President Obama’s 2012 budget was released on Valentine’s Day, just in time to break conservative hearts everywhere. How many times do we have to say that we want less spending before he’ll listen to us? It’s more frustrating than trying to make a phone call using AT&T Wireless.

The President’s self-proclaimed ‘responsible’ budget will double the national debt from $13.56 trillion to $26.3 trillion by the end of 2021. Keep in mind that neither contractors nor the government ever comes in under budget.

President Obama claims that his budget reduces spending. Someone needs to tell him that two plus two does not equal three. It’s true that Obama’s budget reduces discretionary spending. It does this byredefining Pell grants (government- sponsored college scholarships for poor kids) and surface transportation spending as mandatory spending. The budget also reduces spending in Iraq and Afghanistan by $38.2 billion in 2012.

Obama’s 2012 budget increases spending, and it increases taxes on job creators. Probably not the best idea in an economic climate where Americans believe that unemployment is the number one issue to be tackled. Remember, a boss has to pay his taxes from somewhere. She might have to let an employee or two go to foot the bill.

Read the rest at The Stir

When I was little, my mama always taught me that actions speak louder than words. Co-opting a phrase from the most widely owned and read book in the world, she told me that I would be able to discern a tree by the fruit it bore.

In other words, talk is cheap.

I’ve been reminded of this so often over the past couple of years while watching the Obama administration. Barack Obama claimed to be forbetter education, and then he ended the DC voucher program. He said he wouldn’t hire lobbyists, and then he hired lobbyists. He said he wanted make sure every American had health insurance, then he gavewaivers to businesses so they wouldn’t have to provide health insurance for their employees. Anyone else notice a trend?

The latest round of hypocrisy has to do with energy. In 2008, then-Senator Obama vowed to implement a cap and trade law that would limit carbon emissions and ‘necessarily skyrocket’ energy costs. Unable to pass cap & tax through congress, President Obama has decided to do whatever he wants anyway by expanding EPA regulation. Since I’m remembering phrases from my childhood, ‘more than one way to skin a cat’ comes to mind.

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency will regulate greenhouse gases from power plants and other major polluters — which will stifle growth, kill jobs, and raise the cost of electricity. But if you’re lucky, a polar bear will come hug you. Polar bear hugs are far superior to being able to turn on your heat in the middle of a snowpocalypse.

Read the rest at The Stir

When the gut-wrenching story broke of the Philadelphia abortionist that routinely delivered live, viable babies before jamming scissors into their brains to kill them, I had to write about it.

The part of the story that struck me so deeply was the desperation that those women felt walking into that clinic. I don’t believe that anyone wants an abortion; but that women are pressured by family, friends, and society (mostly well-meaning, I’m sure) to believe that the procedure is no big deal.

How far below rock bottom does a woman have to be to walk into a filthy ‘clinic’ and have the kicking, squirming life sucked out of her? That woman needs love and support, not the legal right to an abortion. In the article I wrote, I mentioned some ways to actually help pregnant women, such as donating money to cover prenatal care for those that can’t afford it, bringing meals to single moms trying to make it, or volunteering with a pregnancy care center or adoption agency.

For that I got called a woman-hater.

It turns out that unless one believes that a mother-to-be has the right to end the life of her unborn child, that person hates women. I vehemently dispute that claim. I do like women. I like men, too for the record. I like all people no matter how big or small, no matter their age, and no matter where they live: In a mansion, on the street, or in a uterus.

I believe that God created humans (and other stuff … like everything), and even though you’re not going to get along with everyone, life is worthy of respect.

Read the rest at Pundit League

Social Security is projected to run at a deficit in 2011 and beyond, with the coffers running dry by 2037. After all, there were an awful lot of babies born in the 1940s and ’50s, and they’re just beginning to reachretirement age. Starting this year, there will be more money paid out to these retirees than paid in by workers.

In the Land of Balanced Budgets, there are only two solutions: Cut benefits or raise taxes. Neither is very popular, which is probably why politicians don’t like addressing the Social Security thing.

Let’s do some retirement math. Let’s say you’re 30 years old and making a decent annual salary of $50,000. Right off the top, you have to put $3,100 into a forced retirement plan called Social Security. Your boss has to put another $3,100 into that account for you instead of giving it directly to you. Instead of having $6,200 in your hands to invest however you see fit, the government is now in charge of it.

Assume that you had instead invested that $6,200 in the marketplace with an 8% rate of return. When you are getting ready to retire at age 65, that $6,200 will have grown into $91,669.13, without any other additions (that’s the magic of compound interest). Assuming you added to your retirement account each year, as well as paid off your mortgage and all other loans, you should be financially fine in retirement.

Now let’s give the government that $6,200. How much will it be worth after 35 years? Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Read the rest at The Stir

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger spent his last moment in office Monday morning grabbing a cigar and wishing luck to returningGovernor Jerry Brown. Before he lit up in a pubic building in one of the most anti-smoking states in the Union, the Governator reduced the sentence of the punk son of one of his political cronies.

Esteban Nunez (now 21), the son of former California State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, was serving 16 years in prison formanslaughter, which he pleaded guilty to. In the fall of 2008, young Nunez and three of his hooligan friends went drinking in San Diego and tried to crash a frat party. They got tossed out, so they did what all sensible young men do when their feelings are hurt: They went looking for trouble.

The group of miscreants eventually found Luis Santos and his friends and challenged them to a knife fight. The fight ended with Santos’s death. Sharp metal pointy things thrust through the heart do have a tendency to kill people. (As a side note, maybe we should ban all knives in order to make the world a safer place … that would work, right?)

Read more at The Stir

SEIU (Service Employees International Union) has spent millions of dollars getting Barack Obama and other Democrats elected. The famously left-wing labor union supported the presidential candidate that was going to pay Peggy Su’s mortgage and put gas in her car.

Unions are all about the little people.

One of Obama’s biggest campaign promises was for health care reform, specifically universal health care. It works so well in Canada, after all. SEIU openly supported Obama in the 2008 Presidential election.

Obama was elected, everyone partied (and left their litter behind), and everyone waited for change to come to America. In one of the few campaign promises that the President has actually kept, he signed into law a bill that would transform our health care system into a nationalizedone.

Be careful what you wish for. Since ObamaCare passed last March, small businesses have dropped health care coverage for their employees while big businesses got special exemptions, and drug relabeling has discriminated against women with cancer. Taxes have gone up, and will continue to do so.

Read the rest at The Stir

Are you ready for the biggest tax increase in United States history? Me neither. My only hope is that the still Democratic-majority Congress will vote to extend or even make permanent the so-called Bush tax cuts.

As it stands now, everyone’s taxes are set to go up January 1. The average American household making the average American income of $52,029 will see its federal taxes go up 10%, from $11,261 to $12,441.

That’s a lot of money to be forking over to the government so that Congressman John Conyer’s scalper son can have a sweet ride.

It seems that most of Congress wants to extend some of the tax cuts — specifically for those households making under $250,000 or individuals making under $200,000 annually.

This discriminates against high-income earners, who are already picking up more than their fair share. The top 1% of earners (those making more than $352,900) pay 28.1% of all federal taxes. Despite what Warren Buffet says about ‘doing his part’ for society, it’s not fair to foist your beliefs on other people.

Read the rest at The Stir

Over the weekend, the website WikiLeaks released over 250,000classified State Department documents. Top-secret information about everything from Iran’s nuclear status to concerns over China’s growthas a superpower to the potentiality of a united Korean peninsulasuddenly became public knowledge.

Secretary of State Clinton is mad. President Obama is cracking down with a zero-tolerance policy for anyone caught leaking information. Congressman Pete King (R-NY) is calling for the government to declare WikiLeaks a foreign terrorist organization, in order to “seize their funds and go after anyone who provides them help or contributions or assistance whatsoever.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claims that total transparency is in the public’s best interest.

Read the rest at The Stir

Transparency in politics is good. We the people elect representatives to act in our best interest, and send them off to Washington where we hope they won’t let us down.

There are few things more frustrating than watching unpopular bills being passed into law through backroom deals and partisan meetings. When the health care bill was being rammed through Congress, politicians actually laughed at the notion that they might read it, and Nancy Pelosiherself said we had to pass it to find out what was in it.

We still don’t know what’s in the new health care law, since the rules keep changing.

Americans were told that bailouts were needed to save businesses too large to fail. Billions of dollars have been spent to save jobs and put America back to work. What was in those stimulus projects? Crack monkeys and menopausal yoga and skylights for wine cellars.

Let’s not forget about the auto bailouts, the takeover of the student loan industry, or the whole housing mess.

Little by little, our liberal, humanitarian government has been spending us into poverty in the name of the common good. The silent majority has been awoken and is stirring, getting ready to vote out liberty’s enemies in November.

What is a spendaholic control freak like President Obama supposed to do in the face of steadily declining approval ratings? A certain scene from The Wizard of Oz comes to mind, in which a little man implores his visitors not to peek behind the curtain.

The DNC released an ad Monday accusing Republicans of using shady tactics and dirty money to get elected. The ad says:

Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie: They’re Bush cronies. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: They’re shills for big business. And they’re stealing our democracy. Spending millions from secret donors to elect Republicans to do their bidding in Congress. It appears they’ve even taken secret foreign money to influence our elections. It’s incredible: Republicans benefiting from secret foreign money. Tell the Bush crowd and the Chamber of Commerce: Stop stealing our democracy.

This ad comes immediately after attacks from the President himself. Last Thursday, Obama referred to the Chamber of Commerce buying ads against Democrats with foreign money. On Monday, he smeared Karl Rove twice by name at an Illinois rally for Democratic Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias.

Do the allegations hold any water? No. Not even The New York Times can agree with the President on this one. The highly liberal paper states:

But a closer examination shows that there is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents.

The notion that it’s Republicans stealing our democracy instead of Leftists like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi is laughable at best. It wasn’t the right pushing bailouts and corporate takeovers and socialized health care.

Besides, President Obama and the DNC should be very careful what they wish for. I seem to remember a certain presidential candidate refusing to disclose where all of his campaign contributionsoriginated. Maybe Democrats should get the log out of their own eye before they go looking for splinters in Karl Rove’s eye.

Cross Posted at The Stir

During the health care reform debates, President Obama made a point to say, “If you like your doctor, you’re going to be able to keep your doctor. If you like your plan, keep your plan.”

Thanks to government waivers granted in late September, nearly one million workers at McDonald’s, Jack in the Box, and 28 other firms won’t lose the health insurance they already have. Under the new health care law, the organizations would have been required to raise the minimum coverage of their part-time employees or drop coverage altogether.

That means that nearly a million workers would have been out of luck in the health insurance department, since government plans won’t kick in until 2014.

This is just one more example of how illogical the new health care law is. Instead of simplifying the process and creating real reform, all it does is create new mandates that will be impossible for companies to comply with.

Under the new law, the workers at those 30 companies thought they’d be getting better benefits at the government’s insistence. Instead, their bosses got an exemption. Is that hope and change? Or more of the same?

Even more upsetting is the fact that only 30 (large) organizations got the exemption. What about the smaller businesses — the ones that employ the majority of the American workforce? How are they going to come up with the extra money to expand health care coverage to their employees? They’re going to have to cut costs (fire some employees, use cheaper materials, etc.) or pass that cost along to the consumer.

As a hungry consumer on a tight budget, where would you go to get a burger? The family-owned restaurant down the street that has to charge $8 just to cover their rising costs? Or will you choose McDonald’s, where you can get a Big Mac for a fraction of the price? Most people won’t be able to afford the $8 burger, which means fewer customers for Dad’s Burgers down the street. Eventually, Dad won’t be able to keep his business open.

Government regulation doesn’t help the middle class; it hurts them. Big business will find a way to survive because it’s in bed with big government.

The new health care law isn’t the end of our health care woes. It is just another example of big government screwing over the little guys.

Cross Posted at The Stir