I happened to watch some MSNBC today while flipping through the channels. Al Sharpton was in a fury over Santorum’s theology remark, claiming he was saying the President wasn’t a Christian and then walking it back and bringing up the whole line about ‘We aren’t a theocracy’.

If Santorum is the nominee we a going to hear the ‘theocrat’ charge non-stop, and there is a very simple way to respond.

I struggled a long time trying to figure out how to reconcile my personal religious beliefs and values with the idea that we have to have a ‘neutral’ government. What I eventually realized is that IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO HAVE VALUE-NEUTRAL POLICY. Every law is based on some determination of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. People determine what is good or bad by referring to their value system. So POLITICS IS REALLY ABOUT WHOSE VALUES WILL BE IMPOSED ON EVERYONE ELSE, and which values have highest priority. What the left loves to do is impose their values on us, but accuse conservatives of being ‘theocrats’ whenever conservatives try have policy reflect our values.

The important relation between theology and values is this:

THEOLOGY —> WORLDVIEW  —>  VALUES

Most people have a set of beliefs about God, the nature of the universe, etc which helps them form a worldview, or a context for understanding everything in life. Many times our worldview is not consciously thought through, illogical, and inconsistent with our theology. Regardless, it is from this worldview that we get a system of values that we use to form opinions about what goes on in the world, especially politics.

In America, we have a battle between two worldviews: secular humanism and judeo-christianity/americanism. To a large extent, the democrats represent the values of  secular humanism and republicans represent the american value system (which draws heavily on judeo-christian beliefs).

Dennis Prager has a very interesting take on this when he talks about the American Trinity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn4IH3yng4k

It’s a loser for Santorum to talk about Obama’s theology (although you do have to wonder what Obama’s theology is given how it influences his worldview), but what Santorum was trying to say is that Obama has a different worldview than most Americans. Obama is clearly a secular humanist, and as such he places equality as one of the highest values. The american value system places a high priority on God, the moral order, and liberty. It is from this conflict of worldviews that we have the contraception/catholic church controversy.

I am so sick of hearing the elite media and their favorite Republican call conservatives anti-science and pushing the idea that there is absolute consensus on global warming and evolution.

On the most basic level, these appeals to scientific authority are only valid if the authorities are not significantly biased.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-authority.html

In the case of both global warming and evolution, the scientific establishment is EXTREMELY biased to the point of censoring any dissenting opinion (Expelled! and climategate). Both issues are highly political, and in the case of evolution form the very basis of the naturalistic and athiestic worldview held by many scientists. Making appeals to the authority of scientists who are largely left-wing on these issues is thus a logical fallacy.

Also, direct appeals to evidence are stronger than appeals to authority.

Why are Republicans so bad at messaging? The Democrats know their talking points and repeat them over and over. The result is that people start to believe them, and democrat talking points end up framing the national dialogue.

Here are six simple and powerful arguments Republicans can use as 10 second sound bytes, many of which I have NEVER HEARD:

1. The Stimulus package could not have saved up from a depression as the economy came out of recession in June 2009 and the unemployment rate peaked at 10.6% in Jan 2010. Very little of the stimulus had been spent by that point, so we would have come out of the recession anyway at the same time.

Stimulus Spending Over Time

2. The main cause of rising health care costs is that we have a third-party-payer system, and the biggest third-party-payer is Medicare.

Think about how you spend your money differently when someone else pays the bill. For instance, do you order more expensive food when your employer is paying for it? When someone else pays the majority of the health-care costs, most people over-use the system and don’t make an effort to shop around for cheaper MRIs, X-rays, doctors, etc. Therefore the free market system doesn’t work properly to provide valuable services at reasonable costs.

3. The alternative to privatizing Medicare is government rationing which is EXTREME. Maintaining the status quo (unlimited health care for every senior) is not sustainable, no matter how much we raise taxes on the rich.

4. Changing Medicare to a ‘premium support’ system is not radical, in fact it’s the same thing the democrats do in Obamacare.

Why no Republican has ever pointed this out, along with the double-standard that Obamacare was never called a ‘voucher’ system, is totally beyond me.

5. The Bush tax cuts increased the share of taxes paid by the ‘rich’ by making the tax code more progressive. Repealing them would increase the tax burden on the middle-class more than it would increase the tax burden on the wealthy.

Even factcheck does not seem to understand this, as demonstrated in the link for #6.

6. The top 1% pay 38% of all income taxes even though they only make 18% of all income.

Taxes and Income of top 1%

If I remember my macroeconomics class correctly, isn’t any tax cut a keynesian stimulus, just as any government spending is a stimulus. According to the theory, in both cases shouldn’t either one have some type of temporary multiplier effect on GDP as whoever gets the tax cuts spend the money on goods which then goes to pay workers which then spend the money, etc.?

It seems to me that dems should be for the tax cuts purely because the deficit spending should boost GDP. Wasn’t Krugman worried that if we don’t spend more that the economy will tank and that we shouldn’t worry about deficits right now? Where is he out there championing all these tax cuts?

And why haven’t I heard anyone in the GOP make these points? Also, why haven’t I heard them talk about how much the ‘rich’ pay in taxes relative to their income? I think the top 5% earn 40% of the income and pay something like 60% of income taxes. That seems to me about 50% more than their fair share.

I just finished watching a rather pathetic interview of Carly Fiorina on Fox News Sunday. Chris Wallace kept asking how she would cut spending and reform entitlements and she kept dodging the question and wouldn’t give specifics. Now I understand Boxer would use it against her if she said she was going to cut Medicare, and the same is true of all the other candidates. So how should all our candidates answer this question?

It’s really very simple: The big driver of entitlement spending is Medicare and we are going to make that cheaper by reforming the whole health care system. This gives the candidate a chance to talk about positive things the republicans will do with health care and gives them a chance to slam obamacare.

The points to make are:

1. Health care is expensive because it’s a third party payer system.

2. We should move away from employer healthcare by having tax-deductible insurance for individuals.

3. Let’s let people buy insurance across state lines.

4. Let individuals and small buisnesses join together to buy group policies as a way to create risk pools and have negotiating leverage.

Paul Ryan interview

excerpts:

This whole debate has been a proxy fight about what kind of country America will be — whether we’ll become a cradle-to-grave welfare state or stay a free-market democracy. The Democrats who are being told that the worse is over should know that the battle has not even begun. It’s up to us to now bring the case to the American people — a real moral, philosophical, and economic case — asking about our values, our founding principles, and if we really want to move toward a Western European–style system.”

“What’s really happening here is the president is saying to the American people that you’re stuck in your current station in life, you’re frozen, and the government is here to help you cope with it. But that’s not who we are. We are a dynamic society where people have the will and incentive to make the most of their lives, to reach their potential. With this bill, that whole mindset, the American idea is upended.”

As we work to repeal, we must recognize that we’re fighting a different and distorted progressivism. They want to hook people up to entitlements and delegate more power to unelected bureaucrats and technocrats to micromanage the economy — a government full of Peter Orzags. Yet their fatal conceit is also a rational gamble to establish a new culture of dependency. We need to become the party of liberty and freedom,” Ryan argues. “We’re not doing enough. We can do better, and we will — because we have no choice. If we’re going to offer the country a completely different vision, we can’t be Democratic-lite or resign ourselves to be slightly more efficient managers and tax-collectors for the welfare state. We have to break with that and give people a clear and distinct difference.”

Adversity often creates opportunities for great leaders to emerge. Throughout the past year, the best critic of the social democrats, and the best defender of conservatism has been this man. And if we’re going to fire Obama, repeal Obamacare, and tackle our fiscal problems we are going to need some real, articulate, conservative leaders that can persuade America to support a conservative agenda. Nominating a mediocre candidate in 2012 is not an option. I’m starting to think Paul Ryan may be our best player. And would any part of the republican coalition have a problem with him?

Apparently the Rules committee is in Chaos over whether or not the house can vote on an amendment to non-existing law (the Senate bill). I have brought this point up a few times in comment threads, but I haven’t read any articles about what seems a very obvious point:

If the Senate can’t start reconciliation until the Senate bill is law (since reconciliation must amend existing law according to the parliamentarian) then how can the House start reconciliation on something that isn’t law? In fact, they are trying to start reconciliation on a bill that hasn’t even passed the house.

What they want to do is amend a bill and vote on an amended bill, which happens all the time. But doesn’t that require 2 votes: a vote on the amendment and then a vote on the final bill? And in that case doesn’t the amended bill have to go back to the Senate?

Where is the House parliamentarian and how can the house parliamentarian make a ruling that is inconsistent with the Senate parliamentarian?

AND HOW COME NO REPORTERS OR COMMENTATORS HAVE BROUGHT UP THIS PROBLEM YET?

According to Byron York’s linked post, it seems like the rules committee hasn’t even realized this problem until today.

Consider for a moment what would happen if the House passed a reconciliation package, deeming the Senate bill passed, but the Senate was unable to pass a reconciliation bill. The president could then sign the Senate bill even though that bill, by itself, didn’t pass the Senate and couldn’t pass the Senate (Nancy Pelosi, in a rare moment of truth, just said her members don’t want to vote for the Senate bill).

We would be in a situation where the ‘same text’ did not pass both chambers. The Senate bill only passed the house by a vote on what was an AMENDED bill, as the core bill couldn’t attract enough votes. Just today cnn reported a few yes votes (Arcuri, Costello, Biship, Giffords) said they could not vote for the Senate bill. The president would thus sign a bill that wouldn’t be able to get a majority vote in one chamber at the time he signed it.

Logically, what is happening is that:

Bill A passed the Senate but failed in the House.                                                                                                 Bill B passed the House but failed in the Senate.                                                                                                 Bill A then becomes law.

This is no different than one chamber passing a bill, the other chamber passing an amended version that then fails in the other chamber, and then one of the two bills arbitrarily being signed into law.

I know I am not really saying anything new here, but if you spend a moment thinking about what could actually happen if the reconciliation bill fails, and what that could mean for the legislative process going forward, it becomes obvious how unworkable, illogical, and unconstitutional the deeming strategy is.

If the chambers pass 2 different bills, which one should be sent to the president?

I would recommend everyone read former 10th circuit judge Michael McConnell’s WSJ editorial on the constitutionality of the Slaughter Rule. It is subscriber only content, but the full text is at Powerline.

Freedomworks is coordinating a rally against Obamacare Tuesday, March 16th. I believe this has been advertised for at least a week. If there was ever a time to rally in DC it would be this week against Obamacare. It is not hyperbole to say that losing this battle could be the end of America as we know it.

So why hasn’t this been promoted on the front page of RedState?

Event Information

FreedomWorks is working with the tea parties to storm the capitol March 16th.

Event Information

I fully support this, but I must say, if we want to put together some big rallies we need more time to prepare and plan. Why wasn’t anyone planning a rally in DC as soon as it was clear Obama was going to do reconciliation in mid-February? Let’s get our act together people.

I am calling for another March on Washington on March 26, before the Easter recess, in order to kill Obamacare once and for all.

Both the House and Senate plan to be in recess starting March 29:

My best guess is that the first March on Washington drew a few hundred thousand people to DC, but was a failure due to the lack of media coverage. Media coverage is important because it affects the political dialogue, puts pressure on congress, and gets the attention of Americans who are not following the legislation too closely. It forces them to ask ‘Why are so many people so angry about this bill?’

I get the sense that the people in Congress are becoming complacent and are convincing themselves that the public REALLY supports the policy of Obamacare, they have just been turned off by the process and by scare tactics.

Getting 500,000+ people to rally on the mall will send the signal to congress that we are paying attention, we are determined, and we are not going to let this happen. And it will encourage others to voice their opinion and stand up to these people. Having a rally right before the Easter recess should jump-start another round of raging townhalls.

I think a couple hundred thousand people would draw media attention this time, especially since health-care will be the main news story around that time. To really drive home our point and get the media attention we are going to need to do something more dramatic, such as creating a human wall on the steps of the Capitol to prevent congress from going into session that day. If the police have to drag a few people off to jail, so much the better. More drama for the nightly news. If they are going to jam this thing down our throats let us give the American people the visual of the federal government using the power of the state to stomp out opposition from masses of patriotic Americans.

I doubt Congress can finish a reconciliation process by Easter, and we need to rely on the Senate to hold this thing up until at least Easter (and preferably November). But if for some reason Obamacare passes by the time of the rally, then let the rally be the launching point for the repeal of this monstrosity.

I believe this is what we need to do, but we need some conservative leaders to set the date and send the word out. 3 weeks should be enough time. Tea party leaders, Glenn Beck, Sen. DeMint, and Rep. Bachmann, are you listening?

House Calendar
Senate Calendar

I’m currently watching the health care summit and I think one point desperately needs to be made OVER and OVER, and I have not heard it yet today or in anything any Republican has said regarding health care. And that is this:

GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE IS INEFFICIENT BECAUSE IT CAN’T FAIL

I wish Coburn had made this point when he spoke. He said that the fraud rate in Medicare is 20% while it is 1% in the private sector. He should have said that this is because the Government doesn’t have the right incentive to weed out fraud and no amount of new ‘anti-fraud’ programs will fix that. Private companies only have a 1% fraud rate because if it was any higher than that they will be driven out of business by more efficient companies.

Similarly, this is the problem with the public option. Dems are going to say they want the public option do increase competition and most Americans hear that and think that’s a good idea.

BUT THE PROBLEM WITH THE PUBLIC OPTION IS THAT GOVERNMENT DOESN’T COMPETE FAIRLY BECAUSE IT CAN’T FAIL.

This point needs to be made in the summit and if not it needs to be made by lawmakers who go on TV today and tomorrow.

USA Today published this graphic illustrating how the park service estimates crowds and showing the crowd sizes for various inaugural ceremonies:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-01-19-crowd_N.htm

Based on images like this:

http://reason.com/blog/show/136041.html

it seems the crowd stretched from the captiol almost to the Washington Monument. I saw a better image showing that earlier, but I can’t find it now.

So, if the crowd today was as dense as a typical inauguration, then it seems like there were probably as many people as there were for LBJs inauguration: 1.2 mil. Even if the crowd was 1/4 as dense, that would still mean there were 300,000 people there. I thought anything over 100,000 would be a significant statement. I didn’t think we could get 1 million.

All the news agencies, including fox, kept saying ‘tens of thousands’. Yeah right. If just the section in front of the capitol holds 240,000 (densely packed), then there were EASILY 100k.

It would be interesting to compare aerial photos of the March on Washington with Obama’s inauguration and aerial photos of other events of known size.

I think the best estimates, just based on the photos I have seen and the USA today graphic, would place the likely number at 750k – 1.25 mil.

Like many of you, I feel frustrated and helpless as I watch the radical left race to destroy and bankrupt our country. The unfortunate reality is that once their new government programs are enacted they will be almost impossible to repeal. Not only do these government programs tend to stifle our economy and squash our freedoms, they also manufacture democrats by creating a culture of government dependency. Obama and Pelosi realize this which is why they are so zealous to drive their agenda through Congress while they can. They’re not worried about short-term political losses, because if their agenda passes they will be in control of the country for generations. They will have won the war.

The centerpiece of their agenda, and Obama’s presidency, is health-care reform. If we can stop it, we may stop the entire left wing agenda. I believe we stand at a watershed moment in the history of our republic, and yet I feel impotent. What can I do besides call my congresswoman? Even assuming she wasn’t a liberal democrat (she is), what effect would one call have?

If we’re going to stop this, we need to rally the American people against it. We can’t rely on our elected leaders as most of them have proven to be poor communicators of common sense. Even if our leaders were effective, how do they get their message out through a hostile media to an inattentive, uninformed, and apathetic public?

The American people need to understand what is at stake and how the liberal agenda is going to transform America in a way that they are not going to like. The people we need to reach are the broad middle of America who aren’t political junkies, who haven’t followed the health care debate closely, who don’t have a well-defined ideology, and who may like Obama. The only way to get these people activated against the health care takeover is for people they trust to explain to them in a common sense way why it will be bad for them and for the country.

So what I am proposing is that we use the internet to start a viral grassroots messaging campaign. My initial goal is for 500 people to send an email to 20 people, which means 10,000 people would get the initial blast. Hopefully, 10,000 is critical mass for the message to go viral. Below is my best attempt to explain the health care debate in a pithy and common sense way. If you can write something better, please do so and send that instead.

Family and Friends,

I’m not the type of person who usually sends out mass-emails, but there is something very important that I want to bring to your attention. Some of you may be following this closely, but many are not.

Congress is currently trying to push through a bill that would radically and almost irreversibly change our health care system in America. And if you ever expect to be really sick, or if you’ve struggled to watch someone you love suffer from a disease, then you should care about what is happening.

Many of you are understandably not interested in politics, and you don’t have the time to try to understand how our health care system works or think about how to fix it. You hear different opinions on TV and you’re not sure who to trust. I’m going to do my best to briefly explain what is going on and how it will effect you.

Americans with health insurance have the best health care in the world. We have the best survival rates from cancer, almost three times more MRI machines per capita than western Europe, and much lower wait times for specialists and procedures. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. The problem is that health care costs are growing much faster than inflation, and that 13% of the population doesn’t have insurance. Of those, a third can afford it but don’t want it, a third are illegal immigrants, and another third are eligible for Medicaid (insurance for the poor) or are between jobs and will be without insurance for less than five months.

The reasons costs are growing so fast include:

1. Americans have pre-paid health care rather than insurance. Deductibles, premiums, and co-pays are low; most of the care you receive is paid by someone else so you don’t really care what it costs. Think about how you would eat differently if you had food insurance that paid for groceries and eating out. You only had to pay for the first $1000 per year of food and $10 for every visit to a supermarket or restaurant. Most people would eat much more expensive food. In the same way, we over consume health care because it is cheap.

2. Frivolous lawsuits result in defensive medicine and expensive malpractice insurance.

3. New technology.

4. Americans are overweight and don’t exercise.

5. America subsidizes drug R&D for the entire world. Many countries limit what companies can charge for drugs, so the research costs are recouped from Americans.

6. States mandates on what insurers must cover necessarily raise costs.

The proposed solution to all these problems is to create a government insurance plan to cover the uninsured. Theoretically, this plan would drive down costs by creating competition with the private insurers. But the effect (intentional by some) of a government insurance program will be to drive all the private health-care companies out of business so that all Americans will eventually be forced into government-run health care like they have in the UK or Canada. Some openly state that as the goal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3BS4C9el98&

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ-6ebku3_E

Why will a government insurance company drive everyone out of business? Isn’t competition good? Competition is good except when certain players don’t play by the rules. No business with unlimited resources can compete fairly because it is impossible for them to fail. They could lose money by giving things away for free, drive their competitors out of business, and then they would become a monopoly. Government also makes the rules, and you can’t have the referee also playing the game because you can’t trust them to be fair. Also, government officials tend to use power to advance their interests and the interests of their constituents; therefore, government as a whole makes decisions to maximize political goals whereas businesses maximize financial goals. A government health care company will end up getting special tax breaks, be awarded contracts as a way for congressmen to launder money to their allies, and will be exempt from certain regulations. In other words, it will cheat and result in more corruption. If you doubt this, go spend 15 minutes reading about Fannie Mae and the financial crisis.

If everyone did rely on the government for health care, what would be the effects?

1. Inefficiency. Government programs are inherently inefficient because

a. No incentives for excellence. The people running the organization are not worried about failure, and they don’t profit by being successful and efficient.
b. Customers of government services are COSTS, whereas customers of a business are REVENUE. That’s why you get better service at a restaurant than at the DMV. The DMV doesn’t care if you get mad and leave, it’s just less work for them.
c. Politicians fiddle with government programs to benefit themselves and their supporters at the expense of the general population.
d. The most qualified people don’t run government organizations. Plum jobs at government agencies go to the politically well-connected.

2. Going to the Dr. would be like the worst HMO you can imagine.

3. If you offer seemingly free health care to everyone, the system will be overwhelmed by demand. To contain costs, the government will have to ration care. Instead of you and your Dr. determining what tests and treatments to try, doctors will have to consult a manual to see what tests and drugs are approved for someone with your condition at your age. The government will place a value on your life based on how old you are, and if the treatment costs more than you’re worth you won’t get it. That is exactly what they do in Britain.

4. Fewer people will want to be doctors as it will be a lower paying profession that is less rewarding (since the government sets salaries and regulates how to treat patients).

5. A new health care entitlement will bankrupt our country. When Medicare was passed in 1966, it was estimated to cost $12 billion in 1990. The real cost: $107 billion.

There are problems with cost and access to health care, but a government insurance plan will make the system worse. There are other solutions that address the fundamental problems: letting small businesses form risk pools, tax credits and deductions for individuals, tort reform, allowing insurance to be sold across state lines, and many other things.

If a new government plan is enacted it will be near impossible to repeal. Many employers will stop insuring their employees if it’s cheaper to let the government cover them. Eventually, you or someone you love is going to go through a lot of unnecessary suffering because of a lack of good medical care, and there will be very few if any private doctors to turn to.

Congress is going to try to pass this bill is September, and the only thing that can stop it is the outrage of the American people. What can you do?

Call or Email your Senator and Representative: http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/
Discuss this issue with your friends and family.
Email your friends and family. Forward this email or write your own. When forwarding, copy and paste the text into a new email to avoid having > inserted before the message body.

If you think government controlled health care is going to result in suffering to you, your family, or your fellow citizens, and yet you’re not willing to do something as simple as sending an email to help prevent it, then you need to ask yourself what would motivate you to action?

I’d like to be able to report back to Redstate on our progress in a week, so if you participate, please let me know by emailing stopobamacare@aol.com and letting me know how many people you emailed.

The conservative movement desperately needs a way to spread our message to middle America, and hopefully this can be the start of an ongoing effort to do that.

I head about this case on the radio today and couldn’t find any news stories on it in Google News. This story should be headline news, and among other things it demonstrates why the right needs to develop our own online news outlets (like Huffington Post) and not just opinion outlets.

http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/news/story.aspx?cid=4899

excerpts:

 DETROIT — Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom filed a lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University Thursday after school officials dismissed a student from the school’s counseling program for not affirming homosexual behavior as morally acceptable.  The school dismissed Julea Ward from the program because she would not agree prior to a counseling session to affirm a client’s homosexual behavior and would not retract her stance in subsequent disciplinary proceedings

…”When a public university has a prerequisite of affirming homosexual behavior as morally good in order to obtain a degree, the school is stepping over the legal line.  Julea did the responsible thing and followed her supervising professor’s advice to have the client referred to a counselor who did not have a conscience issue with the very matter to be discussed in counseling.  She would have gladly counseled the client if the subject had been nearly any other matter.”

…EMU initiated its disciplinary process against Ward and informed her that the only way she could stay in the graduate school counseling program would be if she agreed to undergo a “remediation” program.  Its purpose would be to help Ward “see the error of her ways” and change her “belief system” as it relates to counseling about homosexual relationships, conforming her beliefs to be consistent with the university’s views.  When Ward did not agree with the conditions, she was given the options of either voluntarily leaving the program or asking for a formal review hearing.Ward chose the hearing, during which EMU faculty denigrated her Christian views and asked several inappropriate and intrusive questions about her religious beliefs.  The hearing committee dismissed her from the counseling program on March 12.  Ward appealed the decision to the dean of the College of Education, who upheld the dismissal on March 26.

I’m struck by the lack of outrage about Obama’s budget. The AIG bonuses received nonstop coverage for a week, but this budget is at least 100 times more outrageous and insulting to the American people. Obama’s budget puts us more in debt in the next five years than the cumulative debt from George Washington to G.W. Bush. The ratio of total debt to GDP is now about 40% and has been at that level for years. The rosy scenarios in Obama’s budget predicts the debt/GDP ratio will go up to 80%. The largest deficit under Bush was $454 billion in 2008–Obama’s budget will lead to annual deficits of more than 1 trillion dollars per year for the next decade. The actual deficits will be worse than that as the budget assumes government programs won’t have any cost overruns and the economy has 90′s style growth even with massive debt crowding out of the private sector and massive energy tax increases. Even the CBO estimates only include a ‘down-payment’ for health care and don’t include the ‘temporary’ increases in government programs from the stimulus that democrats intend to make permanent. Sen. Richard Shelby said that if this budget passed we would be paying over $1 billion per day just in INTEREST payments. That’s over $32 billion per month–the cost of the Iraq war was about $8 billion per month.

To put this is perspective, the government currently takes in about $2 trillion per year in tax revenue. If we have $1 trillion dollar deficits, that means everyone would have to pay 50% more in taxes to cover it. According to WSJ, if you taxed 100% of the income of everyone making over 500k in 2006 that would only net $1.3 trillion. The big spending Bush administration racked up a total of $2 trillion is deficits from 2001-2008; over the next 10 years Obama is going to add at least $10 trillion.

There are only three possible scenarios here: Obama is insane, Obama is deliberately exploiting a financial crisis to implement his far-left agenda and plans to pay for it with hyperinflation, or he actually thinks socializing medicine and implementing a massive energy tax is going to cause GDP growth to skyrocket. Most people, myself included, would reject the 1st and 3rd options as ridiculous, which means he is deliberately planning to destroy the economy with massive inflation in order to pass his idealogical agenda for reshaping America into a European-style welfare state. I don’t see any other explanation. Anyone who intentionally destroys trillions of dollars of Americans wealth must be by definition the worst white-collar crook in history; many times worse than Bernie Madoff. I do not think I’m exaggerating. If Obama is knowingly destroying trillions of dollars in wealth he is a thief and deserves to be impeached.

Newt Gingrich nailed what is happening:

“I think he’s committed to redistributing wealth in the country, creating a huge government, transferring power to a radical secular-left…I don’t think this administration is all that worried about the economy. I think they’re worried about power, and they think they’re winning because they’re reshaping the law and the structure of government in the US…they’re still confident, they’re still arrogant enough to believe they can run over the American people…the attitude of the left-wing machine in Wahsington is that they have power right now and they’re going to use that power, they’re goinna run over anyone who gets in their way, they’re going to embarrass and attack anyone who questions them, and they will tell you they’re winning.”

And Charles Krauthammer:

“What’s going on? ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,’ said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. ‘This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.’ Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”

Obama had the audacity last night to say ‘At the end of the day, the best way to bring our deficit down in the long run is not with a budget that continues the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt. It’s with a budget that leads to broad economic growth by moving from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest.’ Who does this guy think he is that he can get away with this? Does he think we’re all stupid?

If I’m exaggerating I’d like to hear why.

Links to Charts/Articles:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123776518094909023.html

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/a_dishonest_gimmicky_budget.html

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/03/023156.php

It’s not a good sign for Obama when non-conservatives start calling him out.

video from CNBC:

SUMMARY: We will win this if we get help from outside the state.

Note: this update is based on the emails I receive from the Yes on 8 campaign.

Proposition 8 is the ballot initiative in California that will amend the Constitution to define marriage as a man and a woman. There is a huge amount of opposition to this bill from Hollywood and the other usual suspects.

CA is the largest state in the union and is the cultural trend-setter of our country. If Californians consent to having gay marriage forced on them, it won’t be long until it comes to your state, especially if Obama gets 3 appointments to the Supreme Court.

Prop 8. was behind in the polls (based on lack of advertising) until Yes on 8 (protectmarriage.com) started airing some very effective ads a couple weeks ago. Support immediately shot up 10 points and polls now show that Prop. 8 is ahead by a margin of 48% Yes to 45% No (CBS/Survey USA poll taken 10/15)

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For all the talk about Ayers, I haven’t heard anyone make an argument as to why people should care other than ‘judgment and character’. The Ayers association and Obama’s lies regarding it do reflect badly on those things, but they are so abstract that the media and non-conservatives can rationalize them away.

There are three specific reasons the Ayers connection is relevant to voters.

1. If Obama is friends with Ayers, Wright, Rezko, etc., what does that tell us about who he would appoint to positions in his administration and get advice from?

2. At the Annenburg Challenge, Obama and Ayers gave money to groups to radicalize children with liberal propaganda. If he used $50 mil to brainwash our children instead of teaching them reading and writing, should we trust him with the federal education budget?

3. Obama doesn’t necessarily share the views of Ayers and Wright, but the fact that he is friends with them demonstrates how far to the left he is. 80% of Americans would be so offended by their views they would never be on friendly terms with them, let alone work with them or consider them mentors.

The fact that he would tolerate their radical anti-American views demonstrates his values are such that he doesn’t find them offensive regardless of whether he agrees with them. He must have a pretty negative view of America to tolerate Ayers and Wright’s rhetoric.

Lastly, McCain-Palin needs to point out the media hypocrisy here with an analogy. How would McCain be treated if he had worked for Eric Rudolph or the unabomber?

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Sarah Palin yesterday. I hadn’t heard about it until an hour ago, and I hadn’t seen anything about it on Redstate so I thought I would post a link to the recording which is about 10 minutes long.

recording

I thought it was a good interview that was a little more interesting than the policy pop quizzes she has gotten so far. She comes through as a very real, down to Earth person.

I do think something has changed in how the McCain campaign is handling her. She was much better in this interview, and in the one last night with Katie Couric. Her sentences are much clearer, and I presume she is not trying to recite lines her handlers made her memorize.

My comment on Couric’s last interview is this: I can’t remember ever seeing a reporter pound on a politician to answer ever single question like Couric has done. Usually the interviewee will totally dodge and only occassionally will the interviewer press maybe one more time for an answer to the question.

When Charlie Gibson was asking her about global warming I think he re-asked the question FIVE times! Good grief.