Shortly after George W. Bush proposed his first stimulus rebate check program it was about March last year, or February, with the checks beginning to arrive in June. Remember this? And what was the amount of those checks? Was it $600? Six hundred dollars for a single and $1,200 for a couple, something like that, right?

I want to remind you of a quote from the first lady, Michelle Obama.

In context, remember, Obama’s stimulus tax plan gets you 13 bucks a week starting in June, and that reduces to eight bucks a week starting in January.

Michelle was in Michigan. This is just after she and her girls had an Access Hollywood interview, making fun of their dad’s ten-year-old slacks.

Michelle speaking to a group of people in Michigan:

“You are a getting $600,”

…meaning the rebate.

“You’re getting $600. What can you do with that? I mean, not to be ungrateful or anything, but maybe it pays down a bill. But it doesn’t pay down every bill every month. Barack’s approach is that the short-term quick fix kind of stuff sounds good and it may even feel good for that first month when you get that check and then you go out, you buy a pair of earrings.”

Remember that quote? So the first lady in June of 2008 making fun of a $600 rebate check, and is now praising her husband, whose rebate plan gets you $13 a week.

Revisionism Politics begins early in this new administration.

I realize that some of you, particularly you Democrats, do not want to hear a detailed analysis of all of the provisions in the stimulus package that passed Congress; you have that in common with the politicians who voted for it.

So I’m going to meet your expectations and cut to the chase. I’m going to give you to bottom line and answer the one burning question you have:

“What’s in this stimulus bill for me?”

Well, if you work, you’re going to get a tax credit from Obama — if you make less than $75,000. Not the $500 he promised you during the campaign, but a $400 credit. You couples will get 800 bucks, not the thousand you were promised. After the government does the paperwork — and adjusts your withholding taxes — you’re going to get about $13 a week. Next January, it goes down to $8 a week.

Now, don’t sneer. That’s a lot of money. You can buy a Happy Meal every day. If you’re frugal and save it all up, you might be able to go to the gas pump and splurge once a month. Fill up the tank to the brim!

So you see, folks, in America, hard work pays off after all. The hope and change we prayed for has arrived. Hope can be delivered to everybody — everybody! — for a mere 13 dollars a week (until January)… and you even get to keep the change after you buy that Happy Meal.

Nice…

Can’t wait to see what’s next.

So we find ourselves in a new “era of responsibility” as articulated by President Obama.

President Obama says his administration is going to be the most transparent in our nation’s history. According to the Cybercast News Service and a lot of other people now, not one senator will have read the final stimulus spending bill before they vote on it.

I want to share with you a couple quotes from President Obama before this bill was voted on in the House and the Senate.

“All of you are committed to building a more responsible, more accountable government, and part of what that means is making sure that we’re spending precious tax dollars wisely and cutting costs wherever possible. During this period of economic emergency, families are tightening their belts. So should Washington.”

My friends, it doesn’t matter what he says. It’s how he says it. Because this is the direct opposite of what has happened. Now, if I sit here and say, “President Obama is lying,” nobody wants to hear that. They’re going to hate me. They’re going to think I’m nitpicking. They’re going to think I’m a sore loser — which goes to illustrate the state in which we find ourselves, because this is an out-and-out lie.

What has happened is the opposite of responsible. There is no accountability. There is no precious, wise spending of tax dollars here. It’s irresponsible as hell. There are no costs being cut whatsoever — and Washington is doing the opposite of tightening its belt. This is the largest spending increase in one piece of legislation in the history of this country, and there’s no evidence in this country for 80 years that anything like this has ever worked before.

And then Obama said this:

“Those of us who manage the public’s knowledge…”

Remember that?

“Those of us who manage the public’s knowledge will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can they restore the vital trust between the people and their government.”

None of this except “manage the public’s knowledge,” is true. That’s exactly what they do. I really never thought of government doing that until Obama came, and that’s exactly what they’re doing, government as an entity that manages the public’s knowledge, and he’s got his willing accomplices in the Media doing just that. They are managing the public’s knowledge, and they are targeting anybody who wants to get the truth out about what this administration’s doing.

Make no mistake: they are targeting and they’re going to make every effort at coming after voices of dissent — and leading the charge to silence voices of dissent will be the Media. They’re excited about it, too.

It’s the First Amendment. The First Amendment is under assault, and the very people who have constitutional mention for whom the First Amendment was largely written — members of the press — are going to eagerly sign up to silence the voices of dissent, to “manage the public’s knowledge.“

This is frightening, frightening stuff. In addition to all the lies about accountable government, responsible government, spending precious tax dollars wisely, cutting costs wherever possible. None of this, none of this that Obama said, is happening. None of it.

House of Representatives; Representative David Scott (D-GA) and David Dreier (R-CA) arguing about the written version of the stimulus bill.

SCOTT:

Our economy has leaks and holes in it all throughout. That’s why you’ve got a thousand pages there, because it’s big. Our economy is big. This last November the people of the United States made a decision, and that decision was to put Barack Obama as president, because they wanted a new direction. He has pleaded, he has cajoled, he’s gone all across this country asking for help. I say, Mrs. Speaker, let us give him the help.

DREIER:

We do have a thousand pages here. This was put online after midnight. We all voted in favor of 48 hours. You voted in favor of 48 hours to allow the American people and our colleagues to see this. We all understand the urgency of this matter. Has my colleague read this? Many of us have been trying to go through it since after midnight in the Rules Committee.

TAUSCHER: (bangs gavel)

SCOTT:

I was up until three o’clock this morning reading it —

TAUSCHER:

The gentleman will suspend!

DREIER:

Would the gentleman as an expert address — (crosstalk)

SCOTT:

— just as you have done, Mr. Dreier —

TAUSCHER:

The gentleman will suspend!

SCOTT:

— and we were here debating it yest — just last week.

DREIER:

In two-and-a-half hours you went through a thousand pages?

TAUSCHER: (bangs gavel)

The gentleman will suspend!

That was Ellen Tauscher running the place at the time shutting down the argument there between David Dreier, the Republican; and David Scott, the Democrat from Maryland.

On Fox News Channel’s Happening Now, Jane Skinner was talking to Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland. She says,

“Can you guarantee there’s nothing been added back into this bill that will be taken out that will be upsetting or a surprise to anybody?”

VAN HOLLEN:

I, uh — eh — uh — Oh, boy. I — I — I — Around here I — I cannot guarantee that. What I can say is that most of these provisions have been very publicly (pause) vetted. But, y-y-y-you know, I — I — I — I — I’d be hard-pressed to say that there’s nothing in here that would be a surprise.

The suspension of reality continues.

Publicly vetted? None of this has been publicly vetted. What people in this country know about the contents of this bill has come from that media that the Obama Democrats want to shut down.

The more that comes out about this bill, the less it makes sense, even The Politico, which is one of these places totally in the tank for Obama, reports the projected local job creation numbers that the White House is using to lobby for the bill simply don’t add up. The Wall Street Journal, reports federal agencies simply don’t have the contracting manpower to manage what is a truly unprecedented explosion of government spending.

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

Peter Schiff said:

As the markets drop we are not seeing the problem, we’re seeing the solution. When the markets drop we know we got a problem. The markets dropping are the beginning of the solution.

And of course President Obama and Congress are trying to prevent the solution and make the problem even worse.

Susan Collins is already committed. Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe held in their hands the future of the United States economy.

435 representatives, 100 senators voted on the biggest spending spree in history without reading it. — It’s over a thousand pages— That’s about a Billion dollars a page!!

Do you know that lobbyists got a copy of the bill before anybody on Capitol Hill got a copy of it, including congressional staff? Lobbyists got the bill prior to any congressional staff or members of the House and Senate.

In order for a member of Congress to read the whole bill, before the vote Friday, they would have had to start at 11 o’clock Thursday night and read over two-and-a-half pages a minute until the vote was taken. Nobody has read it.

There was a promise from the Obama administration, the new era of responsibility and transparency, that all such legislation would be posted on the Internet for five days so that the public could read what is being voted on. Ain’t going to happen, didn’t happen.

In addition, they have reformatted the bill. They’ve made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don’t use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page, and so you can read every page but you cannot keyword search it. It’s not a text file as legislation normally is, as posted on these public websites.

Intentional? Damn Right!!

They don’t want anybody knowing what’s in this. They want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what’s in it.

The Media; I don’t know if these people know just how much they are embarrassing themselves. They not only have abandoned their professional responsibility here, it’s almost to the point they have abandoned their citizenship. They have no idea what’s in this, and yet they are promoting it. Now, in the old days, you know, there are things happening in this country today, things being accepted in this country today that ten years ago would not have been. We have the Media now having become activists.

They’re not journalists, they’re not curious, they are simple activists.

They are promoting, they are pushing this piece of legislation without any idea what’s in it. There’s not a one of them who can raise his hand and say,

“Yes, I’ve read it. I know what’s in it and here’s why I think it’s good.”

There’s not one of them. The only way they can stand up and say they support this,

“Hey, it’s Obama, change. He won the election; he gets what he wants; he’s our guy.”

Isn’t it interesting that one of the reasons mainstream journalism exists, ostensibly, is to probe people in positions of power in government. If there were a handbook — and there is — that would be one of the primary things.

Didn’t we hear that for the last eight years from the, “Distroy Bush Fanatics” ?

In the old days, if you worked in a tiny little worthless newspaper in some little town, and you wanted to work at a bigger paper, what you had to do was find some powerful person in the town where you worked and do a profile destroying them, finding out how they got their power, who they cheated, who they screwed in the process, even if you had to make it up, as long as you took out somebody in power, you got noticed by the bigger papers, and then they brought you in. Today, mainstream journalists are out trying to destroy average Americans who are not in power politically, who are trying to get the truth out about this legislation and this president.

And so the mainstream media is now just part of the Obama army, and it is embarrassing to watch, because, as these people engage in this behavior, it is quite obvious that they are among the most uninformed of citizens in the country. They are among the most uneducated, and yet they claim to be members of the elite, better and smarter than everyone else. Only they are capable of probing people in power. But don’t you dare probe them, don’t you dare try to find out what kind of life failings they’ve had either in their youth or in their college days or as adults, don’t try to find out about their divorces, don’t try to find out about their DUIs, they aren’t the story, they have always said.

Well, they have become the story. They have inserted themselves right smack-dab in the story. Their motives are just as subject to investigation as are any elected officials. They have joined forces, they have become activists.

It is embarrassing to watch this play out. It is as though they are unconcerned about the effect on their own lives, of this legislation. They are unconcerned about the effect on their own families, of this legislation. They are unconcerned about the effect on the country, of this legislation. None of that matters. They don’t even care to know what’s in it. They’re not the slightest bit curious.

It is breathtaking to behold the dissent to which people who claim and think that they’re the smartest people in the room have joined the dunce class. It’s also quite dangerous when they join forces with powerful people to try to destroy harmless, innocent individual citizens such as Joe the Plumber, so forth. Oh, they still will poke at people in power if they are Republicans, i.e., Sarah Palin, but they will not deign to investigate one suspicious thing.

“House Passes $800 Billion Stimulus Plan with No Republican Support.”

The headline ought to be:

“House Democrats Vote to Spend $800 Billion in Pork They Don’t Have, Republicans Fail to Stop It,”

or

“Republicans Don’t Support It.“

There’s nothing wrong with needed stimulus, by the way, if it’s stimulus. But this is not stimulus. This is fairness.

Do you remember…?

Remember that interview — and it might have been with Maria Bartiromo at CNBC. It was somebody in the financial community.

He was told that capital gains tax cuts generated more tax revenue and not less, and he said,

“That’s not the issue. The issue is fairness.”

So, at one point, he wanted high income capital gains people to pay a higher rate than lower income capital gains tax. That was just exhibiting a total lack of understanding about capital gains rate, what it is and who pays it.

I have to tell you, the Republicans in the House of Representatives, they are starting to come together. This is just fun. It’s now getting to be fun.

I want to tell you about a man name John Carter. He is a Texas Republican, member of the Congress. He introduced a bill yesterday to eliminate all IRS penalties and interest for paying taxes past due. He’s calling the legislation “The Rangel Rule,” named after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charlie Rangel.
This would enable

“citizens who fail to pay taxes on time to do so later” with no penalty, just like Rangel has done and just like Timothy Geithner has done. “

As of September 2008 the Harlem Democrat reportedly paid back more than $10,000 in taxes but that did not include any IRS penalties.

‘Your citizens back home should have the same rights and benefits that come to you as a member of congress. You shouldn’t be treated any differently under the law than your citizens back home…’

He added that citizens should receive the ‘same courtesy’ that the IRS is allegedly granting Rangel and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who also recently acknowledged a failure to pay taxes.”

That’s a great line. I love the way these guys are starting to think.

Now, let’s talk about the Republicans in the House and the vote on the stimulus bill last night. This was a great victory for conservatives. It was a great victory for Republicans.

If you listen to the media reports, you would think that the only members of the House to vote against the stimulus bill were Republicans. But there were 11 Democrats who voted against it, too.

Not a single Republican voted for it. That means there was a bipartisan vote against the bill. The vote against the bill was bipartisan. The vote for the bill is what was partisan.

Now, neither the media nor Obama want you to know this, because they still want you to believe that Obama is the great unifier, the great uniter, when he couldn’t even persuade a single Republican.

He could not persuade even a single Republican, not even a Republican in Name Only, to go along with this.

This is a huge failure for Obama and the media. They were counting on at least one Republican vote for this so they could spin the story as bipartisan support for the bill and cheer the incredible leadership qualities of Barack Obama.

Well, the opposite occurred, which calls into question his leadership qualities. They’re now saying,

“Well, you know, you can’t change Washington in a week. We knew this going in. It’s going to be a long, long time,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…

As more things in this bill are learned, the more the American people are not going to want any part of this, and they’re being told once again this has to happen now or we’re going to have a terrible result in the economy. It’s going to get even worse — and they tell us, by the way, it’s going to get even worse if this “stimulus” bill goes to the Senate and the president signs it and so forth.

But this is not stimulating. If we’re going to stimulate the economy, there’s gotta be something in here that stimulates, and there just isn’t. It is just traditional typical Democrat spending.

Nancy Pelosi wrote this bill. She excluded the Republican Party. Obama went along with it, saying he wanted Republican input, but when he got Republican input, he rejected it. Remember, he said he won the election, meaning he’s going to do whatever he wants to do.

This entire sham of a bill and the sham of this great uniter and unifier has now been exposed. And, the House Republicans deserve our praise in this. They stood firm.

They understood that they had to stand up against what is the most irresponsible confiscation of wealth and power from the American people in modern history, and that’s exactly what this bill is.

It is a confiscation, the most irresponsible confiscation of wealth and power, from you, the American people, in our nation’s history. They had to say no. The House Republicans had to say no to a bill that has nothing to do with creating jobs, a bill that kills jobs. It has nothing to do with jump-starting the economy. All it does is jump-start the size of government. And they did. And they did so unanimously. And for this they deserve a standing ovation.

See, it’s really not that hard to do what’s right. It is not only good government and good politics. What they did is good for the country.