Conservative author and columnist S.E. Cupp was on the Joy Behar Show earlier this week to talk politics with Jerry Springer and Joy. The conversation centered around President Obama’s tax-the-rich speech, and whether or not wealthier Americans should be more heavily taxed to support massive social programs.

Springer and Behar spoke in favor of higher taxes, while Cupp preferred to let everyone keep as much of their own money as possible. As a side note, I’m dying to know how much money the two liberal talk show hosts donate to the federal government each quarter.

Eventually the subject of Planned Parenthood came up, and Cupp said that she did not support federal funding of the biggest abortion millin America.

The morning after this segment aired, blatherskite Keith Olbermann tweeted about Ms. Cupp, “On so many levels she’s a perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does.” The implication is obviously that he believes her mother should have aborted her.

Read the rest at The Stir

On Wednesday, President Obama addressed the nation to talk about the deficit problem. Theannual deficit is the amount of money our government spends in a year that is not covered by the taxes we pay. That is opposed to the national debt, which is the accumulation of these deficits.

Currently, our deficit is $1.65 trillion. To put that in perspective, if one dollar equaled one second, it would take over 52,000 years to equal this year’s deficit. I don’t think my poor little calculator could do the math on our over $14 trillion of accumulated debt.

Obviously something needs to be done. We either need more money coming in, or less money going out. As pointed out on IowaHawk’s blog, not enough money realistically exists to cover our expenditures. Therefore, we must reduce our spending to balance the budget and begin to pay down our tremendous debt.

According to Reuters, 59% of Americans would cut programs to reduce deficit spending, while 30% would raise taxes to cover the cost. President Obama agreed in Wednesday’s speech that cutting some spending might be necessary … right before he slammed Republicans for trying to lead us to a fundamentally different America than the one he’s known.

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Unless the politicians in Washington can come up with a budgetfor the fiscal year we’re currently halfway through, the government will shut down all non-essential services. The funding dries up Friday at midnight, which means that some 800,000 federal workers will be furloughed and also that Yellowstone Park will close temporarily.

The problem with creating a budget is that Republicans andDemocrats can’t agree on how much money to spend and what items to spend it on. There are just so many ways to spend other people’s money that sometimes it’s hard to decide whether to fundmenopausal yoga classes or blatantly biased media outlets.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi pointed out the key difference between the ideologies of the right and the left: Liberals care about their fellow citizens, and Conservatives don’t give a crap about starving seniors. OK, maybe I paraphrased a teensy bit. Here’s what she actually said:

In one of the bills before us, six million seniors are deprived of meals — homebound seniors are deprived of meals. People ask us to find our common ground, the middle ground. Is middle ground three million seniors not receiving meals? I don’t think so. We’ve got to take this conversation from a debate about numbers and dollar figures and finding middle ground there, to the higher ground of national values. I don’t think the American people want any one of those six million people to lose their meals.

Read the rest at The Stir

In which I rant about cleaning my daughters’ room, household budgets versus the federal budget, and Amelia Hamilton joins me for Conservative Chick Chat.

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Last March, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly told the public that the Affordable Care Act needed to be passed before we could find out what was in it. The bill was soon passed and signed into law, and one year later, we are still peeling back the layers on the onion that is Obamacare.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) originally didn’t support President Obama’s health care initiative, but for a different reason than his Republicans counterparts. Where Republicans on the Hill voted against a massive intrusion of government into 1/6 of the economy, Rep. Weiner wasn’t fond of Obamacare because he didn’t believe it went far enough. The congressman sponsored an amendment to implement universal coverage – Medicare for all.

Read the rest at The Stir

We’re almost half way through the fiscal year (which began on October 1, 2010), and the federal government still hasn’t figured out its budget.They keep passing continuing resolutions, which means that they agree to stick mostly with last year’s budget until a final budget can be passed.

The most recent extension passed 87-13 in the Senate on Thursday, with our politicians assuring us that this will be the last time. The resolution included $6 billion in cuts for the fiscal year, yet nine Republicansenators voted against it.

The conservative naysayers say that the cuts aren’t deep enough for their conscience to allow them to vote in favor of the short-term budget stopgap. Florida Senator Marco Rubio released a press statement explaining his vote in opposition of the resolution:

Today’s vote, first of all, should remind us of how we got here. Why are we funding government in two or three week increments? And it’s because Democrats, when they ran the House, the Senate and the White House, didn’t pass a budget.

“But more importantly, this is a terrible way to run government. We are facing some serious issues in America today, particularly the fact that we are borrowing $4 billion a day to keep the lights on and particularly the fact that we owe $14 trillion and growing. It’s time to face those issues in a serious way. The time for waiting is over. The time for games has passed.

Read the rest at The Stir

A few months ago, conservatives were outraged at the firing of liberalJuan Williams by National Public Radio for saying that flying with Islamic-looking males made him nervous on Fox News’ The O’Reily Factor. According to NPR’s head honcho Vivian Schiller, Mr. Williams had “several times in the past violated [their] news code of ethics with things that he had said on other people’s air.”

Apparently expressing an opinion based on the fact that virtually every airplane-hijacking terrorist in the United States over the past few decades has been a Jihadist is punishable by unemployment from NPR. Juan Williams did not state that he thought all Muslims were terrorists, or even that he refused to fly with them. He simply stated that it made him nervous.

Shortly thereafter, many prominent conservative pundits called for NPR to be defunded of the federal money that it receives. Private businesses can run things how they see fit, but organizations receiving taxpayer money should not be able to terminate someone’s employment for expressing a valid opinion, especially when it wasn’t even done on NPR’s airwaves.

In November, the then-Democratic House of Representatives defeated a bill to cut the federal fundingof NPR. The supposedly unbiased organization released this statement after the vote:

In an increasingly fractious media environment, public radio’s value in fostering an informed society has never been more critical. Our growing audience shows that we are meeting that need. It is imperative for federal funding to continue to ensure that this essential tool of democracy remains available to all Americans and thrives well into the future.

Fast forward to March 2011. Ron Schiller, a senior executive at NPR, was caught on tape in a sting operation criticizing the Republican party, and Tea Party Republicans in particular, as being racist, fundamentalist Christian, and fanatically involved in people’s personal lives.

**Side note: Democrats want to control our health care, our education, and what we can feed our kids, but Republicans are “fanatically involved in people’s personal lives”? Um, ok …

Read the rest at The Stir

People have been breaking rules since God said, “Enjoy the garden … just don’t eat that fruit off that tree.” The first rule in existence and the first humans couldn’t be bothered to follow it.

Let’s face it: Rules are rarely any fun or easy to follow. That’s why there are sayings like, “Rules were meant to be broken,” or my favorite from one of those pirate movies, “They’re more like guidelines anyway.”

Some of the bigger rules are relatively easy for most of us to follow. Thou shalt not murder is one of those that I’m fairly certain most Americans don’t struggle to keep on a daily basis. But what about speed limits? Anti-piracy laws? Tucking the price tags in on an expensive outfit, wearing it to a fancy party, and then returning it to the store for a full refund?

Rules can suck, but like it or not, they’re necessary for order and civility. Reckless driving is dangerous, and kills people every day. Illegally downloading software off the Internet is the same as walking into a store and stealing a boxed computer program. Returning worn clothes to a store as new is dishonest to both the store and the eventual end purchaser.

The wonderful thing about the way our government is set up is that it’s full of rules to protect us against tyranny. We have three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial … someone should remind Senator Schumer of that, by the way) that provide a unique system of checks and balances to keep any one person or group from getting too much power.

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As a conservative, I am often accused of being a selfish, heartless,mean girl. Somehow, believing that Americans are strong, hard-working people well capable of taking care of themselves and their communities means that I’m a thieving capitalist who only wants the rich to get richer. Oh, and for some reason I’m also a racist.

Let’s take a look at the current situation in Wisconsin. The public sector unions are protesting at the state’s Capitol against Governor Scott Walker’s plan to make the members pay a fraction of their own health insurance and retirement contributions, and to limit their ‘collective bargaining’ capabilities to salary alone (as opposed to benefits as well). I stand with Governor Walker on this issue (incidentally, so would Democratic hero FDR), which obviously means I’m joining the ‘attack’ on workers in Wisconsin.

Why is it that every time conservatives advocate for taxpayers keeping more of their own hard-earned money, we’re accused of stealing from the poor? The GOP opposes Obamacare, and Harry Reid claims we’re stealing from the middle class. If we so much as mention privatizing Social Security, John Boehner gets painted as a clown and we’re accused of trying to steal from people’s retirement accounts. (Newsflash: that money is already long gone.) Parents that support a voucher system so that they can choose the best schools for their children are guilty of defunding the public schools they are districted for.

Read the rest at The Stir

I’m in Washington D.C. this week for CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), an annual conferences for conservatives to gather and revel in camaraderie while listening to speakers like Texas Governor Rick Perry, Representative Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney tell us how awesome we are.

It’s really fun.

Once the panels and sessions end for the day, everyone heads out to various parties for food and drink. Conservatives like to have fun, after all. One of the social events was a party sponsored by AndrewBreitbart and GOProud featuring Sophie B. Hawkins.

You may remember some of the controversy surrounding GOProud’s involvement with CPAC.

Read the rest at The Stir