I noticed yesterday that when President Obama was laying down the law, he never uses the phrases, "nuclear option" or "reconciliation." If you feel so strongly about a policy, you shouldn't hide behind doublespeak and sob stories. This is a defining moment in American politics. Obama has painted his democrats into a corner. His Chicago corruption style politics won't work nationwide. It is going to turn really nasty. Pelosi is going to a Jujitsu class all this week to brush up on submission holds. Harry Reid is watching re-runs of Kung Fu and Barack Obama is conducting a "Untouchables" movie marathon on Wednesday nights. "They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue." There has been so many lies propagated in the last forty eight hours that the American people have lost all faith in government. It has become so farfetched and convoluted that I'm afraid the American people will think it is true. The "anointed one" is so disingenuous when he supposedly talks about his plan, he doesn't have a plan, (bill) he is using the senate's bill and adding to it. It has gone from 2,400 pages to 2,411 pages. It doesn't matter how many doctors from central casting he hires, Obama once said, "put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig." Mr. Obama, this proposed legislation is bad legislation. The state run media is being compliant with their master. Watching the news programs, the liberal hosts are besides themselves why certain democrats won't support the messiah's call for action. If they pass this bill, they will see a "call for action" from the American people like they have never seen before. The 912 Rally in DC on September 12th will look like a small family picnic compared to what will transpire. Allegations of White House attempting to buy Congressman Mathesen, D-UT, vote by giving his brother a job. I thought bribery was illegal? This is how the Obama administration operates. As Robert (Family Guy) Gibbs said the other day, "whatever it takes to pass healthcare." Bart stupak, D-WI, a committed pro life advocate has claimed that he will not support the current bill and has united with twelve other democrats who vote against the bill with the current abortion language. Also, other democrats are peeling off like an banana. Another intersting tidbit is why Obama never mentions Romneycare. It has been a disaster for Massachusetts. They are paying the highest premiums in the country. They are $47 million over budget for 2010 and it is only March. Of course, Barry O. will never mention this... Maybe it just slipped his mind? We just need to keep on our representatives by calling and emailing as often as possible. "We the people"
Average day in the Oval office:
President Obama doublin' down:
Question of the day:
Did President Obama wear a purple tie in support of SEIU?
No We Can’tObama’s vanishing charisma
BY John H. Chettle
March 8, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 24
One casualty of the serial crises confounding American politics of late is President Obama’s charisma, heretofore seemingly one of his greatest assets. As Politico pointedly asked, “Obama’s charisma: Where did he leave it?” Pundits and commentators have even raised the question of whether he might after all be “just another politician.”
But the more pressing question, given that the president has at least three more years in office, is whether Obama can fill this sudden charisma vacuum. Can he get his mojo back?
The best answer may lie in the writings of the sociologist Max Weber, who died nearly 90 years ago. Weber famously introduced the concept of charisma into sociology, and his theories have an almost uncanny relevance to the present American scene.
By “charisma” Weber was referring mainly to the quasi-magical qualities of the great religious leaders, but also the “exceptional qualities” of leaders like those in politics. Charisma was, he wrote in a series of papers published under the title On Charisma and Institution Building, difficult to maintain, particularly in a democracy, where it was often based on mere “short-lived mass emotion.”
It took time for Barack Obama to generate that emotion. He may have excited the 2004 Democratic Convention with his keynote speech, but at the start of the 2008 campaign, his experience was something else. In an early appearance, he joined other Democrats to reenact Bloody Sunday in Selma, crossing the Pettus Bridge, arms linked, in commemoration of the famous civil rights march. After the ceremony, Obama waited, cramped and perspiring, in his small plane on the tarmac at Selma while his pilot struggled to jump-start a dead battery. Two large motorcades, meanwhile, swept Bill and Hillary Clinton onto the airfield to their two waiting Gulfstream jets.
Obama began to attract large crowds, particularly after he won the Iowa caucuses, but it took a crisis—as Weber wrote that it usually does—to unleash the phenomenon. The economic meltdown, late in the campaign, created the urgency that triggers the search for a savior. The fact that Obama was an African American lent poignancy to the search. Many, even among his opponents, wondered whether he might be the instrument of a new racial reconciliation. To some supporters he seemed to be, in Weber’s phrase, “a gift of God.”
How fleeting that impression proved to be. “Conflicts that were supposed to be transformed by his magic are immune to his magic,” wrote Leon Wieseltier recently in the New Republic. “He has no magic. There is no magic.” “The animating spirit that electrified his political movement,” wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “has sputtered out.”
2 Comico:
Historical News Flash!
Archaeologists discovered ancient skeleton of liberal democrat. Experts estimate skeleton is approximately 1 day old. Skeleton was discovered in Nancy Pelosi's office. Archaeologists confident to find many more in building.
Green Piece:
Fuel Taxes Must Rise, Harvard Researchers Say
To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.
To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving would simply have to increase, according to a report released Thursday by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The research also appears in the March edition of the journal Energy Policy.
The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.
In their study, the researchers devised several combinations of steps that United States policymakers might take in trying to address the heat-trapping emissions by the nation’s transportation sector, which consumes 70 percent of the oil used in the United States.
Most of their models assumed an economy-wide carbon dioxide tax starting at $30 a ton in 2010 and escalating to $60 a ton in 2030. In some cases researchers also factored in tax credits for electric and hybrid vehicles, taxes on fuel or both.
In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.
“Tax credits don’t address how much people use their cars,” said Ross Morrow, one of the report’s authors. “In reverse, they can make people drive more.”
Dr. Morrow, formerly a fellow at the Belfer Center, is a professor of mechanical engineering and economics at Iowa State University
Researchers said that vehicle miles traveled will increase by more than 30 percent between 2010 and 2030 unless policymakers increase fuel taxes.
Quote du jour:
"Democrats ignoring will of the people"
Mitch McConnell
Writings of Our Founding Fathers
Federalist Papers
Federalist No. 30
Concerning the General Power of Taxation
From the New York Packet.
Friday, December 28, 1787.
Author: Alexander Hamilton
To the People of the State of New York:
IT HAS been already observed that the federal government ought to possess the power of providing for the support of the national forces; in which proposition was intended to be included the expense of raising troops, of building and equipping fleets, and all other expenses in any wise connected with military arrangements and operations. But these are not the only objects to which the jurisdiction of the Union, in respect to revenue, must necessarily be empowered to extend. It must embrace a provision for the support of the national civil list; for the payment of the national debts contracted, or that may be contracted; and, in general, for all those matters which will call for disbursements out of the national treasury. The conclusion is, that there must be interwoven, in the frame of the government, a general power of taxation, in one shape or another.
Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution. From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue; either the people must be subjected to continual plunder, as a substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy, and, in a short course of time, perish.
In the Ottoman or Turkish empire, the sovereign, though in other respects absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his subjects, has no right to impose a new tax. The consequence is that he permits the bashaws or governors of provinces to pillage the people without mercy; and, in turn, squeezes out of them the sums of which he stands in need, to satisfy his own exigencies and those of the state. In America, from a like cause, the government of the Union has gradually dwindled into a state of decay, approaching nearly to annihilation. Who can doubt, that the happiness of the people in both countries would be promoted by competent authorities in the proper hands, to provide the revenues which the necessities of the public might require?
The present Confederation, feeble as it is intended to repose in the United States, an unlimited power of providing for the pecuniary wants of the Union. But proceeding upon an erroneous principle, it has been done in such a manner as entirely to have frustrated the intention. Congress, by the articles which compose that compact (as has already been stated), are authorized to ascertain and call for any sums of money necessary, in their judgment, to the service of the United States; and their requisitions, if conformable to the rule of apportionment, are in every constitutional sense obligatory upon the States. These have no right to question the propriety of the demand; no discretion beyond that of devising the ways and means of furnishing the sums demanded. But though this be strictly and truly the case; though the assumption of such a right would be an infringement of the articles of Union; though it may seldom or never have been avowedly claimed, yet in practice it has been constantly exercised, and would continue to be so, as long as the revenues of the Confederacy should remain dependent on the intermediate agency of its members. What the consequences of this system have been, is within the knowledge of every man the least conversant in our public affairs, and has been amply unfolded in different parts of these inquiries. It is this which has chiefly contributed to reduce us to a situation, which affords ample cause both of mortification to ourselves, and of triumph to our enemies.
What remedy can there be for this situation, but in a change of the system which has produced it in a change of the fallacious and delusive system of quotas and requisitions? What substitute can there be imagined for this ignis fatuus in finance, but that of permitting the national government to raise its own revenues by the ordinary methods of taxation authorized in every well-ordered constitution of civil government? Ingenious men may declaim with plausibility on any subject; but no human ingenuity can point out any other expedient to rescue us from the inconveniences and embarrassments naturally resulting from defective supplies of the public treasury.
The more intelligent adversaries of the new Constitution admit the force of this reasoning; but they qualify their admission by a distinction between what they call INTERNAL and EXTERNAL taxation. The former they would reserve to the State governments; the latter, which they explain into commercial imposts, or rather duties on imported articles, they declare themselves willing to concede to the federal head. This distinction, however, would violate the maxim of good sense and sound policy, which dictates that every POWER ought to be in proportion to its OBJECT; and would still leave the general government in a kind of tutelage to the State governments, inconsistent with every idea of vigor or efficiency. Who can pretend that commercial imposts are, or would be, alone equal to the present and future exigencies of the Union? Taking into the account the existing debt, foreign and domestic, upon any plan of extinguishment which a man moderately impressed with the importance of public justice and public credit could approve, in addition to the establishments which all parties will acknowledge to be necessary, we could not reasonably flatter ourselves, that this resource alone, upon the most improved scale, would even suffice for its present necessities. Its future necessities admit not of calculation or limitation; and upon the principle, more than once adverted to, the power of making provision for them as they arise ought to be equally unconfined. I believe it may be regarded as a position warranted by the history of mankind, that, IN THE USUAL PROGRESS OF THINGS, THE NECESSITIES OF A NATION, IN EVERY STAGE OF ITS EXISTENCE, WILL BE FOUND AT LEAST EQUAL TO ITS RESOURCES.
To say that deficiencies may be provided for by requisitions upon the States, is on the one hand to acknowledge that this system cannot be depended upon, and on the other hand to depend upon it for every thing beyond a certain limit. Those who have carefully attended to its vices and deformities as they have been exhibited by experience or delineated in the course of these papers, must feel invincible repugnancy to trusting the national interests in any degree to its operation. Its inevitable tendency, whenever it is brought into activity, must be to enfeeble the Union, and sow the seeds of discord and contention between the federal head and its members, and between the members themselves. Can it be expected that the deficiencies would be better supplied in this mode than the total wants of the Union have heretofore been supplied in the same mode? It ought to be recollected that if less will be required from the States, they will have proportionably less means to answer the demand. If the opinions of those who contend for the distinction which has been mentioned were to be received as evidence of truth, one would be led to conclude that there was some known point in the economy of national affairs at which it would be safe to stop and to say: Thus far the ends of public happiness will be promoted by supplying the wants of government, and all beyond this is unworthy of our care or anxiety. How is it possible that a government half supplied and always necessitous, can fulfill the purposes of its institution, can provide for the security, advance the prosperity, or support the reputation of the commonwealth? How can it ever possess either energy or stability, dignity or credit, confidence at home or respectability abroad? How can its administration be any thing else than a succession of expedients temporizing, impotent, disgraceful? How will it be able to avoid a frequent sacrifice of its engagements to immediate necessity? How can it undertake or execute any liberal or enlarged plans of public good?
Let us attend to what would be the effects of this situation in the very first war in which we should happen to be engaged. We will presume, for argument's sake, that the revenue arising from the impost duties answers the purposes of a provision for the public debt and of a peace establishment for the Union. Thus circumstanced, a war breaks out. What would be the probable conduct of the government in such an emergency? Taught by experience that proper dependence could not be placed on the success of requisitions, unable by its own authority to lay hold of fresh resources, and urged by considerations of national danger, would it not be driven to the expedient of diverting the funds already appropriated from their proper objects to the defense of the State? It is not easy to see how a step of this kind could be avoided; and if it should be taken, it is evident that it would prove the destruction of public credit at the very moment that it was becoming essential to the public safety. To imagine that at such a crisis credit might be dispensed with, would be the extreme of infatuation. In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large loans. A country so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in a much stronger degree. But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying? The loans it might be able to procure would be as limited in their extent as burdensome in their conditions. They would be made upon the same principles that usurers commonly lend to bankrupt and fraudulent debtors, with a sparing hand and at enormous premiums.
It may perhaps be imagined that, from the scantiness of the resources of the country, the necessity of diverting the established funds in the case supposed would exist, though the national government should possess an unrestrained power of taxation. But two considerations will serve to quiet all apprehension on this head: one is, that we are sure the resources of the community, in their full extent, will be brought into activity for the benefit of the Union; the other is, that whatever deficiences there may be, can without difficulty be supplied by loans.
The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require. Foreigners, as well as the citizens of America, could then reasonably repose confidence in its engagements; but to depend upon a government that must itself depend upon thirteen other governments for the means of fulfilling its contracts, when once its situation is clearly understood, would require a degree of credulity not often to be met with in the pecuniary transactions of mankind, and little reconcilable with the usual sharp-sightedness of avarice.
Reflections of this kind may have trifling weight with men who hope to see realized in America the halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age; but to those who believe we are likely to experience a common portion of the vicissitudes and calamities which have fallen to the lot of other nations, they must appear entitled to serious attention. Such men must behold the actual situation of their country with painful solicitude, and deprecate the evils which ambition or revenge might, with too much facility, inflict upon it.
PUBLIUS.
References:
http://www.hotair.com/
http://www.wnd.com/
http://www.thehill.com/
http://www.drudgereport.com/
http://www.americanthinker.com/
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
Associated Press
http://www.youtube.com/
http://www.newsbusters.com/
New York Times
Library of Congress/Federalist Papers
SINDYA N. BHANOO
John H. Chettle
No comments:
Post a Comment