Why It’s Time to Speak about God Again

By Jay
Haug

America is living under an illusion:
the idea that we can expunge God (broadly understood) from our national and
public belief system and still operate a moral and accountable
government.

C.S. Lewis summed up the problem
in The Abolition of Man.  “We make men without chests and expect of
them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors
in our midst.  We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.”  John
Adams asserted, “Our Constitution was made for a religious and moral people.  It
is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Our founding fathers laid
down a system that demanded conscientious, self-restrained implementation — a
government dependent on the character of the people.  Ben Franklin, perhaps the
most deistic of the founding fathers, famously assured one curious bystander
that the Constitutional Conventions had engendered “a Republic, if you can keep
it.”  How many people today truly understand that America’s health depends on
the moral character of its citizens, of their personal “keeping” of our
nation?

Many people in power have discovered
that what Ivan Karamazov said is true: “If God is dead, all is permitted.”  They
recognize only too well that God has been removed from public life — and with
Him, the attendant moral order.  In their minds, there is no responsibility
because there is no God.  Morality, though not always agreed upon, has become a
matter of opinion, easily dismissed.

How quaint the phrases of JFK appear
to modern ears in his inaugural address: “the same revolutionary beliefs for
which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe — the belief
that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the
hand of God.”  Unlike most of American history, religious utterances today are
considered sectarian, even offensive.  For the publicly disgraced, however, take
a few years in jail or probation and a good lawyer, and they are home free.
Americans forgive, and well they should, but who is left to pick up the pieces
and contemplate the risk/reward of bad behavior?

When was the last time an American
president prayed aloud in public?  It was FDR at the moment of the D-Day
invasion.  According to preacher Andy Stanley, Americans stopped in traffic and
got out of their cars, and major companies sent home their employees to pray for
the invasion.  Children stopped in school, all to pray.  The truth is that for
most of our history, Americans have believed that our nation is accountable to
God for our behavior and prayed publicly for His guidance and forgiveness.  Even
when Abraham Lincoln asserted in his Second Inaugural that “[t]he Almighty has
His own purposes,” intimating that they are not easily discerned, very few
Americans doubted, as Lincoln asserted, that they are “true and righteous
altogether.”

Only since prayer was banished from
public schools in 1962 and a vocal minority began to consider it their right
never to be present in a public place within earshot of a prayer was it that
America decided to hang up on the voice of God in the public sphere.  But this
has not protected us from what Julia Ward Howe called “His terrible swift sword”
— i.e., the consequences for our behavior.  We are reaping the whirlwind even
as we speak.

Many believe that religion should be
confined to the private sphere.  They want religion, in Francis Schaeffers’s
words, “privately important, but publicly irrelevant.”  But the truth is that
public people living out public lives have always been subject to public oaths
and understandings that invoke the name and sanction of God.  According to
historian David McCullough, George Washington added “so help me God” to the
presidential oath, and it has stuck ever since.  In the face of communism in the
1950s, Congress added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance and made “One
Nation Under God” our national motto.  Those who preceded us knew the wisdom of
inculcating an understanding of God and the roots of conscience in all Americans
— even in public schools.  The “lowest common denominator” result of the 1962
school prayer decision was not only foolish constitutionally, but
self-destructive nationally.  Our public schools have never been the same
since.

American history shows that two
“Great Awakenings” presaged the two greatest crises in American history.  John
and Charles Wesley and George Whitfield preached through the entire thirteen
colonies in the 1740s, preparing the next generation for the challenges and
inculcating the self-control needed for revolutionary times.  Charles Phinney,
Lyman Beecher, and others led the 2^nd Great Awakening that formed the
backdrop for the Civil War, empowering in the aftermath a greater healing and
reconciliation of the nation than might normally have occurred.  When the Civil
Rights movement reached its critical stage, Martin Luther King, Jr., a
clergyman, appeared on government property and invoked both the Bible (the book
of Amos) and our founding documents to declare racial prejudice wrong, telling
Americans that racism fell short of both God’s laws and America’s founding
vision.  He knew where freedom came from, proclaiming, “Thank God Almighty, I’m
free at last” as he strode from the Lincoln Memorial.  Must God be turned to
publicly only when America is shaken to the core, or when our values are
seriously compromised?  Are we not in that position right now?

America is in crisis.  Unfortunately,
since the 1960s, we have expunged the one Presence from our public life who can
truly help us as He has in the past.  In his book Who Are We?, Samuel
Huntington tells us that America is different from every other nation in the
following regard:  throughout the world, the more impoverished a nation is, the
more time its people spend in religious observance and activities.  The only
exception — the only one — is America.  We are wealthy and we also spend much
time in religious observance.

Huntington warns us that we have
about fifteen years to preserve what he calls “our Protestant heritage.”  Let’s
expand that here to include the public presence of God, which can help to
enliven the private consciences of all Americans.

What we must face is a simple fact.
A morality unhinged from God is not only inadequate for the times, but it will
also doom us to a permanent slide into oblivion.  Many believe that America will
turn publicly to God…eventually.  But will it be too late when the time
finally comes?

Jay Haug is a freelance
writer living in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.  You may e-mail him at
cjcwguy@gmail.com.

Obama/Holder Could Face Felony Charges for Fast and Furious

Doug Book,FloydReports.com

Why waste time asking “What did you know and when did you know it?” when the
Obama Regime might already face felony charges?

That’s the question Attorney David Hardy and others are asking those
investigating the role of Regime members in the deadly gun walking fiasco,Fast
and Furious.

Since whistleblowers
brought this scheme to the attention of Congress early this year,Senator Charles
Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa have been frustrated
by Department of Justice stonewalling,subterfuge,and
misrepresentation.

As Grassley wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder in a July 18th
correspondence,“If the attorneys working on the [Justice] Department’s response
to the Committee spent less time redacting documents and more time producing
them,we would be much closer to understanding the failures in leadership
surrounding Operation Fast and Furious.”

But it is Hardy’s contention that….

Read
more.

Concealed Carry Would Have Kept Norway Safe

Michael Reagan,FloydReports.com

How long would the Norway gunman have lasted in Texas or any state where
concealed-carry laws are on the books? I ran a survey while on a cruise:in
Texas,3 minutes;in Montana,7 to 8 minutes;in Arizona,2 minutes;and in Nevada,3
to 5 minutes.

Had Norway not surrendered to the anti-self-defense nuts,and allowed
Norwegians to protect themselves by legally carrying guns,the massacre might
well have been prevented. There’s a lot of truth in the old adage that if guns
are outlawed only outlaws will carry guns.

That was certainly true in Norway where Anders Breivik,a lone gunman,launched his assault on youth
campers of Utoya Island. According to press reports he fully expected Norway’s
special forces to swoop down and stop him at any minute. It didn’t happen. Faced
with unarmed victims he was given plenty of time to kill 68 innocent people who
could not defend themselves. Had just one of them been armed,Breivik could have
been stopped dead and lives would have been spared.

Moreover,if anyone had paid attention to Breivik’s rants they would not have
been surprised when he acted on them,especially since Breivik had preceded his
attack by setting off a car bomb in the heart of Oslo.

Tragically,Norway’s anti-gun hysteria resulted in laws restricting gun
ownership by law-abiding citizens,leaving them exposed to gun violence at the
hands of criminals such as Breivik,who simply ignore anti-gun ownership laws.
Despite the Second Amendment,which protects American citizens’rights to access
to guns for self-protection,the Constitutional right of citizens to bear arms is
under constant assault….

Read more.

The separation of mosque and state?

The  separation of mosque and state?

 

---

Posted: July 24, 2011
9:00 pm Eastern

© 2011

 

As the White House and Congress debate cuts in federal spending, millions of  dollars are being funneled overseas to help build many Islamic mosques and  structures.An Atlanta television news station, WSB-TV, reported that “the State  Department is sending hundreds of millions of dollars to save mosques overseas.”  The anchor noted that the State Department’s Agency for International  Development granted enormous funds for mosques in Cairo, Cyprus, Tajikistan and  Mali.

A USAID official spoke with FactCheck.org and confirmed about $2.3 million  was used on the Cairo mosque “to help lower the groundwater at the mosque area,  replacing the old sewage collector, and providing a healthier environment for  people living in the area.” In addition to that 1,000-year old mosque, more than  $15 million was given by the U.S. and the Egyptian government to restore another  1,300-year-old mosque, a Roman tower, a Greek Orthodox church and other  buildings. And in Cyprus, $5 million in U.S. federal funds was granted to  restore a mosque and a Greek Orthodox monastery. FactCheck.org went on to  confirm that the Mali and Tajikistan mosque projects involved funding for  computer equipment. Though USAID won’t specify exactly how much of their monies  in 2010 profited mosques, the agency says it committed $18.8 billion for all of  its global projects.

The U.S. State Department confessed that, “Since its creation by the U.S.  Congress, the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation has also provided  financial support to more than 640 cultural preservation projects in more than  100 countries. This accomplishment … represents a contribution of nearly $26  million …”

(Column continues below)

The Associated Press reported that during America’s recession in 2010-2011,  the Obama administration has doled out 6 million of American tax dollars to  restore or preserve 63 historic, religious and cultural sites, including Islamic  mosques and minarets, in 55 nations under the guise of “Cultural Affairs” and  “Cultural Preservation 2010 Awards,” and they include:

• $50,000 for conservation of Sundarwala Burj, a 16th-century Islamic monument  in New Delhian, India

• $76,000 for the restoration of a 16th-century grand mosque in China, with  one of the longest histories and largest premises in the world.

• $67,000 for the restoration of the mid‐18th‐century Sunehri Masjid (Golden  Mosque) in Lahore, Pakistan

• $77,000 to restore minarets (tall slender towers attached to mosques) in  Nigeria and Mauritania, Africa

• $80,000 for the restoration of the 18th-century Sultan Palace of Ujumbe in  Mutsamudu, Comoros, with its highly ornate ceilings featuring Arabo-Islamic  calligraphy and designs

• $30,000 for the restoration of the 19th-century fort at Lamu, Kenya, a  significant center for the study of Islamic and Swahili cultures where Muslim  religious festivals have been hosted since the 19th century

• $10,000 for the restoration of the Kofar Kansakali Gate in the Medieval  Walled City of Kano, Nigeria, where the stone-laying ceremony was performed by  the Emir of Kano, Alhaji (Dr) Ado Bayero, an influential Muslim spiritual and  community leader in Northern Nigeria

• $49,000 for restoration of a mid‐19th‐century Musafirhana (hostel) in  Fojnica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, originally intended to house and feed Muslim  travelers for free

• $54,000 for the preservation the 6th century Castle in Vushtrri, Kosovo – a  city that overthrew its once-dominant Christian population with a Muslim  majority via the Ottoman conquests and a military post of an Ottoman garrison

• $30,000 for conservation of murals at the early 19th-century palace of Ahmed  Bey ben Mohamed Cherif, who led a fierce resistance against French forces from  that palace in Constantine, Algeria

• $100,000 for the restoration of 17th- and 18th-century monuments in the  Kasbah of Mehdiya, Morocco, which was built in 1185 by Yacoub el Mansour, the  third Almohad Amir and Muslim military conqueror who was responsible for  capturing thousands of Christians and killing tens of thousands

• $95,000 for the preservation of the Varendra Museum Building at Bangladesh  and its prehistoric and historic collections – gallery six of which contains  Persian, Sanskrit and old Bangla stone inscriptions and sculptured stones of the  Muslim period.

• $34,000 for the preservation of traditional Uzbek music in Uzbekistan, which  is one of the many forms of Islamic regional music.

• $450,000 for the restoration of Qala Ikhtyaruddin, the 15th-century citadel  of Herat, Afghanistan – once used by Alexander the Great but also used in more  modern times by even the Taliban. The extremely large project is employing many  local Muslims seven days a week via U.S. funds.

Where are the separatists of church and state when it comes to separating  mosque and state? The First Amendment provides citizens with the freedom to  choose their religion; it doesn’t provide the federal government with the right  to fund the building of mosques overseas. In fact, it specifically says,  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

One thing is certain: President Obama certainly has kept the global promise  he made to the Muslim world from Cairo in 2009, when he said that he considers  it “part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against  negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear” and create a “partnership  between America and Islam.”

And that’s exactly what the president has done. In countless speeches and  actions since taking office, President Obama has sympathized and supported  pro-Islamic ideologies, practice and culture, in and outside our country. That  is why even the New York Times published a multiple-page report on how the  “White House quietly courts Muslims in the U.S.”

To be fair, in 2011 the U.S. State Department has also doled out monies to  restore Buddhist monasteries and early Christian Frescoes in Greece, as well as  17th- and 18th-century church paintings in Peru, etc., too, but the ratio is far  less for non-Islamic projects. Should the federal government be subsidizing any  of these religious projects, especially when the U.S. is broke and indebted up  to its ears? How long will we continue to finance other countries’ economies as  our own goes down the tubes? Maybe it’s time we ask all the countries we’ve been  aiding to return the favor?

Are these really examples how you want the federal government spending your  taxes? I’m certain that the 9.2 percent of unemployed citizens in our country  would rather see these monies building jobs in America. (And President Obama  wonders why the majority of Americans don’t want to pay more taxes?)

The federal government’s actions using taxpayers’ monies to build Islamic  structures overseas during a recession brings me back to the wisdom of our  fourth president, James Madison, who said, “In framing a government which is to  be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must  first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place  oblige it to control itself.”

I understand the necessity of America maintaining good global relations with  other countries, but when we can’t even rebuild our economy, should we really be  rebuilding others? Does diplomacy always have to include America dumping dollars  at everyone’s front door? And if part of the increased Islamic grants under the  Obama administration is to appease the wrath of extremists, then America is to  be most pitied. For we above all should know that bribing Muslims not to bomb us  is bad and futile diplomacy.

In a little more than a month, the U.S. will be commemorating the 10th  anniversary of Sept. 11. Ten years ago we all declared, “We will never forget.”  But when does subsidizing Islamic structures and culture abroad with U.S.  taxpayers’ monies cross the line and trample on the memory of 9/11 victims and  their families? They brought down our twin towers and we build up their  mosques?

Read more: The separation of mosque and state? http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=325625#ixzz1T8wkhsQU

The Tea Party, Right About Everything

By Randall
Hoven

The false narrative is that the Tea Party is a bunch
of stubborn nuts, if not outright racists.  In truth, the Tea Party has been
right about everything, while almost everyone else has been nuts, especially the
“experts.”

Minimum wage.  One of the first
things Democrats did after taking back Congress in 2007 was raise the federal
minimum wage 41% from 2007 to 2009.  Result?  The unemployment rate went
from 4.4% in May 2007 to 10.1% in 2009.  It is 9.2% even today — four years
later.

As for teens, the
unemployment rate went from 14.9% to 27.1%, the highest ever recorded, meaning
since 1948.  Today it is still a high 24.5%.  And for blacks:
from a low of 7.9% in 2007 to 16.5% in 2010.  It is still a high
16.2%.

The Democrat Congress also decided to apply the same
minimum wages to American Samoa.  Results?
Near-decimation of its economy, one that had been based largely on low-cost tuna
canning and textile work.

… employment fell 19 percent from 2008 to 2009 … tuna canning employment fell 55 percent from 2009 to 2010… Average inflation-adjusted earnings fell by 5 percent from 2008 to 2009 and by 11 percent from 2006 to 2009.

Of course, some of the increase in unemployment was a
result of the Great Recession.  But the Employment Policies Institute did
a study to separate the effects for the most vulnerable group: males aged 16-24
without high school diploma.  EPI’s answer: the minimum wage increase killed
over 100,000 jobs (31% of the lost jobs) for that demographic.

TARP.  Unless you were a politician
or executive of a large bank, you were likely against the Troubled Asset Relief
Program.  I would guess that most anyone now calling herself a member of the Tea
Party was against TARP in 2008.  But Senator Barack Obama voted for it, along
with most of his Democrat colleagues.  Also the top brains of the Stupid Party
pushed it: Henry Paulson, George W. Bush, and John McCain.

On October 3, 2008, Congress authorized Treasury
Secretary Paulson to use up to $350 billion under TARP to do what was needed to
stave off financial disaster.  By December, after using $267B, Paulson said he
was done, crisis averted.
(Of course his successor, Tim Geithner, was not done.)

Here’s the funny thing: while Paulson was lending out
less than $0.3 trillion, the Federal Reserve was
lending out over $16T to do about the same thing!  By my calculations, Paulson’s
TARP slush fund was less than 2% the size of the Federal
Reserve’s.

Do you think that 2% was critical to staving off
financial apocalypse?  (FYI, over 3T of the Fed’s emergency loans were to
subsidiaries of foreign-owned banks.)

When the dust cleared, the federal government owned
two bankrupt car companies and the god-awful home mortgage portfolios of Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac — entities that had nothing to do with the original purpose
of TARP.

Global markets were
so enamored with TARP that there was an immediate sell-off of about 20% in
global stock markets the moment it went into effect.  I also credit TARP, and
McCain’s reaction to it, for McCain’s loss to Obama.  Ever since, all budget
discussions have involved units of trillions instead of mere billions.  The
world has not been the same since TARP.

Stimulus.  Opposition to Obama’s
stimulus was the origin of the Tea Party.  Now we know the
story.

How the stimulus was sold: It would create three
million jobs or more.  It would keep the unemployment rate under 8%, instead of
9% without a stimulus.  It would cost $787B.  The jobs were
shovel-ready.

What really happened:
There are 1.2 million fewer jobs now than when the stimulus was
passed.  Unemployment went over 10% (vs. prediction of 8%) and is still over 9%
(vs. prediction of about 6.8% at this time).  It cost $814B or
more.  Maybe 6% of it went to infrastructure projects.
Obama’s reaction?  A
little joke:
“Shovel ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.”

Of course, Obama and his minions simply blame this on
their underestimating the size of the mess they inherited from Bush.  But that
has
been studied by
economists at the University of Western Ontario and Ohio State University.  The
verdict: the stimulus itself cost about one million private-sector jobs; the net
job loss was about 595,000.  We’d have been better off without any “stimulus” at
all, just as the Tea Party said.

ObamaCare.  ObamaCare was sold as a
way to bend the health “cost
curve” down.  As it turned out, it is bending the cost
curve up — health care will be more costly than it would have been
without ObamaCare.  It’s so great that in its first year about 1,500 companies,
states, and unions were granted waivers.

ObamaCare strangled the recovery in the crib.  The
private sector has
been generating only 6,400 jobs per month since it was passed, compared to
67,600 before.  We would never return to pre-recession unemployment
levels at the current pace.  ObamaCare is costing us over 60,000 jobs per
month.

Drilling moratorium.  According to a
new study by IHS
Global Insight,
merely picking up the pace in granting oil drilling permits would go a long way
in producing jobs throughout the US, adding to GDP and reducing dependency on
foreign oil sources.  In 2012 alone it could mean 230,000 new jobs, $44B more in
GDP, 150 million more barrels of oil, and $15B less in imported
oil.

Budgets.  Now we find ourselves in
another budget fight, with the Tea Party getting the blame from much of the
media and liberal punditry.  The truth is that Democrats have not even written,
much less passed, a budget of any kind in over two years; they simply kill
everyone else’s.

• The Republican-led House passed a budget on schedule
  in April.  Senate Democrats voted it down.
• Obama proposed a budget in February.  The
  Congressional Budget Office scored it as having a 10-year cumulative deficit of
  $9.5 trillion.  The Democrat-led Senate voted that down too, 97-0.
• The House proposed the only written plan for
  addressing the debt ceiling — the Cut, Cap and Balance plan.  Senate Democrats
  voted that down, too.

It shouldn’t take a keen insight to see that Senate
Democrats are the “Party of No” and the obstacle to resolving budget and debt
issues.

Uncertainty and arbitrariness.  Just
last December Obama said keeping Bush’s tax rates was critical to keeping the
recovery going.  He and the Democrat Congress at the time extended them for
another two years, plus added over $300 B in additional tax
cuts
and credits.
Now, just seven months later, Obama insists that any deal to raise the debt
ceiling must include tax increases.

Like ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate all
finance in the country is a thousand-page-plus piece of legislation.  As the New York
Times understated it just after its passage, “[a] number of the details have
been left for regulators to work out.” Got it? Those thousand-plus pages did not
include the details.

The EPA now has power
to regulate
every use of fossil fuels in this country, as well as every breath we take, if
they so deem.  What will it do with that power?  You get to guess.  If you think
it wouldn’t do anything too stupid, know that the FDA
just outlawed

common inhalers for asthma sufferers.  Their reason was, get this, those
inhalers are blamed for contributing to upper-atmosphere ozone
loss.

Even if you think CFCs contribute to ozone loss, how
much do you think the CFCs released by asthma inhalers have to do with it?  And
how much is the indirect and ambiguous loss of ozone worth compared to the
direct and known suffering of asthma patients?  Such is the wisdom of government
regulators.

The list is endless.  If you were thinking of starting
a business or making an investment that might not pay off for five or ten years,
would you feel like you know the rules and could depend on them?  No, you’d
hunker down, which is exactly what everyone with any money left is doing right
now.

This jobless recovery is not some mystery.  It is very
clearly the result of decisions — decisions made by Obama and the Democrats.
At every opportunity they grew government, shrank the private sector, and viewed
budding enterprises as little more than beasts of burden — something to whip
while healthy and carve up and eat when not.

As Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms, Obama views
corporations not yet in Chapter 11.

Nothing Democrats did helped; everything they did
hurt.  Everything.  Min wage.  TARP.  Stimulus.  ObamaCare.  The Gulf oil spill.
Every budget they ever proposed, written or not.  Every little czar they put in
place to spend other people’s money and to bully the only productive people
still toiling away at the thankless tasks of making stuff and providing
jobs.

At every point, the Tea Party and its sympathizers
tried to stop these idiocies, only to be called ignorant racists.  You might
want to ask yourself why so many people talk of the “Tea Party,” whatever that
is, the way Lenin and Stalin talked of kulaks and saboteurs, whoever they
were.

Do “taxed enough already,” “stop spending,” and “obey
the Constitution” sound that crazy to you?  If so, you might want to think about
why you think so.

Randall Hoven can be followed on
Twitter.  His bio and previous writings can
be found at randallhoven.com.

What Are Obama’s Chances in 2012? Not Good

Matt Mackowiak,FloydReports.com

Presidential reelection campaigns are always about the incumbent — serving as
a referendum of that President’s performance in office and the results of their
policies. It’s a choice election. It’s not about the challenger. What the
incumbent tries to do is to make the other “choice”unacceptable,resulting in the
incumbent’s reelection.

I suspect the 2012 campaign will be waged on only two issues:the economy and
a referendum on ObamaCare. Consider that,as Virginia Attorney General Ken
Cuccinelli has already predicted,the Supreme Court will likely announce their
decision on the constitutionality of Obama’s sweeping health care law on the
last Monday in June next year. Such a time frame will likely be after the GOP
nominee has been chosen but before the national party conventions,during the
summer when the presidential general election campaign is not yet being waged
ferociously.

No matter what decision is rendered,ObamaCare is guaranteed to burn white hot
as an issue on the campaign trail in 2012.

Only after the 2012 election….

Read more.

Obama and the debt

Is Obama a pathological liar?

Is Obama a pathological liar?

“Mendacity is a system that we live in.”

– Brick, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”

In the weird world that is Washington, men and women say things daily, hourly, even minutely, that they know deep down are simply not true. Inside the Beltway, we all call those utterances “rhetoric.”

But across the rest of the country, plain ol’ folk call ’em lies. Bald-faced (even bold-faced) lies. Those folks have a tried-and-true way of determining a lie: If you know what you’re saying is patently false, then it’s a lie. Simple.

And lately, the president has been lying so much that his pants could burst into flames at any moment.

His late-evening news conference Friday was a tour de force of flat-out, unadulterated mendacity — and we’ve gotten a first-hand insider’s view of the president’s long list of lies.

“I wanted to give you an update on the current situation around the debt ceiling,” Mr. Obama said at 6:06 p.m. OK, that wasn’t a lie — but just about everything he said after it was, and he knows it.

“I just got a call about a half-hour ago from Speaker [John A.] Boehner, who indicated that he was going to be walking away from the negotiations,” he said.

Not so: “The White House made offers during the negotiations,” said our insider, a person intimately involved in the negotiations, “and then backtracked on those offers after they got heat from Democrats on Capitol Hill. The White House, and its steadfast refusal to follow through on its rhetoric in terms of cutting spending and addressing entitlements, is the real reason that debt talks broke down.”

Mr. Boehner was more blunt in his own news conference: “The discussions we’ve had with the White House have broken down for two reasons. First, they insisted on raising taxes. … Secondly, they refused to get serious about cutting spending and making the tough choices that are facing our country on entitlement reform.”

But back to the lying liar and the lies he told Friday. “You had a bipartisan group of senators, including Republicans who are in leadership in the Senate, calling for what effectively was about $2 trillion above the Republican baseline that theyve been working off of. What we said was give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues,” Mr. Obama said.

That, too, was a lie. “The White House had already agreed to a lower revenue number — to be generated through economic growth and a more efficient tax code — and then it tried to change the terms of the deal after taking heat from Democrats on Capitol Hill,” our insider said.

The negotiations just before breakdown called for $800 billion in new “revenues” (henceforth, we’ll call those “taxes”), but after the supposedly bipartisan plan came out — and bowing to the powerful liberal bloc on Capitol Hill — Mr. Obama demanded another $400 billion in new taxes: a 50 percent increase.

Mr. Boehner was blunt: “The White House moved the goalpost. There was an agreement, some additional revenues, until yesterday, when the president demanded $400 billion more, which was going to be nothing more than a tax increase on the American people.”

But Mr. Obama, with a straight face, continued. “We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”

The truth: “Actually, the White House was walking back its commitments on entitlement reforms, too. They kept saying they wanted to ‘go big.’ But their actions never matched their rhetoric,” the insider said.

Now, Mr. Boehner and the real leaders in Congress have taken back the process. He’ll write the bill and pass it along to the president, with this directive, which he reportedly said to Mr. Obama’s face in a short White House meeting Saturday: “Congress writes the laws and you get to decide what you want to sign.”

Watching the one-third-of-a-term-senator-turned-president negotiate brings to mind a child spinning yarns about just how the living room lamp got broken. Now, though, the grown-ups are in charge; the kids have been put to bed. Ten days ago, the president warned the speaker: “Dont call my bluff.”

Well, Mr. Boehner has. He’s holding all the cards — and he’s not bluffing.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.

Obama’s Whole Lotta Nothing

By Jerry
Shenk

That was then; this is now: Now America is facing a
sovereign debt crisis caused by excessive government borrowing and spending,
exacerbated by a recession and by actuary-confirmed, financially unsustainable
commitments to entitlements.

The failure of government to budget and spend
responsibly isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue.  American politicians have
taxed, borrowed and spent far too much money.  It’s irrational and purely
ideological for progressives who support Obama to use what they see as Bush
administration shortcomings to excuse or defend even greater excesses by the
current president and his Democratic congressional allies.

America is about to reach a debt ceiling with an
administration-applied deadline of August 2.  The president says there will be
“fiscal Armageddon” if Congress doesn’t act to raise the debt limit.  So, with
the clock ticking down, what is the president’s plan to reduce spending?  He has
proposed…nothing.

Regardless, on July 19, 2011, House Republicans gave
the president the debt ceiling increase and political cover he wanted.  As part
of a “Cut,
Cap, and Balance”
bill (CCB), the House authorized raising the debt limit by the $2.5 trillion
Obama requested to see him through the 2012 election.  Enacted in the absence of
administration leadership, CCB has some modest strings
attached.

The new debt ceiling would only be effective if a
two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress passes a balanced-budget
amendment to the Constitution and sends it to the states for eventual
ratification or rejection.  CCB also calls for a minimal $111 billion in
spending cuts in FY2012, only $1.5 trillion in cuts over the next ten years, and
firm caps on federal spending at roughly 19 percent of GDP by 2020.  The $1.5
trillion in cuts over the remainder of the decade is less than the government
will borrow this year.

The CCB bill punts on entitlements, proposing no
immediate changes to our largest fiscal problems: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social
Security.  CCB is a major concession by House Republicans, especially by those
sent to Washington following the grassroots-influenced wave election of 2010.
President Obama has vowed to veto the bill if it passes the Senate.  Obama’s
alternative to CCB is…nothing.

Obama has given speeches and held press conferences to
declare his willingness to “make difficult choices,” but he has never enumerated
a single compromise, reform or “difficult choice.”  Obama has
committed…nothing.

In a recent press conference, Obama was asked what
Medicare reforms he’d accept.  He responded, “There’s lots of options on the
table,” but refused to be more specific.  Obama
answered…nothing.

A FY-2012 budget was passed by the Republican House of
Representatives.  The president has rejected it, but, as an alternative, he has
offered…nothing.

To be fair, the president did deliver a rambling,
detail-free “budget” speech in May on which Douglas Elmendorf, the Democrat who
is director of the Congressional Budget Office, commented, “We don’t score
speeches.”  Translation: “The president offered…nothing.”

It’s true that earlier Republican majorities failed to
act, but the Democratic Party which held the White House and majorities in both
Houses of Congress from January 2009-January 2011 (and which still controls the
Senate and White House) has failed monumentally.  Not only have Washington
Democrats increased the debt by more than $5 billion in three years, they
haven’t produced a budget in more than two years.  Though they have paid lip
service to deficit reduction, other than tax increases, Democrats have
offered…nothing.

National politicians have ensured that every child
born here today is already nearly $50,000 in debt, money that must be taken from
wages none will begin earning for two decades or more — debt that increases and
compounds relentlessly.  Absent constitutional requirements to balance budgets
or fix spending caps, our system doesn’t self-correct.  If it must rely on
politicians to correct the problems they caused, America may be
doomed.

It has become very clear.  The president has nothing
to offer that will make him or his party fiscally responsible or our nation
financially sound. President Obama and his liberal enablers in the Democratic
Party, unions, the media and the academy only want to borrow and spend more, and
they want tax hikes to pay for new spending and debt service.

But, in March, 2006, during Bush 43’s second term,
speaking from the floor of the US Senate, then-Senator Obama said:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising
America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.  It is a sign that the US
Government cannot pay its own bills.  It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing
financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless
fiscal policies.  Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and
internationally.  Leadership means that, “the buck stops here.’  Instead,
Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our
children and grandchildren.  America has a debt problem and a failure of
leadership. Americans deserve better.

Senator Obama’s statement is more true now than it was
then.

Jerry Shenk is co-editor of the Rebuilding America,
Federalist Papers 2 website©: www.federalistpapers2.org.

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

This is something I will fight for      and  I hope you all read it all the way through.  You will be      glad you did. 

The 26th amendment (granting      the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be      ratified!  Why?  Simple!  The people  demanded      it.  That was in 1971…before computers, before e-mail, before cell      phones, etc.

 

Of  the 27 amendments      to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of      the  land…all because of public      pressure.

I’m  asking each      addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on      their address list;  in turn ask each of those to do      likewise.

In 3 days, most people in      The  United States of America        will have the message.  This is one idea that really should be passed      around.

Congressional Reform Act of  2011   

1.   No Tenure /      No Pension.

    A       Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when      they are out of      office. 

2.   Congress      (past, present & future) participates in Social      Security.

    All funds      in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system      immediately.  All  future              funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with      the American people.  It may not be     used for any      other  purpose.

3. Congress can purchase      their own retirement plan, just as all Americans      do.

4. Congress will no longer      vote themselves a pay raise.  Congressional pay will rise by the      lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their      current health care system and participates in the same health care system      as the American people.

6. Congress must equally      abide by all laws they impose on the American      people.

7. All contracts with past      and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.    The American people did      not make this contract with Congressmen.  Congressmen made all these      contracts for themselves.   Serving in Congress is an honor, not      a career.  The  Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators,      so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to      work.

If each person contacts a      minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most      people (in the  U.S. ) to receive the message.  Maybe it is      time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX      CONGRESS!!!!!

If  you agree with the      above, pass it on.   If not, just      delete.