WEEK OF MARCH 15, 2009

Holding Congress Responsible: Part II  

The voting results in both houses of Congress for the president’s Omnibus Spending Bill have been posted as Issue #2 in the Hold Congress Accountable pages of The Drum and Cannon. In the tables there, you can see how each member of Congress voted on the Bill.  

This is the second major issue that is addressed in the section. The first issue (Issue #1) for which the congressional votes were tabulated was the president’s Economic Stimulus Bill.  

The purpose of the accountability section is to provide an easy source of information regarding how individual members of the 111th Congress vote on the major issues facing the country. Hopefully, the information will be valuable for voters as an aid to choosing how to vote in the 2010 Election. 

Other current unresolved issues that are being closely watched and will be included in the overall results will be the president’s $3,5billion Budget for 2010 as well as the misnamed Freedom of Choice Act designed to ignore the fundamental American principle of the secret ballot.
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The original article can be viewed HERE.

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The Truth Behind the Current Mortgage Crisis

At least we cannot lay its origins at the feet of Barack Obama. The current mortgage crisis had its seeds sown long before last year's elections. It was, however, Obama's friends in Congress who played the major role is setting up the disaster in the mortgage markets that eventually took place.

In a FOX News report from last September that since then has since been pulled from American media under democratic pressure, this video presentation presents documented proof  that it was Democrats in Congress, not the Bush Administration, who have consistently blocked stricter regulation of financial giants Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. According to the report, which was made available by a Canadian website, Proud to be Canadian, the Bush Administration and Republican Senator John McCain issued repeated warnings from 2001 to 2007 that lax regulation would lead to the problems that we have today. Still, the current president lays the blame on the Republicans, claiming that today's crisis had been "inherited". It was inherited, all right, but not from the Bush Administration.

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We Wish the New President Good Health

Call me unpatriotic, if you will. That is the label that those on the Left ascribe to those of us who share Rush Limbaugh’s refusal to express hope that President Obama’s plans and policies will be successful. It is not like those same members of the Left have even the slightest concept of what the term “patriotism” means in the traditional sense. For them, patriotism now implies a blind willingness to shed our nation’s historic past for the bland mediocrity of “social justice”, another term that itself has been redefined to support the Marxian concept “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. It now means “equal outcomes” instead of “equal opportunities”. In their perverted way of believing that our nation has failed up until now simply because equal opportunities have not always produced equal outcomes.  

It means even more, however. The “new” patriotism of today means that current “common wisdom” acknowledges and supports the belief that government can more effectively and more efficiently control the economy and the marketplace than can the marketplace itself. This belief, no doubt, is based firmly in the narcissistic belief that the people in the Administration and the government bureaucracy are for some reason more intelligent and more capable than the individual entrepreneur. That this “common wisdom” has been imposed on us by those in power, along with their allies in the media, is a fact that is overlooked. They have been successful only through the compliance of the pop-culture hangers-on who are either too uninformed to discern otherwise or too complacent to compete in the marketplace. 

Thirdly, it is a perversion of logic in which the very meaning of a word has been twisted to achieve and maintain political power. Where was the Left’s “patriotism” when its members were bringing about our surrender in Vietnam or during the darkest hours of the War in Iraq? If the left is so interested in patriotism, why did its members not rise in anger when their 2004 presidential candidate called those who were giving their lives in Iraq a bunch of losers, or when Dingy Harry unilaterally declared that war to be lost? During those times if their patriotism was questioned, their standard reply was that patriotism does not require a person to blindly follow our leadership down the path to destruction. Now, for some reason, they expect those of us on the other side of the political spectrum to do that very thing. 

Consider, for example, the following issues. 

HEALTH CARE 

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews recently referred to those who oppose Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Services as “terrorists”.  During her term as Governor of Kansas, Ms. Sebelius consistently advanced pro-abortion positions that directly contradicted those of many, if not most, Americans. Apparently, Mr. Matthews believes that pro-life groups should remain silent on a nominee who voted to weaken and eliminate measures like parental notification and waiting periods.  

In an article appearing at American Thinker, entitled Nationalizing Life and Death, John Griffing writes,

He goes on to explain how the bill establishes a nationwide “comparative effectiveness of health care” system that will allow government bureaucrats to make decisions regarding individuals’ health treatment options, rather than allowing health care providers to make those decisions.  

On the other hand, organizations such as AARP vehemently deny that health care reform, as included in the stimulus bill, would have such disastrous results. On the contrary, they say, provisions exist in the bill to prevent anything similar to what Mr. Griffing claims.  

Wherever the truth lies, asking the questions is perfectly legitimate and rational. Unfortunately, you will never see these issues discussed or debated in the media. Apparently, it would be “unpatriotic” to do so. 

A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE 

President Obama is a graduate of the school of Saul Alinsky, the radical activist who taught that, for Socialists to gain influence and power, Step 1 was to convince the people how badly off they are and how hopeless their current situation is. Once convinced, it was then that you would bring in your proposed solutions to convince them that you could pave their streets with gold. Barack Obama applied this strategy well during the campaign, and by the time of the election, 67 million Americans believed that we not only needed change, but also that he could give them both hope and change. Even if he had spelled out in greater detail what this change would be, i.e. a change to a European style of socialism in the United States, Americans were ready for it without knowing its true implications. 

One group, the stock market investors, did not buy into this fairy tale. nor are they buying into it now. President Obama stated recently that he does not pay attention to the daily ups and downs of stock prices, which he referred to as nothing more than a “tracking poll”, saying that it could detract him from applying his solutions to the woes of the nation’s economy. He is correct in calling it a tracking poll, but it has not been a matter of daily “ups and downs”. It has been in a continuous downward spin, with only rare upward corrections of a few dollars when some investors thought that it had bottomed out. As a tracking poll, it is probably the clearest indicator that investors have no confidence in his solutions thus far. 

A TRAIL OF BROKEN PROMISES 

During his election campaign, Candidate Obama repeatedly asserted that he would not bring any lobbyists into his administration, and that he would vigorously oppose earmarks in spending bills. During his first month in office, both promises went by the wayside. As Bara Vaida points out in an article in the online National Journal magazine,  

In November 2007, Obama boasted at a campaign event that lobbyists "won't find a job in my White House." He later softened that rhetoric to say that lobbyists "won't dominate" the White House. National Journal therefore is tracking the number of lobbyists in the executive branch. As of January 21, Obama had nominated two recent lobbyists to high-level administration posts, and 12 of the 112 White House staffers that Obama had named had been registered as lobbyists at some point since 2005. 

Obama’s Economic Stimulus Bill is free of earmarks, to hear the president tell it. On his second day in office, Obama had huddled with his advisors and told them,

We are going to ban all earmarks -- the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review," he explained. "We will create an economic recovery oversight board made up of key administration officials and independent advisors to identify problems early and make sure we are doing all we can to solve it. 

Apparently Obama’s friends in Congress either did not hear him or they somehow detected a “wink, wink” from Obama as they stuffed over 1,000 earmarks into the bill, including a bridge across the Osage River in Missouri, $8billion for a maglev train to connect Disneyland to Las Vegas, and $30 million for wetlands restoration in the San Francisco Bay Area to protect the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse. He must truly believe that these projects will add millions of new jobs, straighten out the mortgage crisis, and make credit once again available to Americans. (Actually, since Obama later stipulated that all new construction jobs would only go to union members. maybe a few million new jobs is not too high an estimate for these three projects after all.) 

NATIONAL SECURITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 

Thus far, the President has done little to give Conservatives any reasons to either applaud or deride his actions, with perhaps one exception-his decision to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, which is a good start to achieving success there. He will, however, have to do far more if he truly intends to be successful there. 

As for his other actions to date, they are of little overall significance. Instead, they are clear illustrations of his total inexperience and naïveté in foreign policy matters. Nothing illustrates this more than his decision to close Guantanamo Bay, with no idea or no plan whatsoever as to what will be done with the remaining terrorists who are being held there. In retrospect, it appears now that this action was taken merely as a sop to his supporters who fully expected him to honor a campaign promise. 

Similarly, his decision to bring home from Iraq all “combat troops” by August of next year was hollow since, in his own words, the 30,000 to 50,000 troops that will remain will be engaged in, among other things, “counterinsurgency operations”. Since only a handful of his supporters would have just the slightest understanding of what the term “counterinsurgency operations” means, it makes them happy. In reality, it is absolutely no different than what President Bush was planning to do. 

His pledge of $900million for the reconstruction of Gaza will probably become an embarrassment when he discovers that most of the “reconstruction” that Hamas allows to take place will be for its arsenal of Iranian rockets and mortars to fire at Israel.

The reported letter that President Obama sent to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev suggesting the U.S. would back off deploying a missile defense system in eastern Europe to intercept and destroy potential Iranian long-range missiles if Moscow helped stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, apparently had little or no effect. While Russia at least claims that the system would pose a military threat, it is not very likely that she would agree to jeopardize her lucrative contract with Iran to help that country build nuclear power plants. Attempting to influence Iran to not do something that it sees to be in its own best interests could indeed jeopardize those contracts. On paper, it seems like a good idea, but it is not realistic and is another example of Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. That is a serious shortcoming in today’s world. 

President Obama has given Conservatives no reason at all to support his policies, which we see as definite dangers to the well-being of America. Therefore, to even suggest that we blindly go along with those plans simply because he won the election is totally unrealistic and irrational. 

We wish the President good health. We wish him and his family long and healthy lives. But we do not wish him success with his policies. To do so would be hypocritical and a lie.

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