President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year's State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.
The president's plan, which the officials said was under discussion before this month’s Democratic election setbacks, represents both a practical and a political calculation by this White House.
On the practical side, Obama has spent more money on new programs in nine months than Bill Clinton did in eight years, pushing the annual deficit to $1.4 trillion. This leaves little room for big spending initiatives.
In surveying the cultural carnage in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on a military installation in U.S. history, it bears noting that there have been seismic shifts in America. When America was free of the shackles of Islam, say, fifty years ago, the current response to such an attack by an enemy faction would have been unthinkable.
I have watched in abject horror the elites' stunning reaction to this act of war. The denial, the submission, the excuses, the dodging, the self-flagellation, the shame -- the deceiving of the American people by the media, the military, society, law enforcement, authorities and politicians, all the way up to and including the White House -- amounts to the enforcement of Shariah law.
A week after a Muslim jihadi gunned down more than 40 fellow citizens at Ft. Hood, Texas, America’s national security leadership still won’t admit that the attack had anything to do with Islam.
By failing to acknowledge that connection, those with a constitutional duty to defend this nation “against all enemies foreign and domestic” consistently substitute a policy of political correctness at the expense of military readiness.
The fact is that the 5 November 2009 attack that took the lives of thirteen American patriots was not just an act of terrorism: it was an act of war.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes and is not responsible for climate change, a scientist has claimed.
Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist from Adelaide University, argues that a recent rise in temperature around the world is caused by solar cycles and other "extra terrestrial" forces.
He said carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, widely blamed for global warming, is a natural phenomenon caused by volcanoes erupting.
Prof Plimer said the world has experienced three periods of cooling since 1850 and furthermore carbon dioxide was increasing during many of those cooler periods.
Thirty years ago this week, a group of Iranian "students" shouting "death to America" stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking nearly 100 hostages -- among them 65 Americans.
Though foreign national employees and some Americans were released within a few weeks, the remaining 52 were held for 444 days.
For the American people, it was an introduction to militant Islam.
For then-President Jimmy Carter, intent on "engaging" the radical regime that had replaced Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, it was a disaster.
The Obama administration appears to have missed the lessons of this debacle.
[Editor: The following text is known simply as "The Speech". It was a standard oratory delivered by Ronald Reagan when he was stumping for Barry Goldwater in 1964. It is a classic treatise on the principles of conservatism.]
I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.
It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."
This idea -- that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power -- is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream--the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.
Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.
Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything.
We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments....
We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.
We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....
Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.
Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.
If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.
They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Roadmap to Victory
Jefferson on the National Debt
I sincerely believe that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling future generations on a large scale.
The earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge the second with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.
Neither the representatives of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled, can validly engage debts beyond what they may pay in their own time.
The natural right to be free of the debts of a previous generation is a salutary curb on indebtment, which, since the modern theory of the perpetuation of debt, has crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating.
We, as Americans, shall consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves.
If the nation runs into such debts that our rulers must tax what we eat and drink, our comforts and amusements–even our necessities–then we are as a people with rivets chained around our necks.
To preserve the independence of the people, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.
Quote of Note
I got a request here from a major American print publication asking for 400 words on my hope for the Obama presidency. I don't need 400 words. I need four: I hope he fails. Everybody thinks that's outrageous to say. What's unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Were the liberals out there hoping Bush succeeded or were they out there trying to destroy him? Liberalism is our problem. It's what has gotten us dangerously close to the precipice. Why do I want more of it?
