Recently President Obama delivered a speech on job creation and the economy at the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington.
As with most of his speeches, this one was heavy with first-person references and blame of the Bush administration for America’s economic woes.
George Bush it seems has replaced Herbert Hoover, who is widely accused precipitating the depression of the 1930’s, as the Democrats’ favorite whipping boy.
The president again claimed his “Recovery Act” has “created jobs and spurred growth.” The facts tell a different story about economic recovery.
Jake Tapper of ABC analyzed the administration’s claim they saved one million jobs when that assertion was made last year.
Tapper wrote, “The ‘majority of funds’ came from state governments because stimulus distributed the money in block grants to the states.
What did the states do with the money? They did save jobs, but primarily government jobs. States used the money to temporarily cover budget gaps which would have forced layoffs of state employees, which should have been a necessary step in slimming down state-level spending.”
At the Brookings event, the president said, “My economic team has been considering a full range of additional ideas to help accelerate the pace of private sector hiring. We held a jobs forum at the White House that brought together business owners, CEOs, union members, economists, folks from nonprofits, and state and local officials to talk about job creation.”
The way to create jobs is to allow businesses to make sufficient profits so they can afford to hire more workers and produce more marketable goods and services
If businesses are required pay more in taxes, more in health care costs and more in complying with newly imposed federal regulations, there will be less profit and fewer employees.
Why is this formula so hard for the Obama brain trust to grasp?
That has always been the formula that has produced a strong American economy.
Government produces nothing that American people want to buy.
Mostly it takes from those who produce. It can spread, or more accurately redistribute wealth, as this president is attempting to do — but it cannot create wealth.
So by spreading wealth rather than allowing wealth to be created, the end result is less wealth to spread, and there is nothing economically wise about that.
Author of the US constitution, James Madison, warn us that wars are the death of republics?
During the past several decades the American war machine has burgeoned into a massive force capable of immense destruction not only in battle, but in budgets.
The birth of this philosophy of war can be traced to World War II and the Stalinization of much of Europe. Then with the fall of China, and war in Korea came NATO and alliances with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines that exist to this day
In 1989, however, the Cold War ended dramatically with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the break-up of the Soviet Union and Beijing’s abandonment of world communist revolution.
Overnight, our world changed. But America did not.
As Russia shed her alliances and China set out to capture America’s markets, the US continued the military build-up
The US continued to add to its growing list of allies around the world and with it NATO war guarantees were made to former member states of the defunct USSR.
We invaded Panama and Haiti, smashed Iraq, liberated Kuwait, intervened in Somalia and Bosnia, bombed Serbia, and invaded Iraq again — and Afghanistan. Now we prepare possibly for a new war — on Iran.
We spend more on defense than the next 10 nations combined.
Our Navy exceeds in firepower the next 13 navies combined. We have 100,000 troops in Iraq, 100,000 in Afghanistan or headed there, 28,000 in Korea, over 35,000 in Japan and 50,000 in Germany. By the Department of Defense’s “Base Structure Report,” there are 716 U.S. bases in 38 countries.
According to Department of Defense there are U.S. troops stationed in 148 countries and 11 territories around the world
Estimated combined budgets for the Pentagon, two wars, foreign aid to allies, 16 intelligence agencies, scores of thousands of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, is $1 trillion a year.
While this worldwide network of bases and personnel may have been necessary when we confronted a Sino-Soviet bloc armed with thousands of nuclear weapons, next to Health Care, defense spending is the largest part of our Gross Domestic Product
And its cost is so excessive it may well a bigger threat to our national security than the enemies it is supposed to protect us from
President Barack Obama is expected to publish his new and improved healthcare plan combining features of the two Democratic bills passed by the Senate and House of Representatives as early as Wednesday
The administration’s bill will aim to jump-start the stalled healthcare overhaul and comes just days ahead of a planned televised White House summit with congressional Republicans, who are calling on Democrats to scrap the bills and start over with a far less sweeping proposal.
Democrats are struggling to push healthcare legislation over the finish line in the face of sagging public support and solid Republican opposition bolstered by recent election victories in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey.
Supposedly the legislation is will reflect common ground negotiated over the past several weeks by House and Senate Democratic leaders.
Those agreements are likely to be combined as what is being called a privileged budget reconciliation bill, which only needs a simple 51-vote majority to pass the 100-member Senate instead of the 60-vote supermajority previous bills would have required
According one of Obama’s closest advisors, Valerie Jarrett in a speech at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government “The president is going to craft what he thinks is a good bill. It’s not going to be a perfect bill but it’s going to be a good bill,”
Translation: the President plans to dumb down the healthcare legislation to get it through
But according to Representative Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, “If the president is sincere about moving forward in a bipartisan fashion, he must take the reconciliation process — which will be used to jam through legislation that a majority of Americans do not want — off the table,”
But what this new proposal is really all about is Barack Obama believes a face-off with Republicans will give Democrats just enough time to try and sell their plan to the public while explaining why a sweeping, comprehensive proposal is needed now instead of the go slow, approach advocated by Republicans.
It’s simply another political tantrum being thrown by an unqualified President to shove legislation down the throats of people that never asked for it and have rejected it
But since when has what the American people want ever mattered to President Barack Obama
During the recent national Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Former representative Tom Tancredo said the US should consider reinstating the practice of giving literacy tests to people before allowing them to vote.
While I believe all Americans should be much better educated on the issues and the candidates they are considering, requiring a literacy test to determine voter eligibility is not only impractical, it violates civil rights
And the Tea Party organization should distance itself from the idea and anyone that seriously suggests the tests be given.
Why?
In the early years of America only property owners were allowed to vote in national and state elections. The idea actually had some merit. Only people that had a vested monetary interest in the governing of the country were allowed to shape its course.
In those days, people understood what the role of government was to defend the territory and allow for free trade between the states.
It was thought that those two goals would be best achieved by allowing only property owners to vote.
Over the years constitutional amendments ended this practice and other groups who correctly argued they too had a right to protect their interests we’re allowed to cast ballots.
First, black males, then women, we’re allowed to vote in all elections.
In a supposed effort to make sure the newly franchised and represented Blacks understood the workings the country, a literacy test was given to assure eligibility.
The questions we’re absurdly complicated and all but assured anyone who attempted the test would surely fail.
In some states, such as Alabama, blacks we’re required to recite the entire constitution, which of course most US Presidents could not even do
While Mr. Tancredo’s thought does have some merit, that there are too many people in this country that vote without having any idea what the issues are or their future implications,
The idea that we can cleanse the process by allowing only those the government determines educated enough to vote, is not only intolerant, and Un-American, it’s an affront to our right to representation and individual liberty
And the Tea Party Movement would be wise to distance itself as far away from this ridiculous Jim Crow era South idea as it can possibly get.
For decades developmental psychologists have thought that as we age we move into what they call a period of withdrawal.
The elderly slowly separate themselves from the world. They cannot be expected to achieve new transformations. “About the age of fifty,” Freud wrote, “the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.”
But over the past few years, researchers have found that the brain is capable of creating new connections and even new neurons all through life.
While some mental processes — like working memory and the ability to quickly solve math problems — clearly deteriorate, others do not. Older people retain their ability to remember emotionally nuanced events. They are able to integrate memories from their left and right hemispheres. Their brains reorganize to help compensate for the effects of aging.
A series of studies, begun decades ago, are producing an encouraging insight of life after retirement. These studies don’t portray old age as surrender. They portray it as a period of development.
According to the study, by the psychologists Mara Mather, Turhan Canli most people report being happier as they get older.
Gender roles begin to merge. Many women get more assertive while many men get more emotionally attuned. Personalities often become more vivid as people become more of what they already are.
And these new revelations are wonderful news for America
Unlike the youth of our country, who react with emotion and adoration when a charismatic, young politician breaks onto the scene promising to upright our Nations dismal economic crisis
The elderly have a keen grasp on the reality of the situation, the challenges we face as a nation and apparently are quite equipped to respond to it
It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid a deepening economic crisis is if our senior class take it upon themselves to arise and force change, like they have done at so many Town hall meetings and political rallies
The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generational revolution —
millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.
It may very well be only the old can make America new again.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama has allocated 4.3 billion dollars on maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile – 370 million more than what was budgeted by George Bush.
And the budget will increase by more than 3.1billion over the next five years.
The announcement comes despite the President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to the U.S. during in his State of the Union address last week.
And it flies in the face of the Peace Prize, awarded to him in October for his quote, “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.
The Nobel committee was derided at the time for bestowing the accolade on a new president whose initiatives had yet to bear fruit – such as reducing the world stock of nuclear arms which Obama said was high on his foreign policy agenda
The Obama nuclear arms budget is higher than that of George Bush – who was accused by many people on the left as being a warmongering president in the wake of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
During his State of the Union speech Obama said: ‘I have embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons, and seeks a world without them.’
And Vice President Joe Biden announced his support of the increase on nuclear weapons saying: ‘Even in a time of tough budget decisions, these are investments we must make for our security.
While I certainly do not disagree with his position, the additional spending flies in direct conflict with this administrations stated promise to reduce nuclear arms world-wide
Biden went on to say: ‘This investment is long overdue. It will strengthen our ability to recruit, train and retain the skilled people we need to maintain our nuclear capabilities.
“These steps along with others to advance non-proliferation were essential to ‘holding nations like North Korea and Iran accountable when they break the rules, and deterring others from trying to do so’.
And while I certainly agree that national security should be the number one issue of this and any President – I’m bewildered by the stunning reversal in the Presidents stance on nuclear arms.
Could it be Barack Obama is finally coming to terms with the dangerous world we live in today?
Scott Brown, the little-known candidate who pulled a stunning victory over state Attorney General Martha Coakley, is the first Republican to win a Massachusetts Senate race since 1972
and will be the only Republican in what was an all-Democratic congressional delegation from the Bay State.
Ron Kaufman, the longtime Republican National Committee member from Massachusetts, said quote "it was a perfect storm" that made it possible.
"We had a really good candidate," Kaufman said. "A military veteran, a family guy, a fiscal conservative, moderate on social issues, a pro-choice Catholic.
His remarks went on… Saying
“But it was bigger than that. The Democrats didn’t understand that people here are very upset with the way things are going in Washington, just as they are elsewhere. They see big sums being spent, big deficits piling up, and they want to send a message."
Kaufman noted that three speakers of the lower house have been forced out of office and that Gov. Deval Patrick, whose election in 2006 filled the one hole in the Democratic strong hold, has seen his approval numbers fall.
Members of the Democratic congressional delegation and other Democratic polls mirrored Kaufman’s points. They were critical of Coakley’s campaign, arguing that it was a serious miscalculation for her to break off campaigning and advertising after her easy victory in the primary.
The implications of this election are huge. With Brown, Republicans have regained the 41st vote, which allows them to filibuster bills in the Senate.
In November, Democrats lost the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, two states President Obama carried in 2008, and now they have lost a race in Massachusetts, where he won in a landslide.
There is no evidence that Obama provided a boost for local candidates by campaigning in all three of those states in the weeks preceding each election.
One internal Democratic poll in Massachusetts showed that Coakley slid six points during the final weekend when both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were in Massachusetts, urging voters to support her.
Obama may recover, as Ronald Reagan did from a similar second-year slump, but it will take a significant change of direction to turn things around.
But as the crew of the ill fated Titanic learned… It’s nearly impossible to turn a ship that has lost its momentum.
In a recent survey up to 90% of Americans that regularly read the news get at least some of their news online. This trend has been growing and has placed a serious financial burden, and even forced bankruptcy on major US news papers as circulation of print media plummets.
But according to Democrat congressman Henry Waxman of California since the newspaper industry is suffering "market failure" the US government will need to step in to help preserve serious journalism essential to democracy.
In a statement during a meeting on journalism in the Internet age hosted by the Federal Trade Commission, Waxman said "The newspapers my generation has taken for granted are facing a structural threat to the business model that has sustained them".
"The loss of revenue has spurred a vicious cycle with thousands of journalists losing their jobs”.
Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has jurisdiction over the FTC, went on to say "depression in the media sector is not cyclical, it is structural."
"While this has implications for the media it also has implications for democracy," he added. "A vigorous free press and vigorous democracy have been inextricably linked.
"We cannot risk the loss of an informed public and all that means because of this market failure”.
Waxman noted various possible remedies, including new tax structures for publishers, providing non-profit status, changing anti-trust regulations or eliminating a law that bars owning a newspaper and a television station in the same city.
But "as we look at these various solutions, government is going to have to be involved in one way or the other," he warned.
"Eventually, government is going to have to be responsible to help resolve these issues and our whole society depends very much on reaching some resolution of the problem."
When you consider that the first move of any government that is seeking to restrict the rights of its citizens is to seize control of its media, the idea that the US government should take any stake, let alone a financial one in the media should not only be a major concern to all American’s but one that should be stopped dead in its tracks, before this insane notion has any chance of being taken seriously.
Regardless whether or not you accept the bible as the word of God – it is an indisputable historical document that chronicles the social and political system of the era in which it was written.
As such it is interesting to note that as long ago as the year 2000 BC all civilizations we’re based upon what has become to be known as conservatism.
That is more dependence and individual self reliance, which is for Conservatives the basis of our beliefs. While certainly true the governments of the ancient period we’re as, if not more, heavy handed then they are today – the reality is the ruling body did not provide any sustenance to their populations.
This is primarily due to a lack of concern for the citizenry and that government of the period was more concerned with amassing wealth, and much like today usually off the toil of those they ruled.
This harsh reality bred both personal independence and interdependence among people of time causing them to seek support and assistance from their religious groups and families in times of need.
In other words when someone required help, the government was usually the last resort, and frequently not an option at all since there was no social policy of the day other than servitude and oppression.
This fostered a societal self reliance that has survived to this day and is in fact the basis of the founding of America.
For decades scholars have referred to the role of Bible in influencing the founding fathers of this country. While this reference is usually restricted to the fact that most we’re men of God and accepted a Supreme Deity as creator, and therefore the Bible as his divine word – in fact for the framers of the Constitution - the Bible played a more pragmatic role.
It served as a blueprint upon which to base the new society, free from the oppressive reign of a European Monarch. As an historical document the Bible provided them irrefutable evidence that a culture that is interdependent and self reliant is better equipped to thrive then one that depends on an external government that has no vested interest in its survival other than to exploit the resources of the population it governs.
Resisting this role of government is the essence of Conservatism
