That Was Fast - New Allen West Ad "Three Times"

UPDATE: Link fixed. Thanks for the heads up. (Sorry I accidentally deleted your comment.)

Too Good to Check - Nancy Pelosi to Quit?

Please please please please please please please please please please please let it be true.

The Clear Choice for Congress in FL-9: Mark Oxner

If you're in Florida's Ninth Congressional District, there's a potent candidate who's running against the Idiot Alan Grayson.

Moe Lane over at RedState interviewed him recently.




Mark pushes all my political buttons: he wants to repeal ObamaCare, he's for the Keystone Pipeline and for developing American energy, he's for deregulation, and he recognizes the role that the awful Community Reinvestment Act played in the Great Housing Crash of 2008.

As he states in this interview, "I'm a free market guy."

That is enough for me. Plus, he worked in a welding shop alongside his dad.

His site is here. If you're in his district, vote for him on August 14th.

A Fast and Furious Linkfest

As you may have heard (or not, if you watch NBC News), the House Congressional panel that's investigating the illegal transfer of guns to drug cartels in Mexico was just about to hold a vote to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his less-than-full disclosure about his role in the program.

Then President Obama stepped in to invoke Executive Privilege which essentially prevents Congress from receiving the documents it was seeking from the Department of Justice.

This is a complex issue and I'm still digesting all the information on it. It appears that Operation Fast and Furious was an attempt by this administration to turn public sentiment against one of our most revered Constitutional rights to gun ownership by turning loose a large amount of guns to some very dangerous people. This program resulted in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and some 200 Mexican citizens.

This investigation has been going on since 2011, and virtually ignored by the mainstream media, save for Sharyl Atkisson of CBS.

President Obama had pretty much stayed above it all except to signal his support for Holder. But his citing of executive privilege yesterday now implicates him.

Is this unprecedented? No, it's been done before, most notably by Richard Nixon during the Watergate investigation. That ultimately led him to resign and sent the Republican Party into the wilderness for a generation or so back in the mid-1970's. Other presidents have done it on various occasions.

Here are a few links from when George Bush did it.

Harry Reid: "It's like saying, I'm King."

Katie Couric's Perky Colon: "People in power being above the law."

And finally, then-Senator Obama calling for Bush's AG to resign and "trying to hide behind" executive privilege. (h/t to Breitbart.com)

Many federal laws were broken which could amount to something called "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Stay tuned...

Chuck Schumer Commits the Ultimate Gaffe

Gaffe – noun \gaf\ - 1. A social or diplomatic blunder 2. A noticeable mistake. 3. In a political sense, when a Congressman unintentionally tells the truth and gets caught doing so.

There was a little incident yesterday that you may have heard about: Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was on a conference call with reporters. The problem is, he thought he was on a conference call to four other Senators. He told the group to make sure they label the GOP spending cuts as "extreme."

Now, gentle reader, you may discount this little exercise as merely politics as usual inside the Beltway. You would do so at your peril. What it so clearly demonstrates is a far deeper problem: the overriding concern with holding onto power instead of conducting the business of running the country in a responsible manner.

"I always use (the word) extreme, Schumer said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use."

This blog finds it heartening that Senator Schumer is so concerned with following the orders of the caucus. It would be nice if he were equally concerned with the orders of his constituents.

You see, our budgetary woes are directly due to the recently dismissed 111th Congress, led by the Progressive Nancy Pelosi. After running up unprecedented amounts of debt, (a goal they pursued with wild abandon) Queen Nancy deigned that she’d leave one final reminder of her legacy as a noose around the necks of the incoming Republican majority in the House in the form of a non-existent budget. A noose that Progressives would later use to strangle anyone who attempts to reduce the vastly increased spending that she engineered in her four-year reign of terror as Speaker of the House.

I don’t need to tell you how much damage that Congress did to the country; the evidence is everywhere. Never before in our history has one Congress done so much to move this country away from its’ Founders principles of limited government and toward rampant socialism. Four years of Progressive destruction, the last two aided by the most un-American president since Jimmy Carter have resulted in the drastic change of the American political landscape from a pasture to a landfill.

And the Progressives aren’t finished ruining the country. This example of Chuck Schumer putting his interest in power ahead of the good of the country is merely the latest.

How much worse do things have to get in America before we understand that we’re inflicting all of this upon ourselves by electing the wrong people to office?

Democrat Representative Calls for Union Violence

So much for the New Civil Tone in politics. Massachusetts Representative Michael Capuano is calling for union protesters to become violent as a response to efforts by Republican lawmakers to balance their state budgets.

How nice.

In a report by The Hill, Capuano was rallying union supporters Tuesday when he said this, "Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary."

Is this what we’ve been reduced to? As most folks should know by now, public sector union pensions are posing a real threat to many states’ ability to balance their budgets. Year after year of increasing demands from unions have resulted in a greater share of tax dollars going towards unions. It’s not just pay rates; even those are now above the national average for most job descriptions. When you factor in benefits that are paid for by taxpayers instead of the union members, the total bill becomes quite expensive, exceeding the national average by a substantial percentage.

But when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tries to do what the rest of America has to do during this recession, his efforts are met by the unions with demonstrations. Tens of thousands of demonstrators have descended on the state capitol, many bused in from out of state and assisted in their efforts by the Democratic National Committee and President Obama’s own group Organizing for America. These protests have been largely free of violence up until now.

One wonders why a sitting Congressman would be advocating violence. Didn’t we just receive a lesson from the Professional Left following the attack on Gabby Giffords? Wasn’t the Tea Party falsely accused of all sorts of things? Even Sarah Palin got the blame when anyone with two functioning neurons to rub together knew differently. All of the finger-wagging came from the left, whom, as we all know, is incapable of uttering a syllable of incivility towards their political opponents and would never stoop to such tactics as comparing a sitting president to Hitler. Nor would they consider making a movie about the mythical assassination of a sitting president. Or compare him with a chimpanzee.

No, they would never do such a thing.

By now, America has learned how the unions have gamed the system. Public sector unions are paid with taxpayers’ money. Union dues are collected from those members, which are used to pay for the unions’ political support of Democrats. The Democrats, once in office, are indebted to the unions for their support and give the unions sweetheart deals. Money then goes back to the unions to support more Democrat candidates, who again give unions favorable deals in a never-ending cycle of back-scratching and hand-washing.

At least everybody involved is hygienic. Everybody except the taxpayers, that is.

You can expect this reprehensible incitement to violence by a sitting Congressman to be walked back, probably by the end of today. He will doubtless say that’s not what he meant in a weak attempt to appeal to the rest of the country’s non-union populace.

However, the cat is out of the bag, as it were.

America is at a crossroad. We can either continue down the road we’re on, where public sector unions (with the very socialist Richard Trumka as their public and private face) can continue to drain local and state coffers of money, or elected officials can do their duty to the citizens and start to rein in the outrageous demands for an ever-larger piece of a shrinking pie.

The Internet’s Free Flow of Information and How Congress Wants to Stop It

Somebody in Washington missed the memo.

It was sent sometime last November. It said that we wanted less government intrusion into our daily lives.

However, it seems that business as usual has resumed.

The recent events in Egypt should awaken us to the dangers of governmental control of the Internet. As in Iran last year, their government has shut down Internet access, including Twitter accounts, and even disrupted cell phone service in an effort to quell the popular uprisings there. It’s an attempt by what we see as corrupt leaders in a foreign land suppressing the rights of the people.

We think because we’re America that It. Can’t. Happen. Here.

Really?

What if I told you that President Obama has been seeking that very power since 2009? And that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has introduced SR 21 that currently contains vague language about national security, to be replaced with something more definitive later, that would give President Obama that power?

It gets better. Rep. James Sensenbrenner has introduced another bill that would require Internet Service Providers to retain information on your comings and goings for two years even though you’ve done nothing wrong. Naturally, FBI Director Robert Mueller is in favor of this bill, saying that it would be "tremendously helpful in giving us a historic basis to make a case" in investigations. I’m all for that, too, as long as you have a search warrant from a judge who has reviewed the evidence. But if you don’t have one, then you don’t have a legal basis to know what anyone is doing on the Internet.

The memo they missed also contained something about sticking to that thing called the Constitution. However, judging by this news, they have yet to even check their in-box. They’re still making up the rules as they go along, seemingly blissfully unaware that they have rules they have to follow. Old rules like the Fourth Amendment. Old rules that until recently were scrupulously adhered to in order to keep us free from government suppression.

Hopefully, we’re starting to wake up to the sad fact that we are reaching parity with other governments around the world, just as our President has wished. In the past, we could take refuge in the fact that America really was different from the rest of the world, that our freedoms could never be taken away or diminished.

Today, we see this is no longer the case. In fact, Washington seems hell-bent on a fundamental transformation that reduces our nation to nothing more than a banana republic, with a strong-armed leader rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.

We used to be better than this. We used to have representatives who were like our neighbors, who had the same values that we had, and would govern according what was best for the majority of Americans. Our country was designed to be owned and operated by the people, not by career politicians.

I miss the old days.

By not reading the clear message that was sent by us last November to get government out of our lives, we feel like we’ve been unfriended. Even worse, our former BFF’s don’t even want us to log on anymore.

If our representatives ever check their email again, they’ll find this somewhat shorter version of the original memo: We want representatives who will slay the Leviathan, not feed it.

Why Our Economy Sucks – Congress Makes Highest Number of Laws Since 1960’s

Succinct, that’s how this Bloomberg article puts it. “The 111th Congress made more law affecting more Americans since the “Great Society” legislation of the 1960s.”

Thanks a lot.

In order for this story to have its full effect (that is, to pour yourself a stiff drink even if it is 9 a.m.), you only need to understand one principle; we are free to do anything unless there’s a law specifically preventing it. This simple concept is the heart and soul of American exceptionalism. Other countries need permission from their governments to do something, placing them in a far different position than us. They are restricted from the beginning whereas we start from the premise of freedom.

It’s also curious that this little nugget of information, as important as it is, isn’t as widely known as it should be. If it was, I’m certain that there would be much more discontent with the current political atmosphere in Washington. Not that there isn’t already, as demonstrated by the loss of the House to Republican control in the last election.

Still, this is terrible news for freedom-loving Americans. It also explains why our economy has ground to a halt. It’s clear that Congress is legislating us to death.

I should probably introduce another principle for to help you understand how this is bad for the country. This is the principle of cause and effect. Allow me to explain.

Things don’t just happen spontaneously; they have an origin, a cause. After the cause has occurred, the result is the effect. Also, understand that the effect can then become another cause.

In the engineering world, when there is a failure, you want to know what caused it in order to prevent another failure. This is known as Root Cause Analysis.

In our situation, we have legislators creating law, which, by definition, restrict our actions, resulting in less freedom. Is it any wonder that we find ourselves in an economic morass, with record high levels of unemployment and poverty? The cause is too many laws, the effect is economic devastation.

Again, thanks a lot, Nancy, Harry, and Barack. Heckuva job you’ve done there.

Now that we know what caused our problems, we can start to solve them. We can roll back the new laws by any means available to us in this new Congress, be it the filibuster, defunding or repeal. However, repeal of any new law will be highly unlikely with this president. But brace yourself, Effie, there will be howls from the Democrats and those on the left (but I repeat myself) who somehow think they’re doing the will of the people by passing laws at a record pace. What they’re really doing is reducing our freedom, just as hard and as fast as they can.

Let them howl. Let them scream until their voices give out, then, when we can no longer hear their bleating, tell them that their efforts to constrict our lives has failed and they can go back to wherever it is they came from and take their power-mad ways with them.

We will be free once more.

The 111th Congress – How Can We Miss You if You Won’t Go Away?

For this current Congress, the mid-terms never occurred. It’s still business as usual, despite the fact that America voted for change just a few weeks ago.

What we wanted (and expressed through our votes) was some fiscal responsibility in Washington. After two years of spending in a misguided attempt to get our economy going based on voodoo, Keynesian style, we’ve seen no improvement in our national situation. In fact, we’re in far worse shape now than when this Congress began.

So, what part of failure does this Congress not understand?

Now, normal people would be at least a little bit embarrassed by a record that stinks. And this Congress’ record reeks. Normal people would acknowledge the will of the American people and just go home. Not these folks.

Despite new record numbers of people in poverty, on food stamps (including far too many in the military), out of work for over a year, filing bankruptcy, foreclosing on their homes, this Congress looks like the Energizer Bunny, they just keep going and going.

Moreover, just yesterday, they set another record for public disapproval. This Congress is the most unpopular in the history of polling with a rate of only 13%. Yet they’re still on the job doing things that no legitimate body should be doing. In fact, a strong argument could be made that what they’re currently doing is illegitimate and illegal.

After all, many of them no longer have a job in Washington. They’re acting like an employee who knows he’s about to be fired at the company Christmas party who brings brownies laced with a laxative.

The legacy of this Congress will certainly be nothing to remember except for the damage they’ve done to the nation. Their radical, far-left agenda has left a once-great country teetering on the edge of insolvency. Record deficits are now eroding our economy like rust on an abandoned car. If not reined in, these deficits have the potential to literally kill the American Dream for the majority of us. And we don’t want that much. We’d just like to have a good paying job so we can have a bit of security, own our own home and provide for our families. However, even these modest wants are too much for this Congress to secure for us.

It’s much more important for them to expand the reach of the EPA with onerous new regulations, take over the country’s health care system, wildly overspend money that we must borrow from China, take over our financial system and our college loans, take over not one but two auto companies and defy established stockholder law, the list goes on. All this against the will of the people.

No wonder Roger Simon over at Pajamas Media likens Harry Reid to Hugo Chavez. The similarities are creepy, in addition to being destructive to both countries.

We should find a way to halt this lame-duck session. We should issue orders to Congress to cease immediately, stand down, and go home. After all, they’re supposed to work for us.

I know I’m dreaming. This Congress didn’t listen to us for two years, why start now? How many impassioned phone calls did they ignore urging them not to pass the ObamaCare bill for example?

America has seen what an out-of-control Congress can do to damage the country. And we’re going to feel the aftereffects for years to come. But we’ve started to change course. This new Congress has a clear mandate to stop or reverse as much of this destructive leftward lurch that we’ve been on for two years. Although you’ll hear folks like Slow Joe Biden and Harry Reid whine that Republicans are obstructing this president, the correct answer would be, “Hell yeah! We’ve had enough of your job-killing, bank-robbing, thuggish ways and we voted these people in to stop you in no uncertain terms. You are a lame duck administration.”

Get used to it.

An Open Letter to the Incoming Congress

Dear Members of the 112th Congress,

Allow me to be among the first Americans to welcome you to your new job. Congratulations to you. You have a unique job in all the world. Your decisions will have a direct effect upon millions of your fellow citizens for years to come. The opportunity for you is literally boundless. You may be able to lift America from the depths of malaise and incompetence that we’ve suffered under for the past four years during the reign of Nancy Pelosi and her progressive minions.

While there are many important issues facing the country, perhaps none is as important as solving our economic problems. We have them primarily because we’ve allowed the federal government to become far too big and unmanageable. The imposition of an increasing number of federal regulations, rules and taxes have created an environment that is hostile towards business and damaging to the country. The results are all around us – there are record numbers of Americans on food stamps and record numbers of Americans living in poverty. This is the legacy of progressivism, a legacy that is unbecoming the free people of this great country.

Our current economic problems will not be solved quickly. However, you can take steps to minimize the negative effects of too much government by following a few simple principles. First, understand that Americans need good, high-quality jobs. Our way of life is dependent upon creating an atmosphere that fosters the creation of a rich diversity of job options. The move towards a global economy has been an abject failure that has resulted in the massive export of good American jobs overseas. It is time to recognize the value in manufacturing American products for Americans. We can and should be constructing our own cars, computers and washing machines here in America. By not doing so, we are limiting our potential for growth and prosperity unnecessarily. By rejuvenating our manufacturing base, we will once again provide good jobs for a larger number of Americans.

Second, also understand that we need abundant and inexpensive sources of energy. The current regulatory environment is artificially restricting our ability to create these sources for no reason. Our way of life depends upon the wise utilization of our God-given natural resources, but our own government, aided by radical, far-left environmental groups, is preventing us from doing so. Much needed, new sources of power using proven, safe technology are under attack from these groups who are stifling our ability to have efficient energy supplies. Despite being unelected to any office, environmental groups are dictating national energy policy with no regard to the negative effects of their rules. Laboring under the false theory of “man-made climate change,” these groups are damaging our national interests. By standing in the way of proven sources of energy, these groups also bear a great responsibility for the current state of our economy. It is the hope of a nation that you will greatly diminish the harmful influence these fringe organizations currently impose on the construction of new oil refineries and nuclear power plants and you will encourage a return to an energy policy that adequately addresses the needs of a growing nation and a vibrant economy.

Finally, let me impress upon you the importance of conducting your affairs in Washington with the highest legal and moral standards. Let your actions always be guided by the knowledge that what you do has a direct effect on every American. Place yourself in the shoes of your fellow citizens when considering any issue. Guide your actions in a way that will bring honor and respect to our government. Never let there be any question that you are doing your very best to improve the lives of everyone in America.

In conclusion, it is with the best wishes of success that I welcome you to your new station. May it be filled with good things for you, your staff, and your country. May God Bless you and the United States.

Sincerely,
BackwardsBoy