Over the last two weeks, when things were going to hell in a handbasket in Iran, President Obama has been schooled by a couple of females. First, he came out late and little on the protesting in the streets of Tehran. As people died confronting Iran’s corrupt leadership, Obama was meek and non-commital on supporting them. Meanwhile, in Germany, President Angela Merkel was front and center, calling for new elections and condemning what was an obviously rigged vote in the face of angering some of her European colleagues. Merkel’s strong response stood in contrast to Obama’s timid mumblings about the Iranian governments treatment of the protesters. He said nothing about how obvious it was that the recent elections were clearly stolen by the ruling clerics.

It wasn’t until Merkel came to Washington last week that Obama followed her lead in making a stronger statement about how “the world is watching” the events in Iran. No condemnation, no verbage regarding specific voting irregularities. Just a whiny “stop the violence, please” kind of statement.

Fox News reports that Merkel wasn’t the only lady who pushed Obama to get tougher on Iran. Hillary Clinton reportedly had been “advocating a stronger U.S. response”, but was rebuffed by the president. And then when he did decide to use tougher language, he didn’t notify Clinton, who was caught off guard by the statement.

This is why Latin American tinpot dictators are now flexing their muscles. They see the American President as someone they can ignore. And they got a great example of Obama’s ideation on their region this week. When the coup occured in Honduras, and the legally elected President was exiled, it was immediately condemned by world leaders. But all President Obama could muster was that he was “deeply concerned.” He doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers down there.

Here you had a country that has a constitution. In that constitution its states that the president is only allowed to serve one four-year term. It also said that if the citizens wanted to change that law, it could call a referendum through it’s congress. In this case, the president, Mel Zelaya, decided that he wanted to be president longer than four years. So he decided to have his own little election. Skipping the whole constitutional referendum thing, he called on his Venezuelan buddy, Hugo Chavez, to send him some ballots. Chavez knows a thing or two about becoming a lifelong dictator. He tried to force this on his people recently, and was told to forget it. But he was willing to put his freind Zelaya in a position to make it work in Honduras.

The Honduran Supreme Court told Zelaya that his vote would be unconstitutional. Zelaya told the military to prepare to have the vote anyway, and they have alot to do with distributing ballots in Honduras. The Supreme Court demanded that the military refuse the presidential order. Zilaya decided that he could win the majority of soldiers over, and he ordered them to break in and steal the ballots, which had been locked away in a military warehouse. A small group did just that, and began distributing the ballots to anyone who wanted one. This was clearly against the constitution of the country, and in the end Mr. Zelaya was sent packing.

Obama (with the backing of Hillary at the State Department) is now demanding that Zelaya be returned to power. They are in strange company on this. The Hondurans say that they are following their constitution, as is the Supreme Court and Congress. And they are right. Why is our country joining Chavez and a host of others, including the Castro’s in Cuba, in condemning a countries effort to follow it’s constitution? They are insisting that “military coups” are not how to deal with problems like these. They call it barbaric. But this was not a military coup. It was the removal of a law breaker.

If they want to have Zelaya back in Honduras, it should be done by way of a trial. He can return to face the court system and the people who he tried to rule by fiat. Sorry, Hugo, Fidel, Raul, Daniel, and, well, Barack. This time a constitution will stand strong. It is an effort to prevent a president from becoming a dictator. Don’t laugh, America. We may be next.

I’m wondering if Alren Specter has stepped on any toes amongst the democrats in Pennsylvania. Did any of them have their eyes on his Senate seat? I think it would be proper if any of them challenged him in the democratic primary and beat him. He obviously know he’s on the ropes with voters, so if I were him, I’d be watching my left flank. By 2010, I believe most thinking people will have had more than their fill of Obama and the liberals and Pat Toomey will have an easy time with being elected.

While reading the Heritage Foundation’s website today, I came across this gem. It actually made me stop breathing….just before I laughed my lungs out! This is, without question, the boldest stroke of stupid I have ever seen regarding taxes. This comes from the, “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”.

Too often, we forget that the taxes we pay go towards our roads and buses, funds breakthrough research at our colleges and universities, keeps our parks clean, and pays for our police, firefighters, and our teachers.
Taxes help pay for the services we need most–and it’s time we said thanks.
While our tax dollars provide us with a lot, there is a widening gap between what the wealthiest Minnesotans pay and what average Minnesotans pay in taxes. We need to create a fair tax structure to make sure everyone is contributing their fair share.
Denise Cardinal, the Executive Director here at Alliance for a Better Minnesota, sent out the email below this morning asking Minnesotans to take a second to say thank you to all the government services that are paid for by our taxes.

Friend–
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
But the fact is, teachers, roads, and police officers don’t grow on trees.
Taxes pay for the things we use and love — like parks — and things we need, like police. It’s time we say thank you.
http://allianceminnesota.org/ThankYou
Join us to say thank you to all the government services that are paid for by our taxes. Sign our “Thank You” card to taxes, which we will share with state leaders as they address the state budget deficit in the next few weeks.
http://allianceminnesota.org/ThankYou
Safe neighborhoods, good public schools, and inspected bridges are just the start.
Take a moment to share with us why you appreciate all the government services you use every day.
Legislators need to hear that average citizens are willing to invest in these things — the very things that help make our state great. A balanced approach to the state budget, which does not make drastic cuts to our most important basic services, like health care, education, and food stamps for low-income families, is essential to put our state back on the right track toward economic recovery and growth.
Please sign our thank you card and invite your friends to do the same.
Thanks for all you do,
Denise CardinalAlliance for A Better Minnesota

Alright, that’s enough. Settle down and let’s continue. Here are some other things we can thank taxes for…right out of the president’s budget….

1.Thank you, taxes, for The Compton California Dance Theatre Foundation….$483,000 to keep “at risk” kids in the seats at the hip-hop dance theatre.

2. Thank you, taxes, for the Raphael Lemkin Center for Genocide Prevention…$452,000 to “educate world government leaders on genocide, genocide prevention, and response mechanisms.” Good luck with that.

3. Thank you, taxes, for a program in Florida called, “A Child is Missing”. These folks don’t have any law enforcement capacity, but claim that they have worked “7,095 cases” of missing persons and have been “credited by Florida law enforcement agencies with 64 successful recoveries”. Dang, that’s almost 1%….open the vault! Well, we’re kinda stingy here….only $500,000.

4. Thank you, taxes, for the hundreds of millions of dollars that I have read about in the time that I have spent reading through several congressional web pages. We are spending a huge sum of money on earmarks for at-risk youth, unemployed youth, underserved youth, under-educated youth, unsupervised youth, poor youth, hungry youth, homeless youth, socially disadvantaged youth, unhappy youth, bored youth, horny youth, youth without Playstation, youth without kites…..it goes on and on.

Every member of Congress is required by law to post on their website all of their requests for funding earmarks. As I said in a previous post, most of them have done that. But I noticed several have put them in programs that require you to download some reading software from the web. They know most people won’t mess with it. Slick.

By now, we’ve all heard the crude and tasteless ways that CNN and MSNBC referred to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who attended last weeks Tax Day Tea Party’s. At CNN, it was Anderson Cooper who allowed a guest to refer to them as “teabaggers”. I’m pretty sure Cooper knew that this had sexually tainted overtures. And over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow chuckled her way through a story about the Tea Parties, again using the same nasty terminology as Coopers guest. And both networks are just scratching their heads trying to figure out why their ratings are in free fall.

Here’s a clue. While left leaning cable news and newpapers are calling the participants everything but thinking Americans, Fox News covered the events like they were newsworthy. For the day, Fox drew more viewers that CNN, MSNBC, and CNN Headline News….combined! Why? It might just be that ordinary citizens are paying more attention than the liberals thought. Maybe we’re not all drowning in the Obama Lovefest that most news outlets are perpetuating. And it could be that we see through the nonsense that the President is serving up. Here’s one of my reasons for attending.

Federal spending in the Obama budget just passed, will create $9.3 trillion in deficits over ten years. It increases spending by $1 trillion over those ten years, and then doubles the publicly held national debt to over $12 trillion. As angry as I got at the irresponsible budgeting of George W. Bush, this is nearly treasonous. And they want us to believe that we don’t have anything to worry about because Obama is gonna make the nasty rich pay for it all! So the rest of us can just sit back and enjoy the ride, right? Um, whoops…..

According to Obama’s own numbers, this ain’t gonna work. According to Brian S. Wesbury and Robert Stein, both economists with First Trust Advisors of Wheaton, illinois, if you raised the top tax rate from 35% to 100%, you still don’t have enough to cover Obama’s spending. And these are the people that he says will pay for his huge stimulus package, the bank bailout, and all the new spending he plans to do. So there is no way that taxing the rich is going to cover his needs. So, guess what? If you think for a minute that your taxes aren’t going up, think again.

During his first address to Congress in February, the president said that “if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat, not a single dime.” Before the warm fuzzy feeling left us, the president had signed a bill that would increase federal taxes on tobacco by 62 cents. There was no exemption for low income smokers, who make up the vast majority of smokers. He is putting into place a huge “cap and trade” tax on energy companies, and you can be sure that will be passed on to the consumer. So here is a tax that is charged to you on your energy bill. Again, no exemption for lower income families. Their taxes go up…..a lot!

Well, what about all the budget cuts the administration is going to be making? Are you kidding? They have already insulted us enough with the president asking his cabinet to cut $100 million out of their budgets. This is a budget cut of .0023%. It’s like me saying that I need to cut back on my annual spending, so I won’t buy a Snickers Bar this week. Ridiculous waste of press coverage.Obama says not to worry, there will be lots of “savings” in his budget. Here are some examples of Obama’s savings assumptions:

1. The “temporary” stimulus spending will be allowed to expire. this includes all the spending on education and health care in the stimulus. How many times have you heard of a government program ending? Me neither.
2. Discretionary spending will be held to 2% annually after 2012, compared to 8% now. Words cannot express how big of a lie that is. Never has happened, never will.
3. The $632 billion “down payment” on universal health care will not be expanded. Stop. Please.

So, I believe that all of this is why we gathered to protest. We see what is coming. We see what our children are going to spend their lives paying for. We see that we have been sheep far too long. We know that the only way to stop it is to remove from office those that insist on taking us down this road against our will. And those who continue to bow at the altar of Obama because he isn’t George Bush, are really going to have a hard time explaining to their children how they could have wished this horrible future on them.

It seems that Janet Napolitano, the new Secretary of Homeland Security, has given a spirited defense of the recently released “threat assessment” that her department released on April 7. The report is supposed to give the DHS a heads up about who they need to be watching as possible domestic terrorists. It included veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, due to them “facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities…”, whatever that means. Those who do face these “challenges” are said to be potential members of terrorist groups or lone wolves out to attack the government. Veteran’s groups, such as the American Legion, are upset with the secretary, and a meeting has been requested.

The really interesting thing about this report is it’s sweeping assumptions. Guess who is among those that the report includes as suspect? Me! And you may also be considered a potential threat to the United States. Here is the quote right from the report itself:

“Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration…”

So, being pro-life and one who would like to see a large part of government shifted from the federal level back to the state and local level, I am potentially dangerous to my country. An amazing stance for this particular administration to take. How many times have we been told by the Democrats that racial profiling is against the law? It’s a horrible injustice wherever it occurs. You can’t just make someone suspect based on an observation that you make about the person. Until now.

If you have a “pro-life” or anti-illegal immigration bumper sticker on your car, a VFW license plate holder, or a “Jesus Loves You” tee shirt, Big Brother may be watching you. Profiling? You better believe it!