Spineless Republicans reject an additional $22 billion in budget cuts

Levin furious at weak Republican leadership

Feb 18, 2011
Posted by The Right Scoop

Today an amendment to cut an additional 22 billion across-the-board failed with Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy siding with Democrats, along with 97 other Republicans. Levin says that this was a huge vote and can’t figure out why Republicans who say they are all about cutting can’t follow through. The excuses ranged from “across-the-board cuts are lazy members way to achieve something” to “this goes too far!”

Levin is furious:  To Listen

Debt, Debt, Debt – 15 Facts About U.S. Government Finances That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

If your family started spending nearly twice as much as it brought in every single year, how long do you think it would be before your family was completely and totally broke? Well, that is essentially what the federal government is doing. The U.S. government is so deep in debt at this point that it is hard to even try to describe it. Where do you even begin? Trying to put the vastness of U.S. government debt into words is kind of like trying to describe a great work of art by Michelangelo to a blind person. This year the U.S. government is going to go 1.645 trillion more dollars into debt. How can one possibly accurately convey just how large that amount of money really is? If you went out today and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you over 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars. Who can even comprehend such an amount? The U.S. government has mismanaged our finances so badly that it is hard to believe. We have sold our children and our grandchildren into perpetual debt slavery and not that many people really seem very upset about it. It is as if most of the nation is in a massive state of denial.  Read More

Apocalypse Now: Wisconsin vs. Big Labor

"As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation"

Feb 18th, 2011
by Michelle Malkin

Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Let us pray it does not go the way of the decrepit welfare states of the European Union.

The lowdown: State government workers in the Badger State pay piddling amounts for generous taxpayer-subsidized health benefits. Faced with a $3.6 billion budget hole and a state constitutional ban on running a deficit, new GOP Gov. Scott Walker wants public unions to pony up a little more. He has proposed raising the public employee share of health insurance premiums from less than 5 percent to 12.4 percent. He is also pushing for state workers to cover half of their pension contributions. To spare taxpayers the soaring costs of Byzantine union-negotiated work rules, he would rein in Big Labor’s collective bargaining power to cover only wages unless approved at the ballot box.

As the free-market MacIver Institute in Wisconsin points out, the benefits concessions Walker is asking public union workers to make would still maintain their health insurance contribution rates at the second-lowest among Midwest states for family coverage. Moreover, a new analysis by benefits think tank HCTrends shows that the new rate “would also be less than the employee contributions required at 85 percent of large Milwaukee-area employers.” Read More

George Soros: ‘President Obama Has Lost Control’

The Blaze
February 18, 2011
by  Meredith Jessup

In a pre-recorded interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria set to air Sunday morning, investment billionaire George Soros accuses President Barack Obama of having “lost control” of the national economy and criticizes the Democratic president for allowing Republicans to set the national agenda.

Furthermore, Soros goes on to predict that Obama‘s policy shortcomings will have a negative impact on the nation’s economic recovery and accuses the GOP of mixing economic and ideological priorities at the expense of the American worker.

They are going to pursue a very strong effort to cut services by refusing to have any tax increases. I think this agenda will be successful. But it will be pursued, I think, to an extent where it’s more directed at cutting services and achieving the ideological purposes of the Republicans rather than to get the economy going. So I think this will have a negative effect on the economy.  Watch Video

Netanyahu: Change isn’t always a good thing

Boehner rips Obama for meddling in Wisconsin

"Lest there was any doubt that this showdown has been fully nationalized, this should finish it off."

February 18, 2011
by Allahpundit

“The President of the United States has a unique opportunity and responsibility to lead this nation. President Obama has acknowledged the challenges we face, but – thus far – he has done nothing to offer solutions. Now, worse, his political organization is colluding with special-interest allies across the country to demagogue reform-minded governors who are making the tough choices that the President is avoiding.

“This is not the way to begin an ‘adult conversation’ about solutions to the big challenges facing our country. Rather than inciting protests against those who speak honestly about the challenges we face, the President and his advisers should lead.

“When the American people watched the people of Greece take to the streets to protest cuts to unsustainable government programs, they worried it might foreshadow events in our nation’s distant future – but today, we see the same sort of protests on the streets of Madison, fueled by President Obama’s own political machine.  Read More

Wisconsin’s Democratic Senate members hiding In Chicago

Wisconsin State Troopers Sent Out to Retrieve AWOL Dems …Update: They’re Hiding In Chicago

Gateway Pundit
February 18, 2011
by Jim Hoft

State troopers were sent out this morning to retrieve the AWOL state democratic senators.
TMJ4 reported:

According to the Wisconsin senate majority leader, the Governor’s office is sending out state troopers to go after Wisconsin’s Democratic Senate members to bring in a vote on Governor Walker’s budget bill which would dramatically limit government workers union’s ability to negotiate many of their benefits.

“They are prepared to dispatch state troopers to go out to some of the residences of some of the senators,” said Republican State Senator Scott Fitzgerald on Newsradio 620 WTMJ’s “Midday with Charlie Sykes.”

“We don’t know that everybody is out of state. These troopers are going to go and try to escort these senators back to the chamber.”

The State Patrol cannot go after the Democratic senators who have left the state, and Democratic State Senator Jon Erpenbach told “Wisconsin’s Morning News” that all 14 Democratic Senate members have fled Wisconsin and have not announced a timetable for their return.

UPDATE: 64% of Americans agree with Governor Walker that government employees should not be represented by labor unions.

UPDATE: The Wisconsin democrats are hiding in Chicago!

Christie Showing the Power of the Real New Tone

"Christie is not afraid to get in the face of our economy's key enemies"

February 18, 2011
By C. Edmund Wright

Move over President Bush. Step aside Karl Rove. There's a real "new tone" in town. Frankly -- unlike your misguided attempt, this new tone is actually effective. And conservative and Constitution conscious Americans across the land are cheering and collectively saying "about damned time!!"

And Washington got a dose of the new tone of Chris Christie up close Wednesday as the governor addressed a packed house at an American Enterprise Institute event (video here).

To be blunt, it's not the fact that Chris Christie's bold in-your-face demeanor is playing well that is surprising. What surprises those of us not living in the Washington-Manhattan-San Francisco bubble is that it took so long for someone to have the courage to embrace this attitude. This is what folks have been craving for the longest time. This should not have been some kind of deep dark secret. It is common sense. Then again, in Washington, common sense usually is a deep dark secret.
Read More

Obama...The Doomed President

"The more he tries to finesse the real hunger of nations with conferences and rhetoric, the more the streets of these nations will turn against him."

February 18, 2011
By Bruce Walker

Pundits muse how Obama can save his presidency. He cannot. Obama, politically, is doomed. Republicans do not have a Reagan waiting in the wings, but that will not matter in 2012. All Republicans are attempting to don the mantle of Reagan, who has thoroughly captured in death what he could not in life, the heart of the Republican Party. This grand and overriding figure, like FDR and Lincoln, will dominate the rhetoric and policies of the Republican Party. Republicans will not commit hara-kiri in 2012.

So why is Obama certain to lose, even against very ordinary Republican nominees? Food, fuel and clothing are rising in price at dramatic rates. Food, especially, is critical. Every shopping cart in every grocery is pushed by an American who finds prices for ordinary things, like bread, milk, and cereal jumping higher and higher. At the checkout counter, the total keeps rising higher and higher. In the last six months, food prices have risen by over 27%. The size of the beef herds in America is at a fifty year low and the impact upon consumers will, inevitably, be sharp. Obama and his Kobe beef-eating friends, invariably rich, do not feel the pinch. All the rest of us do. Government could do a lot to lower food prices, from ending the Ethanol scam to overriding environmentalists who are turning some of the richest farmland on earth in California into a dust bowl.  Read More 

Radical Islamist Calls for Egyptian Army to Open Border Crossing With Gaza

"The revolution must continue"

Gateway Pundit
February 18, 2011
by Jim Hoft

Radical Islamist Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, spoke at Tahrir Square today. He called for the Epyptian army to open the border crossing with Gaza.
The Wall Street Journal reported:

Mr. al-Qaradawi’s return on Thursday night to Egypt from Qatar, where he spent years in exile, is the latest example of how Egypt’s long stagnant political scene is being enlivened by an ideologically diverse array of leaders, who had been kept in check by Mr. Mubarak. Mr. al-Qaradawi is close to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

The graying 84-year-old sheikh, speaking from a chair on stage in the square, told Egyptians that the revolution must continue and called on the army to free all political prisoners still in detention, to dissolve the cabinet of ministers appointed by Mr. Mubarak, and to transfer authority to a civilian government as soon as possible.

He also called on the military to open Egypt’s border crossing with Gaza immediately to allow free passage of goods and people into and out of the territory, home to 1.5 million Palestinians.

Mr. al-Qaradawi’s call is likely to increase popular pressure on the military government to ease the siege of Gaza, which was strictly enforced by Mr. Mubarak. But even if the military regime resists such calls in the short term, it is an indicator of the direction in which Egyptian popular sentiment may push a future democratically elected government.

FBI urges Congress to expand Internet wiretapping

"The proposed changes will not only make it easier and cheaper for the government to invade our privacy, but also make the Internet more vulnerable to penetration from other sources."

Eric W. Dolan
Raw Story
Feb 18, 2011

The FBI urged members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security on Thursday to update the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and make it easier for authorities to eavesdrop on Internet.

The act was passed in 1994 and requires telecommunication companies to design their equipment and services to ensure that law enforcement and national security officials can monitor telephone and other communications whenever necessary.

“Over the years, through interpretation of the statute by the Federal Communications Commission, the reach of CALEA has been expanded to include facilities-based broadband internet access and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services that are fully inter-connected with the public switched telephone network,” FBI General Counsel Valeria Caproni told the subcommittee.

“Although that expansion of coverage has been extremely helpful, CALEA does not cover popular Internet-based communications modalities such as webmail, social networking sites or peer-to-peer services.”
Read More

Union Fascism on Full Display

Feb 18th, 2011
by Rich Trzupek

The hypocrisy of the American left is on full display in the heart of America, as the teachers’ union in Wisconsin continues to show how it will use any tactic, no matter how reprehensible, to try and get its way. Threats, intimidation, violent imagery and inflammatory rhetoric – all of the sorts of tactics that the left and the mainstream media routinely accuse conservatives of using – are on full display in Madison. But, rather than condemning such behavior, left wing champions from Barack Obama to Michael Moore are falling over themselves to show solidarity with the teachers’ union.

Protesters carried signs likening Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler and Hosni Mubarak. One protester carried a placard that posed the question “why do Republicans hate people?” while others likened Walker’s budget cutting efforts to rape. He was called a dictator by some and an image of the governor was overlaid with crosshairs by at least one protestor. A rent-a-mob marched on the governor’s home. None of this behavior seems to bother leaders on the left, no more than the same kind of extremist rhetoric and actions concerned them when the left directed it towards George W. Bush for the better part of eight years.

Wisconsin state senator Randy Hopper, a Republican, told National Review that he and his colleagues have been receiving threats of a physically violent nature, and that law enforcement has stepped in to protect the homes and businesses of Republican legislators in the Dairy State. And how does the President of the United States react to all this? Barack Obama, after all, called for more civil and respectful political debate in America just a few short weeks ago. Here’s what the President had to say  in an interview with Milwaukee’s WTMJ:   Read More