Republicans may not abstain from participation!

Thousands of bloggers will hold you accountable

Republicans will not be allowed to sit out

You’ve admitted this is your strategy

It is not acceptable

No congressional abstinence, period

A little less passive aggressive, A little less spending, Mr. President

A little less passive aggressive

A little less spending, Mr. President

Your Support with Independents is sketchy

Thousands of bloggers intend to hold you accountable

Will Tax Cuts Really Help?

On Limbaugh’s Demands for Additional Tax Cuts

• The Bush administration spent trillions of dollars we didn’t have on things we didn’t need as well as things that did us harm like an unprovoked war in Iraq. Sooner or later this debt must be paid down. Later is almost here.

 • During the boom days of the past decade (that were created by wistful real estate buying and obstruction of mortgage regulations by the executive branch of the federal government) the Bush tax cuts (for the old fashioned investor classes) failed to generate sustainable economic growth across class lines as required for trickle-down economics to work effectively. In other words, new jobs, new businesses, new money were not created at levels that could generate the tax revenue required to manage the eight Bush budgets. Bottom line: trickle-down, Reaganomics, tax-cut stimulation failed in the 2000s to keep up with government spending just like it failed to keep up with government spending in the 1980s. These facts pre-date the onset of the banking crisis which became publicly visible in August of 2007. Our government was outspending itself in the good times.

• Rush Limbaugh presently spends his days demanding more tax cuts based on his presumption that we have not yet figured out that the Bush tax cuts didn’t work. The boom of the 2000s was a speculative housing bubble. Period. Nothing more. The Bush tax cuts did not generate sustainable economic growth. The tax cuts Limbaugh now so crudely demands will perform the task of righting the economy no more effectively than they performed under Bush.

• I am challenging loyal Rush listeners to call the show this week and start asking the hard questions that Rush doesn’t want to hear. Mr. Limbaugh, isn’t “insanity doing the same things over and over and expecting to get different results? If so, why should I support the policies of the Bush administration that created the budget deficits that plague our country today? It didn’t work during the Bush boom, why will it work during the Bush crash?”

• I’ve read Limbaugh’s holy-grail, by the way, Atlas Shrugged.  I probably read it before Rush read it.  It is the reason I am a fiscal conservative and not a liberal. It is an exceptional book with truly prescient insights into the chaos that surrounds us today. The author understood that it is the captains of industry who make opportunity and that they must be rewarded with a fair and reasonable tax code. I am not in favor of Obama deficits any more than I was in favor of Bush deficits. All this said, there are elements of the Obama budget that we must accept as necessary medicine. This is the subject of a future post. For now we have to stay on task. Limbaugh is demanding more of the bad medicine that created the economic collapse keeping Americans awake at night.

• Post disagreements, agreements, questions and challenges of any kind on this blog.  Get a dialogue going. It’s time for all of us to roll up our sleeves and get into the heart of the questions at hand like:  more tax or less tax for those earning over $250,000 per year?

President Elect Obama is the only elected official who responded publicly to my concerns more than two years ago. Thank you, Sir.

Shortly after Bush’s reelection, I began to sense America’s decline.  By late 2005 I had begun writing letters to every Senator and Representative who had ever represented me.  President Elect Obama was the only elected official to respond publicly and positively to my concerns. 

God bless you, Sir.  Congratulations.

Conservative response to Obama’s Election

The 20 -25 or so people I care for the most have tonight cried at and sworn over the outcome of this election.  I can only pray tonight that they each will soon begin to sense the passion and authenticity of a man who is not afraid to speak truth and define reality – who genuinely cares about their future – cares, especially, in comparison to the power brokers he has replaced. 

Let this be a holy place for the human spirit consecrated to the forces which magnify the soul.

Lincoln’s Prayer Proclomation – second posting

After months of isolation, I nearly lost my desire for occasional solitude.  After years of corruption, I nearly lost my conservative balance.  While the election cycle recovers from the full-tilt we experienced over the past two weeks, I find I’m left with prayer and deciding between the Prayer of St. Francis and the Prayer of Lincoln.

Lincoln’s Prayer Proclamation

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln called the nation to repentance, confession of our national sins and turning back to God. We believe America, more than ever, needs to do this again. Seven months prior to his Proclamation for a National Day of Thanksgiving, Abraham Lincoln issued the following:

A Proclamation for a National Day of Prayer

Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the supreme authority and just government of the Almighty God in all the affairs of men and of nations has by a resolution requested the president to designate and set apart a day for national prayer and humiliation.

And whereas, it is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God: to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon: and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord:

And insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people?

We have been the recipients of the choices bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God.

We have forgotten the gracious land which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us:

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

All this being done in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the divine teachings, that the united cry of the nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.

Abraham Lincoln

 

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

 

Alas, my favorite:

Let this be a holy place for the human spirit consecrated to the forces which magnify the soul.

Holy grail of the republican party

Reaganomics had a hand full of positive outcomes.  

That said,  the upside to trickle down economics looks something like obsolete and out of fashion household possessions assembled for a lawn sale while the downside looks like America’s mounting credit card balances, bankruptcy rates and 10 trillion dollar  national debt.   Unless the American voter is prepared to learn Chinese, our debt has to be tended to by a responsible president.   Please read this link where you’ll discover that Reaganomics failed to delivere on its promise of sufficient tax revenue generated by economic growth. 

If you don’t trust wiki, call an economist at your nearest Land Grant University and ask her to discuss the upside and downside to trickle economics.

 

Go to:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics

Campaign Reform: discovery period – voter fraud not admissible

Don’t we have to approach an 11th hour election attack with a healthy amount of skepticism?  

Go to:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/13/election-acorn-voter-fraud

Banking Crisis — my problem with truth

My only problem with truth is that it requires a lot of reading.

 

Please read all the way through.  You will find significant blame for Mr. Mandate.  Go to:  http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html

Why I Like Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin is unashamedly conservative.  She is proud of her family.  She does not pretend to be anyone other than who she is.  She is a social conservative. She is a Christian conservative.  She appears to be a fiscal conservative.  She pulls no punches.  She is charismatic.  She attended 6 colleges and earned a bachelor of science degree in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho. 

Reasons I won’t vote for Sarah Palin.  She is another pure-oil politician.  Her executive experience is unimpressive.   She blurs the line between personal and professional agendas (troopergate).   I expect our next executive officer to have a comprehensive working knowledge of basic political philosophies such as The Bush Doctrine (preemptive war) and The Carter Doctrine (military defense of US interests in global oil supplies).    I can stand about 40 yards from my parents front door and look both at their home and Kentucky at the same time.   This does not make me an expert in bestiality nor animal husbandry.  (Apologies to your wife brotherfour).   Don’t get me wrong.  I suspect Governor Palin could be given a crash course in international affairs, national security and perhaps even a rudimentary vocabulary for use while discussing the economic theories relevant to our present economic turmoil.  As John McCain has said, though, this is no time for on the job training.  (NOTE  Obama’s academic credentials:  Columbia University – B.A. political science with a specialization in international relations  &  Harvard – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude).  Note as well the Nobel Prize for Economics given to Paul Krugman for work that he started 30 years ago that today provides an outline of the Bush policies that led to our present global banking crisis.  Yes, I know, Rush Limbaugh doesn’t approve of Nobel Prize winning egg-heads who go around poking holes in the existing world order.  We do have to think for ourselves from time to time though.    Sarah is a fine person and I am confident I would enjoy her conversation over a cup of coffee.   My attraction to her position on a few social issues will not get my vote, nonetheless.

Additionally, there are many very well qualified and successful female politicians and business people with experience that is relevant to this brave new world filled with lost jobs, lost income, lost retirement accounts and a brand new vocabulary of scary words like recession, depression, derivatives and credit default swaps.   Look for a link below to top female candidates.  I have a personal attraction to her personality, her support for life and her support for gun rights, but she brings only one genuine contribution to the McCain campaign… distraction.  Keep your eyes on the ball America.  Our retirement funds and real estate investments are paying the price for two decades of collective indifference.  I do really like the way she winks and nods. 

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Does_Sarah_Palin_hold_any_degrees

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Which_college_degrees_does_Barack_Obama_have

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/gatemouth/partial_list_of_republican_women_more_qualified_to_be_president_than_sarah_palin.html

http://mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/FullArticle/CTOP/ntopNews_uUSTRE49C37520081013?p=1