Columnist.
Republicans acted on the message voters sent in the 2010 congressional elections when they elected more than enough members of the House to control that body; they tackled the scandal of out-of-control spending and the voters responded. So far they have shoved a poison pill down the throats of spending-happy House Democrats, chopping a cool $38 billion from the 2011 federal budget. They now face a new challenge in enacting a budget for 2012 by passing the one introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., which begins to put the nation's fiscal house in order.
If President Obama's address to the nation the other night was meant to keep the American people up-to-date on the situation in the Middle East, it missed its mark, leaving us in a state of confusion. For starters, the president implicitly limited America's proven exceptionalism. We may be exceptional, he admits, but not in his opinion nearly enough to maintain our lead position as protectors of the rights of all people everywhere.
Ronald Reagan called him the "Mad Dog of the Middle East" and treated him as such, launching a bombing raid against his compound that purportedly killed a member of his family and scared Moammar Gadhafi silly, reining him in for 20 long years. As my father said then, Gadhafi has a goal of a Muslim fundamentalist revolution which is targeted on many of his own Arab compatriots. Dad said that it could be that the only reason Gadhafi sees the United States as an enemy is simply because we exist and stand in his way. Now he's at it again, even killing his own people in a brutal effort to save his brutal dictatorship, yet our president seems unable to cope with the international crisis Gadhafi has created.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is getting away with murder because the president of the United States refuses to take action when that's exactly what is called for. Gadhafi is thumbing his nose at the alleged leader of the Free World, leaving the crazed dictator free to slaughter his own people in a frantic effort to save his dictatorship. It is hard for me to examine President Obama's current behavior without comparing it to a similar crisis during my father President Reagan's administration, and the way my Dad handled it.
Uncle Sam is spending a lot of your tax dollars on programs that do the exact same thing as other federal programs, and you are paying the tab, a shocking new report shows. According to a report by the watchdog Government Accounting Office (GAO), Uncle Sam hosts 47 job-training programs, 44 of which do the same things. The federal government also runs 80 programs for what it calls the "transportation disadvantaged." Count 'em: 80 -- paid for by your tax dollars.
The turmoil and shocking thuggery we are now witnessing in Madison, Wis. is at a level seldom seen in America in this era. School teachers, of all people, are setting bad examples for their students. Some engage in outright fraud, aided by medical doctors giving them phony diagnoses of nonexistent illnesses to give them an excuse for near rioting instead of doing their job of teaching. There is a name for that kind of thing -- it's called a crime. You know, the kind of offense that can get you tossed in the slammer. In the process they show students how to commit fraud -- on their taxpaying parents.
Welcome to three-card monte. That’s all that the Obama administration's economic program amounts to -- a sleazy con man’s card trick. The president didn't even bother to pay any attention to the recommendations of his deficit reduction group, headed by former Sen. Alan Simpson. That would have required adhering to a modicum of fiscal discipline.
We keep hearing claims that a lot of money goes into the pockets of so-called right-wing groups, but we hear nary a word from the media of where the really big bucks originate and where they end up. That’s too bad, because if the truth were known Americans would discover that those huge political contributions we keep hearing about really help finance far-left candidates and their generally wacko political causes.
President Obama's State of the Union address said more about the state of his approach to governing than it did with the present condition of this nation under his governance. It was an uninterrupted march of platitude upon platitude, with nary a solution offered to any of the problems facing the United States. As anyone with one cent's worth of intellect understands, the United States is not only broke, but up to its thinning hairline in debt to -- of all places -- China, which despite its communist government is acting more like a capitalist regime than an old Moscow-style dictatorship.
Who was the first black president? Two decades before the election of Barack Obama, novelist Toni Morrison dubbed Bill Clinton "our first black President." She even said that Clinton was "blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime." Well, I could make an even stronger case for my father, Ronald Reagan, as "our first black president" -- but I won't make that claim. I don't want to diminish the justifiable pride African-Americans take in having a president who is genetically and culturally black. Our first black president is Barack Obama.
When a would-be assassin shot my Dad, President Ronald Reagan, nobody questioned the fact that the shooter was certifiably nuts. Authorities recognized that fact and put him in a mental institution as his obvious disturbed mental state demanded. Now we have another attempted killing of a public official, Arizona's widely admired Rep. Gabby Giffords, and just about everybody recognizes the fact that the shooter, one Jared Loughner, is crazy as a loon.
It takes what a lot of my Jewish friends call chutzpah for House Democrats who ran the House of Representatives since 2003 as if it was their solely owned domain for so long, now to demand a policy of the very bipartisanship they scorned. With Republicans now at last in control of the House, Democrats who ruled the lower body with an iron hand, and stone deaf to the voice of the GOP minority, now cry out for a policy that will give them the important role in the business of the so-called lower body on Capitol Hill -- the rights they denied to the GOP.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to get its grasping hands around the throat of the Internet, the international town hall where Americans have been free to express their opinions without Big Brother's permission or interference. That makes the FCC unhappy. It seems that this taxpayer-supported, intrusive federal agency simply can't bring itself to allow anything having to do with Americans communicating with each other in public without their lordly oversight or permission.
A newly formed organization of black clergy has lashed out at supporters of the so-called 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, providing a graphic illustration of liberal America's favorite target -- the mixing of church and state. According to The Conference of National Black Churches, (said to represent nine of the largest historically black denominations with 30 million people and more than 50,000 churches in America and worldwide), the tax cuts are to be extended without any evidence that they helped the economy.
We are rapidly becoming a nation whose distaff leadership is allowing radical feminists to redefine the role of motherhood. Our moms are being all but ostracized by a raging cadre of radical feminists should they dare to consider cooking for their families to be a major part of their traditional role as wives and mothers. In modern America, the feminists would take Mom out of the kitchen and put her in the drive-thru lane at the local fast-food chain (ironically, that's verboten also). They have eulogized the nation's First Lady for assuming the role of a food czar who instructs us on what chow is good for us and our children, who should cook it, and what foods should be kept off the national menu.
In 1976, I stood beside my father in Kansas City after he lost the Republican presidential nomination to Gerald Ford. I asked him why he wanted to be president of the United States. His answer was a preview of the policies he would pursue when he finally won the presidency, recalling that for far too long he had watched American presidents inevitably cave in to the Soviets in every agreement reached with them. He said that he wanted to be the first president to say "NYET!" to their demands, loudly and clearly.
If we had a president in the White House who understood that we are at war with a crazed faction of Islam, and was willing to act on that belief, there would be no question about how we should deal with people who give aid and comfort to the enemy -- they'd be tried for treason and when found guilty stood up before a firing squad.
Four years ago I had hip replacement surgery -- which involves having an implant containing metal -- and that means that every time I fly, which is often, a Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) employee passes a wand over my body to be sure I'm not concealing some explosive device on my person. I'm used to it and I don't complain. It's the price we pay for airline safety.
If Sen. Mitch McConnell’s pledge to get behind the movement to ban the cynical practice of earmark spending is any indication that Republicans heard the message voters sent them in the recent Congressional elections, the GOP is off to a good start. It’s about time. Over the years members of Congress have acquired a lot of bad habits and the use of so-called earmarks -- the Senate tacking on spending measures to bills that have already passed the House -- are among the worst.
The late psychic Edgar Cayce was famed for predicting that in the not-too-distant future the entire state of California would collapse into the Pacific Ocean and disappear beneath the sea. That may be a questionable forecast, but the collapse of the Golden State into a sea of debt is already upon us, and if we don't act now to begin to reclaim California it will soon be too late to save it from disappearing under a mountain of IOUs that cannot be repaid.
