JAMES SIMPSON: A common complaint we hear about members of Congress is that they have never served in the military. A total of 95 veterans of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and the National Guard are current House members (the 96th, John Murtha just died). This represents a mere 20 percent of sitting Members of Congress and is a record low. We can chalk this up as one good reason for Congress’s stunning ignorance regarding military matters.
“I will go to Washington to do battle against Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Steny Hoyer and the rest of them. They have never seen anything like the Southern fried butt whipping that’s coming at them!” Lt. Col. Allen West (Ret.)
Among the many encouraging signs for the nation as we head into the 2010 midterm elections is the number of first-time Republican candidates for Congress who are recent military veterans. There is even an organization supporting them: Iraq Veterans for Congress (IVC). Read more…
JAMES SIMPSON: Rick Sanchez made a bald-faced lie on CNN yesterday in defense of President Obama’s budget numbers. He was attempting to methodically debunk Republican claims about Obama budgets, arguing that most of the trillions in spending came on Republicans’ watch and Obama just added a little bit.
He started by claiming that Obama came into office facing a $1.2 trillion budget. Obama makes the same claim. Actually, the deficit for 2008, Bush’s last year in office, was $459 billion. Bush does share responsibility for TARP though, so you could say that Obama was only partially responsible for 2009’s deficit, even though his proposals added $787 billion in new spending through the failed “Stimulus,” which was not supported by Republicans.
I know, I know. It was all Bush’s fault, so Obama can’t be blamed even if he had to shell out $800 billion of our dollars to save his Wall Street and union friends. In fact, Bush and the Republicans do share some of the blame for the financial crisis, but it was a sin of omission, not commission. The truth is that the financial crisis was the direct result of a half-century of Democrat meddling with the housing market. Bush and the Republicans failed in that they did not push hard enough for needed reform.
But however you want to argue it for 2009, Obama owns the 2010 and 2011 budgets all alone. FY 2010 included the largest regular budgetary increase in recent history, a whopping 15 percent higher than Bush’s 2009 proposal. According to Obama’s 2011 budget, deficits for 2010 and 2011 are projected to be $1.6 trillion and $1.3 trillion respectively. And while Obama continues to call for health care reform, no spending for it is included in the 2011 budget.
The 2011 budget does, however, include an assumed $150 billion in deficit reduction from passage of healthcare reform. Who is he kidding? This is the same smoke and mirrors game the Senate played in claiming “savings” from overhauling healthcare. Don’t believe it! The true cost will be in the trillions. Read more…
JAMES SIMPSON: Newly minted Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell will be presenting the “Republican Response” to President Obama’s State of the Union address this coming Wednesday evening. Given McDonnell’s victory in Virginia, Chris Christie’s upset win in New Jersey, and especially Brown’s stunning triumph in Massachusetts, it is absolutely critical that McDonnell capture the optimism, energy and momentum these victories have generated by sending exactly the right message.
I hope Governor McDonnell hears me on this.
The reason Republicans are having such stunning success is because Republicans are currently the only viable alternative to the willfully destructive policies of the radical leftist Democrats currently in charge, and those policies are deliberately destructive. As an economist and researcher of radical movements for 25 years, I can speak with authority on this subject. I know this by the enormous mass of evidence available. My writings are but the tip of the iceberg.
Many U.S. citizens however, now recognize the same thing intuitively and have been responding with justifiable alarm. Therein lies the reason for the Tea Party movement’s explosive growth. Therein lies the reason people are taking precious time away from work and families, attending evening-long meetings, showing up at rallies and pouring energy into upstart campaigns. Therein lies the reason middle-aged people who never carried a sign in their lives, are showing up – I’ve seen ‘em even in wheelchairs and on oxygen – to express their outrage. Read more…
JAMES SIMPSON: Scott Brown’s stunning electoral victory in Massachusetts yesterday (in depth results here) confirms to the world what we have known all along: patriotism and common sense are alive and well. Real Americans remain a majority in this country, and the massively-funded, corrupt Democrat machine, engorged with our tax dollars, radical billionaire money and lock-step union support, cannot buy elections, even in hardcore Democrat states, once the sleeping giant has awoken.
And make no mistake about it: we are wide awake!
The Democrats were certainly hamstrung by choosing an impossibly bad candidate. Martha Coakley made a fool of herself repeatedly, yet throughout it all carried herself with an astonishing sense of conceited entitlement, seemingly contemptuous of even having to campaign at all. Meanwhile, her campaign took on an air of ugly thuggishness. Two scenes captured on video during this short campaign say it all. Everyone has seen the first one, where a reporter is pushed to the ground by a Coakley supporter while Coakley stands by doing nothing. Remember, she is the Massachusetts attorney general. The second one has received less attention, but is even more telling: a female reporter getting thrown out of a Coakley campaign office with shouts of “Nazi.” Someone even used the “F” bomb. What class acts.
JAMES SIMPSON: In a recent article we discussed the possibility that Democrats will introduce universal voter registration (UVR) legislation this year, and offered that as an explanation for their seeming carelessness in the face of plummeting poll numbers. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal was quoted in the article as asserting that UVR will open the nation up to massive vote fraud. The reasons are straightforward and many: 1. registering people using existing government databases will result in many duplicates; 2. many of the lists contain names of illegal immigrants; 3. the list could be expanded to include felons currently ineligible to vote.
The notion of universal voter registration has been, like most leftist agenda items, a long time in the making, but flying beneath the radar for all but those paying close attention. As a result, most of us are behind the curve. The left can thus present universal voter registration as a much-needed “reform,” with talking points and ready answers to objections all lined up, while the rest of us struggle to assess the damage it will do. But it will do damage, potentially permanent damage to our representative republic.
Most of the calls for UVR cite the fact that about 30 percent of eligible voters remain unregistered. (In the last election cycle 29 percent were not registered.) The radical left Nation magazine effuses:
It doesn’t have to be this way. Registration rates in other countries frequently run upwards of 90 percent (both Canada and France hit that mark, for example, while Venezuela stands at roughly 94 percent, and Russia about 97).
Venezuela and Russia. How has voter registration worked out for them? Not exactly the role models for democracy if you ask me, but then for the folks at Nation, they’re all of a piece. Just ask Bill Ayers.
JAMES SIMPSON: Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats while seemingly unconcerned by their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago: “what do they know that we don’t?”
We may have found out. It’s called universal voter registration. The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund described the Democrat plan recently at a David Horowitz Freedom Center forum.
Political Islam, i.e. radical Islam, is actually a cutout for continued communist aggession against the West. This is perhaps the most justifiable explanation for the resurgence of radical Islam in recent years, though it receives scant recognition.
We knew this to be true back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the communist-inspired PLO began its operations against Israel. We knew that Hezbollah and the other Muslim terrorist organizations got their training, weapons and support from Syria – a Ba’athist (Stalinist Arab Communist Party) country. We knew by extension that Syria, like all Soviet client states, was acting on behalf of the Soviet Union.
But after the Soviet Union “fell” in the 1990s, suddenly we were confronted with “Muslim” terrorism. Still the same actors, still the same support networks, still the same tactics, yet now it was supposedly a dire new threat. And if you think horrific public killings and suicide bombings – even using children – are an Islamic invention, ask anyone who served in Vietnam. Communist tactics, all. Even before the communists, Japanese frequently used this tactic in WW II. A very good article on Alternet.org, The Hard Truth About Suicide Bombers had this to say:
Martyr missions made their official twentieth-century debut in the Second World War with the Kamikazes; they showed up again in the 1960s, when Viet Cong sympathizers exploded themselves amidst U.S. troops. Their debut in the Islamic world was not until the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war.
If you listen to statements from jihadists like Osama Bin Laden, their justification for war against the West is based on the same tired slogans repeated by leftists since the 1930s, i.e. that America and its allies are “imperialist,” “greedy capitalists” “exploiting” the rest of the world, yada yada, only now it is the Muslim world we are supposedly oppressing.
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JAMES SIMPSON: A common complaint we hear about members of Congress is that they have never served in the military. A total of 95 veterans of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and the National Guard are current House members (the 96th, John Murtha just died). This represents a mere 20 percent of sitting Members of Congress and is a record low. We can chalk this up as one good reason for Congress’s stunning ignorance regarding military matters.
