget</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/after-four-years-dem-senate-passes-a-budget/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=after-four-years-dem-senate-passes-a-budget</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/after-four-years-dem-senate-passes-a-budget/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Mar 2013 04:25:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[four years]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pass]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=182910</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A doomed effort defined by crushing taxes and government spending.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/after-four-years-dem-senate-passes-a-budget/harry-reid-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-182912"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-182912" title="harry-reid" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/harry-reid-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="202" /></a>After a series of debates beginning Friday afternoon and continuing for almost 13 straight hours, the Democratically-controlled Senate <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/23/politics/senate-budget-bill/index.html">passed</a> its first budget in four years. The $3.7 trillion blueprint for 2014, that contains almost one trillion dollars in tax increases, narrowly passed by a vote of 50-49. Every Republican voted against it, as did four Democrats facing reelection next year. One Senator, Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), was absent. “The Senate has passed a budget,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/us/politics/senate-passes-3-7-trillion-budget-its-first-in-4-years.html?_r=1&amp;">declared</a> Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA) at 4:56 a.m.</p>
<p>The marathon session is called a <a href="http://keithhennessey.com/2010/03/25/vote-a-rama/">&#8220;vote-a-rama&#8221;</a> because the Senate can conduct a series of back-to-back votes far more quickly than normal, due to a 1974 law that limits the time for debate to 50 hours, rather than the unlimited time afforded to other measures. As a result, Senators filed as many as 500 amendments. Only 101 of them were <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/senate-passes-budget-89244.html">considered</a>, but that still gave both parties a chance to force votes on a series of issues they each favored. Yet because the budget is non-binding, the voting was largely a theatrical exercise, and very little of it is likely to be enacted into law.</p>
<p>It is just as well. The plan calls for an immediate $100 billion to be spent on infrastructure &#8220;to bolster the economy,&#8221; making a mockery of the more than $800 billion in <a href="http://cnsnews.com/blog/terence-p-jeffrey/obamas-stimulus-documented-failure">stimulus funds</a> earmarked for shovel-ready jobs in 2009 that did next to nothing on that front, despite being eight times larger. A tax code overhaul that aims to bring in another $975 billion over the next ten years with filibuster-proof legislation. Those taxes are coupled with spending cuts of $875 billion, generated by modest reductions to federal health care programs, domestic agencies and the Pentagon, along with reduced federal borrowing costs.</p>
<p>Yet the net result is tiresomely familiar: ten years from now, the government will still be running a deficit in excess of $500 billion&#8211;and more than $5.2 trillion will be added to our already unconscionable <a href="http://www.usdebtclock.org/">$16.7 trillion</a> of national debt.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Patty Murray was delighted with the result. &#8220;The budget we&#8217;re debating this week puts our middle class families first,&#8221; she <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/23/politics/senate-budget-bill/index.html">said.</a> &#8220;It reflects our pro-growth, pro-middle class agenda that the American people went to the polls in support of just a few months ago.&#8221; Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the Budget Committee&#8217;s ranking Republican, saw things quite differently. &#8220;Honest people can disagree on policy, but where there can be no honest disagreement is the need to change our nation’s debt course,” he contended. “The singular truth that no one can escape is that the House budget changes our debt course while the Senate budget does not.”</p>
<p>The various amendments that won approval reflected the differing priorities of each party. They dealt with a variety of issues, including such items as raising or lowering taxes, hiring veterans, repealing Obamacare, prohibiting illegal aliens from being eligible for various government programs such as Medicaid, preventing the UN from abridging the Second Amendment, allowing states to collect Internet sales taxes, a redefinition of full-time employment, and a bid to end the mobile phone welfare program.</p>
<p>Three of the more popular amendments <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/23/politics/senate-budget-bill/index.html">dealt</a> with the approval of the Keystone pipeline by a bipartisan vote of 62-37, a 79-20 vote to <a href="http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2013/03/22/senate-passes-bill-repeal-medical-device-tax-industry-urges-house-the-same/NNnMVECmYGD9oxTW8dwlaN/story.html">repeal</a> the medical device tax, and a unanimous vote to end &#8220;too big to fail&#8221; financial advantages for any &#8220;megabank&#8221; with more than $500 billion in total assets.</p>
<p>The impetus for passing a budget for the first time in four years was likely the <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/02/05/Pelosi-Not-Happy-About-No-Budget-No-Pay-Bill">passage</a> of the &#8220;No Budget, No Pay&#8221; bill which suspended the current debt limit until May 18th, so the federal government could continue to pay its bills. One of the bill&#8217;s provisions prohibits legislators from getting paid if Congress doesn&#8217;t pass a budget by April 15. Salaries will either be held in escrow until they do, or resume being paid in January 15, when the current congressional session ends.</p>
<p>Considering the vast differences between this legislation and the House budget <a href="http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/21/17401829-house-passes-budget-for-2014-sends-2013-spending-bill-to-obama?lite">passed</a> last Thursday that brings the budget into balance by 2023, but changes the nature of entitlement programs in ways completely anathema to Democrats, it is virtually certain that no budget will be reconciled before the debt ceiling showdown. On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) revived a rule ignored in January, stating that any increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by commensurate spending cuts.</p>
<p>Yet even leaving that rule aside, passing a budget by May 18 is <em>still </em>overly optimistic. Thus, the House also passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, which lasts through September. The Senate approved that resolution, and it is expected that the president will sign it once he gets back from his trip to Israel.</p>
<p>In other words, the more things seemingly change, the more they remain the same: barring a miraculous spasm of bipartisanship, government will likely be funded piecemeal&#8211;and our unsustainable fiscal trajectory will remain unaltered.</p>
<p>Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell illuminated this undeniable reality. “Although Senate Democrats finally generated a budget after four years, the plan they produced raises taxes, increases spending and debt and never, ever balances,” he cautioned. “The only good news is that the fiscal path the Democrats laid out in their Budget Resolution won’t become law.”</p>
<p>Four Democrat Senators up for reelection in 2014 in red or red-leaning states, Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mark Pryor (D-AK), Max Baucus (D-MT) and Mark Begich (D-AK), voted against the measure. It remains the job of voters in each of those four states to determine whether those votes represent a principled stand against runaway government spending, or merely an expedient desire to get reelected.</p>
<p>In the end, the public will have to be satisfied by the fact that Harry Reid and the Democratically-controlled Senate have finally produced something that has eluded them for four years: a budget. That would be the same Harry Reid who <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/washington/04cnd-budget.html?_r=0">blasted</a> president Bush in 2008, when the former president submitted a 3.1 trillion dollar budget, later whittled down to <a href="http://federal-budget.findthedata.org/compare/111-114/2008-vs-2011">$2.9 trillion</a>, that contained a then-record of $458 billion in deficit spending. “President Bush’s fiscal policies are the worst in our nation’s history&#8211; he has turned record surpluses into record deficits&#8211;and this budget is more of the same,” Reid said at the time.</p>
<p>Yet as far as Reid is concerned, passing a $3.7 trillion budget that includes no plan whatsoever to bring spending and revenues into alignment, even as it contains a projected deficit of $700 billion, and adds an additional $5.2 trillion to the national debt, is now considered <a href="http://my.news.yahoo.com/us-senate-approves-budget-first-093107362.html">&#8220;a Herculean feat.&#8221;</a></p>
<p>Such overt hypocrisy ought to be laughable. Unfortunately,  the seemingly inexorable march towards national bankruptcy this irresponsible budget represents, is no laughing matter.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>No Money for Traffic Control Towers, But $700 Mil Available for Palestinian Terrorists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/no-money-for-traffic-control-towers-but-700-mil-available-for-palestinian-terrorists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=no-money-for-traffic-control-towers-but-700-mil-available-for-palestinian-terrorists</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:07:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinian authority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sequester]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=182871</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Should the needs of the American people come before those of the Palestinian people... or should the needs of the terrorists come before those of Americans?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_182872" style="width: 487px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/no-money-for-traffic-control-towers-but-700-mil-available-for-palestinian-terrorists/us-democratic-presidential-candidate-barack-obama-waves-upon-his-arrival-for-a-meeting-with-palestinian-president-mahmoud-abbas/" rel="attachment wp-att-182872"><img class="size-full wp-image-182872" title="US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama waves upon his arrival for a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/abbas-obama.jpg" alt="" width="477" height="302" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Wave bye bye to another $700 million in taxpayer money</p></div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Budgets are all about priorities. Some things don&#8217;t matter, like<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-budget-priorities-2000-marines-vs-1-billion-for-muslim-terrorists/"> 20,000 United States Marines</a>, <a href="http://www.pottsmerc.com/article/20130324/OPINION03/130329724/ralph-r-reiland-cutting-white-house-tours--sparing-the-waste">White House tours</a>, the space program and<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/22/faa-to-close-14-air-traffic-towers-citing-sequester/"> air traffic control towers</a>.</p>
<p>But some things <a href="http://patdollard.com/2013/03/obama-quietly-unblocks-500-million-for-palestinians/">do matter&#8230; like aiding terrorists</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>The United States has quietly unblocked almost $500 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority which had been frozen by Congress for months, a top US official said Friday.</p>
<p>“To date, we have moved $295.7 million in fiscal year 2012 money… and $200 million in fiscal year 2013 assistance,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.</p>
<p>The Obama administration also notified Congress in late February that it was seeking a further $200 million to fund US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs for the Palestinians, she said.</p></blockquote>
<p>And that brings us up to the $700 million<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obama-fires-20000-marines-but-sends-700-million-to-palestinian-terrorists/"> that Kerry was discussing last month</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is fighting to send the Palestinian Authority nearly $700 million in aid, despite major budget cuts and a fierce debate over where existing money should go.</p>
<p>“The Secretary feels extremely strongly that it is time now to get this support to the Palestinian Authority,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.</p>
<p>Kerry is working with lawmakers to “get appropriated money released for the Palestinian Authority because we think it’s very, very important that they remain effective in supporting the needs of the Palestinian people,” Nuland said.</p></blockquote>
<p>The question is should the needs of the American people come before those of the Palestinian people&#8230; or should the needs of the terrorists come before those of Americans?</p>
<p>Kerry and the rest of Obama Inc. clearly believe that Palestinians should come before Americans.</p>
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		<title>The Budget Battle Begins</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-budget-battle-begins/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-budget-battle-begins</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-budget-battle-begins/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:40:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Federal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=181148</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Democrats and Republicans: worlds apart.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-budget-battle-begins/ap13031215369-fcaabc814aaf280a1c668e0c884e507e2d3818db-s6-c10/" rel="attachment wp-att-181150"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-181150" title="ap13031215369-fcaabc814aaf280a1c668e0c884e507e2d3818db-s6-c10" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ap13031215369-fcaabc814aaf280a1c668e0c884e507e2d3818db-s6-c10-436x350.jpg" alt="" width="262" height="210" /></a>On Tuesday, House Republicans and Democrats <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/us/politics/ryans-plan-aims-to-balance-budget-in-10-years.html?_r=0">unveiled</a> budget plans that illuminate the wide ideological divide between the parties when it comes to dealing with the nation&#8217;s burgeoning debt and unsustainable entitlement programs. Despite that divide, both parties contend that a bipartisan deal can be reached.</p>
<p>The House Democratic <a href="http://democrats.budget.house.gov/sites/democrats.budget.house.gov/files/documents/dem_alt_summary_3.pdf">budget</a>, written by Rep. Chris Holland (D-MD), the House Budget Committee’s top Democrat, is an effort to offer a different vision than the one proposed by Republican Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). Holland&#8217;s plan focuses on <a href="http://democrats.budget.house.gov/sites/democrats.budget.house.gov/files/documents/dem_alt_tables.pdf">reducing</a> the percentage of the deficit relative to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from 6.1 percent in 2013, to 2.7 percent by 2022. Yet despite Holland&#8217;s contention that his plan will &#8220;reduce the deficit in a balanced and credible way, making difficult choices while providing investments that help create jobs now and build an even stronger economy for the future,” there is no point in his timeline where a balanced budget is achieved. After the year 2017, the point where the debt as a percentage of GDP reaches a low of 2.3 percent, and remains there through 2018, that percentage begins to rise again, reaching 2.7 by 2022.</p>
<p>The same goes for the level of deficit spending. The <em>lowest</em> level of deficit spending Holland&#8217;s budget achieves is $451 billion in 2017. (For perspective&#8217;s sake it is worth noting that the <em>highest</em> level of deficit spending during the <a href="http://www.gop.gov/policy-news/12/10/09/u-s-officially-records">eight years</a> of the Bush administration was $458 billion). After 2017, the deficit begins to rise again, reaching $675 billion in 2022. As for the national debt, Holland&#8217;s plan burdens the nation with another $6 trillion-plus, added to the already unconscionable $16.7 trillion debt we have already accrued.</p>
<p>The short-term aspects of Holland&#8217;s plan are a rehash of President Obama&#8217;s proposals. On the spending side, the plan includes $80 billion education spending, $5 billion for police and firefighters, and $50 billion for infrastructure. Apparently the $865 billion stimulus program, purportedly aimed at the same targets, was insufficient. On the tax side, class warfare remains in play, as the &#8220;Bush tax cuts&#8221; would remain permanent for the &#8220;middle class,&#8221; while another $1 trillion will be raised by raising taxes on &#8220;millionaires,&#8221; closing tax loopholes, and enacting the so-called “Buffett Rule,” where millionaires will not be able to pay lower tax rates than the middle class. With respect to spending cuts, Holland proposes $80 billion in reductions to mandatory government programs, including &#8220;agriculture direct payments, improvements to the solvency of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation,&#8221; and &#8220;no funding for Overseas contingency Operations after 2014.&#8221; In other words, unspent money on un-fought wars is also counted as a &#8220;reduction&#8221; in spending.</p>
<p>Entitlement programs? Nothing in this budget proposes any concrete reductions in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) program, despite the reality that those programs, along with military spending, are the main drivers of our unsustainable debt load.</p>
<p>The House Republican budget, authored by Paul Ryan, is a 91-page <a href="http://www.c-span.org/Events/House-Budget-Chairman-Releases-Budget-Proposal/10737438723/">plan</a> designed to balance the federal budget by 2023, cutting $4.6 trillion in federal spending over the same period. In Ryan&#8217;s plan, projected revenue would <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2013/03/12/ryan-plan-seeks-balanced-budget-in-10.html">remain</a> the same, including the recent tax increase on upper income earners that was part of the fiscal cliff deal. And like Holland, Ryan proposes an overhaul of the tax code, eliminating a number of deductions that Americans currently enjoy. Ryan gets more specific on the end game, proposing only two different tax brackets of 10 and 25 percent for individual Americans, and lowering the corporate tax rate from its current 35 percent, the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/03/30/no-joke-obama-corporate-tax-rates-are-worst-in-world/">world&#8217;s highest</a> when state taxes are included, to 25 percent.</p>
<p>Unlike Holland, Ryan tackles entitlements. First and foremost, he would repeal Obamacare, eliminating the insurance exchanges the administration tried to make mandatory before they were ruled unconstitutional. A $750 billion reduction in Medicare spending enacted as part of health care reform would be used to shore up the Medicare trust fund. Medicare&#8217;s retirement age would eventually be increased for Americans under age 55, and its costs would be controlled by offering seniors federally funded vouchers to buy private insurance at a level that would be capped. Spending on Medicaid and food stamp programs would be would be sent back to the states in the form of block grants, reducing overall spending on the programs in the process.</p>
<p>Regarding deficit spending, the plan <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/12/us-usa-fiscal-idUSBRE92B0ZE20130312">envisions</a> deficits of  $528 billion in 2014, $125 billion in 2015 and $69 billion in 2016, as well as a $700 billion reduction in interest payments on the debt, due to less borrowing.</p>
<p>A third plan is <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/03/12/dueling-budget-plans-opening-gambits-in-bigger-fight/1982555/">reportedly</a> in the works, courtesy of Senate Democrats who will unveil the details today. Anything proposed by them would be an improvement on their recent track record, in that they have failed to produced a budget of any kind in over four years. Their plan will call for a $1.85 trillion reduction over the next decade, achieved through a fifty-fifty combination of taxes and spending cuts. the $85 billion in cuts triggered by the sequester will be replaced by &#8220;targeted cuts&#8221; that give the president more flexibility. Yet once again, like their counterparts in the House, Senate Democrats will keep Medicare spending off the table.</p>
<p>As for President Obama&#8217;s budget plan, right now there isn&#8217;t one. Yesterday the White House <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/12/obama-delays-budget-until-april-slams-ryans-plan/">announced</a> it would delay the release of it budget until early April&#8211;even though that is two months past the legal deadline for doing so. In other words, once again Obama is &#8220;leading from behind.&#8221; Yet even as Obama the took a pass on his legally required duty, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was sent out to read a statement <a href="http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2013/03/12/White-House-slams-GOP-budget-plan/UPI-53581363089335/">trashing</a> Ryan&#8217;s proposal. &#8220;While the House Republican budget aims to reduce the deficit, the math just doesn&#8217;t add up,&#8221; it said. &#8220;Deficit reduction that asks nothing from the wealthiest Americans has serious consequences for the middle class. By choosing to give the wealthiest Americans a new tax cut, this budget as written will either fail to achieve any meaningful deficit reduction, raise taxes on middle class families by more than $2,000&#8211;or both.&#8221;</p>
<p>Thus, the battle begins, with the idea of reaching an agreement by late July or early August. Considering that both sides remain at ideological loggerheads, such a timeline may be optimistic. Add  an overhaul of the tax code to the mix, a gargantuan effort despite being an idea shared by both parties, and the timeline becomes almost fantastical.</p>
<p>As for the public, two surveys show that Americans have a real appetite for reducing government spending&#8211;as long those reductions are applied to &#8220;someone else&#8217;s&#8221; programs. A <a href="http://images.politico.com/global/2012/12/07/121207_battlegroundpoll.html">poll </a>taken in December 2012 by <em>Politico/</em>GWU/Battleground revealed that more than three-out-of-four Americans favored cutting government spending &#8220;across the board.&#8221; Pew Research Center <a href="http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/02-22-13%20Spending%20Release.pdf">survey</a> taken a month ago reveals that &#8220;across the board&#8221; is a euphemism. Of the 19 categories surveyed, including such items as aid to the world&#8217;s needy (foreign aid), environmental protection, Medicare, education and 14 others, not a <em>single item</em> garnered a majority of Americans willing to cut spending. The closest was foreign aid with 48 percent of Americans willing to cut back spending overseas. Yet 49 percent said keep it the same or increase it.</p>
<p>The ideological divide between the parties can only be exacerbated by such a public disconnect&#8211;meaning genuine leadership will be necessary to bring the public around. Around to what remains a mystery. Yet one thing remains completely <em>un</em>-mysterious: our current fiscal course is unsustainable, and despite all contentions to the contrary, entitlement programs <em>must</em> be overhauled. Democrats may call that reality &#8220;draconian.&#8221; Yet absent draconian changes, nothing less than bankruptcy awaits. Denying reality may be politically advantageous for Democrats&#8211;but only until reality itself can no longer be denied.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Plutocrat Jack Lew Is Confirmed, But Sessions Embarrasses Democrats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-hinderaker/plutocrat-jack-lew-is-confirmed-but-sessions-embarrasses-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=plutocrat-jack-lew-is-confirmed-but-sessions-embarrasses-democrats</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-hinderaker/plutocrat-jack-lew-is-confirmed-but-sessions-embarrasses-democrats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Mar 2013 04:20:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Hinderaker]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[confirmation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jack Lew]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jeff sessions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[treasury department]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=179509</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A senator's plea for the Congress to reject the architect of Obama's ruinous economic agenda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-hinderaker/plutocrat-jack-lew-is-confirmed-but-sessions-embarrasses-democrats/jeff-sessions-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-179510"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-179510" title="jeff-sessions" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/jeff-sessions-450x338.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="203" /></a>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/02/plutocrat-jack-lee-is-confirmed-but-sessions-embarrasses-democrats.php">PowerlineBlog.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Jack Lew, the <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/02/jack-lew-an-object-lesson-in-plutocracy.php">plutocrat</a> nominated as Secretary of the Treasury by Barack Obama, was confirmed by the Senate this afternoon on a 71-26 vote. What was notable about the vote was not so much the outcome as the challenge that Senator Jeff Sessions threw down before his Democratic colleagues–try to defend Jack Lew, and if you can’t defend him, don’t vote for him. One thing is for certain: the Democrats had zero interest in trying to defend Lew’s record. They spoke for a total of 17 minutes on his behalf, while Sessions spoke for 2 1/2 hours, in several installments through the day.</p>
<p>Sessions’ closing statement was an eloquent indictment not only of the plutocrat Lew, but of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. It is quoted here in its entirety:</p>
<blockquote><p>During my remarks today I have exhaustively documented the case against the confirmation of Mr. Lew. I have detailed his disastrous budget plans, rebuked by editorial boards across the country and unanimously rejected by Congress.</p>
<p>I have discussed his repeated, knowing, and deliberately false statements about those budget plans–most notoriously his claim that “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.”</p>
<p>As I close my remarks, I would appeal to my colleagues to oppose Mr. Lew.</p>
<p>I would appeal to my colleagues to defend the integrity of the Senate, to defend the right of our constituents to hear the truth from government officials, and to defend the idea, the very concept, of truth itself.</p>
<p>I would also like to place this in a wider context.</p>
<p>Today is the 1,400th day since Senate Democrats passed a budget. Why has this gone on so long? Because they decided it would be better to offer no solution, no plan to help struggling Americans, and instead to tear down anyone who dared to offer a plan to solve our nation’s economic problems.</p>
<p>This is the heart of the problem here in Washington right now. We have one political party that sees the budget debate as exercise in political warfare, not problem-solving.</p>
<p>At the center of this strategy is the White House.</p>
<p>In his campaign for re-election, President Obama repeatedly said that he had a plan to “pay down our debt.” He even ran a campaign ad saying: “I believe the only way to create an economy built to last, is to strengthen the middle class—asking the wealthy to pay a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way. So we can afford to invest in education, manufacturing, and home-grown American energy, for good middle class jobs.”</p>
<p>But this is all totally false.</p>
<p>Again, this was the strategy: offer a plan that does nothing to alter our dangerous debt course while pretending the opposite.</p>
<p>Then, once you’ve done that, attack anyone who dares to reduce the size of the bureaucracy. Attack anyone who suggests Washington is too powerful. Attack, attack, attack–while never offering anything to help Americans who are struggling every day.</p>
<p>After the White House budget was submitted in 2011, President Obama spoke at George Washington University and, with Congressman Paul Ryan sitting in front of him, and said:</p>
<p>&#8220;One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives…It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years…But the way this plan achieves [that goal] would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history…This is a vision that says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. And who are those 50 million Americans? Many are someone’s grandparents who wouldn’t be able afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down’s syndrome… These are the Americans we’d be telling to fend for themselves.&#8221;</p>
<p>Majority Leader Reid said of one Republican reform effort that it was “a mean-spirited bill that would cut the heart out of the recovery that we have in America today… It goes after little children, poor little boys and girls… We want them to learn to read.”</p>
<p>This is how the White House and Senate Democrat leaders approach the budget debate. It’s the same strategy with the sequester. And Republicans, candidly, have not done enough to stand up to these egregious slanders. Voting against Jack Lew would be a vote against these dishonest tactics. These misrepresentations of fact.</p>
<p>The painful truth is, the White House strategy has been largely successful up until now. President Obama and his Senate Majority have blocked fiscal reform and continued our path to fiscal disaster.</p>
<p>It is time that we pointed out that the establishment they are shielding from cuts–the big-government apparatus they are defending–is hurting people every day. Their policies, their endless support of the bureaucracy, has created poverty and joblessness and dependency. In cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago–governed almost exclusively by Democrats at every level–good, hardworking people are hurt every day by the policies of the Left.</p>
<p>* In the city of Baltimore, one in three children live in poverty. One in three Baltimore residents are on food stamps.</p>
<p>* In Chicago, there were roughly 500 homicides in 2012. Fifty-one percent of the city’s children live in a single-parent family.</p>
<p>* In Detroit, almost one in three households had not a single person working at any time in the last 12 months. The city’s violent crime rate is among the worst in the country. More than half of all Detroit children live in poverty.</p>
<p>This should not happen. These are the consequences of leftist policies. We are fighting to create jobs, to create rising wages, to create opportunity, to help more people earn a good living and care for themselves financially. We are trying to lift people out of poverty, to strengthen family and community. And we are trying to protect the good and decent people of this country from a debt crisis.</p>
<p>Where does Mr. Lew stand? Where does the White House stand?</p>
<p>They did everything they could to defend the bureaucracy–no matter the cost in wasted tax dollars or lost jobs. Mr. Lew submitted an indefensible budget plan that would have caused further social and economic devastation, deliberately misled the nation about that plan, and then participated in a strategy to shut down GOP efforts at reform.</p>
<p>I urge my colleagues to reject these tactics from the White House. I urge them to stand up for the good and decent people of this country and to oppose Mr. Lew.</p></blockquote>
<p>For now, Democratic Party plutocrats are firmly in the saddle. But the handwriting, perhaps, is on the wall. Their policies have failed, again and again; they have no plan to rescue the nation’s finances; they have nothing to offer but slander and hate. Won’t the day inevitably come when they get what they deserve?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Cheated: Sham Education for Minority Students in Dem-Run Philadelphia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/philadelphia-students-cheated-by-democrat-run-education-system/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=philadelphia-students-cheated-by-democrat-run-education-system</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Feb 2013 04:37:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=176284</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Another Democratic stronghold, another wasteland of public schooling. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/philadelphia-students-cheated-by-democrat-run-education-system/arlene-ackerman/" rel="attachment wp-att-176304"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-176304" title="Arlene Ackerman" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/AP110525047806.jpg" alt="" width="274" height="203" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the third in a series of FrontPage articles that will unmask the racial injustice of Democrat-controlled education by examining some of the nation’s worst (and biggest spending) school districts. Read our previous reports on the public school systems of  <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/dc-democrats-sell-minority-students-education-short/">Washington, D.C.</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/detroit-public-schools-bankrupting-minority-students-futures/">Detroit</a>. </em></p>
<p><em></em>The Philadelphia public school system is on the verge of implementing what the <em>New York Times</em> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/education/philadelphia-district-may-close-37-schools.html?_r=1&amp;">refers</a> to as &#8220;unprecedented downsizing&#8221; of its public school system. As many as 37 campuses, representing one of out every six public schools in the city, is slated to close by June. For those familiar with the failures that underscore union-controlled, Democrat-dominated big city public schools systems, the impetus behind these closures is unsurprising: once again we have a system with huge budget deficits that must reconciled. And once again, the brunt of that reconciliation will be borne by the city&#8217;s black American school children.</p>
<p>Some Philadelphians are up in arms. Just recently, as the City&#8217;s School Reform Commission neared its decision on which schools will be shuttered, United Action, a group of activists, clergy and elected officials, presented a <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2013-01-29/news/36598408_1_philadelphia-school-closings-public-schools-facilities-plan">analysis</a> of the initiative, demonstrating that such closures disproportionately affect minority, poor and disabled students. Moreover, they have gotten the U.S Department of Education involved in pursuing a civil rights investigation as a result. The <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em> obtained a letter from the Department to that effect, confirming that it would look into United Action&#8217;s contention that the &#8220;district adopted a school closing and consolidation plan&#8230;that has a disparate, adverse impact on African American and Hispanic students, and on students with disabilities.&#8221;</p>
<p>There is a bit of irony attached to this effort. The analysis was compiled by the Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools (PCAPS). PCAPS is comprised of Action United, other community organizations &#8212; and the district’s teachers union. Thus, while this seemingly noble effort is ostensibly aimed at stopping such closures to prevent their adverse effects on children and their parents, the reality is that 1,100 teachers would also be affected by the consolidation.</p>
<p>Yet PCAPS presents numbers that, if accurate, are nonetheless compelling. Of the approximately 15,000 students who would be caught up in the ensuing chaos, 81 percent are black American, in a school district where the overall number of black students is 56 percent. Twenty-four of the 37 schools that would be closed are more than 90 percent black American.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the Philadelphia School District (PSD) presents a reality that is equally, if not more, compelling. First, there is the problem of under-used schools. There are currently 195,000 available seats in Philadelphia schools. A staggering 53,000 of them are empty, forcing the district to maintain buildings it can no longer afford. Thus, despite borrowing more than $300 million to get through the current school year, the PSD remains $27.6 million in the red, with no relief in sight: over the next five years the total deficit is expected to hit $1.1 billion. That number reflects a cut of $419 million in financing from the state this year, as well as the end of federal stimulus funds.</p>
<p>Yet as it is with so many municipalities across the nation, the shortfall is also driven by ever-increasing pension costs paid to retired educators. Taxpayer contributions to Pennsylvania public pension funds in general are expected to <a href="http://www.statebudgetsolutions.org/publications/detail/pa-budget-chief-says-pension-reforms-essential">rise</a> by $1.5 billion in the fiscal year that ends in June, to nearly $3 billion by 2014-15. By 2019-2020, more than $5 billion will be required to maintain that funding. For perspective&#8217;s sake, it should be noted that the <em>entire</em> state budget for this year less than $27.7 billion.</p>
<p>All of this chaos, only the latest in a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/a-defeatist-plan-to-restructure-philadelphia-public-schools/2012/04/28/gIQAjRSanT_blog.html">series</a> of reform attempts promised by city official over the course of years, has produced the typically dismal results one has come to expect in Democratic-controlled urban school centers with large minority populations. In 2011, city officials, much like their counterparts in Detroit, were congratulating themselves for a 3 percentage point <a href="http://thenotebook.org/february-2012/124482/district-time-graduation-rate-surpasses-60-percent">increase</a> in the on-time, four-year graduation rate from Philadelphia public schools&#8211;up to 61 percent. The six-year graduation rate for the freshman class of 2005 (whose four year rate was 56 percent) was also 61 percent&#8211;two points <em>lower</em> than the previous high for the PSD. Again, the reality that nearly two-in-five students fail to graduate is apparently cause&#8230;for celebration.</p>
<p>The sharp decline in student enrollment should not be surprising considering this systemic failure. Like the other cities chronicled in this series, the racial achievement gap in the PSD follows a familiar pattern. In 2009, a <a href="http://thenotebook.org/blog/091541/naep-report-achievement-gap">report</a> by the National Center on Education Statistics revealed that Pennsylvania had a 33-point gap between white and black students &#8212; predominantly trapping failing urban schools &#8212; in fourth grade reading scores, one of the largest in the nation. In eighth grade math scores, the gap was a gargantuan 36-point divide. Since 45 percent of the state&#8217;s black Americans live in Philadelphia, it remains the epicenter of this achievement gap.</p>
<p>At the high school level, there is also an “excellence gap.” Only <a href="http://dropoutnation.net/2012/03/12/americas-woeful-public-schools-two-districts-show-how-poor-and-minority-students-lose-out-on-college-prep/">18 percent</a> of black students took Advanced Placement courses in math in 2009, compared to 34 of white students, and 52 percent of Asian students. Only 3 percent took A.P. science classes, compared to 22 percent of whites and 39 of Asian students. Overall, only 18 percent of black students took at least one A.P. course, compared to 34 percent of white students, and 52 percent of Asian students who took one. Furthermore, a ten-year report released in 2010, chronicling Philadelphia students who entered public high school in 1999, <a href="http://thenotebook.org/october-2010/102930/new-data-only-10-philly-students-earn-degree">reveals</a> that only one-in-ten earned either a two-year or four-year college degree a decade later.</p>
<p>As bad as those gaps are, there is another, far more pernicious one, namely a &#8220;reality&#8221; gap. In 2010, education officials were again congratulating themselves for gains made on the state-administered standardized test known as the PSSA. The test purported to show that district-wide proficiency rates in the eighth grade math and reading scores had <a href="http://thenotebook.org/blog/102640/8th-straight-year-pssa-gains">reached</a> 57 percent and 51 percent, respectively, ostensibly representing the eighth consecutive year of growth. Eleventh graders&#8217; proficiency rates &#8220;soared&#8221; as well to 45 percent in math and 38 percent in reading, representing the highest one-year gain recorded. Yet even in the midst of this “success,” the achievement gap remained at 22 points.</p>
<p>However, as it is in so many urban school systems, the far less successful results <a href="http://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/research/detail/pennsylvanias-academic-performance-and-implications-for-charter-school-reform">posted</a> on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests reveals the fraud that localized testing has become. Every achievement score posted by Pennsylvania&#8217;s fourth and eight grade students on the NAEP test was lower than that posted on the PSSA. The gaps were stark. For example, on the 2011-2012 PSSA test, 81 percent of fourth graders were proficient or advanced in math and 72.1 percent were proficient or advanced in reading. On the NAEP test, those numbers cratered to 48 percent and 41 percent, respectively. Moreover, charter schools, the bane of public school status quo-ers everywhere, far outperformed the PSD. In a measurement known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) only 13 percent of Philly&#8217;s public schools made progress compared to 53 percent of their charter schools.</p>
<p>One would think such test score disparities might elicit outrage. One would be wrong. In 2011, Dan Piotrowski, the executive director of accountability and assessment for the PSD, ignored the obvious. “The best news is of course that grade 4 reading and math are both showing gains,” he said at the time, even as he acknowledged that Pennsylvania should re-assess its standards, but not necessarily with regard to the gaps between PSSA and NAEP. “If we see a curriculum or standards disconnect, we should be addressing it not necessarily so that the students do better on NAEP, but that they are getting everything they need to prepare for high school and college and further on.”</p>
<p><em>If</em> they see a disconnect? How about if they discover outright cheating? Currently there is a state <a href="http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/44439-philly-schools-promoted-some-principals-who-ran-schools-now-under-suspicion-for-cheating?Itemid=1&amp;linktype=hp_impact">investigation</a> being conducted involving 53 PSD schools for cheating perpetrated by <em>adults </em>on the state&#8217;s standardized tests. Part of it centers on the &#8220;miraculous&#8221; results garnered by students at Strawberry Mansion High School in 2009, when more than 66 percent of its students scored proficient or above on the exams. Lois Powell-Mondesire was principal at the time these scores were registered. When she left, the miracle apparently left with her. On last year&#8217;s spring exams, just over 10 percent of the students were proficient.</p>
<p>Again, one might think that Lois Powell-Mondesire might be disciplined or, at the very least, viewed with a great deal of skepticism. Not in Philadelphia. In 2010, the former principal was promoted. She now commands a salary of $145,000 for her new job advising other principals on how to turn around struggling schools.</p>
<p>She is not alone. Although no one has been formally charged with cheating as of yet, there are a number of disturbing correlations between administrators whose schools turned in questionable gains on tests, and rewards for those administrators, including tenure. Furthermore, such rewards are continuing to be made, even as district officials became aware of exams containing evidence of questionable erasures.</p>
<p>Michael Josephson, a leading national expert on ethics and education and the president of the non-profit Josephson Institute of Ethics characterizes such behavior as &#8220;willful blindness.&#8221; &#8220;There&#8217;s a deliberate looking the other way,&#8221; he contended.</p>
<p>Looking the other way might also be an apt description for a new disciplinary policy that was <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2012-08-18/news/33249350_1_dress-code-new-code-principals">implemented</a> in September. The new code of conduct engendered by School Reform Commissioner Lorene Cary was put in place, which has watered down requirements for disciplining students. One of those new standards does <em>not</em> allow for the suspension of students who use profane language. A fight or drug use <em>may</em> result in either out-of-school suspension, which has been primarily used to control bad behavior, or an in-school suspension instead. Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. explained the reason for the change. &#8220;We can&#8217;t suspend our way to higher student achievement. We can&#8217;t arrest or suspend our way to safer schools,&#8221; Hite told principals during a three-day safety summit last August. In other words, rather than the students adopting the no-nonsense culture of a school system run by adults, the adults are watering that culture down to accommodate the students. The code explains the capitulation. &#8220;Though there can be no excuse for behavior that harms or disrupts, there may be reasons that caring adults in school need to understand. We educate the whole child,&#8221; it states.</p>
<p>That is hardly the case. Moreover, like so many failing, big city school districts around the nation, Philadelphia is a Democratic stronghold. The party has run the city virtually <a href="http://brettmandel.com/content/are-democrats%E2%80%99-days-philadelphia-numbered">unopposed</a> for sixty years, and in the 2012 presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney didn&#8217;t get a <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/year-in-review/20121112_In_59_Philadelphia_voting_wards__Mitt_Romney_got_zero_votes.html">single vote</a> in 59 voting districts clustered in the almost completely black sections of West and North Philadelphia. Thus, in a city where 80 percent of 11th-graders read below grade level, 85 percent can&#8217;t do grade-level math and only 25 percent even bother to take the SATs, the status quo is being embraced&#8211;even as it is black American school children whose futures are being disproportionately mortgaged by that status quo.</p>
<p>It is impossible to underestimate the irony that attends massive black support for the political party that has produced decades of substandard education for inner-city wastelands. While the Left coaches minorities, particularly blacks, to unquestioningly believe that their disadvantages can be laid at the feet of &#8220;racist&#8221; Republicans or &#8220;racist&#8221; white America, it is clear who the real oppressor is. As former Presdient George W. Bush put it, the &#8220;soft bigotry of low expectations,&#8221; marches on, unimpeded.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama, Not GOP, Retreats on Debt Ceiling</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obama-not-gop-retreats-on-debt-ceiling/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-not-gop-retreats-on-debt-ceiling</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:39:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tom Blumer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[But who will have the upper hand when the new extension expires? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obama-not-gop-retreats-on-debt-ceiling/r-obama-economy-rhetoric-large570-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-174769"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-174769" title="r-OBAMA-ECONOMY-RHETORIC-large570" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/r-OBAMA-ECONOMY-RHETORIC-large5702.jpg" alt="" width="247" height="188" /></a>If it&#8217;s so obvious that the President and Democrats in Congress have the upper hand in discussions about raising the nation&#8217;s debt ceiling, why did Barack Obama and his administration backpedal on a threat he made just ten days ago?</p>
<p>At his first term-ending <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/01/14/president-obama-holds-news-conference#transcript">victory lap news conference</a> on January 14, Obama told reporter Major Garrett that he would not accept a short-term extension of three or fewer months of &#8220;the so-called debt ceiling&#8221; &#8212; that&#8217;s what a sneering Obama actually called it in his introductory remarks &#8212; in these specific words:</p>
<blockquote><p>[W]e shouldn’t be doing this on a one to three-month timeframe. Why would we do that? This is the United States of America, Major. What, we can’t manage our affairs in such a way that we pay our bills and we provide some certainty in terms of how we pay our bills?</p>
<p>&#8230; I’m not going to have a monthly or every-three-months conversation about whether or not we pay our bills. Because that in and of itself does severe damage. Even the threat of default hurts our economy. It’s hurting our economy as we speak.</p></blockquote>
<p>On Wednesday, the House of Representatives led by Republican Speaker John Boehner passed a three-month extension of the debt ceiling from February 18 to May 19. It included an <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/23/opinion/avlon-no-budget-no-pay/index.html">interesting</a> but <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/no-budget-no-pay-congress-2013-1">debatably effective</a> provision that is &#8220;designed to stop all pay to members of Congress until they pass a budget.&#8221;</p>
<p>The previous day, as the White House signaled that it &#8220;welcomed the (expected) move,&#8221; Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2012/04/09/ap-the-administrations-press-and-propagandists/">the Administration&#8217;s Press</a>, <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_FISCAL_FIGHT?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2013-01-22-03-16-15">falsely characterized </a>it as a &#8220;retreat&#8221; &#8212; by the House, with Obama headlined as having stood his ground. Nice try, Jim and AP; no sale. Even though you and the rest of the press won&#8217;t report it, the reality is that Barack Obama is the one who retreated from a supposedly firm position on the very first day after his second inauguration.</p>
<p>Please note that the &#8220;bills&#8221; Obama wants Congress to unconditionally &#8220;pay&#8221; were almost entirely created or committed to during the first half of Obama&#8217;s first term when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.</p>
<p>Reported spending during the final eight months of fiscal 2009 Obama&#8217;s first eight months in office &#8211; after <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2010/04/13/ap-cites-dramatic-march-deficit-reduction-due-to-non-cash-item-out-of-control-spending-continues/">correcting</a> for <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2009/05/31/the-federal-deficit-gets-indecipherable/">accounting shenanigans </a>&#8211; <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">averaged almost $280 billion</a> per month, a record up to that point. Ordinarily, one would say that Obama inherited that level of spending from predecessor George W. Bush, as the budget for fiscal 2009 should have been a done deal by September 2008. But it wasn&#8217;t. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (with then-Senator Obama firmly in their corner), banking on Obama defeating John McCain in November, effectively forced Bush to either accept continuing resolutions extending past the end of his term or risk the media-fed wrath of voters by shutting down the government just as the economy was tanking and the Democrat-driven housing mess arrived.</p>
<p>Once Obama took office in January 2009, Pelosi, Reid, and Obama, that terrible triumvirate of Democratic Party plunderers, worked on ramping up spending immediately &#8212; and as it has so far turned out, irrevocably &#8212; by passing a &#8220;stimulus&#8221; plan which stimulated nothing except higher spending and <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2012/09/12/43-months-of-depressing-misery/">economic malaise</a>.</p>
<p>Fiscal 2009 was just a warm-up. Since April of that year, Reid&#8217;s Senate has refused to pass a budget, putting spending into autopilot. Outlays (again after adjusting for accounting tricks) averaged <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">$298 billion per month</a> in fiscal 2010, and <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">broke the $300 billion per month barrier</a> in fiscal 2011.</p>
<p>Faced with Reid&#8217;s intransigence, Speaker John Boehner and his Republican House majority lacked the nerve to change the trajectory of spending during the rest of fiscal 2011, betting that they would have a better shot trying to control spending in fiscal 2012. Though in hindsight Boehner&#8217;s decision was a tactical blunder, that doesn&#8217;t change the fact that Pelosi and Reid, with Obama eagerly accepting their continuing resolutions, are responsible for <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">the $9.4 trillion in spending</a>, the $3.7 trillion in deficits, and the $4.2 trillion increase in the national debt which occurred from February 2009 through September 2011. Those Democrat-caused &#8220;bills&#8221; are the ones Obama wants the current Republican House to unconditionally &#8220;pay.&#8221;</p>
<p>Though it&#8217;s way too early to give the House any positive credit, it clearly didn&#8217;t cave to Obama&#8217;s press conference demand. Wednesday afternoon, Reid, who has usually thrown spending-related House bills into the trash can upon receipt and prevented the Senate from even considering them, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/harry-reid-senate-will-pass-house-debt-ceiling-bill-86617.html?hp=l1">falsely claimed victory</a> and said that the Senate will pass the House bill as is.</p>
<p><a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DEBT_LIMIT?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT">Another AP report Wednesday </a>by David Espo characterized the Republicans&#8217; move as &#8220;retreating with a purpose.&#8221; The purposeful retreaters are really in the White House.</p>
<p>As I <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2013/01/22/four-years-later-all-he-can-say-is-an-economic-recovery-has-begun/">noted on Monday</a>, there are good reasons to believe that the economy is once again sputtering. Economic growth in the fourth quarter appears to have <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-11/us-q4-gdp-25-sub-1-under-six-months">slowed by at least half</a> from the previous quarter. Job growth has continued to be unimpressive compared to what is needed to make a meaningful dent in the number of unemployed, under-employed, and discouraged. Though it was masked by a quirky seasonal adjustment calculation, raw initial jobless claims for the week ended January 12 were higher than the analogous week in 2012, the first time that has happened in a truly comparable full business week comparison <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2013/01/17/initial-unemployment-claims-335-sa-nsa-layoffs-up-by-almost-6-year-over-year/">since October 2009</a>.</p>
<p>My take on the political maneuvering is that the White House is anticipating poor economic performance during the early months of 2013, and that it is looking for someone other than themselves to blame. So, with the help of their new <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/">Organizing for Action</a> shock troops, they&#8217;ll try to claim that Republicans are responsible for foisting a short-term debt ceiling extension on Reid and Obama (those poor helpless creatures), creating an unmanageable atmosphere of economic uncertainty.</p>
<p>Republicans, on the other hand, may have been emboldened by the belief that continued economic underperformance will work in their favor, expecting public opinion to move into their corner as more Americans become convinced that our struggling country cannot afford a never-ending regime of reckless spending.</p>
<p>Who&#8217;s right? I don&#8217;t know, but it appears that the playing field may be more level several months from now than the left and press would like us to believe.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Three Years of Budget Failure</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obamas-three-years-of-budget-failure/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-three-years-of-budget-failure</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obamas-three-years-of-budget-failure/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2013 04:45:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deadline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt ceiling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[press conference]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173452</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president demonizes Republicans over the debt ceiling while leading the nation into the abyss. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/obamas-three-years-of-budget-failure/abc_obama_specreport_121114_wg/" rel="attachment wp-att-173486"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-173486" title="abc_obama_specreport_121114_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/abc_obama_specreport_121114_wg-450x348.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="209" /></a>The mixture of arrogance and indifference to the law that has become the trademark of the Obama administration hit another mile marker yesterday. At a press conference, the president <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/276967-obama-demands-congress-raise-164-trillion-debt-ceiling">demanded</a> that Congress raise the debt ceiling, because America is not &#8220;a deadbeat nation,&#8221; further characterizing the failure to do so as &#8220;irresponsible&#8221; and &#8220;absurd.&#8221; The White House should be quite familiar with both concepts: last Friday, the administration&#8217;s acting Budget Director, Jeff Zients, told House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) that it will <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/276969-obama-budget-delayed-again-white-house-tells-paul-ryan">miss</a> the legal deadline for submitting a budget to Congress.</p>
<p>The White House&#8217;s disregard for its legal obligations is hardly an anomaly. &#8220;This will mark the third time in four years the president has missed his statutory requirement to present a budget on time, while trillion-dollar budget deficits continue to mount,&#8221; <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/jan/23/white-house-miss-budget-deadline-third-year/">said</a> Ryan. Nor is such irresponsible behavior limited to the White House. The Democratically controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget in more than three and a half years, taking several proposals enacted by the House and tabling them. The last time they adhered to their legal obligation was in 2009.</p>
<p>Missing the budget deadline is no accident. Last month, the White House <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/fiscal-cliff-2014-budget-already-delayed-85145.html?hp=f2">told</a> <em>Politico </em>that it had &#8220;deliberately slowed preparations for President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2014 budget&#8221; until it &#8220;had a better fix&#8221; on negotiations with Republicans regarding the fiscal cliff deal. Despite that reality, Obama had no qualms about taking Congress to task for its inability to reach a deal in a timely manner. “America wonders why it is in this town why you can’t get stuff done in an organized timetable,” said the president. “Why everything has to always wait until the last minute. We’re now at the last minute. The American people are not going to have any patience for a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy,” he added.</p>
<p>The American public is indeed low on patience. But that impatience pales in comparison to their general lack of knowledge regarding economics, and the subtleties of the fiscal cliff deal and the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations, in particular. Nothing epitomized that lack of knowledge better than the <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/010713-639637-reelected-obama-immediately-raises-middle-class-taxes.htm">shock</a> expressed by the legions of Obama&#8217;s supporters when they discovered that the tax increases they heartily supported when they thought it was all about making the &#8220;rich&#8221; pay &#8220;their fair share&#8221; included a bite out of their own paychecks. Somehow the president and his media enablers failed to mention that the expiration of the payroll tax holiday, raising the rates from 4.2 percent back up to 6.2 percent, was part of the equation.</p>
<p>That lack of understanding invariably works to the president&#8217;s advantage with respect to the debt ceiling debate. Thus, the president can once again <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/01/obama-press-conference-january-14/60965/">chide</a> Republicans in Congress with pithy phrases such as, &#8220;You don&#8217;t go out to dinner and eat all you want and then leave without paying the check,&#8221; or &#8220;I don&#8217;t think anyone would consider my position unreasonable. I&#8217;m not going to have a monthly conversation of whether we will pay our bills,&#8221; even as this administration can neither pay for its &#8220;dinner check&#8221; or its &#8220;monthly bills&#8221; without massive amounts of borrowing that now <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/7/government-borrows-46-cents-every-dollar-it-spends/">comprises</a> a mind-bending 46 cents of every dollar spent in FY2013, which began October 1. In October and November alone, the government rang up another $292 billion in deficit spending&#8211;as in $4.8 billion of borrowed money <em>per day.</em></p>
<p>Yet at the press conference, the president insisted that his administration has already cut more than $1 trillion in federal spending. He said the same thing in a December 30 <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-i-cut-spending-over-trillion-dollars-2011">appearance</a> on NBCs “Meet the Press.” &#8220;Well, I have to tell you, David, if you look at my track record over the last two years, I cut spending by over a trillion dollars in 2011,&#8221; Obama told host David Gregory. That is a flat out lie. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) not only revealed that the federal government <em>increased</em> spending by $147 billion from FY2010 to FY2011, but added another $1.29 trillion to the national debt&#8211;which is the primary reason the nation has once again bumped up against the debt ceiling.</p>
<p>Even more remarkable than the president&#8217;s ability to lie without the slightest hesitation, is the mainstream media&#8217;s abject failure to call him on it. Whether this is an error of commission, as in a failure to obtain budget information that is readily available, or an error of omission, meaning they have the information and refuse to bring it up during a high-profile press conference, hardly matters. The public hears $1 trillion in cuts, and the contention is left unchallenged. Thus, Americans are forced to endure a media that is ignorant, collaborative or both.</p>
<p>As we get closer to the debt ceiling, nothing will change. Thus, when the president begins his opening round of debt ceiling &#8220;negotiations&#8221; by warning the public that Republicans &#8220;will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy,” no one is willing to explain that the only way the economy crashes is if the president <em>orders</em> it to happen. The <em>NY Post&#8217;s</em> Carolin Baum <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/obama_phony_default_drama_sJgRMsRg3RXNJ23fLybYxI">explains</a> that the tax receipts government takes out of Americans&#8217; paychecks each month far exceeds what the government owes in monthly interest payments. Furthermore, despite claims by the Treasury it has no authority to prioritize payments to holders of U.S. debt, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reached the following conclusion in 1985: “We are aware of no statute or any other basis for concluding that Treasury is required to pay outstanding obligations in the order in which they are presented for payment, unless it chooses to do so.”</p>
<p>In other words, the only way America could default is if Obama issues an executive order to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, mandating that America&#8217;s obligations must be paid in the order they are received, even if it crashes the economy in the process.</p>
<p>Yet that didn&#8217;t stop the president from characterizing 2011&#8242;s debt ceiling negotiations in precisely that manner. When CBS News&#8217; Major Garrett noted that Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling as Senator, even as he is adamant about raising it now, absent &#8220;deficit reduction or budget maneuvers&#8221; that presidents Reagan, G.W. Bush and Clinton were willing to undertake, the president blamed &#8220;certain groups in Congress&#8221; for their &#8220;absolutist positions&#8221; that brought the nation &#8220;within a few days of defaulting.&#8221;</p>
<p>No it didn&#8217;t. It bought the nation within a few days of a likely government shutdown, during which serious choices would have to have been made regarding what the government could actually pay for, <em>in addition</em> to the interest on the debt. It is <em>that</em> conversation that the president, his party, and more than a few Republicans for that matter, are desperately trying to avoid.</p>
<p>Moreover, exactly as he did in 2011, the president is once again attempting to avoid that conversation by instilling fear in vulnerable and economically illiterate Americans, <a href="http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/national_world&amp;id=8953973">warning</a> them that &#8220;Social Security benefits and veterans&#8217; checks will be delayed&#8221; if the debt ceiling isn&#8217;t raised &#8220;quickly.&#8221; This is nothing less than Chicago-way thuggery designed to obscure the reality that the president could begin debt ceiling negotiations <em>right now, </em>even as he steadfastly refuses to do so.</p>
<p>The reason for such intransigence is simple. A combination of fearful Americans, a duplicitous media, and a Republican party with a track record of spinelessness will allow Obama to demagogue the issue without restraint. The purposeful failure to present an on-time budget is icing on the cake, in that it pushes any chance of negotiations closer to the deadline where the debt ceiling is raised, or the government shuts down&#8211;but does <em>not</em> default.</p>
<p>As of now, Republicans are talking the talk. &#8220;I do know that the most important issue confronting the future of our country is our deficit and debt,&#8221; said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).  &#8220;So we are hoping for a new seriousness on the part of the president with regard to the single biggest issue confronting the country, and we look forward to working with him to do something about this huge, huge problem.&#8221; House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) concurs. &#8220;The American people do not support raising the debt ceiling without reducing government spending at the same time. &#8230; The House will do its job and pass responsible legislation that controls spending, meets our nation&#8217;s obligations, and keeps the government running, and we will insist that the Democratic majority in Washington do the same.&#8221;</p>
<p>It won&#8217;t happen. Only the Republicans have to have enormous courage to take on America&#8217;s insatiable addiction to spending. Democrats and the president can sit back, hold veterans and elderly Americans hostage, and wait for their media apparatchiks to pile on a &#8220;heartless&#8221; GOP.</p>
<p>&#8220;If we want to have a conversation about how to reduce our deficit, let’s have that. We’ve been having that for the last two years,&#8221; said the president at yesterday&#8217;s press conference. During those two years, America&#8217;s debt has increased by more than $2.1 trillion. By the time this president is finished talking in 2016, the national debt will top $20 trillion. At some point, talk of &#8220;cliffs&#8221; and &#8220;ceilings&#8221; will cease to matter. Only the word &#8220;abyss&#8221; will be relevant.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>&#8220;We Are Not a Deadbeat Nation&#8221;, Obama Says, Then Misses Deadline for Sending Budget to Congress</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/we-are-not-a-deadbeat-nation-obama-says-then-misses-deadline-for-sending-budget-to-congress/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=we-are-not-a-deadbeat-nation-obama-says-then-misses-deadline-for-sending-budget-to-congress</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/we-are-not-a-deadbeat-nation-obama-says-then-misses-deadline-for-sending-budget-to-congress/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[statutory debt limit]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=173416</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When you run up this high a debt, then you are a deadbeat. Turning the national numbers into a family income, Obama's spending spree is the equivalent of a family with a $21,700 annual income running up $16,500 in new debt to be added to $142,710 in existing credit card debt.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/we-are-not-a-deadbeat-nation-obama-says-then-misses-deadline-for-sending-budget-to-congress/obama-cap-backwards/" rel="attachment wp-att-173419"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-173419" title="Obama cap backwards" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Obama-cap-backwards-339x350.jpg" alt="" width="339" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>But don&#8217;t call the man, lazy. According to Colin Powell, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/colin-powell-claims-calling-obama-lazy-is-racist-but-jewish-lobby-is-fine/">that&#8217;s incredibly racist.</a></p>
<blockquote><p>“The issue here is whether or not America pays its bills,” Obama said at a press conference on Monday, the last of his first term in office. “We are not a deadbeat nation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>There are so many things wrong with that&#8230;</p>
<p>1. In 2006, <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/14/obama-06-raising-the-debt-ceiling-means-america-cant-pay-its-bills-obama-13-not-raising-the-debt-ceiling-means-america-cant-pay-its-bills/">Obama said that raising the debt limit</a> was &#8220;a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies&#8221;.</p>
<p>Now failing to raise the debt limit and not pay the bills using financial assistance from foreign governments to finance his reckless fiscal policies is a sign that America can&#8217;t pay its own bills. By which he means his bills.</p>
<p>2. When you run up this high a debt, then you are a deadbeat. Turning the national numbers into a family income, Obama&#8217;s spending spree<a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-phase-of-the-global-debt-crisis-widespread-discounting-of-western-public-debt/27707"> is the equivalent of a family</a> with a $21,700 annual income running up $16,500 in new debt to be added to $142,710 in existing credit card debt.</p>
<p>If that&#8217;s not the definition of a deadbeat, I don&#8217;t know what is.</p>
<p>3. It&#8217;s not America&#8217;s debt. It&#8217;s America&#8217;s debt the way that it&#8217;s your debt when the bellboy runs up illegal charges on your credit card. And here the bellboy is accusing the hotel of being deadbeats unless they let him run up a lot more charges on the country&#8217;s credit card.</p>
<p>4.  Obama isn&#8217;t proposing that America pay the bills, but that it borrow even more money that he doesn&#8217;t intend to pay back either. The bills are being paid by taxpayers. This isn&#8217;t bill paying, it&#8217;s debt raising.</p>
<p>But Obama assures that he will be happy to take control of the purse strings and shred the Constitution some more.</p>
<blockquote><p>“If the House and the Senate wants to give me the authority so they don’t have to take these tough votes… I’m happy to take it,” he said. But, Obama added: “There are no magic tricks here, no loopholes. There’s no easy way out.”</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s actually really hilarious coming from a guy who is just printing money at this point and whose economic adviser proposed minting a trillion dollar coin.</p>
<p>But Obama is no believer in magic tricks and shortcuts. He just believes we have to raise the debt limit, borrow more money and then never pay it back&#8230; like a responsible adult.</p>
<p>And like a responsible adult, <a href="http://weaselzippers.us/2013/01/14/obama-regime-tells-house-gop-it-wont-meet-legal-deadline-for-submitting-a-budget-to-congress/">Obama will be missing a budget deadline</a> because not being a deadbeat, means pretending not to be one on camera in front of your press corps. It doesn&#8217;t mean actual responsibility.</p>
<blockquote><p>The White House has informed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that it will miss the legal deadline for sending a budget to Congress.</p>
<p>Acting Budget Director Jeff Zients told Ryan (R-Wis.) late Friday that the budget will not be delivered by Feb. 4, as required by law, a House aide said.</p>
<p>“Zients did not indicate how late the administration will delay its submission, simply noting ‘We will submit it to Congress as soon as possible,’ ” the aide said.</p></blockquote>
<p>Maybe BO ate the budget. And I don&#8217;t mean the dog.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Fiscal Cliff Will Increase Spending by %55</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-fiscal-cliff-will-increase-spending-by-%55/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-fiscal-cliff-will-increase-spending-by-%2555</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-fiscal-cliff-will-increase-spending-by-%55/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Dec 2012 16:58:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget Deficits]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fiscal cliff]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=170931</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Back under George W. Bush we had a mere 239 billion dollar deficit. These days a 239 billion dollar deficit is as fanciful as a trip to the moon. By 2016, the last year of Obama, unless he decides to go full FDR and go for a third term, we'll be spending over 4 trillion a year.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obamas-fiscal-cliff-will-increase-spending-by-%55/obamamoney/" rel="attachment wp-att-170932"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-170932" title="ObamaMoney" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ObamaMoney-389x350.jpg" alt="" width="389" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Good news everybody. We&#8217;ve been running a trillion dollar deficit every year that Obama Inc. has been running the country into the ground. And those deficits <a href="http://weaselzippers.us/2012/12/24/spending-by-federal-government-to-increase-55-under-obamas-fiscal-cliff-plan/">are about to get even bigger</a>.</p>
<p>Back under George W. Bush we had a mere 239 billion dollar deficit. These days a 239 billion dollar deficit is as fanciful as a trip to the moon. By 2016, the last year of Obama, unless he decides to go full FDR and go for a third term, we&#8217;ll be spending over 4 trillion a year. And we&#8217;ll be making up that money by printing it and borrowing it from countries whose economies are even more disastrous than ours are. Can you say global depression?</p>
<blockquote><p>Spending will increase 55 percent over the next decade, if President Barack Obama’s budget plan goes into effect. The finding comes from the Republican-side of the Senate Budget Committee, which notes that Obama’s “Proposal Would Spend $880 Billion Over Already Projected Increases.”</p>
<p>After subtracting the president’s savings from his spending increases, over the next 10 years the President’s proposal actually spends $880 billion more – $44.368 trillion versus $43.488 trillion – than currently projected spending levels.  In the next two years alone, the President’s plan would spend $255 billion over current projected spending levels ($156 billion higher in FY13 and $99 billion higher in FY14). Overall, spending would increase 55% under the President’s plan, from $3.6 trillion in FY13 to $ 5.6 trillion in FY22.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But we can afford it because money is magic. If you really want it, it will just appear out of thin air. Money is this mysterious thing. There isn&#8217;t enough of it to provide armed guards in schools, but there is enough of it to make sure every teacher has a masters&#8217; degree because you can&#8217;t teach second graders to count without a masters in education. We don&#8217;t have enough money for embassy security, but we do have enough money for embassy art. We can&#8217;t afford to employ marines or cover military health care, but we can pay for all the LGBT and Green energy measures that the Pentagon has now been told are more important than winning wars.</p>
<p>Money is magic. Like Obama.</p>
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		<title>California State Workers Took Home 1 Billion in Overtime</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/california-state-workers-took-home-1-billion-in-overtime/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=california-state-workers-took-home-1-billion-in-overtime</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/california-state-workers-took-home-1-billion-in-overtime/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:22:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[public sector unions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=169425</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In California, a state psychiatrist was paid $822,000, a highway patrol officer collected $484,000 in pay and pension benefits and 17 employees got checks of more than $200,000 for unused vacation and leave. The best-paid staff in other states earned far less for the same work, according to the data.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/california-state-workers-took-home-1-billion-in-overtime/bond_briefcase/" rel="attachment wp-att-169431"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-169431" title="bond_briefcase" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/bond_briefcase.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="214" /></a></p>
<p>California truly is the golden state. Just look at its state employees. California may be sliding toward bankruptcy, but its state employees have been raking in the gold <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-11/-822-000-worker-shows-california-leads-u-s-pay-giveaway.html">with nearly 1 billion in overtime</a>. That&#8217;s enough money to feel all of Africa for a week.</p>
<p>In Micronesia, Somalia and the British Virgin Islands, 1 billion dollars is their entire GDP. 1 billion is the entire national budget of Rwanda, Monaco, Haiti and Afghanistan. (You wouldn&#8217;t catch Gaza making do on so little. Their budget is 2 billion dollars.)</p>
<p>But in California, 1 billion dollars is overtime. California workers in the golden state take in $5,000 more in average pay than New York, $9,000 more than Illinois, and twice as much as Georgia.</p>
<blockquote><p>In California, Governor Jerry Brown hasn’t curbed overtime expenses that lead the 12 largest states or limited payments for accumulated vacation time that allowed one employee to collect $609,000 at retirement in 2011.</p>
<p>Last year, Brown waived a cap on accrued leave for prison guards while granting them additional paid days off. California’s liability for the unused leave of its state workers has more than doubled in eight years, to $3.9 billion in 2011, from $1.4 billion in 2003, according to the state’s annual financial reports.</p>
<p>In California, a state psychiatrist was paid $822,000, a highway patrol officer collected $484,000 in pay and pension benefits and 17 employees got checks of more than $200,000 for unused vacation and leave. The best-paid staff in other states earned far less for the same work, according to the data.</p>
<p>Davis had taken office in 1999 with a <a href="http://www.dof.ca.gov/budget/historical/2000-01/documents/mayReviz00.pdf">$12 billion</a> budget surplus. Four years later, he began his second term by reporting a $35 billion budget deficit &#8212; about $1,000 for every man, woman and child in the state.</p>
<p>The prison guards’ union gave Davis more than $3 million for his various elections, including $250,000 a few weeks after the pay increase was negotiated, campaign records show. The state’s auditor, <a href="http://search.bloomberg.com/search?q=Elaine%20Howle&amp;site=wnews&amp;client=wnews&amp;proxystylesheet=wnews&amp;output=xml_no_dtd&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8&amp;filter=p&amp;getfields=wnnis&amp;sort=date:D:S:d1&amp;partialfields=-wnnis:NOAVSYND&amp;lr=-lang_ja">Elaine Howle</a>, in July 2002 estimated the contract cost taxpayers an extra $500 million a year.</p>
<p>“California spends most of its money on salaries, retirement payments, health care benefits for government workers, and other compensation,” said Schwarzenegger, 65, who replaced Davis as governor. “State revenues are up more than 50 percent over the past 10 years, but still we’ve had to cut spending on services because so much of that revenue increase went to increases in compensation and benefits.”</p>
<p>The result isn’t only a heavier burden on California taxpayers. As higher expenses competed for fewer dollars, per- pupil funding of the state’s public schools dropped to 35th nationally in 2009-2010 from 22nd in 2001-2002. Californians have endured recurring budget deficits throughout the past decade and now face the country’s highest debt and Standard &amp; Poor’s lowest credit rating for a U.S. state.</p>
<p>The disparity with other states is also evident in payments for accumulated vacation time when employees leave public service. No other state covered by the data compiled by Bloomberg paid a worker more than $200,000 for accrued leave last year, while 17 people got such payments in California. There were 240 employees who received at least $100,000 in California, compared with 42 in the other 11 states, the data show.</p>
<p>California also leads in overtime expenses, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Last year, it paid $964 million in overtime to 110,000 workers, an average of $8,741 per employee. That was more than twice the $415 million New York paid in overtime to 80,000 staff members, for an average of $5,199, and almost as much as all the other states in the database combined. In Georgia, total overtime for 8,935 workers last year was $12.3 million, an average $1,378.</p>
<p>California employees generally make at least 1.5 times their regular pay to work overtime.</p>
<p>California had almost 11,000 workers in the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who made $100,000 or more in 2011, and about 900 prison employees earning more than $200,000 a year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. New York had none. Its top-paid officer is a sergeant at Sing Sing Correctional Facility who made $170,000 last year.</p>
<p>Nurses in California last year made $673 million in total pay, including $103 million in overtime, or 15.3 percent. By contrast, those in New York made $561 million in total pay, of which almost $40 million was in overtime, or 7.1 percent.</p>
<p>Forty-two nurses in California’s prisons and mental hospitals have reaped especially rich overtime payouts. They made an average of $1.3 million each during the seven years, including $674,000 in overtime.</p>
<p>The highest-paid nurse in the seven years was Lina Manglicmot, who worked at a state prison in Soledad, about 130 miles (209 kilometers) south of San Francisco. She collected $1.7 million from 2005 through 2011, including $1 million in overtime, the data show. Manglicmot declined to comment.</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Rob Portman: Romney&#8217;s VP Pick?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/rob-portman-romneys-vp-pick/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rob-portman-romneys-vp-pick</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/rob-portman-romneys-vp-pick/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 May 2012 04:51:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rob Portman]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vice president]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=130658</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the Ohio senator lacks in star-power he may make up in expertise and swing state sway.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/139422473.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-130662" title="139422473" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/139422473-300x197.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="197" /></a><a href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2012/05/01/senator-marco-rubio-talks-to-bret-baier/">Marco Rubio</a>, <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/04/vp-buzz-about-paul-ryan-grows-louder/">Paul Ryan</a>, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/05/01/why-condoleezza-rice-could-change-everything-for-romney/">Condoleezza Rice</a>…Rob Portman. The last name on the list doesn’t have the political star power of the others, but the freshman senator from Ohio has recently emerged as a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304868004577376372101851252.html">leading contender</a> to be Mitt Romney’s running mate.</p>
<p>That Portman&#8217;s is being seriously considered for the GOP ticket is no fluke. His status as a first-term senator belies an impressive political resume. For starters, he is a veteran of two presidential administrations, having served under President George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He also spent 12 years in Congress, before being elected to the Senate in 2010. Just as significant is Portman&#8217;s experience on budget and spending issues, on which he is considered a respected authority. A former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, he also served on the deficit-reduction &#8220;super committee&#8221; that last fall unsuccessfully tried to craft a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion.</p>
<p>Despite that failure, Portman has emerged as an effective critic of the Obama administration’s fiscal stewardship. In February he released an <a href="http://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=01f733b4-1390-433a-ae50-c1a8716d6813">analysis</a> showing just how fiscally irresponsible the administration is. Portman estimated that the administration’s budget increases would lead to the government reaching the debt ceiling once again by October, meaning that it would have slashed through last year&#8217;s $2.1 trillion increase in just 14 months. “This is an unfortunate but clear signal to the American people that Washington is spending too much, borrowing too much, and putting our nation’s fiscal stability at risk,” Portman noted at the time.</p>
<p>Due to his command of budget issues, Portman has also been an <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2012/04/sen_rob_portman_says_buffett_r.html">effective critic</a> of the Obama administration’s budgetary gimmicks. When the administration recently touted the so-called &#8220;Buffet Rule,&#8221; a minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires, Portman was among the first to point out that it was little more than political posturing. After calculating that the high-profile tax would bring in less than $5 billion per year, Portman <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2012/04/sen_rob_portman_says_buffett_r.html">observed</a>, “That represents 0.4 percent of annual individual income taxes paid — or enough to pay one week’s interest on the national debt.&#8221; The Obama administration subsequently shifted course, insisting that the tax was not intended to bolster the country&#8217;s finances but rather to promote &#8220;fairness.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Battle of the Budget Bulge</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/battle-of-the-budget-bulge/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=battle-of-the-budget-bulge</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/battle-of-the-budget-bulge/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:35:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2012 election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=126358</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Paul Ryan's latest fiscal plan draws the battle lines for the 2012 elections.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/gty_paul_ryan_jef_110822_wblog.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-126375" title="gty_paul_ryan_jef_110822_wblog" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/gty_paul_ryan_jef_110822_wblog.gif" alt="" width="375" height="247" /></a>Yesterday, House Republicans offered Americans their vision for the nation&#8217;s fiscal future, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/20/us-usa-budget-idUSBRE82H0B820120320">releasing</a> a budget proposal that attempts to bring runaway deficits and the national debt under control. In a <em>Wall Street Journal</em> editorial, budget author Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291221193908272.html">explained</a> the that difference between Republicans and Democrats &#8220;revolves around the fundamental nature of American democracy and the social contract,&#8221; further noting that &#8220;no two documents illustrate this choice of two futures better than the president&#8217;s budget and the one put forward by House Republicans.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mr. Ryan is correct. In February, President Barack Obama <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/210253-obama-releases-38-trillion-budget">released</a> his budget for FY2013, a $3.8 trillion compendium of higher taxes and more spending that did nothing to address America&#8217;s ballooning national debt. The CBO&#8217;s latest analysis <a href="http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-03-16/economy/31200106_1_obama-budget-cbo-budget-plan">noted</a> that deficits added to the national debt between the years 2013 and 2022 would come to $6.4 trillion, if the budget were adopted. Yet they also revealed that if there were no changes to the current law, the national debt would only increase by $2.9 trillion. Republicans were quick to play up the $3.5 trillion difference, saying the CBO analysis shows that the president&#8217;s budget &#8220;achieves virtually no real net deficit reduction and leaves unchanged our dangerously unsustainable debt path,” according to the Republican staff of the Senate Banking Committee.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s moot point. Mr. Obama&#8217;s budget is one hundred billion dollars higher than the one he <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/210253-obama-releases-38-trillion-budget">sent</a> to the Senate last year. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) forced his colleagues to vote on the president&#8217;s 2012 budget as it was presented. It was defeated by a vote of 97-0. This year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is not about to let history repeat itself. On February 3rd, he <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/budget/208593-reid-this-years-budget-is-done">announced</a> that the Senate will not vote on a budget at all this year. &#8220;We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year&#8211;it&#8217;s done, we don&#8217;t need to do it,&#8221; Reid  told reporters, contending the agreement reached by the Congressional Super Committee on August 2nd, as a result of the debt ceiling imbroglio, obviated the need for further legislation.</p>
<p>That argument is specious at best. It says essentially says that the $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years&#8211;cuts that resulted from the Super Committee&#8217;s <em>failure</em> to reach an agreement&#8211;is the same as crafting a budget. Furthermore, it attempts to obscure some inconvenient facts. First, the Democratically-controlled Senate didn&#8217;t passed a budget <em>at all</em> in each of the two years prior to the agreement reached in August. Second, the &#8220;budget&#8221; passed on August 2nd was done to avoid a national default engendered by broaching the limit of the debt ceiling. That&#8217;s the same debt ceiling Democrats sought to keep completely separate from the budget issue, insisting they were only interested in passing &#8220;clean&#8221; budget bills. And finally, the Super Committee&#8217;s handiwork was so &#8220;well-received&#8221; by the financial ratings agencies, America&#8217;s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in the nation&#8217;s history.</p>
<p>Mr. Ryan is attempting to offer the nation a stark contrast to such recklessness. The big picture is straightforward. It calls for a combination of spending cuts and tax reform aimed at wiping out deficits, and balancing the budget by the year 2040. The national debt would continue to rise, but an expanding economy would put it on track to return to 18 percent of GDP, a long-term historic average abandoned by an Obama administration that has <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204883304577221342883636060.html">averaged</a> more than 24 percent of GDP in its first three years. Ryan&#8217;s budget also aims to slash federal spending by $5.3 trillion more over the next decade than the president&#8217;s proposal. If that number sounds familiar, it&#8217;s because president Obama <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/02/cbo_projects_another_trillion_dollar_deficit_for_this_year.html">will have added</a> almost $5 trillion to the nation&#8217;s deficit by the time he finishes his first term in office.</p>
<p>Like any budget however, the devil is in the details. Right out of the gate, Ryan grabs the revenue stream being generated by taxes over the next ten years to pay for the healthcare bill. Ergo, the bill must be repealed in order to get the money. The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-20/ryan-budget-to-end-health-care-law-while-keeping-the-tax-revenue.html">estimated</a> that amount would come to $409.2 billion, and Republicans plan to retain the healthcare law’s higher revenue stream. Yet Ryan insisted that his budget would not increase taxes, but generate the same amount of revenue by overhauling the tax system. Toward that end he proposes two individual tax brackets, 10 percent and 25 percent, and a repeal of the alternative minimum tax. The corporate tax rate would also be reduced to 25 percent from 35 percent, and he would shift to what he calls a &#8220;territorial&#8221; tax system allowing businesses to invest profits earned abroad back into America without getting hit by an extra tax bite for doing so.</p>
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		<title>For Dems, No One &#8216;Plays By the Same Rules&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/for-dems-no-one-plays-by-the-same-rules/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=for-dems-no-one-plays-by-the-same-rules</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/for-dems-no-one-plays-by-the-same-rules/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 16 Feb 2012 04:40:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Affirmative Action]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fairness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[playing by the same rules]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=122613</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The vast history of the Left rigging the system to benefit different players. 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/65f8a_120213053829-bts-va-obama-budget-remarks-00015909-story-top.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122639" title="65f8a_120213053829-bts-va-obama-budget-remarks-00015909-story-top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/65f8a_120213053829-bts-va-obama-budget-remarks-00015909-story-top.gif" alt="" width="375" height="245" /></a></p>
<p>When President Barack Obama released his $3.8 trillion budget on Monday he reiterated a familiar theme that has become the centerpiece of his re-election strategy. &#8220;We built this budget around the idea that our country has always done best when everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same rules,&#8221; he said. With all due respect to the president, everyone &#8220;playing by the same rules&#8221; is completely at odds with the prevailing ethos of the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>To begin, perhaps the president could explain how &#8220;playing by the same rules&#8221; translates into <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/202791-hhs-finalizes-more-than-1200-healthcare-waivers">granting waivers</a> from the healthcare bill. More than 1200 entities were granted the privilege of playing by a completely different set of rules. Furthermore, the bill grants enormous power to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius to continue <a href="http://spectator.org/archives/2010/06/04/the-empress-of-obamacare/">making up policy</a> as she goes along. As for the bill itself, it is a <a href="http://www.politico.com/livepulse/1209/Ben_Nelsons_Medicaid_deal.html">compendium</a> of rule &#8220;variations,&#8221; highlighted by two Democratic senators, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska, being granted special favors in return for their votes.</p>
<p>While he&#8217;s at it perhaps the president could explain how Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano could defy Congress last August when she <a href="http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/immigration/8672-napolitano-dream-act-is-now-law">announced</a> that she will stop deporting illegal aliens who meet the DREAM Act criteria, despite Congress&#8217;s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/politics/19immig.html">refusal</a> to pass that law. Failure to enforce illegal immigration statutes per se is the epitome of playing by two sets of rules, yet this president is willing to up the ante and grant special status to a subset of law-breakers he deems worthy. This might also explain why his Justice Department has sued several states, such as Arizona, Utah, Alabama and South Carolina, for attempting to enforce immigration statutes virtually identical to federal immigration law, even as states that completely defy immigration law with &#8220;sanctuary city&#8221; policies apparently remain free to do as they please.</p>
<p>In the arena of taxes, playing by the same rules reaches the level of farce. While Mr. Obama is busy haranguing the rich for not paying their fair share, reality is quite different. In 2009 (latest data available), the <em>real</em> &#8220;1 percent&#8221; of Americans <a href="http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html">paid</a> 36.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes&#8211;but earned only 16.9 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). In addition, the top 10 percent <a href="http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/do-the-rich-pay-their-fair-share-in-taxes/claim-that-rich-dont-pay-enough-based-on-perception-not-fact">paid</a> 70 percent of all income taxes, while 47 percent of Americans paid no income taxes at all. One can debate the merits, or lack thereof, of a progressive tax system. But the fact that there is a different set of rules for different Americans is beyond dispute.</p>
<p>Such rule-bending is verging on absurdity. Six House Democrats want to <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/205085-dems-propose-reasonable-profits-board-to-regulate-oil-company-profits">set up</a> a &#8220;Reasonable Profits Board&#8221; that would impose a tax as high as <em>100 percent</em> on the sale of oil and gas, on all &#8220;surplus&#8221; earnings exceeding &#8220;a reasonable profit.&#8221; Yet profits are not profit <em>margins.</em> From 2006-2010 the nation&#8217;s five largest oils companies&#8217; profit margins <a href="http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-05-11/news/29546963_1_oil-companies-big-oil-oil-revenues">averaged</a> 6.65 percent. For perspective sake, <a href="http://smallbusiness.chron.com/typical-profit-margins-media-companies-38012.html">profit margins</a> for media companies from 2006-2009 were 23 percent. One is left to imagine if such media profits are considered &#8220;reasonable&#8221; by Democrats. Perhaps they might train their gaze on an Obama administration whose track record of rule-bending with respect to the subsidization of &#8220;green&#8221; energy companies is a sordid tale of favoritism coupled with dismal results: as of September 2011, <a href="http://biggovernment.com/whall/2011/11/16/80-of-green-energy-loans-went-to-obamas-top-donors/">80 percent</a> of the $20.5 billion in loans doled out by the Department of Energy went to the president&#8217;s top donors. Donors who apparently play by a different set of rules than most Americans.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Tax Insanity</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rick-moran/obamas-budget-tax-insanity/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-budget-tax-insanity</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/rick-moran/obamas-budget-tax-insanity/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Feb 2012 04:43:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rick Moran]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deficit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fair shot]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tax increases]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=122397</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New budget shows the 2012 election campaign will feature an assault on entrepreneurs, investors and small business people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2013-us-budget.gi_.top_.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-122401" title="2013-us-budget.gi.top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2013-us-budget.gi_.top_.gif" alt="" width="375" height="247" /></a></p>
<p>President Obama <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/us/politics/obama-budget-raises-taxes-on-the-rich-to-spend-on-jobs.html">unveiled his budget</a> for Fiscal Year 2013 on Monday and threw down the gauntlet to Republicans, daring them to oppose his idea of &#8220;fairness&#8221; in an election year &#8212; ideas that, as he will frame the debate, will no doubt be popular with many Americans. Indeed, as <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/13/politics/budget-politics-analysis/index.html">CNN&#8217;s Alan Silverleib</a> points out in his analysis, &#8220;It&#8217;s all about election year 2012, not fiscal year 2013.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is an extraordinary document. Not because it has a ghost of a chance of becoming law, but because it reveals themes and issues the president plans to run on in the fall, while exposing the rancid nature of Obama&#8217;s redistributionist ideas: taking, taking &#8211; and then taking some more &#8212; from those who produce and create the nation&#8217;s wealth and jobs all in the name of a cynically dishonest notion of &#8220;fairness.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is also extraordinary because in a year that the administration projects the government will run a deficit of $901 billion dollars (a rosy scenario considering Obama has yet to come anywhere close to achieving his deficit goals), the president is proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending. In essence, Mr. Obama is not taxing producers in an effort to slow the runaway spending and deficits his policies have caused. He is going to use those new found revenues in a bid to buy votes by divvying up the extra cash among favored constituencies.</p>
<p><a href="http://rightwingnuthouse.com/wp-admin/Obama%20said">Obama said</a> his budget would &#8220;renew the American values of fair play and shared responsibility.&#8221; But how does he square that with the &#8220;values&#8221; of the president and his party where cronyism, political favoritism, and corruption dominate the landscape?  How does the president get away with talking about &#8220;fair play&#8221; and &#8220;playing by the same rules&#8221; when his party continuously demonstrates a predilection for favoring groups based not on merit, but on the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their sexual preference, their gender, and their affiliation &#8211; or not &#8211; with a union?  It is this kind of hypocrisy that permeates this budget document and makes the president&#8217;s calls for &#8220;fairness&#8221; ring hollow.</p>
<p>His spending &#8220;cuts&#8221; included in the budget do not touch entitlements, forcing the nation&#8217;s defense to take the brunt of the cutbacks. The defense budget will fall 4%. In <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/agency-agency-guide-obamas-budget-164800001.html">practical terms,</a> it means slashing eight Army combat brigades, six Marine Corps battalions and 11 fighter squadrons, and will start to pull two Army brigades out of Europe.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Department of Energy becomes <a href="http://rightwingnuthouse.com/wp-admin/a%20huge%20winner,">a huge winner,</a> increasing its budget a whopping 41% &#8212; mostly to fund Obama&#8217;s green energy fiascoes. The Department of Justice makes out a big loser, with its budget falling 15%. But it is where the cuts will be made that will rile Republicans. The president proposes to massively cut a program that reimburses states and cities for jailing illegal immigrants for committing crimes. Funding would fall from $240 million to just $70 million.</p>
<p>The Hispanic vote is vital to his re-election and allowing illegal aliens who have committed crimes out on bail or to simply disappear will no doubt sit well with liberal Latino groups who have been agitating against enforcing any of the nation&#8217;s immigration laws.</p>
<p>For some reason, the president is proposing a big increase for the Commerce Department. This useless federal bureaucracy will get a $10 billion gift &#8220;to help build an interoperable public safety broadband network.&#8221; <a href="http://psc.apcointl.org/2011/05/26/public-safety-representatives-talk-broadband-spectrum-governance-funding-at-subcommittee-hearing/">Critics point out</a> that the government has already spent $13 billion on radio equipment since 2001 and that a public auction of frequencies &#8212; ostensibly to recover the costs of the program &#8212; won&#8217;t realize nearly enough to pay for it.</p>
<p>Agency after agency, department after department, will see new spending. For the Department of Transportation, a pork-laden, five-year $476 billion highway bill and a $50 billion &#8220;infusion&#8221; for roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure. Did we mention the $47 billion for high speed rail? Such trivialities are an asterisk in this budget.</p>
<p>Foreign aid gets a boost, including <a href="http://rightwingnuthouse.com/wp-admin/$800%20million">$800 million</a> for the &#8220;Arab Spring.&#8221; The president wants to create a &#8220;Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund&#8221; &#8212; explained in the budget document as a fund that &#8220;will provide incentives for long-term economic, political, and trade reforms to countries in transition &#8212; and to countries prepared to make reforms proactively.&#8221; Analysts are unsure if this is &#8220;new money&#8221; or simply collecting cash from other programs and placing it in a fund with a new name.</p>
<p>No comment yet from the Muslim Brotherhood whether Shariah finance rules will allow them to participate in the &#8220;incentives for reform&#8221; in economic, political, and trade matters.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Medicare and Medicaid spending continues its unsustainable pace, rising 9% in FY2013. The administration is claiming $360 billion in savings as a result of paying doctors and hospitals less for Medicare services &#8212; the old &#8220;doc fix&#8221; that is added to HHS budgets every year and is shot down every year by Congress and the AMA.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Left Turn</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dick-morris/obamas-left-turn/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-left-turn</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/dick-morris/obamas-left-turn/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Apr 2011 04:13:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dick Morris]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Afternoon Edition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[class antagonisms]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal outlays]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gas price increase]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[populist rhetoric]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=91401</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the president has abandoned the centrist approach. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/obama-whcd-speech1.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-91403" title="obama-whcd-speech" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/obama-whcd-speech1.gif" alt="" width="375" height="293" /></a></p>
<p>Two months ago, Washington was abuzz with speculation that Barack Obama was going to follow Bill Clinton&#8217;s re-election strategy and move to the center, forsaking his liberal agenda that cost him control of the House in 2010. Now, it is evident that he has decided to come down hard left and wage his re-election fight from his liberal bunker, firing shots at Republican cuts in Medicare, pushing tax increases on the rich and attributing the gas price increase to speculators.</p>
<p>Very possibly the decision to tack to the left was not entirely voluntary. With the Republicans constantly confronting him with budget cuts and spending reductions, Obama cannot portray himself as a centrist. Every day, he is on the defensive against proposals for Republican attempts to rein in federal outlays. Amid a background of repeated confrontations, he cannot move to the middle. Indeed, there is no middle. His budget compromises with House Speaker Boehner are not middle ground, they are partial surrenders, grudging acceptances of budget cuts he would never otherwise allow.</p>
<p>In the Clinton days, there were — and I suspect still are — two camps in the Democratic White House. There were those who advocated a fundamental repositioning in the center of our politics and those who wanted to battle along ideological lines, using economic populism and class antagonisms to bolster their chances of victory.</p>
<p>The problem with a leftist strategy is that the vote share a Democrat can attract with it has a very low ceiling — in the low 40s. Economic populism just doesn&#8217;t play that well outside of the Democratic left.</p>
<p>The key to this electoral model is, of course, turnout. Obama made it work and bring him a majority in 2008 by adding the votes of new, younger voters, increasing the African-American and Latino turnout, and playing on the unique economic panic of the times.</p>
<p>But, absent a big increase in liberal turnout, the appeal of class warfare and populist rhetoric is sharply limited.</p>
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		<title>Governing While Drunk on Partisanship</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/tony-blankley/governing-while-drunk-on-partisanship/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=governing-while-drunk-on-partisanship</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Apr 2011 04:04:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tony Blankley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[american prosperity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Catastrophe]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=90938</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The central indictment for the catastrophe that ended American prosperity and world dominance.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/obama-budget.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90941" title="Barack Obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/obama-budget.jpg" alt="" width="512" height="332" /></a></p>
<p>If future historians look back on the ruins of the American economy  after a U.S. bond crisis struck in the second decade of the 21st  century, many causes will be noted. Obviously, it will be seen that for  decades before the catastrophe, the U.S. was spending vastly more than  it could afford on government health and <a id="itxthook0" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/tony-blankley/governing-while-drunk-on-partisanship.html#">retirement programs</a>.</p>
<p>And, just as after the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11,  2011, blue-ribbon commissions will be incredulous that all the telltale  signs of the coming disaster were in plain view, yet were ignored.</p>
<p>But the central indictment for the catastrophe that ended American  prosperity and world dominance will be justly laid at the feet of those <a id="itxthook1" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/tony-blankley/governing-while-drunk-on-partisanship.html#">Washington</a> politicians who continued to play for short-term partisan advantage,  even as the economic earth was beginning to move under their feet.</p>
<p>Of course, it may be claimed in partial mitigation of their guilt  that the politicians, like the witch in Goethe&#8217;s &#8220;Faust,&#8221; had become  acclimated to the noxious brew: &#8220;Here I have a bottle. From which, at  times, I wet my throttle; which now, not in the slightest, stinks.&#8221;</p>
<p>But the cup of Washington partisan politics is raising a higher and  higher stink among the public. And if the crisis comes while some  Washington politicians continue to get drunk on their business as usual  brew — the public is likely to choke on the defense of &#8220;governing while  drunk on partisanship.&#8221;</p>
<p>Former Clinton Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin warned in  January that most dangerously, there is a risk of disruption to our bond  and currency markets as a result of much higher interest rates due to  fiscal imbalances, fear of inflation and efforts to monetize our debt  (print money). Significant deficit premiums on bond market interest  rates would follow and seriously impede private <a id="itxthook2" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/tony-blankley/governing-while-drunk-on-partisanship.html#">investment</a> and growth, causing an economic crisis.</p>
<p>To look more deeply just at the impending interest burden on the  federal budget, consider the assessment of economic analyst Craig  Steiner last week: &#8220;The problem is that the United States, with a $14  trillion national debt, cannot afford to pay a higher rate of interest.  President Obama&#8217;s budget proposal outlines <a id="itxthook3" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/tony-blankley/governing-while-drunk-on-partisanship.html#">interest rates</a> of 3.2 percent this year, going up to 5.3 percent in 2021, and that  produces interest payments of $205 billion this year to $928 billion in  2021. The projected annual deficit is going from $841 billion in 2015 to  $1,116 billion in 2021. That means in 2021, 83 percent of the money we  borrow will be to pay interest on money we&#8217;ve already borrowed.</p>
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		<title>Conscientious Tax-Cheats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/mark-d-tooley/conscientious-tax-cheats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=conscientious-tax-cheats</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Apr 2011 04:02:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american empire]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[shane claiborne]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[utopian ideals]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=90375</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Evangelical leftist protests the American "empire" by with holding federal taxes. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/shane_claiborne_edit_resize.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-90385" title="shane_claiborne_edit_resize" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/shane_claiborne_edit_resize.gif" alt="" width="375" height="311" /></a></p>
<p>Self-professed “urban monastic” Evangelical Leftist Shane Claiborne has publicly announced his withholding 30 percent of his taxes to protest all U.S. defense spending.  A strict pacifist who was in Baghdad in 2003 to protest the U.S. liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein, Claiborne is an icon for young evangelicals opposed to the American “empire.”</p>
<p>“While I am glad to contribute money to the common good and towards things that promote life and dignity, especially for the poor and most vulnerable people among us, I am deeply concerned that 30 percent of the federal budget goes towards military spending, with 117 billion going to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he explained in his recent letter to the IRS.</p>
<p>It’s not clear where Claiborne got the 30 percent figure.  U.S. military spending in 2011, including Iraq and Afghanistan operations, is supposed to be about $671 billion out of an over $3.8 trillion budget.  So the military will consume under 18 percent of federal spending.  Maybe Claiborne is playing the usual game of excluding “entitlement” spending from the total.</p>
<p>Claiborne, who sports dreadlocks and a frequent hoodie, is a very popular lecturer and author among especially hip, young evangelicals.  Operating a Philadelphia “Simple Way” commune in an impoverished neighborhood, he is understandably hailed for his concerns about the poor.  But he evidently does not want the poor or anybody else protected from terrorism or foreign aggression.  A pacifist absolutist, Claiborne represents the rising generation of neo-Anabaptists so popular today in America’s seminaries, where Utopian ideals often prevail over both reality and historic church teaching.</p>
<p>“My Christian faith and my human conscience require me to respectfully reserve the right not to kill, and to refrain from contributing money towards weapons and the military,” Claiborne told the IRS.  He added that if the military’s share of deficit spending were included, he would have to withhold about half his taxes, once again exaggerating defense expenditures.  “Entitlements” grab most of the federal budget, which the Left would prefer to ignore.  Defense of life and liberty in a chaotic world evidently does not qualify as an “entitlement.”</p>
<p>Claiborne earnestly informed the IRS that he will donate 30% of his tax bill to a “recognized US nonprofit organization working to bring peace and reconciliation,” which he did not name.  “My faith also compels me to submit to the governing authorities, which is why I am writing you respectfully and transparently here,” he added.  “May we continue to build the world we dream of.”</p>
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