Let’s put aside political affiliation for the moment and look at the recent developments on Washington. The first one I would like to talk about is the fact that the day after Obama’s Health Care bill passed, Bart Stupak and his coalition of 10 pro-life representatives requested billions in earmarks. Remember that the “compromise” reached between the Democrat party and the Stupak 11 was for the president to issue an executive order banning the use of federal funds for abortion. Legally, executive orders cannot overturn laws passed by Congress, therefore, two posts ago, I accused the Democrats of bribing or threatening Stupak (and by implication, the group he represented). At the moment, people on the right are pointing at this as proof of said bribery… but I am not convinced. Looking at the numbers, some are lower than last years earmarks and some are higher, yet this does not seem like a sufficient enough bribe. In other words, health care bill or no health care bill, these congresspersons may have requested the same amount. Given the fact that the Democrats have the majority in both houses of Congress, there is no reason to believe that they would not have received these earmarks anyways. While the timing is suspect and any independent thinker can see the absurdity of the Stupak “compromise” (a non-legally binding executive order), if they were threatened it might be difficult to find out and if they were bought off then I think we should be looking at something more substantial than this. Possibly this is part of a series of small payoffs and if so, we must wait to see how much the total is. Regardless of political affiliation, the Stupak episode does indeed stink to high heaven… especially since the margin of victory was 7 votes and the bill was/is opposed by a significant majority of Americans.

Moving on to the what I consider to be a real dirty trick: Obama proposed opening areas off the east coast and potentially areas off the Alaskan coast for oil and gas drilling. Personally, I welcome this as an opportunity to become more energy independent as we have seen what reliance on Middle East oil can lead to. Regardless of the merits, we must take a look at what is happening in Washington and understand why Obama is proposing something that he adamantly opposed and ridiculed during his campaign. See video:

Of course, in politician fashion, he made some indications that he was willing to change his mind, trying not to lock himself into a position, but in speech after speech across the country he outlined in a professorial manner the reasons why he opposed offshore drilling. He even said that he would keep the moratorium in place around the country. This pleased his base. It pleased environmentalists. But now we see that Obama and McCain agreed on this major issue, they both wanted to expand offshore drilling… sometimes it makes me wonder if there are any real differences between these “establishment” Republicans and the Democrats… in many ways they agree (see: Obamacare/Romneycare). I think that they tend to agree, not because their ideologies are the same, but because they do not stick to their guns, they retreat on their own principles just for politics’ sake. And for those who thought that Obama was post-political I think by now they have woken up.

This concession to the Republicans on offshore drilling was something he talked about during the state of union address. In that same address, he talked about meeting with Republicans about health care so that they could reach a compromise on the bill. This is starting to look like a pattern. As I wrote before, it is clear that the president is using this concession as a political prop, something that he can point at and say “look, I tried to compromise with them, but they didn’t budge.” With the health care meeting, little to nothing was accomplished and the Democrats proceeded with their nuclear option: reconciliation. No Republican voted for it. Obscure Senate rules were used to pass the most sweeping non-budgetary legislation in years by a bare majority, something that Congress has never done before. Reconciliation has only been used to tweak the system, lower/raise taxes, extend or retract coverage, change qualifications and requirements for our old health care system, not ever for a top-to-bottom restructuring of one sixth of our economy, here is a list on page 9 showing that only budget related items were passed using reconciliation. The scope of this bill was too large and should not have been passed through reconciliation, which stifles debate and dissent.

Enough about that though. This new concession by the administration seems to be in the same spirit as the “GOP health care sit-down,” i.e. it is simply a political prop. This is the only way to explain this about-face by the president, who previously said that this would do little to end our dependence on foreign oil but now calls this decision necessary to ensure energy independence. Amazing. What will the administration use this prop for? Probably for a bill that is being worked on by Senators John Kerry, D-Mass., Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that is a revision of the cap-and-trade bill. It’s a bill already being called Cap-and-Tax and is being heralded as a job-killer and another huge burden on American citizens because of higher energy costs and taxes. Its aim is to reduce carbon emissions by a significant percentage, but ultimately this will do little or nothing to curb emissions. Primarily because the United States is not the top air polluter, that crown belongs to China, and China will not sacrifice its quest for economic dominance by becoming more environmentally friendly. In fact, China refuses international monitoring of its carbon emissions and calls on the US to provide more money to combat climate change. The top Chinese climate negotiator has said “there was still uncertainty about the causes of global warming… there are still two different viewpoints in the scientific field,” which shows their reluctance in slowing their economic machine by cutting emissions.

Ultimately, this means that the Democrats are now on their way to asserting more power over the energy industry in this country which ultimately will lead to higher costs, put small companies out of business, and higher taxes. Do we want to live in a country where only the large oligopolies can survive because of excessive government taxation and regulation? Do we want to make small businesses a thing of the past? Obama has admitted on the record that his proposals would bankrupt the coal industry, which provides the majority of electricity in this country (see video here). This is too extreme. Too many jobs will be lost. All Americans must come together and choose a path that is not so destructive to America’s middle class. The health care bill already increases the burden on the middle class through mandates, higher taxes (there are a few tax cuts and many tax increases, here’s a list of some), and cuts in Medicare. The Cap-and-Trade 2.0 version is part of the second wave of attacks on the middle class.

Already, the political gears are turning and trying to secure the votes by any means necessary, including symbolic concessions such as the offshore drilling proposal. Our government is tightening the screws on America. The Democrats have gotten punch-drunk with power and have betrayed their promises to the American people in order to pass a more government-centric agenda. This was expected though. We must fight to stop them or our present and future generations will be stuck with a bill too large to pay and we will no longer be the greatest nation on Earth. We can’t let that happen.

-AG

It’s a little old, but I enjoyed this video very much. Enjoy.

-AG

I have not written lately because what is happening in America right now is terrifying. This week, the Congress passed the Democrat party’s health care reform bill, to summarize: it is a law that imposes mandates on Americans simply because they are alive, increases taxes, and sets out to control the entire health care system. The United States government has now nationalized wide swaths of the US economy and are encircling individual freedom. In the age of Obama, the United States has nationalized, bailed out, and set out to control the financial sector of the economy and this week they audaciously asserted their power by passing a law that requires Americans to purchase a product. They have gone after mortgages, money in general, cars, and our health. Everyday we surrender more to the federal government… and there seems to be no end in sight.

The way that the Democrats rammed this down the throats of Americans was shameful. They lied. They cheated. They bribed. A prime example is when congressman Bart Stupak, who was leading a group of anti-abortion Democrats to vote against the bill, hammered out a compromise with the president which would require Obama to issue an executive order banning the use of federal funds for abortion. Everyone everywhere knows that the executive order has no legal weight, so what is it that really made Stupak change his mind? In my opinion, they bought him. That, or they threatened him. Either way, through stick or carrot they herded the donkeys to vote on a bill that is so terrible, so dangerous to freedom that I believe that America’s superpower status will soon be over because of it.

There are many terrible parts of this new law, the individual mandates being one of them, but there is another part that is equally dangerous to our Republic. The law establishes something called the “Independent Medicare Advisory Board… a 15-person board of independent experts chosen by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and empowered to cut through congressional gridlock.” By design, it seems to be part of the executive branch and it answers only to the president (at least in terms of appointment). The powers of this board are near-absolute when it comes to health care (the government administered portion of it) because they make decisions that Congress cannot revise, ignore, or overrule. This means that the executive branch can now pass laws and reforms that Congress cannot easily overturn, a complete reversal of the ideas that our government was founded on. This board IS the death panel, ladies and gentlemen. These are the rationers, the people who determine which treatments are good and which are bad, and the people in charge of cutting Medicare which will inevitably come to cover a huge percentage, if not the majority, of Americans in the near future.

Now imagine if you live in an impoverished part of Latin America… wouldn’t the idea of emigrating to the United States, where not only can you possibly get a job doing some sort of menial labor but you also get FREE health care courtesy of the US taxpayer? In fact, wouldn’t public housing and public health care be an incentive for people to remain in poverty, especially in the US where poverty is nowhere near as bad as poverty in many places around the world? The US nanny-state that today exists will make immigration a bigger issue and will only perpetuate poverty. This is exactly what the Left wants.

So while the lefties of America are cheering over the passage of the health care takeover bill, most regular Americans feel like they have lost something valuable. They are right. We have lost some of our freedom. Losing that freedom gives many a feeling of emptiness, a feeling of emptiness that comes from realizing that tyranny continues tearing away at America, a feeling of emptiness that I share with those many. Despite that feeling, or rather because of that feeling, we as Americans cannot let up, we must push forward. The vote is still our most powerful weapon, even if in this instance our vote seemed to count for nothing. We can vote them all out. We must. The very existence of our free Republic depends on it. I don’t merely mean the Democrats, I now reserve special ire for the big government Republicans who during Bush inflated government and betrayed our trust. It was the big government Republicans who set the stage for today’s events, for the sheepishness of our people, for the demagoguery of Obamism that we are now subject to. I’m sick of it. It is high time for a renewed revolution in this country, one of ideas… the left’s utopic ideals are the mask of tyranny, the lemmings follow these ideas, and off the cliff we go… the real revolutionaries of today are the ones with common sense, the ones who believe in freedom, the ones who have the guts to stand up to these self-righteous, pompous fools who point their fingers at you, commanding you to buy their product of choice, to stop driving cars because it angers the “earth-spirit,” to not make so much money because it’s bad, to give up your paycheck for the welfare of some lazy leech, to hold your tongue because someone, somewhere might be offended somehow, to give terrorists more rights, to not be Christian while saying that Islam is just misunderstood, to not protest their agenda or else you’re a racist. I say we need these real revolutionaries to stand up and take our country back.

Peering into the abyss, the progressives’ agenda for America, for too long is dangerous and shortly after the health care vote I prayed that no one would take these feelings of powerlessness and turn them into acts of violence. We cannot afford that in our great country. That’s what these Leftists want, to push Americans into a corner and then have us react so that they can finally use our reaction as an excuse to take away the last bit of freedom we have. Don’t give them the pleasure. Vote them out. Call them out on their treasonous, incompetent ideas. Do not shy away from a discussion in public anymore. Speak truth to power. Don’t back down. They’ll call us racist. They’ll call us paid mercenaries. They’ll call us stupid. They’ll call us anything they can think of… but our Republic is dying. You don’t want to think back and regret not speaking up when the time came, and trust me, the time has come.

-AG

People new to this site or who are not familiar with communism in practice may not like some of my claims about big government and the leftist agenda in America… but this is probably because the idea of what government should be has never been fully thought through by regular folks out there. I mean, when times are good, when we are not being killed by enemies and our economy is humming along, no one really pays attention to politics… only when times are tough do we have a majority that start having real, hard opinions on what is happening in our country, but by the time they do start thinking critically, people start worrying about what the government should do and not questioning what the role of government should be. This is the most important question.

Ultimately, citizens must decide on how much government is best. Conservatives, true conservatives, believe that a society where government simply serves as an arbiter, as a protector of rights, contracts, and provider of national security is the best model. This belief stems from our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that provided our nation more than two hundred years ago with one of the most effective and free forms of government ever conceived. Mistakes were made along the way and mistakes are being made as we speak, but essentially, the dream of America is what made this country great and what, God willing, will make this country even greater in the future. Conservatives answer the question of the role of government by putting faith in a balanced idea of freedom and responsibility, faith in free market competition, and faith in the first principles upon which our nation was founded.

Other nations have answered this question differently. The extreme examples are the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Of these countries, most of them have teetered on the verge of starvation, one collapsed without a shot being fired, and one is growing because they have embraced a limited free market model. This is the (sadly) enduring legacy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the architects of the idea of communism, i.e. absolute central government power.

The modern liberals, since FDR, answer the question of government’s role in a similar fashion. They believe that the government should be placed in charge of things beyond what government was initially intended for and this belief makes them think of themselves as “progressives“… in charge of progress. They find disparity, in any sense, unnerving and therefore see government as the only vehicle to address such disparity. The answer to pressing needs, for liberals, tends to be “more government,” with the idea behind such a belief being: if it’s important, then government should be taking care of it. This is the liberal opinion of what government’s role is. Motivations and ulterior motives aside, I believe, as do conservatives in general, that such an approach puts us on the road to a more centrally planned society… a repudiation of the American Dream.

The idea of liberty is one that most Americans believe in. Most liberals I talk to are more put off by the “social issues” espoused by the right than the ideas of fiscal responsibility or limited role of government… but I often ask these liberals if we should ignore American culture outright? Is that the nature of our republic? To ignore the beliefs of a people and deny them their right to be heard? Whether the issue is abortion rights or prayer in school, shouldn’t American citizens get a say in these types of decisions? Theocracy is as terrible as communism and true conservatives do not believe in that type of society. Right now, with the leftward swing of government, conservatism is experiencing a sort of revival, a revival that does not necessarily include socially-based politics. This is a good thing. Politics should focus more on the political than on the spiritual especially because our founding fathers erred on the side of liberty rather than the side of morality when they thought up our great system. This also applies to the left, meaning we should not impose a particular secular moral code on America either. People can choose for themselves. Conservatives are reclaiming their political power in the wake of the leftist takeover of Washington and this is something that should be cheered by all parts of the political spectrum… if successful, conservatives will hold Republicans accountable for their mismanagement and for their complicity in the culture of corruption that engulfs both parties. Conservatives believe that the solution lies in reducing the scope and size of government, for if there is nothing for the special interests to pay for, no one will get paid off. Those that would nudge us in the direction of a Big Nanny State bring us dangerously closer to a society where government gives and government takes at its own discretion, where personal freedom gets taxed, mandated, and regulated, and where people start to lose the American spirit… this I call socialism, a society based on the collective that stamps out the individual, and those who advocate for “spreading the wealth around” I call socialists. It may seem extreme to those who think that socialism represents only those dictatorships with the goose-stepping military marches and large statues of stern-looking demagogues, but in truth many of those systems were put into place by people who thought that government was the answer for all their problems… until their own governments got so out of control that it became the problem. Socialism starts somewhere… and that somewhere is the minds of everyday Americans who place more trust in a central earthly authority than in the power and endless potential of human freedom.

-AG