Domestic Policy: May 2009 Archives

Dear Jim,

Congressman Henry Waxman is trying to finish his "Cap and Trade" Energy Tax bill by today, in order to have it ready for a full vote by Memorial Day.

And as Politico reports, he's had a "hidden helping hand" this week from Al Gore. They write that Gore has "mobilized his green grass roots, marshaled his well-endowed lobbying organization and even personally called Democratic committee members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee."

So, we're launching a nationwide "Stop the Energy Tax" campaign to stop this.

It's been estimated that the Waxman energy tax bill would raise an average family's annual energy bill by $1,500, and destroy 1-3 million jobs per year, over the next 15 years.

Can you afford to pay $1,500 more a year for energy?

Our "Stop the Energy Tax" campaign is how we can fight back, but the first step is launching it.

We need to raise $100,000 in the next two days, so we can set up a rapid-response operation, create internet ads, and deliver your petitions to Congress. Think about this - you are one of 1.3 million people getting this email today. If 10,000 members chip in just $15, we'll beat our goal.

Can you make a secure donation right now for $15, $25 or whatever you can afford? If so, click here.

A generous donor has agreed to match up to $100,000 in online donations. Your contribution today will have double the impact in stopping this massive tax increase. Here's the link to contribute:

http://www.americansolutions.com/contribute/index.php?id=70180000000JAdi§ion=energytax

We can have a "Full Power" American energy policy that produces more energy here at home while protecting the environment.  This will lead to more jobs and a more prosperous America.  

Thank you for what you're doing.

Your friend,

Newt Gingrich
General Chairman
American Solutions for Winning the Future

		Liberals want to tax soda to pay for government-run health care   During the presidential campaign of 2008, Barack Obama pledged that those making below $250,000 would not see their taxes go up one dime. He promised to cut taxes for the middle class and poor people. But if his friends in Congress get their way, President Obama will have a tough decision to make – whether to break his campaign pledge again in the form of higher taxes on soda and “sugary drinks” like sports and energy drinks. Some liberals in Congress have proposed paying for government-run health care by hiking taxes on soft drinks and other beverages. Because the socialized health care schemes being considered will cost at least a trillion dollars, liberal politicians are looking for ways to pay for their schemes without upsetting too many folks. So they think that a tax on soft drinks is better than any other type of tax. They are wrong, and need to understand this message loud and clear: NO NEW TAXES! As if government-run health care weren’t bad enough in terms of quality, now we have another reason to stop it dead in its tracks. Paying for government-run health care will cost every American that enjoys soft drinks, or even sports and energy drinks. This tax and spend scheme is typical of liberals, and only reinforces my belief that this is about them increasing their power, and their control over our lives. We can’t let them get away with it anymore. TAKE ACTION! The battle against higher taxes and government-run health care is just beginning. But if we can stand together and show our opposition loud enough, we just might be able to defend liberty, and keep more money in our pockets as well. Sincerely, Dick Armey Chairman FreedomWorks.org

JASmius adds: Since it's common knowledge by now that a big part of the Obama health care rationing (or what they call "cost control") scheme is cutting off access to high-tech treatments and medications, can it not be fairly said that under Red Barry-care, the Democrats will be, as it were, throwing the old and the sick out in the street to die?

I still have a friend of mine and my very own father alive today thanks to those high-tech treatments and medications.  B.O. and the Dems would have put them in the grave.  Do I really need to elaborate my thoughts and feelings on this issue any further?

Is it possible to cram two weeks of neglected center-right political commentary into a single post?  We'll soon find out....

***One time-saver is to "liberally" quote from Newsmax Insider's "liberal" quote of Deroy Murdock's account of more Obamunist education deck-stacking:

President Barack Obama’s Department of Education sat on a report chronicling the success of a school vouchers program until after Congress had voted not to continue the program.

That’s the report from Deroy Murdock, a media fellow with the Hoover Institution, who exposes the subterfuge in an article published by National Review Online.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program allows 1,714 children — 90% of them black and 9% Hispanic — to receive up to $7,500 to attend a private or parochial school instead of a public school in the District of Columbia, which is widely believed to have one of the nation’s most troubled school districts.

Since the program’s launch in 2004, 7,852 students have applied for these grants, and participants have been chosen by lottery.

Obama — who said last year that “you do what works for the kids” — did not intervene as Congress scheduled the program’s end after the 2009-2010 academic year.

“Now it emerges that Obama’s Department of Education  possessed peer-reviewed, congressionally mandated, federally financed research proving this program’s success,” Murdock writes.

“Though it demonstrates ‘what works for the kids,’ DOE hid this study until Congress squelched these children’s dreams.”

An amendment in the Senate to rescue the vouchers program failed on March 10 by a vote of 58-39. The DOE finally released the report on April 3. Even then, DOE researchers were reportedly barred from discussing their findings.

“You’d think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program,” an April 5 editorial in the Wall Street Journal reported.

During the March 10 vote, 57 Democrats voted and 54 of them opposed the vouchers program.

Why? Murdock suggested, “Follow the money,” and he pointed out that teachers’ unions shelled out $55,794,000 in political donations between 1999 and 2008, with 96% of the funds going to Democrats.

The “winners” in the Senate vote, he added, are “the teachers’ unions, who hate school choice, hate vouchers, and don’t give a damn about school kids when they threaten union pay, benefits, and control of classrooms.”

Like the Li'l President said, "You do what works for your co-partisan cronies".  Or something like that.

***The good news: Rudy Giuliani is the runaway favorite in the 2010 New York gubernatorial race.  The bad news: only if he's running against more-unpopular-than-swine-flu incumbent David Paterson.  The high likelihood of ending up facing state Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo is most of why the Mayor hasn't committed to an Albany bid as yet, I'd reckon.

***Protecting the lives of American citizens is reaching the threshold of criminality:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States lost "our moral bearings" with gruesome terror-suspect interrogations and he left the door open to prosecuting Bush Administration officials who vouched for their legality....

Obama had said earlier that he didn't want to see prosecutions of CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, so long as they acted within parameters spelled out by government superiors who held that such practices were legal at the time.

But the administration's stance on Bush Administration lawyers who actually wrote the memos approving these tactics has been less clear.

Whereas the gruesome terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the very real and palpable threat and fear of a whole string of sequel strikes, and the overriding imperative - shared in by the very same Democrats now going to war against their "criminal" Bushkin predecessors - of doing whatever it took to prevent them, have disappeared down the public policy memory hole.  Perhaps to not revive even in the wake of fresh Islamist atrocities on our soil, as the intent of the Obamunist oberfuehrers is clearly to so demonize the very concept of muscular American "forward defense" against those who to this day make unequivocally clear their intent to kill as many of us as they can that there will be public support dared for nothing except the same neurotic, self-loathing, pacifist prostration that got us attacked eight years ago and will get us attacked again, even harder, and sooner rather than later.

Then again, it was on the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle, no less, that appeared the 9/12/01 headline "BASTARDS!" in huge, quivering, Bold-faced-raging capital letters.  It took eight years for liberals to agitate and caterwaul and demonize the public back into a September 10th mindset; it'll take mere minutes to reverse it again.

Meanwhile, while Big Time was helpfully suggesting that B.O. stop cherry-picking only the classified CIA reports on how the Bush Administration gathered its al Qaeda-stopping intelligence and leaving out what they did so successfully with said intelligence, Lucifer was revealing anew where his true loyalties lie:

A liberal newspaper columnist and former counsel to billionaire George Soros’ Open Societies Institute has been tapped for a key Defense Department position despite what Washington insiders have termed her “extremist,” Bush-bashing views.

Rosa Brooks will serve as principal adviser to Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, according to a report in the Weekly Standard. In that substantial insider position, Brooks, who once famously penned that the Bush administration’s “big legal lies paved the way for some of the most shameful episodes in our history,” will have constant contact with DOD policy chief Flournoy, who reports directly to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and eyeballs every major defense department decision....

In 2007, Brooks wrote: “Thanks to U.S. policies, al-Qaida has become the vast global threat the Administration imagined it to be in 2001.”

That sort of attitude, along with Brooks' apparent lack of military or policy experience, has many pundits scratching their heads over the hiring.

Only if they haven't been paying attention.  To quote the army of Agents Smith in Matrix Reloaded, "It is inevitable".

***Where will the money come from?:

A growing chorus of experts is warning the Obama administration’s plan to add 47 million people to the health-insurance rolls may kill hopes for a sustained economic recovery.

Obama’s healthcare plan would follow the $700 billion TARP bailout, the $787 billion stimulus, and a $410 billion, earmark-laden budget appropriation -- at a time when the national debt already exceeds $11 trillion.

Such staggering deficits are leading economists to question whether enough investment capital would be left over once the expected economic recovery takes hold. Any economic recovery could stall or be seriously limited, economists say.

With "cap & tax" costing four grand per household and destroying as many as four million more jobs, just to mention another of Red Barry's (and Fat Albert's) insane, leftwing extremist schemes, I ask again: where will the money come from?

It's a trick question.  The money was gone long, long ago.  To quote the famous philospher Yosemite Sam, the libs have long since "scraped our hide clean offin' our carcasses"; now they're sucking the marrow from our economic bones like vampires with overbites.

Maybe Senator DeMint is onto something.

***Has Obamastapo Reichdtierdamm Janet Napolitano "absolutely gone stark raving mad" in replacing America's real Islamist enemies with extremist partisan demonizations of political conservatives and American veterans and serving men & women in uniform?  Remove the word "gone" with "always was" and you'll be closer to the pin.

Pity that truth won't matter for another three and a half years - or until Napy becomes too much of a liability for The One to delay any further her introduction to the undercarriage of his PR bus.  Somebody'll have to check bin Laden's attack calendar for the specifics.

***Guess we found it - it isn't possible, at least in one sitting.  So much for taking big bites.  No wonder my mom always warned me against that.

We'll reconvene "later," morale and interest level permitting.