Hey Boehner, Balance the Budget Yourself

One idea has nagged at me for years and Charley Reese elucidates it with this article. When our politicians come to us for help with their re-elections 94% of us say "sure we will help, you are doing a great job".

Like the willfully naive mother who welcomes her son home from school. He was a total delinquent and came home and defecated in the middle of the floor and told his mother to clean it up. She only sees her little man. "Ok Dear, we'll pretend that did not just happen." "That's right wench", "you got it".

For a generation, maybe longer, every successive Congress has allowed entitlements to grow and they have done nothing. We are the parents who have to clean up the $14.2 trillion deficit and figure out what to do with the $62 trillion (yes, that is TRILLION with a capital "T") of stinking unfunded liabilities. While Republicans rebuke Democrats for their intransigence, "The Architect" Karl Rove convinced the Bush White House and GOP Congress that adding an $8 Trillion unfunded Medicare Part D (free drugs for seniors plan) was the way to maintain Republican faith with seniors and therefore dominate the electorate for a generation. How did that work out?

Well, a two bit State Senator who abstained from nearly one half of his votes clobbered us in November. People smarter than me can give all kinds of excuse for electoral losses. I suspect the fact that when the GOP had nearly total control we maybe should have voted like Republicans and cut things. Had we cut entitlements and not added to them, maybe the independent voters would believe us now when we try to tell them there is a difference. Instead, we have a generation of Republican lawmakers who share culpability for the $62 trillion stinking pile on the floor. But we have a pivotal opportunity to capture the narrative.

As Charlie Reese points out in his famous last column entitled "545 vs. 300,000,000 People":

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? John Boehner. He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

There is your road map to restoring faith in the Republican Party and, by the way, to saving the Republic. The House GOP needs to send a balanced budget to the Senate and steadfastly refuse to accept from the Senate Democrats, a conference budget that goes higher.

Now, there will be plenty of excuses as to why that is impossible. It may be tough, but nothing is impossible. Here is my list of cuts as to where to begin:

1. Cut all federal salaries by 15-25% or at least to a wage scale roughly equal to the average private sector or at least state government employee. If we lose too many highly specialized employees we can give limited latitude to executives to limit their cuts. Mail carriers, HUD workers, sorry. The gravy train is going to roll back for a while.

2. Eliminate all non-essential federal departments that should be handled by state governments, beginning with that loathsome US Department of Education. Zero it out of the budget. Before Carter created the huge new Cabinet level bureaucracy in 1980, Education was a minor "Office" founded in 1868 to distribute good teaching methodology. I think we can handle it now.

3. Eliminate the Department of Commerce. Any others?

4. Allow oil drilling and tax it.

5. Sell off a few million acres of government owned land. Enjoy the cash and enterprise while at the same time reducing the liability and maintenance costs of the land.

These ideas are just a start, but the principle remains the same. If the GOP, which Party controls the House, from which all spending bills originate, truly desires a balanced budget, they need to pass a budget that is balanced and refuse to blink when the Senate Democrats try to force a budget that is in the red. Simple.
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Another Reason For Tea Party November Enthusiasm - Ligies

No matter what happens on November 2nd, 2010 will be year for that conservatives won. Patriotic conservatives of all flavors, have risen up in extraordinary ways, in every corner of the country. It appears all but certain that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be dethroned. Dick Morris even predicts as many as 100 new Republican Congressmen giving many people really high expectations for the new Congress. Others fear that for all their trouble from organizing to holding rallies to knocking on doors, they will only replace the leftist Democrats with RINO Republicans who will squander the victory. Will we get Speaker Boehner, or a fresh new conservative leader who will truly take a big stick to big government. A closer look at the numbers should give conservatives reason to be really excited and also a cause for continued resolve.

If you want a conservative Congress, you have to ask yourself just what kind of conservative are you after. Drew Kurlowski, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri who studies voting behavior and partisanship, referred me to a dataset popular with political science academics called DW-Nominate. It is a tremendous resource that meticulously compiles the voting records of the Congress going back to the1st Congress. If you want to know who George Washington’s favorite conservative was, this is your site. Moreover, they settled on a definition of “conservative” that is tremendously useful. Move over “fiscal conservative” and “social conservative” and make room for (limited) "government intervention in the economy”. Let’s call it L’GIE. So who are the ligies?

That most potent army of political groupies has one more reason to crow about Congressman Ron Paul. He sets the bar as champion of limited government. No one is close. For the rest of the nation, imagine what a force his son, Senate candidate Rand Paul will be in the Senate. "Senator Paul" is just the beginning.

By sorting the Senate in order of most conservative to least, it is no surprise that the fiscal champion, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma gets the award. Conservative darling, Jim DeMint is close behind. Which one of them will run from President? Hint: I asked Coburn’s office already, someone needs to call DeMint.

Another trend is fun to see but stands as no great surprise. The sisters from Maine, Senators Snowe and Collins compete for dead last among Republicans but still destroy every single Democrat.

Here is where it gets fun for conservatives. There are five Republican House members making strong bids for the Senate. None of them ranks lower than the Senator being challenged. In Missouri, Roy Blunt is running extremely hard and looks almost a shoe in to replace Kit Bond. Bond ranks a surprisingly low 35 out of 40 on the conservative scale. By contrast, Roy Blunt would join the Senate as the 6th most conservative on the L’IGGE scale. Illinoisans may finally be so fed up with infamous Chicago Democrat corruption that they will elect Republican Congressman Mark Kirk. While the Illinois Tea Party activists preferred Patrick Hughes, it may be a nice consolation prize to hear that Mark Kirk at 23, is eight points to the right of Bond. It is important to note, that Kirk is pro-choice while Bond is pro-life. Also, because the House and Senate members do not take the identical votes, comparisons are imperfect yet illustrative.

This data will surprise a lot of patriotic Tea Party activists who are disappointed by Mssrs Blunt and Kirk for support for the high profile TARP and “cash for clunkers” votes. High profile votes however, often overshadow the facts in balance. According to Kurlowski, “I think it is a fair assessment to say that Blunt has compiled a more conservative record in the House, than Bond has in the Senate. The DW-Nominate scores show it, and ideological rankings from major interest groups on both sides of the aisle confirm the data.” The same surprisingly, applies to Kirk. So the Illinoisans who suffered under liberals Durbin (10th), Burris (97th) and Obama, for many years left casting an occasional jealous gaze across the Mighty Mississippi River upon Missourians who enjoyed 18 years of Kit Bond’s leadership, now have the opportunity to install a centrist technically more conservative than Bond! Happy Day!

All told, taking the House and vastly improving the Senate, conservatives have a lot to be excited about. The next vote will be for a Republican Speaker, and quite possibly, Republican Senate Majority Leader. The next task for patriots is to challenge their delegates to vote for conservative leadership. You rose up and elected them, now tell them what you want.

The Afghan Extortion Racket

In her article, "Trucking in Cukoostan" Diana West lays out what one can only conclude, is the real reason a troop surge is the only solution to American withdraw from that corrupt Country. For Obama to fiddle while American tax dollars burn and a handful of individuls get rich off blood money is about what we have come to expect from this administration. Read and conclude for yourself:


I missed Aram Rostom's expose of what is in effect and in part a giant Pentagon-to-Taliban payola scheme when it came out earlier this month in the Nation (not ordinarily high on my reading list). Now circulating in various publications on the Left -- but sent my way by John Bernard (no Lefty, he) -- this story of the systemic US-Afghan corruption that undergirds our continued presence in Afghanistan must not be dismissed as political fodder for just one side of the spectrum. This is a story of central importance to the American people, and deserves Left, Right and middle of the road attention.

Roston's digging attempts to lay bare the interlocking webs of corruption and pay-offs in which the US has enmeshed itself in an effort to supply US outposts in hostile territory -- i.e., all of Afghanistan. Our military people depend on those supply convoys for everything. But what kind of commanders put men and materiel in jeopardy in such hostile territory in the first place?

To Our Friends in Europe, I apologize, for our President

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The America in which I was raised always stood for freedom, and not just freedom for Americans but freedom for suffering people around the World. When I was an exchange student in Germany in 1983, I found myself in endless debates about this, and about my President Ronald Reagan and his desire to build a missile defense system in Western Europe. I loved the German people. The kids were so refreshing in many ways, but their cynical views of the motives of my President shocked me.

I admit that I am a little unique. As a fairly young child, I poured through every issue of Time magazine, which is like our version of the German magazine, Die Zeit. Jimmy Carter was the President. He talked of peace while cutting our defense spending. I remember being very scared seeing charts and graphs comparing our defense systems including war planes, ships and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The American armaments were blue and the Soviets vastly superior forced were Red. Here my story gets really odd. I was 12 years old when I read George Orwell’s 1984. The year was 1979. I was so struck by what I read and the parallels to the modern Soviet Union, that I picked up a copy of the Communist Manifesto. What I read made me nearly shriek in fear.

The Communist manifesto holds that communism cannot work unless the World is communist. The other fact I read, was that every time in this Century that America was attacked, a Democrat was in the White House, downsizing our military. So it was clear that the nearer the Soviet empire came to economic collapse, and had superior military capabilities, the more likely it was that they would attack. They were aggressively building up while Carter, the face of America, was downsizing our military. I often had trouble sleeping at night for fear of the Soviet missile attack. Then we elected Ronald Reagan.

Reagan became the new face of America to the World. My German friends did not like him. He moved fast and completely changed the course of America. He began rebuilding our military and he delivered that famous speech in Berlin in which he challenge Soviet President Michael Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!” My teenage German friends kept arguing that Reagan was a war-monger and that while Americans were good people, our President was bad. I tried to explain that in our political system, you cannot separate the two. Our President is us. The President cannot go to war without the American people. But he will go to war to protect you. He wants to use American tax dollars to place a missile defense system in Western Europe to protect you, because he felt a moral duty to you.

One of the most momentous experiences in my life was in June of 1990. I was back in Germany! Now I was married and my new wife, Gina and I were making a fast trek through Europe on our way to Berlin. On Saturday, June 16, 1990 I had the amazing privilege to chop on the wall. I got very emotional and still do to this day, at the realization that I was literally tearing open the cage that imprisoned my fellow man. This was of course a symbolic move, although we wondered whether Gorbachev would change his mind or become the victim of a coup and the Wall chopping would stop. So I joined hundreds of people, mostly Germans, I rented a hammer and chisel and I chopped. The real satisfaction was that I had helped to elect a President who valued the individual lives of any human being, without regard to geography, religion or people group enough that he would risk everything to set them free. Now we have a new face of America.

We elected Barak Obama, and he does not feel that moral duty to you as Reagan did, at least not enough to stand up to the shrill American voices that hate the American military. So he will not be there on November 9^th to Celebrate the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I do not think he sees it the way you do. He will also not participate in the festivities on the campus of my College. Westminster College, in my State of Missouri, is where the great Allied leader Winston Churchill gave the Iron Curtain Speech. He told the World how millions of our fellow human beings were being stuffed into the cage, the very cage I was privileged to help dismantle. He had a way with words. On the campus of another American College he gave his shortest speech “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give in.” But I digress.

Our new President believes that you are on your own. As the KGB agent-turned-billionaire, puppet master of the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin conducts war games of an assault on Poland, Obama has decided to tear down the American missiles from Poland. We knew that he cared less as he promised to remove our protection from the Iraqi people. 150 of them were slaughtered just this week. He really wants to find a way out of Afghanistan and pull our soldiers out just as you are pulling your U.N. workers out right now.

So my new President will not be there with you, like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were there for you. He has other priorities. I really wish I could be there to celebrate with you. Unfortunately, with the passing of time, I have five children, our economy is bad, and I too, have other priorities. So I am sorry that my President, the American face to the World will not be there for you. I feel just a little better knowing that you asked America to give him to you. I hope you like him.

When $80 Billion is not that Important

On MSNBC this morning, when asked by Joe Scarborough whether the media missed the story on former "Green Czar" Van Jones, Chief White House correspondent and political director for NBC News, Chuck Todd defended the dearth of media attention as proportional to the importance of the role. Joe Scarborough pushed back, reminding Todd that even the left of center, New York Times had admitted the oversite. Todd stood by his assessment, stating in essence that there are so many people (Obama appointees) doing so many things that following the background of each one is just not that valuable. Really?

The newly created job of "Green Czar" put Jones in charge of $80 billion of the $787 billion in "stimulus" funds. I am not sure what is more shocking, that the appointments of such radical individuals is being made at all or that the major media are largely falling down on the job of scrutinizing these people.

The major media have nearly 100% ignored these arguably extra-constitutional appointments. It is one thing to appoint a specialist to dig into a problem in blue ribbon panel fashion, like a drug czar for instance, but quite another to put someone in charge of billions of tax dollars. Certainly, money is power and $80 billion is a lot of power. For anyone in the media to defend the laziness, flat dereliction, or deliberate obfuscation by saying that control of $80 billion is really not that important is beltway arrogance at its worst.

This kind of major media arrogance breeds suspicion. We are suspicious of the people who make these appointments and the media who choose not to discuss them. I did a fairly through search of the Whitehouse website looking for the page that proudly displays their Czar Dream Team. I hoped to see pictures and bio maybe in a nice complete listing. I hoped to get a total for the number of czars. No luck.

So it is not surprising that this has become a red state/blue state country. In the midwest we still think $80 billion is a lot of money. We would like to know about the agenda of the people spreading it around. What are they buying with our money? Who is getting incentivized and who is getting denied? What behavior are you seeking to create with that money? And by the way, what the hell is a "green job" anyway?

Obama Math - Part 1. Cash for Clunkers does not add up.

Among the brave new government programs, like TARP bailouts, and auto industry takeovers, Cash for Clunkers was another program that defied logic. There were several arguments to "justify" it, few of which seem to have panned out. One of the worst performers was the argument that it would save vast sums of money wasted on poor fuel efficiency.

This from a friend of mine:

I guess I must be on the wrong page…
A vehicle at 15 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 800 gallons a year of gasoline.
A vehicle at 25 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 480 gallons a year.

So, the average clunker transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year.
They claim 700,000 vehicles – so that's 224 million gallons / year.
That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil.
5 million barrels of oil is about ¼ of one day's US consumption.
And, 5 million barrels of oil costs about $350 million dollars at $75/bbl.
So, we all contributed to spending $3 billion to save $350 million.
How good a deal was that ???

They'll probably do a great job w. health care though!!

As author Keith Gosney alludes, the health care math used by the President is similarly challenged. He will expand access, add 42 million new insureds, and no one will be rationed out, no provider will be reimbursed less, and the budget will not be blown. Sounds "fishy".

Greed or Envy - Two Motivating forces

I saw this in the Investors Business Daily. It is an amazing summation of the competing ideologies at war in this country today. The more we learn about what President Obama meant by the word "change" (actually, what "independents who voted for Obama learn that conservatives already knew) the more people are rising up to resist. We see this in the Tea Partiers but also in the dramatic slip of the President in the polls. Support among independents is plummeting. Not one of the major policy initiatives of the Obama administration from the Employee Free Choice Act, to Health Care "Reform" to Cap and Trade enjoy anywhere close to 50% of popular support. So what motivates the leftist leaders that run our country? Do they really think that captalism is bad and socialism is good? We are in a war of ideaologies. This Russian immigrant offers up a history lesson that sums it up beautifully.

The Perspective Of A Russian Immigrant

By SVETLANA KUNIN | Posted Thursday, August 20, 2009 4:20 PM PT

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was taught to believe individual pursuits are selfish and sacrificing for the collective good is noble.

In kindergarten we sang songs about Lenin, the leader of the Socialist Revolution. In school we learned about the beautiful socialist system, where everybody is equal and everything is fair; about ugly capitalism, where people are exploited and treat each other like wolves in the wilderness.

Life in the USSR modeled the socialist ideal. God-based religion was suppressed and replaced with cultlike adoration for political figures.

The government-assigned salary of the proletariat (blue-collar worker) was 30%-50% higher then any professional. Without incentive to improve their life, professionals drank themselves to oblivion. They — engineers, lawyers, doctors, teachers — earned a government-determined salary that barely covered the necessities, mainly food.

Raising children was a hardship. It took four to six adults (parents and grandparents) to support a child. The usual size of the postwar family was one or two children. Every woman had the right to have an abortion and most of them did, often without anesthesia.

There is a comparative historical reality that plays out the consequences of two competing ideologies: life in the USSR and in America. When the march to the worker's paradise — the Socialist Revolution — began in 1917, many people emigrated from Russia to the U.S.

In the USSR, economic equality was achieved by redistributing wealth, ensuring that everyone remained poor, with the exception of those doing the redistributing. Only the ruling class of communist leaders had access to special stores, medicine and accommodations that could compare to those in the West.

The rest of the citizenry had to deal with permanent shortages of food and other necessities, and had access to free but inferior, unsanitary and low-tech medical care. The egalitarian utopia of equality, achieved by the sacrifice of individual self-interest for the collective good, led to corruption, black markets, anger and envy.

Government-controlled health care destroyed human dignity.

Chairman Nikita Khrushchev released facts about Stalin and his purges. People learned of the horrific purge of more than 20 million citizens, murdered as enemies of the state.

Those who left Russia found a different set of values in America: freedom of religion, speech, individual pursuits, the right to private property and free enterprise. The majority of those immigrants achieved a better life for themselves and their children in this capitalist land.

These opportunities let the average immigrant live a better life than many elites in the Soviet Communist Party. The freedom to pursue personal self-interest led to prosperity. Prosperity generated charity, benefiting the collective good.

The descendants of those immigrants are now supporting policies that move America away from the values that gave so many immigrants the chance of a better life. Policies such as nationalized medicine, high tax rates and government intrusion into free enterprise are being sold to us under the socialistic motto of collective salvation.

Socialism has bankrupted and failed every society, while capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

There is no perfect society. There are no perfect people. Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism. My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism. Change to socialism is not an improvement on the imperfections of the current system.

The slogans of "fairness and equality" sound better than the slogans of capitalism. But unlike at the beginning of the 20th century, when these slogans and ideas were yet to be tested, we have accumulated history and reality.

Today we can define the better system not by slogans, but by looking at the accumulated facts. We can compare which ideology leads to the most oppression and which brings the most opportunity.

When I came to America in 1980 and experienced life in this country, I thought it was fortunate that those living in the USSR did not know how unfortunate they were.

Now in 2009, I realize how unfortunate it is that many Americans do not understand how fortunate they are. They vote to give government more and more power without understanding the consequences.

Svetlana Kunin, Stamford, Conn.

Editor's note: Mrs. Kunin, an IBD subscriber, is a retired software developer. In the Soviet Union, she was a civil engineer.