Saturday, September 10, 2011

Weekly Polls

The Rasmussen Reports is an independent electronic publishing firm that specializes in public opinion polling. Here are some current results on some main issues:

Presidential Tracking Poll
This tracks how the President is doing by those surveyed.
  • Strongly Approve... 20%
  • Strongly Disapprove... 43%
  • Approval Index... -23

Presidential Approval Index
This chart is from RasmussenReports.com:


Job Approval Rating

  • 41% of voters say that they do NOT like House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH).
  • 59% say that they do NOT like Nancy Pelosi (D, CA).
  • 51% say that they have an unfavorable opinion of Senat Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV).

Friday, September 9, 2011

Why Didn't This Hit The Mainstream News?

Media Ignores Senate Procedure
Last Thursday the United States Senate passed a hike of $500 BILLION to the debt ceiling in an unusual procedure. This officially lifts our debt ceiling to $15.9 TRILLION dollars. Perhaps the Left-Wing media didn't deem this to be newsworthy.

Recall that this "deal" was worked-out by John Boehner (R, OH and GOB [Good-Old-Boy]) and Harry Reid (D, NV Progressive union supporter) last August. It allows Obama to keep borrowing and spending to the new limit. The vote for this "deal" was 52-45. Do you know how your US Senators voted on it? You should!

DEMs Change the Rules
Senate Democrats however just changed the rules agreed to in the August agreement. Under the August agreement, the lawmakers in both houses had to vote on a resolution of disapproval against the increase of borrowing limits. This in effect, would allow the GOP to veto the measure. Obama would then still have his veto to override the GOP's no vote. But the Senate DEMs didn't like this arrangement, so THEY CUT it out of the deal. This eliminated the "negotiated" (built-in) fail safe for the GOP.

Moral of This Action
You cannot TRUST Progressives! Actually, you cannot trust ANY politician! This is just more proof that we need to make a clean sweep in the upcoming 2012 elections. Dump the DEM incumbents for sure and consider doing the same for the GOPs as well. Corruption is corruption. Both parties will screw you the first chance they get. Congress should have term limits, but since they won't do it, we will!

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Stimulus Collapse Plan Example

Buddy Obama
Before getting a $535 Million dollar loan to Solyndra (a now bankrupt solar energy company), Obama was good friends with the Solyndra's most prolific financial backer, George Kaiser. Kaiser is an Oklahoma oil billionaire who helped bundle millions in campaign donations to Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign. Kaiser is the single largest shareholder of Solyndra as reported by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. Kaiser and his affiliates held 39% of the solar company.

So it should come as no surprise that when it came time for the Stimulus (Obama's Collapse Plan), Obama would make sure that his friends at Solyndra got a piece of the action. It came in the form of a low interest loan (that the Federal government had to borrow - in order to loan) to the energy firm Solyndra. The $535 Million went to Solyndra, Inc was issued by the Department of the Treasury (Tax Cheat Tim Geithner). This is rather odd because Solyndra was a high risk firm and should probably not received such a low interest loan in the first place. Incidentally, of the 18 Energy Department loans given, Solyndra's rate was the lowest interest rate! Nice!!

Shortly after the loan was issued, Obama made a factory visit to the "wonder" green energy company.

Circumstantial
So was this a coincidence that that company got such a GREAT deal from the Federal government? Take a closer look at the facts. Before Obama was elected, Solyndra had applied for a green-energy loan. It only rated a B+ from government appraisers indicating a "red flag" on giving them ANY loan. After Obama took office, strangely, Solyndra's loan application process was fast-tracked and the company was made an example of the new green-jobs technology that Obama loves so much.

Questions to Ask Obama
Congress should ask the White House these questions:
  • Why were the appraiser's warnings ignored?

  • Why did the White House overrule the appraisers when the company was in serious financial trouble?

  • Who decided that Solyndra should get such a "sweetheart" deal on the loan?

  • Why did Kaiser get all HIS money back in this failed company?

  • When did Obama know about this situation?

More Political Corruption!
Once again, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a DUCK! This is just another example of how Obama's Collapse Plan is in action and working against the USA! Overload the system and collapse the economy. What better way then to give a "risky" loan to a failing company?

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Guest Article - Industrial Decline

How Capital Crushed Labor
by Patrick J. Buchanan

"Once, it was a Labor Day tradition for Democrats to go to Cadillac Square in Detroit to launch their campaigns in that forge and furnace of American democracy, the greatest industrial center on earth.

Democrats may still honor the tradition. But Detroit is not what she was, not remotely. And neither is America.

Not so long ago, we made all the shoes and clothes we wore, the motorcycles and cars we drove, the radios we listened to, the TV sets we watched, the home and office calculators and computers we used.

No more. Much of what we buy is no longer made by American workers, but by Japanese, Chinese, other Asians, Canadians and Europeans.

"Why don't we make things here anymore?" is the wail.

Answer: We don't make things here anymore because it is cheaper to make them abroad and ship them back.

With an economy of $14 trillion, we may still be the best market in the world to sell into. But we are also among the most expensive markets in the world in which to produce.

Why is that? Again, the answer is simple.

U.S. wages are higher than they are almost anywhere else. Our health, safety and environmental laws are among the most stringent. Our affirmative action demands are the most exacting, except possibly for those of Malaysia and South Africa.

Does the cost of production here in America alone explain the decline in manufacturing and stagnation of workers' wages?

No. For since the Revolution, America has had a standard of living that has been the envy of the world. From the Civil War through the 1920s, as we became the greatest manufacturing power the world had ever seen, our workers enjoyed pay and benefits that were unmatched anywhere.

Yet our exports in those decades were double our imports, and our trade surpluses annually added 4 percent to the gross national product. How did we do it?

We taxed the products of foreign factories and workers and used the revenue to finance the government. We imposed tariffs of up to 40 percent on foreign goods entering our market and used the tariff money to keep taxes low in the United States.

We made foreigners pay a price to get their products into our market and made them pay to help finance our government. We put our own country and people first.

For corporate America, especially industrial America, this was nirvana. They had exclusive free access to our market, and foreign rivals had to pay a stiff fee, a tariff, to get their products in and try to compete with U.S. products in the U.S. market.

What happened to this idea that made America a self-sufficient republic, producing almost all it consumed, a nation that could stay out of the world wars as long as she wished and crush the greatest powers in Europe and Asia in less than four years after she went in?

A new class came to power that looked on tariffs as xenophobic, on economic patriotism as atavistic and on national sovereignty as an antique idea in the new world order it envisioned.

By 1976, editorial writers were talking about a new declaration of interdependence to replace Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, which was now outdated.

The new idea was to replicate America on a global scale, to throw open the borders of all nations as the borders of the 50 states were open, to abolish all tariffs and trade barriers, and to welcome the free flow of goods and people across all frontiers, thereby creating the One World that statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson and Wendell Willkie​ had envisioned.

By three decades ago, this globalist ideology had captured both national parties, a product of universities dominated by New Dealers.

But why did corporate America, with its privileged access to the greatest market on earth, go along with sharing that market with its manufacturing rivals from all over the world?

The answer lies in the trade-off corporate America got.

Already established in the U.S. market, corporate America could risk sharing that market if, in return, it could shift its own production out of the United States to countries where the wages were low and regulations were light.

Corporate America could there produce for a fraction of what it cost to produce here. Then these same corporations could ship their foreign-made products back to the USA and pocket the difference in the cost of production. Corporate stock prices would soar, as would corporate salaries -- and dividends, to make shareholders happy and supportive of a corporate policy of moving out of the USA.

Under globalization, America's investor class could and did get rich by the abandonment of America's working class.

America is in a terminal industrial decline because the interests of corporate America now clash directly with the interests of working America -- and, indeed, with the national interest of the United States.

And both parties are either oblivious to or indifferent of what is happening to their country."

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Guest Article - Obama's Watergate!

New Fast and Furious details indicate gov’t cover-up, White House involvement
By Matthew Boyle - The Daily Caller

"New emails obtained by the Los Angeles Times appear to show senior Obama administration and White House officials were briefed on the gun-walking operation. The three White House officials implicated by the LA Times’ reporting are Kevin M. O’Reilly, the director of North American Affairs for the White House national security staff; Dan Restrepo, the president’s senior Latin American advisor; and Greg Gatjanis, a White House national security official.

The emails were sent between July 2010 and February 2011, before the scandalous ATF program was exposed, according the LA Times.

The LA Times says a senior administration official denies that the emails which lead Fast and Furious ATF agent William Newell sent to O’Reilly — who later briefed Restrepo and Gatjanis –included details on “investigative tactics” used in the program. By “investigative tactics,” the White House means how ATF agents facilitated the sale of firearms to drug cartels via “straw purchasers,” or people who could legally buy guns in the U.S. but did so with the intention of selling them to individuals who would traffic them to Mexico.

Those emails apparently show Newell and O’Reilly discussing how the program was affecting Mexico.

Another explosive new detail that emerged on Thursday was a set of documents showing senior officials in Phoenix attempting to cover up a connection between Fast and Furious weapons and U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s death.

In a letter sent to Ann Scheel, the new acting U.S. Attorney for Arizona, House Oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley wrote that high-ranking Phoenix officials tried to “prevent the connection [between Terry’s death and Fast and Furious weapons] from being disclosed.”

Internal emails also show that recently resigned Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke and his deputy Emory Hurley made the decision because “this way we do not divulge our current case (Fast and Furious) or the Border Patrol shooting case.”

Though the White House has claimed these newly discovered emails didn’t contain any details on the “investigative tactics” officials used in Operation Fast and Furious, one comment has surfaced suggesting otherwise. Politico reports that, in an August 18, 2010, email to O’Reilly, Newell described the details of what was going on.

I appreciate and respect the struggles the [U.S. Attorney’s Office] has to go through with juries in this State to convince them of the illegality of this. We routinely have ‘straw’ purchasers tell us that ‘yeah, I knew what I was doing was wrong but the money was good and who cares — the guns are going to Mexico right?’” Politico reports Newell wrote to O’Reilly last year."

Monday, September 5, 2011

More Allogations - No Proof!

Saul Alinski At His Best
In addition to the Congressional Black Caucus, it seems that the Academic world has also joined forces in employing Saul Alinski's tactics. In Alinski's "Rules for Radicals" he outline the strategy on how to deal with those who oppose your views. Simply follow these directions:
  • Isolate your enemy.

  • Attack your enemy using ANY tactic to get the job done. The ends justify the means. Lie, cheat, steal - whatever it takes to do the job.

  • Make ANY allegation regardless of whether you have proof. Example: Call them a RACIST! This is really inflammatory, and causes emotions to flare. Use this name calling to discredit ANY valid opinion. Don't show or offer ANY proof.

  • Keep repeating the untruthful allegations over and over. This will make the "good guys" begin to look like the "bad guys."

  • Repeat the LIE until it sticks. Keep repeating the lie until people begin to believe the allegations. Never argue the facts. If you repeat it long enough, people will believe the lies.

Annual Political Science Convention
Over this weekend, it seems that academia are joining forces with the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to try and dirty the Tea Party with unproven allegations of racism. A page right our of Alinski's book. They are throwing mud and vitriol at the Tea Party. For example, here is a statement from professor Gary C. Jacobson: "Tea Party activists have denied accusations that their movement is racist, and there is nothing intrinsically racist about opposing ‘big government’ or clean-energy legislation or health care reform. But it is clear that the movement is more appealing to people who are unsympathetic to blacks and who prefer a harder line on illegal immigration than it is to other Americans."

Professor Alan L Abramowitz stated that the Tea Party members were more likely to harbor racial resentment, which he judged based on their answers to questions such as whether blacks could succeed as well as whites if they “would only try harder,” and whether they agreed with the statement that Irish, Italians and Jews overcame prejudice and “blacks should do the same without any special favors.” He stated further "Tea Party supporters displayed high levels of racial resentment and held very negative opinions about President Obama, compared with the rest of the public and even other Republicans... In a multivariate analysis, racial resentment and dislike of Barack Obama, along with conservatism, emerged as the most important factors contributing to support for the Tea Party movement."

Summary
All in all over a dozen papers presented at this conference bashed the Tea Party without any significant proof of their allegations. Most were purely subjective based on the opinions of their authors. In other words, these academics claimed that the Tea Party members were devout racists. We know that statistics show that the vast number of college professors are Liberals (Progressives). We also know that Progressive do NOT like the Tea Party. And, we know that they are following "Rules for Radicals."

The Good News
Americans are NOT stupid. We are becoming aware of these tactics and recognize who is using them against us. It's time to turn the tables on these groups and give them a taste of their own medicine! We can recognize OUR enemies by their behavior, their words, and their tactics.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Guest Article - Unions Out-of-Touch

Labor Daze

By Daniel Flynn FrontPage.com

"Three Labor Days into his presidential term, Barack Obama has finally devised a jobs plan. With unemployment eclipsing nine percent for 26 of his first 30 full months in office, the focus on putting America to work, to be unveiled in a speech initially crassly scheduled to conflict with Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate, seems quite late. But to satiate the grumblings of Big Labor, it comes not a second too soon.

This is going to be a moment where history and our members are going to judge him,” Richard Trumka says of Obama’s jobs plan. The AFL-CIO president threatens that some of his affiliates may sit out of national politics next year, focusing instead on local races (as they disastrously did in Wisconsin this year).

The about-face would appear both tone deaf and an act of massive ingratitude. President Obama turned over General Motors to the United Auto Workers. Democrats in Congress and the White House infamously exempted unionized workers from the 40 percent excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” health-care plans through 2018. His recent selection of Princeton labor economist Alan Krueger to replace Austan Goolsbee as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers has been widely interpreted as a sop to unions. And his National Labor Relations Board has become a rubber stamp for union whim, with its job-killing edict blocking a new Boeing aircraft factory in right-to-work South Carolina the most glaring demonstration of this.

America wants to work,” Trumka commented this August. “To make that happen, it will take smart, large-scale public investment to restore America’s place in the world—and the opportunities are there. Our crumbling roads, highways and bridges cry out for investment. We have a tax system that begs for an adult conversation about how to make it fairer and raise the revenues we need.”

It’s not just that Trumka’s comment overlooks the last three years—isn’t he describing what the stimulus package was supposed to be?—it overlooks the last six decades. Trumka’s demands for more spending and higher taxes seem something out of Great Depression America. They don’t reflect the political realities of a 21st-century nation facing a $15 trillion debt and an economy stuck in neutral.

If Trumka is out of touch with America, he is in tune with Unionized America. Trumka’s call for jobs is as much about means as ends. He wants more jobs, but only if pursued in a manner (massive government spending) that benefits the job holders who pay his organization a portion of their earnings. Alas, his process necessarily defeats his stated goal. The Big Government that serves as a boon for Big Labor has been a bust for the United States. Massive government projects, in the immediate wake of several years of massive government projects no less, are nonstarters for a broke nation. But such boondoggles are the lifeblood of unions that increasingly depend upon government spending. In effect, they want taxpayers to pay union dues, too.

Most unionized workers in America are now government employees. Just 14.7 million—less than twelve percent of the workforce—out of 310 million Americans pay dues to organized labor. Of these unionized workers, 7.6 million hold public sector jobs. Whereas organized labor claims less than eight percent of private sector workers (down from 30 percent in 1958), they boast more than 36 percent of public sector employees, with public librarians and teachers among the most represented professions. Librarians of the world unite!

When the adversarial relationship was primarily one between blue-collar workers and fat-cat plutocrats, unions understandably won the admiration of much of the public. But now that summers-off guidance councilors and six-figure Social Security Administration employees demand raises from taxpayers, the public’s sympathy necessarily wanes.

Big Labor has a bigger friend in Big Government. The president in Trumka’s doghouse has expanded organized labor’s greatest single source of funding. The federal government’s share of gross domestic product rising from 18 to 25 percent in just a few years has coincided with an economic slump not experienced in generations. The policies that Americans voted to curb in 2010, labor unions pressure politicians to expand. If jobs were the concern of labor unions, they would not push to hike the spending, regulations, and taxes that have largely calcified hiring. But since union members (particularly dues-paying public sector employees) often benefit from what harms the rest of us, their leaders frequently advance policies that not only damage America—but the politicians they ostensibly support.

A president, of the USA or of the AFL-CIO, can’t serve two masters. Richard Trumka’s constituency is the AFL-CIO. Barack Obama is the president of the United States. Should the latter confuse the people he serves with the people the former serves, he will be soon looking for work with so many of his countrymen.

Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, popularized the political strategy of the union movement to “reward its friends” and “punish its enemies.” As long as Gompers’s progeny can’t tell their allies from their adversaries, they will continue to act as their own worst enemy."