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.

After watching my government denying Catholic institutions the ability to act in accordance with religious teachings, I was struck by the irony that is developing.

Rights are discovered in language apparently hidden in the text of the Constitution and which can only be discovered by intellectual elites in robes, you know, like The DaVinci Code.  Meanwhile, rights expressed in plain English in the Constitution are considered null by government fiat. For instance, although few would relish taking on the argument that the poor have no right to a free attorney, there is no language to that effect in the Constitution. The word Miranda is not in the Constitution either. Nor is its thesis, upon which a generation of law enforcement officers have operated under its limitations.  Neither is the word privacy, nor even the concept of privacy explicit in the document.  They were fabricated by robed and bespectacled people, out of the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing that no person will be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Therein lies at least one tragic irony: the right of privacy, a word not found in the Constitution, of a pregnant woman guarantees her right to kill the woman in her womb, but the right to life for that unborn woman, which was the explicit language upon which the right to privacy is founded is rendered invisible. Another irony is the theory that a criminal has been denied his rights if he fails to acknowledge that he understand his rights. In other words, it’s our responsibility to teach him his rights before he can be considered fully vested in the franchise.

But this post is fundamentally about the invasion on the free exercise of religion by people who reject lifestyles which have been considered sinful in their religious scriptures, consciousness and preaching for millennia.  Indeed that same belief system formed the very foundation of the values upon which the Founders of this nation acted. The free exercise of religious beliefs has always been a major hallmark of American liberty, yet the practice is suddenly and inconveniently at odds with Obamacare, which requires religious institutions to violate their own teachings in the name of a government program foisted upon them by legislative fiat. This assault on religious liberty is being perpetrated with distressing alacrity by the Obama administration, and the aggression is manifest in the voices of his surrogates and sycophants.

The words of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Address outlining his “Second Bill of Rights” (rights he invented but those not found in the Constitution), calling for government guaranteed employment, retirement, food, housing, education, health care and more recently free cell phones makes it abundantly clear the agenda at play, and here it is: keep calling these things “rights”, pay for them, and then after a generation or two they become known as “fundamental”, meaning they are just assumed to exist.

In fact it seems any more that rights today are not rights unless the government pays for them.  And remember, if government can give you rights, then government can also take them away.  Why would our society want to empower government with that authority?

What did Ben Franklin say? “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” After all, when the government pays for things they are declaring themselves the guardian of those rights, indeed?  To whom else do we turn as the protector and guarantor of our rights any more, but the government?  If the government is the guarantor, they are the keeper and the arbiter of those rights…right?

Well okay then. I declare that the government has to buy me a gun. I can’t afford one, and it’s in black and white in the Constitution. If you don’t read me my rights, you deny me my rights. If you don’t pay for an abortion you deny my right to have one (for my sex partner of course). If you don’t provide me a job, you are denying my right to work. You are violating my rights if you don’t provide me free food, free housing, free cell phones and a free education. None of these are specifically mentioned in the Constitution. But the right to keep and bear arms is there in glorious black and white. Fine, I’ll take a Smith and Wesson .357 King Cobra with a 6” barrel.  Oh yeah, make that nickel-plated with a contoured grip please.  Rosewood will be fine.  I’m not sure I will be able to understand my rights fully if I only own one firearm, so I’ll let you know if that adequately fulfills my rights or not. I’m not sure my privacy is fully protected if I don’t have a shotgun too.

The Obama administration is single-handedly bringing back manufacturing in America, by facilitating the manufacturing of rights that are not in the Constitution, and confiscating the taxes of working Americans to pay for them, to wit Obamacare. He said he was “proud” of Sandra Fluke. Well this one is a no-brainer, and an ironic one at that.

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.

We know that Tim Bishop hates outsourcing. He has gone so far as to introduce new legislation to prevent outsourcing of call center jobs. Tim Bishop may be a very big oursourcer himself.

Tim Bishop supported the auto bailout of GM and Chrysler with tax dollars. Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, an Italian automaker. That means that all Chrysler employees who are not employed in Italy, are by Tim Bishop’s definition, outsourced. If he is consistent with his beliefs he should demand that all Chrysler jobs be relocated to Italy, so that this invidious outsourcing is stopped.

GM, the other half of the auto bailout Bishop voted for, although still an American company took taxpayer dollars and then increased the amount of automobile production overseas by 35%. More outsourcing.

So, Tim Bishop is outraged by the amount of outsourcing going on by private companies, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem taking your money through taxes and outsourcing jobs as long as a big union, such as the United Auto Workers, is in favor of it. If a union like the Communications Workers of America complains about call center jobs being outsourced it’s an outrage, and Tim Bishop takes umbrage with that and introduces legislation to stop it. If another union, the United Auto Workers, begs the Obama administration to bail them out even if it means outsourcing more jobs, Tim Bishop blithely goes along.

So, which is it Tim? Is outsourcing good or is outsourcing bad? Or do you just not have a clue? Don’t answer that until you hear from Nancy Pelosi, President Obama, the CWA, the UAW, United Federation of Teachers or whomever else does your economic thinking for you.

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

President Barack Obama has a new budget. So it’s time to suspend reality and listen and nod your head and pine for four more years.

President Obama promised in 2009 to halve the deficit by the end of his first term. The last fiscal year budget deficit under Bush was $482 billion. In the four years of Obama’s first term it has yet to be less than $1 trillion. As former New York City Mayor Ed Koch used to asks his constituents, “How’m I doing?”

So while Obama’s new budget promises another trillion plus deficit, but don’t worry he will cut $4 trillion in spending over the next ten years. Never mind that even if he is reelected 60% of that timeline is beyond his control. It should also be pointed out that $4 trillion over ten years is only $400 billion a year, which leaves another $600 billion to be added to the national debt each year.

If that is not smoke and mirrors enough, that $4 trillion includes $1.5 trillion in tax increases. Why does this president and his backers insist that we have to take more money from the production of America’s citizens to cover his spending, rather than cutting his spending to fit within the available revenues?

For his first two years in office he worked with a Democrat controlled Congress. He got everything he asked for and everything is worse. We have staggering debt despite his promises to cut the deficit in half, unemployment worse than when he took office despite his promises to that his stimulus would cap unemployment at 8%, we have ObamaCare striking right at the heart of the First Amendment and he basically says, “get over it.”

Enough is enough. The experiment failed. It is time to cut this man loose and start working to repair the enormous damage he has done.

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

Rick Perry at CPAC 2012

At CPAC this week, Rick Perry visited the Blogger Lounge and while there spoke briefly about the Keystone Pipeline.

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

While President Obama is planning on raising taxes and spending another trillion dollars more than the government takes in for yet another feeble attempt at a government led job recovery, private industry jobs are ready to go, but he has killed it and China stands to benefit. Sure he will tell us that he is only delaying the decision until after the election to give time to study the issue in greater detail.

Similarly, he is bragging now about opening more acreage to oil drilling after he put a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, waiting until the oil rigs sailed into the sunset in search of more favorable countries, so now he can blame the oil companies for not drilling.

But getting back to the Keystone Pipeline, the argument of the environmentalists is that this pipeline will jeopardize a large drinking water aquifer in the mid-west. But this map proves otherwise.

Ogallala Aquifer Map

If you click on the link to enlarge the map you will see that the Ogallala Aquifer is already criss-crossed with many pipelines today and that the proposed Keystone Pipeline passes over the upper corner of the aquifer but otherwise goes around it.

This is purely Obama desperately trying to hold some kind of coalition together. But as in the recent battle with the Catholic Church over ObamaCare and contraception, he has supporters on both sides of the issue, a no-win situation. In this case it is the environmentalists on one side and union construction workers on the other. He continues to build upon his record and that record is a disaster for America.

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

At the conclusion of Newt Gingrich’s speech as CPAC a colleague and I discussed the Republican chances for the White House. That day we heard from Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt and we both agreed that winning in the fall should not be hard. But a couple of conditions had to be met.

The most important condition of all was that no matter who won the nomination, we all had to coalesce behind the nominee and fight hard to win. What that means is that Mitt and Newt have to stop the scorched earth personal attacks. So far, Santorum has avoided getting down in the mud, but with his new ascendancy, he will now be a prime target. Stop it and stop it now. It’s not about you. It’s about dislodging the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Tell us about your vision and stop hanging labels on each other. Forget the polls showing Obama beating all comers. In January 1980, Gallup had Carter beating Reagan 63% – 32%. This is how Time magazine saw it March of that year:

National opinion polls continue to show Carter leading Reagan by an apparently comfortable margin of about 25%. They also show that more moderate Republicans like Ford would run better against the President. This suggests that Reagan is not the strongest G.O.P. choice for the November election and that he clearly faces an uphill battle. . .

Carter, for all his problems, has the power of incumbency. As President, he can react to challenges by changing the direction of the whole Government, which he has done recently by attempting to balance the budget in the coming fiscal year, a course urged by all Republican candidates. Carter is an undeniably deft—and extremely lucky—politician. He also is a relatively known quantity in the White House, whereas the inexperienced Reagan would require a definite leap of faith by voters supporting him. Says Northwestern University Political Scientist Louis Masotti: “There’s a variation on the old cliché: you don’t change horses’ asses in midstream. You’ve got one, and at least you know its contours.”

Newt Gingrich

Gingrich was on his game at CPAC. He clearly outlined what he would do, within hours, of taking the oath of office. It was vintage Newt. It was Contract with America stuff and the crowd ate it up. This is the good Newt, who is very good. Besides putting down the sword against Romney, Newt needs to clean out his closet. Whatever he did for Freddie Mac, whether good or bad, get it out there now. Just saying you were a consultant is not enough. You can bet the Democrats know what he did and if it looks bad they will protect it like it is gold in anticipation of Newt winning the nomination. Then they will devise a scheme, with their allies in the main stream media, to release it about two weeks before the general election so that it will have maximum negative impact against Gingrich and the Republicans.

If Gingrich can get any bad news out now it will die down and be old news by election day. There is a risk, that it may kill his chance at the nomination, but for the sake of the country, it is better sooner than later.

Rick Santorum

Santorum has done a good job of laying out the moral argument for his candidacy. He has to shift his focus more on where he wants to take America rather than in the dismal place we find ourselves. He has to take a cue from Reagan and Thatcher and express an optimism that will engage his fellow Americans.

He has to avoid joining the Romney – Gingrich food fight. So far he has stayed above the fray, but he is climbing in the polls and that makes him a prime target, particularly for the Romney attack machine. He has to stay clean and ride the wave of disgust that people are feeling for all the mud-slinging.

Mitt Romney

Romney has to stop the attacks. He seems to be the one to fire the first spit ball. In one of the debates, when Santorum called for a ceasefire, Gingrich seemed inclined to go along, but Mitt couldn’t resist one last shot, which Gingrich naturally could not leave alone and off we went. Negative campaigning does work up to the point where we become sick of it and then it is a pox upon all your houses.

Romney also has to loosen up and lose his perpetual sunny disposition, that seems somewhat manufactured. It would be refreshing to see him without the perpetual smile and see some genuine concern for his fellow Americans who are having a tough time. If he doesn’t connect with the common folks, he will never climb above the 25% or so that typically vote for him.

Coming Together and Being Gracious

To get everyone to close ranks behind the eventual winner, we need to care for the ultimate losers. Toward that end I would like to propose a fallback job for each of the four remaining candidates in the administration of the winner. Here they are.

For Ron Paul, I would suggest appointing him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. He could then freely find out what the heck they are doing there and make recommendations up to and including ending the Fed. For Newt Gingrich, I would suggest appointing him UN Ambassador. What better way to follow up a speech by Ahmadinejad than a critique by Gingrich destroying everything the little weasel said? For Rick Santorum, Secretary of State. He seems to understand there is more to the world than just the Middle East and that we have some work to do in our own hemisphere. For Romney, I would suggest Secretary of the Treasury. Bain Capital was not Goldman Sachs. I think between his finance background and his government executive experience as governor of Massachusetts, he could greatly help get us on the right track.

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

To many conservatives Mitch McConnell is a sellout. To me, he is a parliamentary master who held off a filibuster-proof majority by his fingernails until reinforcements arrived in the person of Scott Brown. He kicked off his address to the crowd with a little humor.

McConnell said that conservatives are more fun because we are always right. He then quoted what Democrats believe in by quoting from Saul Alinsky. It is all about division and smearing your opponents. But it is going to be a tough task with the president’s record.

The president believes in rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies. Examples include: the Keystone pipeline, Solyndra, Goldman Sachs. He preaches diversity and then attacks Catholics.

This is about Obama’s policies. He asked for and received from his Democrat Congress, nearly $1 trillion so that unemployment could be kept under 8% and since then it hasn’t been below 8%. The average length of unemployment under Obama is forty weeks. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is over 14%, for Hispanics it’s 10.5%, for recent college graduates it’s over 10%. He promised to cut the deficit in half and the deficit has been above $1 trillion for the fourth straight year. He ignored his own deficit commission.

Obama believes in bigger and bigger government. Today, the earnings of federal workers is 60% higher than those in the private sector who pay those salaries. Layoffs of federal employees is running at less than 300 per year, meaning there is a higher probability of a federal worker dying of natural causes than getting laid off. Meanwhile Obama has added 150,000 to the federal payroll. We are supposed to believe that there is no possible way to shrink the federal payroll because of how important government is to life in America.

In just nine months we will have a chance to let Obama know what we think of his vision of big government.

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

Congressman Tim Bishop continues to push his manufactured campaign issue, with the full union backing of the Communication Workers of America, to fight against outsourced call centers. He calls it a “surgical strike”. I think there are more appropriate names for it.

It’s always fun to listen to someone who hasn’t spent a day outside of academia or government tell the rest of us, a) what the problem is; and b) what the solution is. The first question that I would ask Congressman Bishop is “why is this such an important issue for your constituents?” Answer: It isn’t. There are no major call centers in his district and there are none that I know of that are weighing a move to his district. So why is this his major legislative focus?

He is desperately looking for an issue, any issue, that he can campaign on. He cannot campaign on his record. He cannot campaign on a record of supporting the Obama economic disaster. He cannot campaign on how much the debt ballooned on his watch. So Doctor Bishop wants to do a little surgery and penalize companies who outsource call centers. Since Bishop never held a job that produced anything for a profit he can be excused for not grasping the impacts of his proposed bill.

One of his provisions is to make companies that have outsourced call center jobs overseas ineligible for government contracts. Two of the largest US PC manufactures HP and Dell and they both have call centers overseas. So does Congressman Bishop want the stop the federal government from buying PCs from HP and Dell? Who should they buy them from? Chinese Lenovo, Taiwan based Acer? Japan’s Toshiba? Speaking like a general he says it is a surgical strike. Well surgical strikes are designed to limit collateral damage, and Bishop’s plan is chock full of collateral damage.

Here is how Bishop could really help the situation. First, take a basic economics course. Study how the global economy works and how free global trade helps everyone. Perhaps he should ask his backers at the Communications Workers of America, what they can do to make call centers in the US more cost-effective. Do they have too many work rules in their contracts? Do they force their members to pay union dues to pay for the union to back Bishop and Obama? If their dues were limited to collective bargaining, perhaps employers could afford more call center jobs in the US. Tell Obama we need to slash the corporate tax rate so that companies do not save billions of dollars by locating operations in overseas countries with lower tax rates and then trap those profits overseas so they can’t be brought back to create jobs here.

But that may be too much to ask of Mr. Bishop before November. So here’s a better idea. Step down, and let someone who has actually created jobs take your place.

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