MITCHELL:

I wanted to ask you about a report in the New York Times today. The president’s going to take on immigration reform, which, of course, became impossible for George Bush. With all of his good intentions he wasn’t able to accomplish it, something that John McCain has been pressuring to have some action on. Is this really going to become a priority on top of everything else that he’s trying to do?

SHRUM:

Yes, I think they’re going to move on immigration. I hope the Republicans fulminate against it because they’ll get to the point where they won’t get a single Hispanic vote. Go ahead and make my decade, turn Texas into a Democratic state.

MITCHELL:

I don’t know about Texas.

SHRUM:

If it can happen in California, it can happen in Texas.

Bob Shrum reveals what we’ve always known about amnesty:

It’s designed to expand the Democrat Party and kill the Republican Party.

And, of course, the Republican Party’s way of dealing with it is self-defeating, to pander and so forth and act like they have the same attitude about it that Democrats do.

The only answer is Conservatism.

You approach people as people, not as members of groups.

You approach them as people.You tell them they live in the greatest country in the world, United States of America, that you love ’em, you want the best for them, but it’s up to them.  And this country provides more opportunity for people willing to go out and strive for it and work for it, and what our party is going to do is get out of your way, we’re going to get out of your way and we’re going to let you.

Now, if you’re illegal, we’re not going to violate our laws. But the Democrat Party way is to destroy the US culture in order get votes for power.

Why would the Republican Party want to go along with that? But they do ’cause it’s the path of least resistance, the path of least criticism, other than from their own voters.

Time to grow a backbone, and wake up people.

And get this, you probably heard about this. Harry Reid got his train from Disneyland to Las Vegas. It’s a train that travels 311 miles an hour and makes the trip in two hours. That’s an $8 billion earmark. The environmental impact studies alone will take more than five years to complete. Before they even break ground on the construction of this super train, what is the five years of environmental impact studies gonna cost?

It’s an abomination. It is an outright abomination and if there were a watchdog media that were concerned, either as professionals or as citizens, this thing would be in huge trouble. But it’s not.

Does anybody in his or her right mind think that the biggest spending spree in history has to be voted on before anybody reads it today or that the economy will collapse?

It’s the same modus operandi:

We don’t have time, Obama wants this, we have to vote for it.

If you think the only thing that can save our economy is that Congress vote today before anyone has time to read it, then you probably are one of the 50% of non-taxpayers that are not going to have to pay for this.

Do you know this thing also gets rid of welfare reform? This thing totally gets rid of welfare reform. This bill will reward state governments for the more people they enroll on non-work required welfare plans. Everything you’ve heard about health care is in the final bill. It sets up the bureaucracy for national health care. $2 billion is there for ACORN, for neighborhood stabilization. It’s down from the four, but still the Democrats are using you taxpayers to fund one of their organizations that engages in illegal voter fraud, or voter registration vote fraud, in essence, and other things.

Now, interesting, when we get to the Senate for the vote, Senator Kennedy is too ill to make it. He will not be able to get to Washington. They need 60 votes on this. Harry Reid says he’s going to try to find a parliamentary rule to ensure that neither Specter, Collins, or Snowe is the 60th vote. He is going to protect them. He is going to find a way that they get to vote prior to where they would in the roll call so that their votes are tabulated before the magic 60th vote takes place. It was the last chance for Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter to understand what they hold in their hands. What they hold in their hands is the next generation of our economy in the tank. It was in the hands of two Republicans.

From the Heritage Foundation:

“True Cost of Stimulus: $3.27 Trillion — All of the major news outlets are reporting that the stimulus bill voted out of conference committee last night has a meager $789 billion price tag. This number is pure fantasy. No one believes that the increased funding for programs the left loves like Head Start, Medicaid, COBRA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit is in anyway temporary. No Congress under control of the left will ever cut funding for these programs. So what is the true cost of the stimulus if these spending increases are made permanent? Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) asked the Congressional Budget Office to estimate the impact of permanently extending the 20 most popular provisions of the stimulus bill. What did the CBO find?”

There’s a chart and a table that Heritage publishes.

“[T]he true 10 year cost of the stimulus bill $2.527 trillion in spending with another $744 billion cost in debt servicing. Total bill for the Generational Theft Act: $3.27 trillion.”

Senator McCain is calling it “generational theft,” which is exactly what it is.

“What’s the big deal about spending?” All of your life have maybe heard peripherally that we’re running budget deficits and that we have a national debt this high and you’ve never seen the sky fall because of it. Well, you are now. That’s the bottom line here.

The #1 culprit in what’s happening now is debt.

At every level you will find irresponsible, unmanageable debt from the subprime crisis, to the “toxic assets” that were created to try to give to the subprime mortgages, which had none from the get-go, to the government owing more than it can ever pay back, to individual consumer debt. It’s just out the window, and it’s now in the process of all coming due — and the best thing to do is to let it play out. We are going to pretend that we can manage our way out of this with Big Government, Big Brother helping us, experience as little pain as possible when in fact what they are on the verge of doing is going to cause pain that you can’t believe. The results are going to be so inflationary.

You can see all of this at AskHeritage.org. They touch on the inescapable inflationary aspects of this down the road. It’s impossible for inflation not to increase, and probably dramatically because of all this. But aside from all that, the reason that all of this spending matters is that we have lived in a capitalist country all of our lives, and there have been battles throughout our nation’s history between people who believe in liberal socialism and capitalism because capitalism is said to provide unequal, unfair outcomes. Capitalism features winners and features losers. Liberalism pretends to level the playing field and say, “There will not be any losers if, one, we have Central Planning and people who have ‘compassion’ at the top running it.”

Well, what’s going to happen here, in order for liberalism, socialism to prevail, they have to find an enemy, they have to find demons, and they have. The demons now are the achievers in this country.

The left never seeks to make lives more equal by elevating those at the bottom so that they, too, might become more prosperous. Liberalism, socialism targets people at the top as achievers and punishes them, tries to take away from them so that everybody is equally miserable.

All of this spending is going to mean far less money in the private sector where your jobs are. If employers have far less money to expand and hire and invest via borrowing, then you can kiss massive reemployment good-bye for a while.

Post:
Feb 5
Obama and the Stimulus – simple truths

“Gov. Sarah Palin announced in her State of the State Speech on Thursday night that she wants to freeze all state hiring except for public safety but also pursue ambitious projects like a road to Nome. … Palin acknowledged that the state is facing a potential budget deficit of more than a billion dollars as a result of the drop in oil prices. She didn’t propose specific cuts to government programs but said she wants to freeze state hiring as well as restrict ‘non-essential purchases.’ She didn’t elaborate on what those are. … The governor said she learned about fighting against long odds, protecting family and putting ‘Country First,’ referring to John McCain’s campaign motto, ‘even when voters put you second,'” meaning her loss as the running mate to Senator McCain. “Palin has previously said she’s not enthusiastic about the state helping pay for the in-state pipeline but wants to work with private business to make it happen. She hasn’t laid out a plan, but that could change with the bill she said she would introduce next month.”

Now, if Republicans would support Sarah Palin she could still provide an attractive reminder of what a conservative leader can accomplish when they cut the size of government. If she actually succeeds in this, I guarantee you she will get rid of the budget deficit of nearly a billion dollars. She’s going to develop local energy sources that are sufficient to run local businesses and homes, self-sufficiently, and running a straightforward administration.

So I think this is good. Let’s keep an eye on her. Let’s keep an eye on this and see how it works.

CNN’s Campbell Brown — ran a story defending Sarah Palin.

Now, this might only be on their website. I don’t know that it aired either.

“Whatever you may have thought about John McCain’s running mate … try to put all of that aside for just a moment, because Sarah Palin is who she is. She did not become measurably more intelligent or measurably less intelligent during this campaign. Remember, she was only part of the campaign for a matter of nine weeks. Sarah Palin is who she is, which is why I find it so stunning that the very people who introduced us to her, who told us she would make a great vice president, have now turned on her with a vengeance. They are the top advisers to John McCain’s failed campaign and they are desperate to find someone to blame for their long, long list of mistakes. They have been launching grenades at Palin and her supporters. CNN has found some of their allegations to be patently false.”

CNN admits they investigated something.

CNN did this story on right-wing rage? Let me be honest with you.

If there is any right-wing rage today, it is at the moderates in the Republican Party who are responsible for taking this party down a sewer.

Governor Palin ignited a dead and dry campaign.

She’s tough. She’s smart. She’s competent. She’s articulate, a doer, and she’s got a proven track record to prove that — and she just doesn’t talk. She’s done the walk, and I think that’s what her attackers fear most, that she’s too effective at brushing the waste where it belongs.

She is a threat to the modern Republican Party, which is made up of a bunch of spineless moderates. And they’re trying to take her out now.

But the problem is that conservatives love this woman.

It’s not even arguable and it’s not even close.

“Do you have any regrets that you said to Joe the Plumber, your spread the wealth comments?”

OBAMA:

Not at all. Look, if John McCain’s best argument is that he wants to continue the same Bush tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans that in 2000 he himself opposed — and in the meantime fails to give tax cuts to a hundred million people in America that I would give tax cuts to — John McCain’s going to have some problems. Because the American people understand that the way we grow this economy is from the bottom up.

Wrong on so many counts.

But the one thing that I have to say here about Obama: He is consistent. He never wavers from what he says. Well, that’s not true. He has moderated his position on a couple things. But the point is, as far as his base is concerned, he’s consistent. He didn’t back off this.

When he talks about the free market he always criticizes the free market. When he talks about the rich, he always rips the rich.

You know, one day you’ve got McCain out there sounding like Milton Friedman; the next day you’ve got him sounding like FDR. The lack of consistency in the McCain message is striking compared to the consistency in the Obama message. And he’s also, Obama, very consistent about America is to blame.

Now, he’s consistent. He’s wrong in practically everything he’s voted on and said, but he’s consistent with it. He doesn’t shock his supporters. He doesn’t make ’em scratch their heads. Of course they’re not even really listening to the substance of what Obama is saying.

Now, this tax cut thing is one thing where he has changed his mind because he got caught on this. He was going to give “a tax break to 95% of Americans.” Now, the problem is that a little under 70% is the largest number of Americans that pay taxes. Around 30, 32% of Americans do not pay income taxes.

This was pointed out to Obama. He said,

“Well, they pay payroll taxes, and I’m going to give them a tax credit, and they’re going to get a tax credit on their payroll taxes. They’re paying taxes; they ought to get a tax cut, too.”

So he’s going to rob the Social Security trust fund, theoretically, in order to give this tax cut, and then he said… This is one of these things that leads me to believe that Obama does not understand certain crucial things about this government. When he was challenged about his tax plan for “a tax cut for 95% of all Americans” — because 95% of all Americans don’t pay taxes — he was quick to point out that working Americans do pay payroll taxes. He said they needed a tax cut, too. When it was pointed out to him that his tax cut was in reality a socialist welfare program because it was confiscating more tax revenues from income-tax-paying Americans to hand over to non-income-tax-paying Americans, Obama said, “No, no, no, no, no.”

He did this last week. He said there’s going to be a “work requirement” to his tax plan.

Now, I have a news flash to Obama here: The fact that a person pays payroll taxes means they already have a job. And if they already have a job, it means they’re already working. So what in the name of tarnation are you talking about that these people are going to face a work requirement, and that’s going to eliminate the fact that it’s welfare?

They’re already working if they’re paying payroll taxes. Now, because I have come to understand Obama, I don’t think he understands what payroll taxes are. I don’t think that he understood what capital gains taxes are when he started talking about making them “progressive.”

I’m not sure he knows that payroll taxes are taken out of workers’ paychecks. Furthermore, I don’t think he cares.

He talks about Biden’s rhetorical flourishes, but Obama is given to his own. What he understands and believes, is income redistribution. He understands socialism. He understands radicalism, just like his friends.