As they sit in the warm sun and listen to the celebrity speakers tell them about their bright future a grim reality will set in once the graduation cakes are cut and consumed.

The reality is that, particularly on Long Island, the job outlook is bleak, affordable housing is out of reach, our elected leaders are clueless and whatever opportunity can be found will be found in other parts of the country.

While some of us fight to cut the government leviathan down to size so that is doesn’t suck up the resources that productive people are better suited to employ, those in office are fighting for their own survival and will stop at nothing to hold onto office.

College Loans

As someone paying for their children’s college education, I don’t like paying any more than I have to, but the focus on holding interest rates constant is misguided. College graduates need jobs, not more debt. President Obama and local representatives like Tim Bishop already have piled up enormous debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay back. Making it more affordable to take on more debt is not a winning strategy. Congressman Bishop used to run a local college, Southampton, that had to be bailed out via a purchase by Stony Brook University. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Bishop Touts Highway Bill

On his website Tim Bishop boasts about his support for the two-year transportation bill. While keeping our roads in good repair is important, a closer reading of what Mr. Bishop says is revealing. The highway bill, “would create or sustain 113,300 construction jobs in New York alone: 61,100 in highway construction and 52,200 in mass transit construction, according to the US Department of Transportation.” There it is: “create or sustain.” Well, Congressman, which one is it? How many jobs will be created and how many will be sustained? Any economist, and almost anyone else for that matter, can count a new job. After all, there is a bit of paperwork associated with filling a new job, W-4 forms, I-9 forms, etc. But there isn’t a soul who can count a job sustained.

Created vs. Sustained

Why is that important that we know the difference? Because if you recall with the great stimulus bill, in Tim Bishop’s district, $105 million dollars was spent on school districts to create seven new jobs. In that case the teacher’s union, a big Bishop supporter, got a lot of money and our children and grandchildren got the bill. So how many new jobs will the transportation bill create? We also know that those highway jobs are heavily unionized and the unions back Bishop. Coincidence?

Perhaps another reason Bishop doesn’t want to say how many jobs will be created  is that he could be held accountable. Remember how that pesky promise to keep unemployment below 8% if we gave Obama nearly a trillion dollars blew up in his face?

A Coherent Policy?

On the one hand Bishop is pushing to drive more people into going to college whether they can afford it or not or whether they belong there or not. On the other hand he is pushing spending on construction jobs. How many of our college graduates are going to take those construction jobs? It’s more government spending coming and going. No spending cuts, just more spending, more debt, kick the can down the road.

What we need is less government and more entrepreneurs; less taxes sucking resources out of the economy and more investors putting money where it will generate the most returns; the realization that college isn’t for everyone and we need skilled blue-collar workers who can operate computerized machines in our factories; lower energy costs so that we can afford to actually run factories. We need to unleash the imagination and brainpower of hundreds of millions of Americans in the private sector and not count on bureaucrats picking and choosing winners and losers based on their left-wing ideology.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Obama has been on the stump trying to cobble together a coalition that will help keep him in the White House. It matters little what damage his actions might do to America, he has bigger plans and needs more “flexibility” to get them done.

On college campuses he is trying to gin up support by making the interest rate on college loans a campaign issue. The issue is government subsidized Stafford loans. He wants to freeze the current interest rates at 3.4% and he wants the Republicans to fight him on this so that he can create another class warfare wedge issue.

Where have we seen something like this before? Wasn’t the government’s heavy involvement in housing, pushing for everyone to be a homeowner that led to the housing bubble? When that bubble burst, all hell broke loose with it and Obama was able to ride the gush of air into the White House.

Think about the growing debt being accumulated by college students and think about their job prospects in the Obama economy. It is not a pretty picture. What happens if those students upon graduating say, “I can’t find a decent job. I have been duped. I’m not paying back my student loans.” What do you do? Jail them?

Now if interest rates climb, the economic effect will be to curtail borrowing, that is, the old price, supply and demand thing. But if interest rates are kept low, then the demand for more debt will not be curtailed. If the demand for more debt is not curtailed the bubble grows. Four more years of Obama managing the economy will not be a boon to jobs. If we haven’t figured that out yet, we better start studying quickly. There’s a big test coming in November.

I fully appreciate the college financing issue. But the education model is broken. Colleges seem to raise tuition in lock step with increases in government aid, so no progress is made. Colleges also seem to be afraid of not attracting enough students so they fill their course catalogs with nonsense courses that will interest no employer. The amount of debt piling up is frightening, but hey, we have a president to reelect. We’ll fix that later; just like Social Security, Medicare, budget deficits…

The Republicans are right to at least demand cuts in spending elsewhere to pay for this. They know the problem won’t get fixed or even addressed with Obama at the helm. We have to hang on for another six or seven months to cancel Obama’s contract and then prepare to roll up our sleeves and undo the damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

George Demos kicked off his Hail Mary campaign to win the Republican nomination to challenge Congressman Tim Bishop in New York’s first Congressional District. As he did the last time around he boasts that he is the only true conservative in the race. His claims, though, are devoid of any facts to base them upon other than him saying so. His kickoff ad is either downright dishonest, or just sloppy. Either one hardly qualifies him to represent anyone.

Demos uses campaign material from incumbent Tim Bishop, an odd source for a Republican, to attack Randy Altschuler who was the Republican nominee against Bishop in 2010. Demos also ran in the primary that year and lost to Altschuler by a wide margin. In the general election Altschuler lost by a whisker, in the closest Congressional race in the country that year.

The video that Demos chose to use was selectively edited. The issue that both Demos and Bishop are trying to run on is Mr. Altschuler’s founding of a business, Office Tiger, that provided back office services to other companies. Some of the work was done overseas, some in the U.S. The video shows Mr. Altschuler talking about some overseas locations, but where he speaks of talent in the U.S. that is edited from the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9A8v8RdMgA

Neither Bishop nor Demos mention that when Altschuler started Office Tiger in 1999, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 4.2%. That is not an environment with a lot of idle workers standing around. Bishop and Demos want to plant the seed in the minds of voters, who are suffering through the longest period of 8%+ unemployment since the Great Depression, that it is not Obama’s and Bishop’s dismal performance ruining the economy but “outsourcers” who are causing the problem. When Altschuler later sold the company in 2005, the unemployment rate was 5.08%, still rather low. Altschuler then went on to found Cloud Blue, creating more jobs in the U.S., by recycling old technology gear.

So what is Demos’ claim to fame as “the only true conservative?” He has worked as a government lawyer at the SEC. The SEC you may recall could not bring down Bernie Madoff although for ten years an individual named Harry Markopolous practically delivered evidence wrapped up with a bow that Madoff was a fraud. The SEC was also noted for staff that was spending their days looking at pornography on government computers. It was also alleged that Demos had outed a whistleblower at JP Morgan, although the third Judicial District  found an “insufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

So where is all the evidence of Demos’ conservative credentials? Has he created any jobs? Worked for any period of time in the private sector? In these tough economic times what experience does Demos have that indicates he has solutions to our problems? The Republican Party, the Conservative Party, the Independence Party, and many Tea Party groups have endorsed Randy Altschuler.

Demos on the other hand takes a doctored video from a Democrat and uses it to attack a Republican, a direct violation of Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. He calls himself a winner and Altschuler a loser. Replacing one government employee for another hardly sounds like bold thinking, when most of our issues are government created. However, replacing a government backbencher with someone who grew up in a household headed by a single mother, secured a good education, started a couple of companies, is the kind of breath of fresh air we need in Washington.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

A funny thing happened as Congressman Tim Bishop tries to manufacture a campaign issue. The very thing he is fighting about, we learn that the government has been underwriting with taxpayer dollars.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a program to train people in Sri Lanka high-tech IT skills so that they could better compete in the world economy. Needless to say, such competition would come at the expense of American workers. As a free marketer, I don’t have a problem with private enterprises investing their own money any where they want to. I have a big problem with using taxpayer dollars to train foreigners to take away American jobs.

My first problem is with the morality of taking taxpayer dollars to help take away taxpayer jobs. My second problem is that I don’t find a right to do that anywhere in the Constitution. To his credit Tim Bishop in 2010 fought to stop the program.

In 2010, Bishop compelled USAID to abandon a high-tech training program for outsourcing industry workers in Sri Lanka, with the agency committing to “conduct a review to ensure the project will not take any jobs away from Americans.”

Note the year. Tim Bishop has been in Congress since 2002. This program came to light as a result of investigative reporting by Information Week magazine, in August of 2010. What else was happening in the fall of 2010? Tim Bishop was running for reelection against Randy Altschuler who started a business and later sold it that provided business services to companies with employees in the US and overseas. Bishop won by a whisker, but the outsourcing angle is his last, best hope for his rematch with Altschuler.

The problem is that Congress holds the purse strings and this program could not have been funded without Congress’ approval. What did Tim Bishop know and when did he know it? If he argues he was unaware of the program the question becomes, is the federal government that Tim Bishop loathes shrinking, too big for Congress to properly oversee? If Tim Bishop did know about it, why didn’t he stop it earlier or prevent it from being funded in the first place?

I am reminded of that famous scene in the movie Casablanca, where Claude Rains professes to be “shocked, SHOCKED,” that gambling is going on in the back room as member of the club’s staff comes out to hand him his gambling winnings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM_A4Skusro

Now it turns out a new program has been launched by the Obama administration (again USAID) to train people in the Philippines to speak better English to prepare them for better jobs, such as in outsourced call centers. This is what President Obama said at an insourcing summit:

 ”My message to business leaders today is simple. Ask yourself what you can do to bring jobs back to the country that made our success possible. And I’m going to do everything in my power to help you do it.”

Really? But is anyone surprised that this president says one thing while doing the exact opposite? President Obama and Tim Bishop bailed out GM, which then immediately turned around and increased offshore production.

Instead of funding the training of people in other countries to compete for American jobs, perhaps the focus should be on revising our tax code so that the US doesn’t have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which makes it attractive to locate operations overseas in the first place. The tax code also traps profits from those operations overseas so that it makes sense for businesses to expand those operations overseas rather than bring the money back to the US (where it will get taxed more as soon as it arrives) to expand here.

Just more hypocrisy from the big government crowd. They don’t fix problems. They screw the American people coming and going. It’s time for a change.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

I just got my latest e-mail update from Congressman Tim Bishop and one cannot help but just shake his head. He leads off by mentioning his bogus survey, and tells the reader how (surprise!) people are concerned about taxes. Of course that is when Tim Bishop loses his way again.

You see Tim Bishop is a big supporter of the payroll tax cut. He is also a big supporter of big spending and big government. So let’s examine this closely. What is the purpose of the payroll tax? In the structure of the great Ponzi scheme that it is, the payroll tax goes to fund Social Security checks and Medicare. So a payroll tax takes away revenue from these programs. To put it another way, Tim Bishop is saying, “Let’s raid the piggy bank of today’s retirees and hand the bill to our children and grand children.” They will have to pay more than they did before because not only must they support the baby boomers who are now retiring they will have to make up the shortfall from this cut in funding. Tim Bishop is actually bragging about this.

Class Warfare

He then goes into the class warfare riff, about how nobody likes to pay taxes, that Republicans want to balance the budget on the backs of middle class taxpayers, etc. Okay, let’s talk about fairness. How fair is it that 47% of income earners pay no income tax? How politically dangerous would it be if that number increases to greater than 50%, such that the majority of voters pay no taxes, but the minority is demanded to pay more? Is that fair? Is that America?

“That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.” – James Madison, March 29, 1792, Essay on Property

But who do you want to believe? James Madison, the father of the Constitution, or Tim Bishop? It is income taxes, not payroll taxes, that go to the funding of the federal government. Tim Bishop attacks any curtailment of income taxes but makes not a peep about curtailment of runaway spending. No, we need to spend more on Solyndra, on bailouts, on Fannie and Freddie, on the Department of Education! We need to tax, tax, tax, he says.

He then attacks the Ryan budget. This is from a man whose party has not passed a budget, as required by law, in the Senate in nearly three years. This is from a man whose party leader, the president, has seen his budget go down in  a Democrat controlled senate 97-0, and he attacks Paul Ryan’s plan? What’s Tim Bishop’s plan? Oh, that’s right, stop the outsourcing of call centers overseas. That will get the economy humming.

He specifically attacks broadening the tax base.

“Base-broadening” is a Washington term for eliminating some of the credits and deductions that help middle-class families own a home, send their children to college, and afford healthcare.

No, Tim, broadening the tax base means getting more people into the workforce as taxpayers. Get it? Broadening the base, not squeezing more out of it. After squandering nearly a trillion dollars on the stimulus that promised us unemployment would not rise above 8%, it has not been below 8% since then. That is the worst record since the Great Depression, but of course that was all Bush’s fault.

It’s time to realize the hope and change experiment is over. It is time to get back to the principles of the founders which make this country great for over two centuries. It’s time to get rid of the politicians who keep throwing sand in the gears in the form of mountains of regulations. It is time to shrink government back to where it protected our rights and liberties rather than took them away to substitute them with the collective wisdom of politicians like Tim Bishop.

Tim Bishop says we need more spending, more stimulus, more debt, no solutions. I say, no more. 2012, the end of an error.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

It the last few days we have heard President Obama ranting about the Supreme Court. This is not anything new. You may also recall his unprecedented calling out of the Supreme Court as the justices sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech attacking them over the Citizens United v FEC case.

The Great Reconciler has also done this in other venues. After Paul Ryan released his budget last year, President Obama invited him to a speech on the budget and with Ryan sitting there devoted his speech attacking the Ryan plan. Very classy. Is this what we hoped and changed for?

Obama and the Constitution

What is most disturbing to me is what Obama is saying about the Supreme Court’s role with regard to the Constitution. What he is saying is approaching downright ignorance and yet he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. What did he teach his students? Where are these students today? Are they some sort of Manchurian Candidates to be unleashed with their own new-found ignorance upon us as lawyers and judges? Are we watching a bad science fiction movie?

‘I am confident,” announced the president of the United States, “that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” – President Barack Obama, earlier this week.

Unprecedented? What exactly is unprecedented? What is extraordinary? Striking down a law? That capability of the Supreme Court was established by the Marbury v Madison  case in 1803. One hundred fifty-eight acts of Congress have been overturned by the Supreme Court since Marbury. Sounds like a lot of precedent to me.

A strong majority? ObamaCare was passed by a margin of 219 to 212. What would a weak majority be? Actually, since we often hear our liberal friends cry out for bipartisanship, let me point out that there was bipartisan opposition to ObamaCare. Every Republican and thirty-four Democrats voted against it. Only Democrats voted for it.

Passed by a democratically elected Congress? Is there another kind of Congress than a democratically elected one? Also, in order for a review by the Supreme Court, a law by definition has to be passed by Congress. Otherwise it is just a bill and has no effect on anyone. Doesn’t constitutional law professor Barack Obama know any of this? Isn’t he embarrassed to be saying such things? It is clear that most American citizens, sixty-seven percent by some polls, think the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Do they understand the Constitution better than a man who took an oath to preserve, protect and defend it?

I think an effort should be made to find every student who sat in one of Barack Obama’s constitutional law classes. Give them a test on their comprehension of the Constitution. If they fail, force the University of Chicago to refund their tuition for that course and send them to take Hillsdale College’s Constitution 101. It’s a free ten week course and perhaps the students can help out by donating their refunded tuition money to Hillsdale.

We should all be very concerned that this kind of thinking is being taught in our law schools and will one day come back to destroy the Constitution. Some on the left are trying to call any invalidating of ObamaCare as judicial activism on the right. Adhering to the founding principles and the original intent behind the Constitution is not activism, it is the sworn duty of the justices. If you want to know what activism sounds like, go no further than the words of Associate Justice and former chief counsel of the ACLU Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the court should do a “salvage job,” not undertake a “wrecking operation.”

It is judicial activism for the court to try to salvage Congress’ work. It violates the separation of powers. It is the job of the judiciary to interpret the law not make the law. If they interpret the law to be unconstitutional it is not their job to fix it. That’s Congress’ responsibility, but Ginsburg knows full well that the Congress that passed this monstrosity isn’t there any more and will not be there again any time soon. There is a new Congress that was swept in, to a large extent based on the outrage over ObamaCare. Ginsburg is afraid that if the Supreme Court doesn’t salvage it, sending it back to Congress would put the final nail in the coffin. RIP.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

When you try to manufacture a campaign issue it requires some deception and in the more extreme cases outright lies. This is because the truth doesn’t have to be manufactured. It stands tall on its own.

As Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That’s what the left is banking on. So let’s dig a little deeper into the hearings at the center of the controversy.

House Oversight Committee Hearing

Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa, scheduled a hearing on religious liberty in the face of the ObamaCare mandate requiring the purchase of contraceptives by all employers regardless of their own religious beliefs. It is customary for the minority party (Democrats at this time) to choose one witness. The Democrats chose Barry Lynn and Sandra Fluke. Byron York of the Examiner provides some detail.

“The Democrats played games with us the day before [the hearing],” says a Republican committee source.  “After days of asking for a witness, they waited until the last-minute, the afternoon before the hearing.  They asked us to invite Rev. Barry Lynn [head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State] and Ms. Fluke.  We said we’ll invite one, per standard procedure.  We formally invited Rev. Lynn, and the Democrats, at 4:30 pm, changed their mind and said they wanted Fluke.  We said too late.  They told Rev. Lynn not to show up the next day.”

Issa explained that Democrats had requested Barry Lynn, that Lynn was invited, and that Democrats then retracted the Lynn request.  As for Fluke, Issa said Republicans had never heard of the Democrats’ last-minute choice.  “I asked our staff what is her background, what has she done,” Issa said at the hearing.  “They did the usual that we do when we’re not provided the three days and the forms to go with it. They did a Google search. They looked and found that she was, in fact, and is a college student who appears to have become energized over this issue and participated in approximately a 45-minute press conference…I cannot and will not arbitrarily take a majority or minority witness if they do not have the appropriate credentials, both for a hearing at the full committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and if we cannot vet them in a timely fashion.”

Barry Lynn is both a lawyer and holds a degree in theology. He is an author, radio host, frequent television commentator, and he has held senior positions at the national level for the United Church and the ACLU. I would probably agree little with Rev. Lynn, but you can’t argue he has credentials. Who is Sandra Fluke? She is a law student, not a lawyer; she was president of a college club that advocated “reproductive justice.” How does that fit in with a hearing on religious liberty. It doesn’t and the Democrats don’t care.

When the hearing began, the Democrats attacked the Republicans. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked, “Where are the women?” There were two panels that day, which according to my sources is typical when more than four people testifying. The second panel had two women on it. My source also tells me that the witness list was released a week before the hearing so either Rep. Maloney was deceitful or she doesn’t know what is going on in the committee she is a member of.  I am sure if pressed, Rep. Maloney would say, there were no women on the panel in front of me. But it is all part of the big lie, it was done for the cameras and the sound bite.

Since their plan to put on Sandra Fluke failed, they staged their own show.

Steering and Policy Committee

The Steering and Policy Committee is the committee that actually had Sandra Fluke address them on February 23. The purpose of the Steering and Policy Committee is to assign fellow party members to other House committees, and it also advises party leaders on policy. It is chaired by Nancy Pelosi. What does anything that Sandra Fluke has to say have to do with assigning party members to other committees or advising party leaders on policy. Nancy Pelosi policy on ObamaCare was clear, “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in the bill.” She didn’t do any fact-finding then, and she isn’t interested in facts now. It was all a show, and it was all for what is popularly called the “optics”.

Who Is Sandra Fluke?

Sandra Fluke is an attractive, clean-cut, woman who is poised in this setting. She is thirty years old, and she has been a left-wing advocate, so she provides the right look for the ensuing sound bites. She provides the right optics.

Before going to Georgetown Ms. Fluke researched the University’s health care policies and learned that they did not provide contraceptive coverage. She enrolled anyway and started working to overturn that policy. In her opening remarks she confidently states that President Obama’s policy “adjustment” of paying out of the left pocket instead of the right “addresses any potential conflict.” That’s another lie. It does not address large institutions that are also self insured, but that doesn’t matter, the narrative must go on; the campaign issue must be built. Just steamroll any real concerns of the other side.

While trying to defend ObamaCare her opening exposes the major problem with it when she says contraception can cost $3,000 during law school. President Obama and the woman sitting in front of Ms. Fluke, Nancy Pelosi, told us how ObamaCare was going to control costs. A quick check on the internet reveals that contraception can be purchased for about half of what Fluke says, but if someone else is paying for it, why would you bother to check? It was probably unintentional but she blew a hole in the theory that ObamaCare will save money. It won’t.

She scrupulously avoids talking about her personal behavior but talks about other women and friends. That is the trap Rush Limbaugh fell into by characterizing a behavior to her that she didn’t discuss. It was out-of-bounds for him to do so, and the Democrats, ever anxious to keep the discussion away from the real issues have made this a major focus.

Why didn’t she talk about herself? I don’t care about her activities, but everything she said was hearsay. Who were these other women? She didn’t give their names. How can we verify their stories? Do they really exist? Why didn’t they come and testify themselves? Wouldn’t it be more compelling to have a first hand account. Yes, but consider the optics. What if they were not as polished? What if they felt foolish trying to go in front of Congress to discuss a $10 item?

She talked about the financial burden of buying contraceptives, but said nothing about the financial burden of college tuition which is thirty times more. What do you think is causing these students a financial strain, tuition or contraception?

She talked about clinics being unable to meet the “crushing demand” for contraceptives. Why not set up a charity that progressives can contribute to that would provide more funds? If given a choice if they would underwrite what Ms. Fluke is advocating, would they? Nancy Pelosi is a multi-millionaire. Wouldn’t it help her cause if she wrote a big six figure check to kick it off?

She then brought out the campaign theme that any restrictions on what is decided between a woman and her doctor is “policing her body.” She said that 65% of students were “interrogated” about the need for contraceptives for non-birth control purposes. Maybe it’s time for a brief recap. We are talking about a $10-$15 item. One story she relates is about a woman who finds out at the pharmacy counter that her health plan doesn’t cover her contraceptives and has to turn away. Really? How about not having two cups of Starbucks this week so you have contraceptives for a month? For a $10 item you are going to sit through an interrogation? How about giving up your iPhone for a cheaper model? These are law students she is talking about at a prestigious university and they can’t figure out how to come up with $10? How about asking your boyfriend to help? Why not ask mom and dad? Why raise taxes on some poor guy who is not going to Georgetown law to pay for your $10 contraceptive while he is trying to live from paycheck to paycheck and take care of his own family?

There is no free lunch, Sandra. If you don’t pay someone else has to. You can say Georgetown can afford it! Maybe so, but they have to find a way. What do you suggest? Raise tuition? Lay off a maintenance worker or a receptionist? Cut back on scholarships, so that you don’t have to come up with $10 on your climb to the 1% club once you get out of Georgetown.

Fair and Balanced?

Where are the other women, Leader Pelosi, who don’t agree with Sandra Fluke. Why didn’t you ask fellow Georgetown student Angela Morabito testify? Because lies don’t like sunshine and fresh air.

The lie has been crafted. It’s about policing a woman’s body. It is being packaged. It is being taken on the road at The View, she has been on NBC news three times, and she received a phone call from President Obama. Are you going to be taken by the lie?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

This is what Andrew Breitbart warned us about and fought so courageously against. The lies of the left to advance their agenda. Do we roll over, or do we take up the torch and continue the fight?

The Losing Abortion Attack

Abortion used to be the tried and true social attack point of the left. Being pro-abortion gave them a 10% edge where abortion was important to the voters. Over time as medicine has advanced and people learn more about abortion, it is now a 10% loser. What’s a leftist to do? Simple, shift gears and try to make an issue out of contraception.

It’s a different argument though. The argument with abortion was whether there were two lives involved or one. If it was one life, the woman and a clump of cells, then an abortion is little different from a tonsillectomy. If, however, two lives were involved then an abortion is tantamount to homicide. There is , for the most part, no human life at risk through the use of contraceptives so this tack loses some of it’s potency. While there are those who oppose contraception on moral grounds, there are very few who would seek to outlaw it. It is a case of moral persuasion rather than saving a life.

Fabricating the Contraception Issue

If you watched the Republican presidential debate where George Stephanopoulos asked MItt Romney about states banning contraceptives you probably felt as puzzled as Romney at the question. Huh? Where did that come from? As Romney tried to grasp the question and answer it, he said, George, no state is trying to ban contraceptives that I’m aware of. Stephanopoulos would have no part of it, he came at Romney again, yes, but do you believe states have a right to ban contraceptives? Look at the news coverage on contraceptives from that debate, and you can see the left trying to put the pieces in place to create an issue out of thin air.

The Attack on the Church

To paraphrase Machiavelli, when you sup with the devil, bring a long spoon. The Catholic Bishops were strong supporters of ObamaCare and now they have come to the realization that the devil is in the details. Now there is a pitched battle to oppose the contraception provision of that law. It is a blatant violation of the First Amendment to force the Catholic church to act contrary to its beliefs. Obama and the left know they are on the losing end of that argument, so they had to pivot.

Access to Contraceptives

They way they pivoted was to claim that women were being denied access to contraceptives, which is a lie. Contraceptives are readily available and relatively cheap. Why should the rest of us be paying for someone’s recreational sex? If you can’t pay for your own contraception, try a little abstinence. This entitlement mindset of instant gratification whether they can afford it or not, is about as un-American as it gets.

Enter Sandra Fluke

So who is Sandra Fluke? Does she have an agenda or is she just expressing her own concerns? She says she is a third year law student at Georgetown. Do they not teach the Constitution and the First Amendment at Georgetown Law? She says she is a past president of Georgetown’s Law Students for Reproductive Justice and she’s attending Georgetown on a Public Interest Scholarship. Okay, law student, reproductive justice, public interest; sounds like a trifecta of the liberal left.

Fluke came to Georgetown University interested in contraceptive coverage: She researched the Jesuit college’s health plans for students before enrolling, and found that birth control was not included. “I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care,” says Fluke, who has spent the past three years lobbying the administration to change its policy on the issue. The issue got the university president’s office last spring, where Georgetown declined to change its policy. – Washington Post

So Sandra Fluke is a law student, an advocate for reproductive justice, and is on a scholarship tied to a future career in fighting for liberal causes, and she “researches” the health care plan, not just looks it up and reads about it. Her intent was to take on the health care plan and change it, which she did, but lost.

Democrats wanted Fluke to testify before Congress but Congressman Darrell Issa said she wasn’t a qualified witness. The matter before the committee was on religious liberties, not about women and Fluke was neither a lawyer nor a member of the clergy. As fellow Georgetown student Angela Morabito puts it:

Her one claim to fame in the reproductive health care debate is…drumroll, please…being a student club leader! You go, Sandra! Hang those posters girl. Wear out those Sharpies.

Me?  I love me some extracurricular involvement. The difference between Sandra and me is that I don’t think it qualifies me to speak in front of Congress.  ”The Chair calls to the stand  the captains of the intramural ultimate frisbee team!” – Angela Morabito, Georgetown student

Of all the women in America who did meet Chairman Issa’s qualifications, the Democrats picked Sandra Fluke?

So Nancy Pelosi got the cameras together and a room and set the stage to look like a Congressional hearing and gave the floor to Sandra. She said her fellow classmates have suffered financially, medically, and emotionally because, you know, contraceptives can cost $3,000 during law school. I don’t know what kind of contraceptives Sandra is interested in, or if it is going to take her a lot longer to finish law school than most, but according to Planned Parenthood, birth control pills cost $15-$50/month; the birth control injection Depo-Provera costs $35-$75 and lasts three months; and the birth control patch costs $15-$80/ month. It seems that with a little shopping, Sandra could cut her costs in half, but let’s hear from Angela again:

Let’s talk priorities here. It costs over $23,000 for a year at Georgetown Law. Sandra, are you telling us that you can afford that but cannot afford your own contraception? Really? Math was never my strong suit, but something about Sandra’s accounting just doesn’t seem right. – Angela Morabito, Georgetown student

Extreme Cases

Another of the left’s ploys when abortion was a winning strategy for them was pointing to rape and incest, not birth control, as the absolute need for abortions. True to form, Sandra’s mock testimony was not about wild and free recreational sex, it was about non-contraceptive uses for contraceptives. Huh? There are medical conditions for which birth control is sometimes prescribed, not to prevent pregnancy but to alleviate the particular condition. If you look at the totality of use for contraceptives these cases would be quite small. It’s like a magician. They want to keep your focus on this small exceptions, the left hand if you will, so you don’t see what the right hand is doing.

A Simple Solution

We buy our own auto insurance, we buy our own life insurance, we buy our own homeowner’s insurance. We should buy our own health insurance. Kill Obamacare. If individuals owned their own policies, there would be no mandate of what to cover or not, it would be up to the market to decide. You would not have to worry about pre-existing conditions if you maintained your coverage, you would not be afraid of changing jobs for losing your health insurance. The tax breaks that currently go to companies to provide health insurance should be abolished and those tax breaks given to the individual. The amount of money that companies are currently spending to pay for health care for their employees could be given to the employees in the form of a raise. Insurance companies should be allowed to create any kinds of plans they want, this one including contraceptives, that one not.

However, by doing so, the Democrats would lose the campaign issue they are busy trying to fabricate out of thin air. American was conned in 2008. Don’t get conned again.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

I just got a survey request from my Congressman Tim Bishop. I started to fill it out but it was limited in its responses. Limited to what could easily be tabulated and put into a self-serving graph, but the same limited responses also spoke volumes.

He introduced his survey with two wishes:

I’d like to know how you think Congress can best help your family this year.

I hope you will take a moment to tell me what you believe my priority should be in Congress for 2012.

The first question tells all about what is wrong with Tim Bishop’s thinking, Barack Obama’s thinking, and why we are heading off a cliff. So let me answer the question. Tim, get a copy of the Constitution. Go to a quiet room; sit down and read it. If you don’t immediately grasp the meaning of the document you took an oath to support, may I recommend you buy a copy of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, it will help explain it to you. It is not Congress’ job to help my family. That is my job. Congress’ job is primarily to defend our borders (think Mexico), interact with foreign nations, and to regulate commerce between the states and with foreign nations; to coin money, not print it without end so that it becomes increasingly worthless (see Bernanke); provide a federal court system and that’s about it. Everything else is left to the states and to the people (see Amendment 10).

To answer the Congressman’s second question, I would say, Tim, stop doing everything else. Stop spending money like there is no tomorrow because there is a tomorrow and my children, and yours too, will have to pay all this debt back. There is no one to bail out the United States of America.

If Barack Obama wanted to be a venture capitalist, perhaps he should have applied for a job at Bain Capital. It is not his job, nor yours, to gamble our tax dollars on your favorite pet project. It is not your job to tell Boeing where they can or can’t locate their factories.

Before I could stop myself I clicked on the link to get to the actual survey and here were Congressman Bishop’s choices:

• Lowering taxes for the middle class
• Access to affordable higher education
• Caring for our veterans when they return home
• Investing in transportation and water infrastructure
• Creating incentives for companies to insource jobs
• Other (where he provides a tiny box to type in your own priority

Let me take them one at a time.

• Lowering taxes for the middle class – Who decides where the middle class begins and ends? Where in the history of this country has class warfare led to greatness? We are perilously close to the point where the majority will pay no federal taxes but will have the power to demand from the minority that they provide and pay for whatever they want. Of course, I expect Congressman Bishop to shoot back that everyone pays payroll taxes. Payroll taxes do not fund the operation of the federal government. In the case of Social Security everyone who pays in expects to get every dollar back and then some. It is a lousy savings plan not a tax that funds government. Medicare/Medicaid is similar in that everyone expects to get it back in the form of free health care if they become impoverished or when they reach sixty-five years of age.
• Access to affordable higher education – This is building the next bubble. At some point students who graduate will not be able to afford to pay their skyrocketing college debts and will default and we will be forced to pick up the tab. Every time the federal government offers scholarship money, say, $1000 to students, you can bet colleges will increase tuition by $1000 shortly thereafter. Higher education is ripe for a new paradigm.
• Caring for veterans when they return home — I would bundle this under providing for the national defense and since that is included in the Constitution that is a legitimate function of the federal government.
• Investing in transportation and water infrastructure — the government doesn’t invest in anything, they spend money. The left which is constantly trying to hide what they are really doing stopped calling spending, spending because it was out of control. By calling it investing, they thought it had a degree of sophistication about it. When you invest in something you expect to get all your money back and a decent rate of return on it as well. We pay gasoline taxes that are supposed to pay for the roads and bridges that are falling down. Where is that money? What happened to it? Secondly, this is not a federal function. Every state has (or should) have taxes on gasoline or tolls on roads to maintain them. Someone in Maine shouldn’t be paying taxes to fix roads in Hawaii. If every state should take care of its own roads and water needs. If a bridge or road or river goes between two states, those two states can join forces to manage those joint properties, it doesn’t require Washington’s meddling. Of course, Tim Bishop will plead that the General Welfare clause of the Constitution calls for such meddling. Not true and here’s why (click for an explanation).
• Creating incentives for companies to insource jobs — This one is simply Tim Bishop’s manufactured campaign issue against his likely opponent. It is not the job or the talent of the federal government to pick winners and losers. Does Tim Bishop really want to send the thousands of auto worker jobs from Toyota, Nissan, and Honda back to Japan? BMW back to Germany? Chrysler jobs to Italy (Chrysler is now owned by Fiat of Italy)? Or does he just want to make American firms uncompetitive and force them to lay off workers. It was a study at Dartmouth University that showed that for every job outsourced overseas, two new jobs were created in America. So why does Tim Bishop want to do the exact opposite of what might actually create jobs here and lower unemployment (Hint: he thinks he can fool the people into reelecting him)

Nothing could be clearer than if we want to get America back on track, this kind of thinking has to go. If I have a problem that government is causing, I want to go first to the mayor of my village, next to the supervisor of my town, then the county executive of my county, then the governor of my state. I don’t need to try to hack through the massive bureaucracy of Washington to get anything done and Tim Bishop is only one of 435 representatives. Why would any sane person want to give away that much control to Washington?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Andrew Breitbart at CPAC

The shocking news arrived courtesy of Fox News this morning. Conservative lion Andrew Breitbart was dead. In his pursuit of conservative principles and his disdain for the other side, he was fearless.

He grew up as a secular liberal, but had his epiphany during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings. He saw how the left was lying and trying to destroy a man with a great American story. After that he became a Reagan conservative with libertarian leanings.

He started working with Matt Drudge helping spread Drudge’s articles across the Internet. He later helped Ariana Huffington create the Huffington Post website. He went on to create his own group of sites including Big Government and Big Hollywood.

I first met him at the 26th Annual Martin Luther King National Holiday celebration sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality dinner in 2011. He was the chosen to be the master of ceremonies because of the firestorm surrounding the alleged use of the “N-word” during Nancy Pelosi’s famous march to the capital to pass ObamaCare. He was being damned as a racist by every main stream media outlet, and CORE would not let that stand.

He didn’t pull punches as he wrapped up his address to the dinner saying “the GOP sucked,” and then this:

The Tea Party needs you, period. Allen West and Tim Scott did not get elected through the leadership of the Republican Party. They got elected because of the Tea Party and I have been to Tea Parties all across this country and the people who move the crowds, they’re not invited to speak, they just show up and they’re the people that possess the crowds, and that is African Americans; and that is Hispanic Americans who understand that this country has been divided along the grounds of race and creed and we have been pitted against each other by this multicultural model that is nothing short of cultural Marxism.

I next met him at CPAC last year where he was trying to get greater focus on a scandal that was bilking the federal government of over $1 billion in bogus payments to fictional farmers claiming they were harmed by the government in the Pigford case. People who did no more farming than having a potted plant in their backyard were being encouraged to apply for a $50,000 settlement.

In April of last year his publicist contacted me to see if I wanted to interview him about his new book, Righteous Indignation. I called him on his cell phone and he asked if I was going to record the call. I said that I would like to, and he asked me to call him back on a better line so the recording would be a better quality, which I did. He was someone who truly understood the details of getting the message out.

He went to Wisconsin to challenge the protesters who were attacking Scott Walker trying to wrest his state from the grip of public sector unions. He went to Occupy Wall Street to see if this was truly a grass-roots movement, or a

carefully orchestrated effort from the left. Hopefully his untimely death will not delay that film’s release in the next month or two. It took an Andrew Breitbart to make an entrance to the meeting introducing the film in a mask.

He was always a fighter but he was also charming. At CPAC he spoke about being invited by a friend to a Super Bowl party at the home of none other than Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn. He said they were very civil to him and that Bill Ayers was a fantastic cook.

Andrew Breitbart always seemed to be running at hyperspeed. Perhaps God took him from us because he accomplished in 43 years what many others couldn’t complete in 80. He often said that this election was perhaps the most important one in our history. He is counting on us to carry the flag forward. Let’s not let him down. Thank you, Andrew, for the inspiration you gave us to get up and get into the fight.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.