Immigration Reform? No, Emigration Reform!

   Now that President Obama and the left wing of the Democrat party have secured their healthcare victory, they have begun to turn their attention to the rest of their leftist agenda. High on the list is immigration "reform." Immigration is high on the Democrats' list for November for two reasons, neither of which has a lot to do with securing borders or orderly entry into the U.S.

   The first reason the Democrats will push immigration reform is that it is a divisive issue that has the potential to split the Republican party in advance of November's critical elections. Never were Republicans so united on domestic policy as they were during the bruising healthcare debate. Forcing individual Republicans to go on record on immigration will to a great degree neutralize the GOP's strategy of forcing individual Dems to go on the record about where they stood when healthcare and student lending were nationalized.

   The second reason the Dems like immigration as a "wedge" issue is that it will further erode Republican standing with Hispanic voters-one of the fastest growing voter blocs in the nation. In fact, if Democrats are as unscrupulous on this issue as they were on healthcare, they could consign Republicans to permanent minority status.

   So into this debate comes this bit of news: Every year the U.S. deports almost 140,000 criminal aliens. We tend to think that the bad actors come here and set up shop forever, but the G-men do get their man quite often. These are 140,000 convicts that have come here and broken our laws.

   But here's the alarming part: 100,000 of these cons come from one country-Mexico. The first crime committed by most of these former prisoners was illegally entering our country. Granted, a lot of these crimes are things like driving without a license, shoplifting or public drunkenness. But a lot of them get sent up for narco-trafficking related offenses. From San Diego to Brownsville, distance of nearly 1,300 miles, our southern border has become a third world lawless region, like the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mexican drug lords have exported their violence and drugs to the streets of American cities like El Paso and Laredo.

   Of course, the Mexican government blames us-if the U.S. didn't have as many drug users, the entire Mexican peninsula would be a Garden of Eden. You've created the problem, they say, so solve it yourselves. And the "Blame America" crowd that is now in charge of the American government agrees.

   Well, I don't agree. And neither do the majority of Americans, according to the polls. Mexico is a corrupt oligarchy. The entire country is run by a handful of rich, connected families. It bears a stronger resemblance to The Sopranos than it does to a democratic government. This clan-government creates a society where criminality exists from top to bottom. And we pay the price.

   But here's how to stop it. Every year we ship a hundred thousand Mexican cons back home. While they're here, we billet them in our prisons, feed them, clothe them and take care of their families on the outside. The cost? About $6.5 billion each year, according to one estimate of the California prison system. That's money out of the pocket of U.S. taxpayers.

   It's time for us to make sure that that money comes out of the pocket of the Mexican government or the Five Families, or whoever runs the place. We send Mexico some $30 million a year, according to the latest estimates, in "Official Foreign Aid." This is essentially bribery. We're bribing the Mexicans to be nice to us, not to cuddle up to caudillos like Hugo Chavez or the Castro brothers. $30 million, no strings attached.

   Sorry, Pancho. Time to attach some strings. You keep your riff raff out of our country, or we send you a bill for their care and feeding by the California, Arizona and Texas departments of corrections. Better yet, we deduct their room and board at the Hotel California from your OFA. Let's see...at $30 million a year in OFA it's going to take you about two centuries to work off that debt.

   To help you pay down your debt faster, we could also steal a page from the Democrat playbook and readjust the NAFTA treaty to re-tariff goods coming in from Mexico. That would help our neighbors to the south work pay back the vig faster. If the Mexicans retaliate and tax our goods, fine. We can hold out longer without strawberries, tee shirts and plastic statues of the Pope than they can without American movies, CDs or Levis.

   The point is that we're never going to solve the immigration problem till we solve the "emigration" problem: until the Mexicans have some skin the game to stop exporting their social problems to the U.S. Uncle Junior and his crew can run their country any way they want. I don't care. But until they have a financial reason to control the border from their side, our immigration policy will be decided by the same crew of geniuses that brought you socialized medicine. And that's enough to make anybody sick.

   Just thought you might like to know.

High Noon in Health Care

   It's coming up on noon in Washington and everything's gotten real quiet. As Pres. Obama says, the politicians have said everything there is to say about healthcare. That leaves the rest of us waiting for the final showdown on healthcare which should come on Sunday. In this stare-down will the Democrats shoot quick and straight and take down one-sixth of the U.S. economy? Or will the conservatives in both parties get the drop on the Dems and once and for all kill of this charade known as ObamaCare?

  The president is correct in saying that the time for talk is over. But the time for understanding is just beginning. Once the president sits down in the Rose Garden with a pocket full of pens and signs this disaster the American people will just begin to understand how a crowd of venal Chicago pols could conspire with a cadre of septugenarian Congressional leftists out for their Last Ride and pull off what amounts to a coup d'etat on American government.

  These proponents of ObamaCare will have trampled on the Constitution in a mad rush to get to the Rose Garden before Americans begin understanding what's happening. They will have resorted to multiple bribes in Congress, parliamentary tricks, smear tactics, obfuscation, and plain old lies to avoid the truth on this bill.

But the truth is unavoidable. There are really only three justifications currently given for adopting this disasterous piece of legislation, and the truth about each is inescapable:

• "My proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions-families, businesses, and the federal government."
• So says Pres. Obama. But the reality is starkly different. Small family businesses that purchase their own insurance without the benefit of group plans will see their costs escalate. That's because ObamaCare will be forced to accept all policy seekers without regard to pre-existing health conditions. That means insurers will have to spread the cost of caring for these less healthy people over all their policy holders.
• The president's plan will add millions of people to the existing Medicaid program. Saying that the additional cost of caring for these people will reduce cost defies logic.
• This bill is "fully paid for."
• Again, this defies logic. The government is running record deficits and is deeply in debt. It can't pay for what is has on the books, let along add a new entitlement.
• Here's the truth the president is hiding: The only reason it looks fully paid for is because the Democrats have schemed to doctor the true cost of the bill. They've done this by removing the cost of certain Medicare reimbursements to doctors that they'll inevitably have to pay. This is like signing for a new $40,000 car, putting $5,000 down, and bragging that the car only will cost you $5,000. Anybody drawing breath will know that you still have $35,000 to pay on the car, the true cost of which is $40,000. Nobody would believe your alleged car-buying prowess. The president belittles and underestimates the American people by thinking he can fool them with the same scam in healthcare.
• This bill "brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion over the next two decades."
• The real cost of this bill? About $2.3 trillion. Again, the logic-defying arithmetic is that the bill will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion by adding $2.3 trillion.
• Whatever cost savings are achieved in this bill come through legislative and budgetary sleight of hand. These include
• It takes $50 million in Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets to the spending bill. Either the Democrats have no intentioin of paying those benefits or they're counting them twice: in healthcare and in Social Security.
• The Democrats are sneaking into the healthcare bill their plan to socialize college student lending because they've tricked the Congressional Budget Office into blessing their claim that the lending takeover will save money. So by including these phantom savings in the healthcare bill they get to claim the savings for healthcare-even though they have nothing to do with healthcare.

Whether it's the "deem and pass" parliamentary trick that will let House Democrats pass this bill without having their dirty fingerprints all over it, or the voodoo math that they've used to trick the CBO into blessing it, this bill is a perfidy on the public trust. It is the poster child for what's wrong with Congress. The clock is ticking down to High Noon.

Just thought you might like to know.

Chief Justice Roberts Fires Back at Pres. Obama

   The wires were abuzz this week with news of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts' speech to the law school at the University of Alabama. Chief Justice Roberts broke his silence about Pres. Obama using his State of the Union address in February to lash out at the Supreme Court"s recent decision on campaign financing.


 
By a narrow margin the Court invalidated certain restrictions on campaign financing by corporations and labor unions. Pres. Obama lashed out at the decision in front of the justices who were forced to sit there, stone-faced, as the overwhelmingly Democrat chamber applauded loudly around them. It was a scene out of a North Korean re-education camp.

   Chief Justice Roberts today questioned whether the Court should continue attending the annual State of the Union affair, saying that the event had "degenerated into a political pep rally."

  Obama Minister of Propaganda, "Bagdad Bob" Gibbs, staunchly flaked for the president, saying in reply that the Court ruling opens the door for Big Corporations to buy elections. (In the liberal half of the world there's always a bogeyman, and the bogey is always Big.)

   But that's a red herring. Few if any corporations can or would do that because they have to answer to too many people. For example, they would risk loss of business by endorsing a conservative candidate and risk upsetting their more liberal customers. The same goes for financially supporting liberal candidates and causes. No company wants to risk a product boycott. And if sales do decline because of a company's political activism the company's management has to answer to shareholders who care about only one thing: their investment.

  Truth be told, the ruling, far from ushering in a new era of Robber Barons, as the president intimated, actually benefits Mr. Obama's biggest supporters: labor unions. Labor union spending on elections far exceeds that of corporate America, $80 million in the last presidential election. Labor bosses themselves strutted around after Pres. Obama's election and claimed that they were responsible for putting him in the White House, with millions of dollars in donations and thousands of get-out-the-vote foot soldiers. The Court's ruling only increases their ability to buy elections.

   In seeking to embarrass the Justices Pres. Obama said that they had "reversed a century-old law...that will open the flood gates for special interests." But the president, who bills himself as something of a constitutional scholar should have known that the turn-of-the-20th-century law he claimed the ruling invalidated wasn't the issue. It was a portion of the more recent McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act that the Court took to to the woodshed.

   Let's assume for a minute that the president confused the two laws, rather than engaged in deliberate demagoguery, railing against "special interests". The real issue is that he committed a transgression not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the Court to task 73 years ago for invalidating much of his New Deal program (It's a prickly thing, that Constitution.) In addition to socialist-leaning politics, Barack Obama shares what was FDR's boundless self-confidence that somehow his intellect gave him the right to act badly in public.

   The Supreme Court is the most respected institution in the U.S. At a time like this, when the president's job approval ratings continue to sink like a two-seam fastball, and Congress' job approval rating hovers down there with used car salesmen and televangelists, the Supreme Court remains nearly universally respected. Does the Court always get it right. No.  Both liberals and conservatives rail against specific decisions, and not all individual justices are held in the same regard. But the institution of the Court is respected by nearly everyone.

   That's because no matter who we are, where we come from, whether we're rich or poor, black or white, we all feel that the Supreme Court is the last stop on Democracy Road. It's the institution that will set things right when everything else seems so wrong. It is the one place we can go where we think we'll get a fair shake, no matter if our name is Linda Brown or Ernesto Miranda. Yaser Hamdi or George Bush. The one place that's never forgotten the Forgotten Man, because it doesn't forget the Constitution.

   Mr. Constitutional Scholar, Mr. Defender of the Forgotten Man, forgot. He forgot when insulted the Court on national TV.

   Mr. Obama's supporters use a lot of adjectives to describe him. Brilliant. Articulate, Cool. I'll add another based on his State of the Union performance.

   Graceless.

   Just thought you'd like to know.

The Evil Empire vs. the Apologist-in-Chief

   Tomorrow, March 8, marks the anniversary of one of the defining speeches of our time: Pres. Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech. Like Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech 38 years before, and Pres. Reagan's own speech 15 days later, outlining a vision of a "strategic defense initiative," the Evil Empire speech set the tone for the Reagan foreign policy for the remainder of his presidency.

   Speaking to a group of evangelicals, Pres. Reagan pulled no punches in comparing the expansionist Soviet Union to an evil empire, complete with its gulag and its constellation of satellite nations.

   By speaking more openly and freely about the Soviet Union than any other American president had, Mr. Reagan for the first time challenged the very moral underpinnings of the USSR.

   Fifteen days later, Mr. Reagan followed up his Evil Empire speech with a speech that described his vision of a virtual nuclear shield that could be deployed over and shared with peace loving democracies across the globe.

   The mainstream media and the liberal intelligencia ridiculed both speeches. Mr. Reagan was accused of oversimplifying the Cold War, fear mongering, chest thumping, and pushing the world closer to nuclear war.

   But it was Ronald Reagan's clear vision that triumphed. His willingness to say what other world leaders knew but were afraid to say--that the Soviet Union was a morally bankrupt state bent on world domination--and his willingness to raise the military stakes with the Soviets that consigned the evil empire to the "ash heap of history," as the president had predicted.

    Within seven years the USSR collapsed, a victim of its own immorality and inability to match the American economy, ingenuity, values, strength, and a president who refused to compromise on the evil he saw.

   In his Evil Empire speech he challenged his audience to ignore the temptation of labeling both the United States and the Soviet Union equally "at fault" in the nuclear arms race. He reminded them that there is no moral equivalence between defending freedom and enslaving whole populations.

   Ronald Reagan stands in clear contrast to Barack Obama. Mr. Obama's foreign policy relies on wanting people to like America, rather than on the values of truth and liberty for which the world has come to rely on America. So instead of the moral clarity of "evil empires," and "ash heap of history," we get apologies to the Muslim world for defending freedom and welcoming its sons and daughters. Instead of the "shining city on a hill" we get repeated bows to foreign leaders.

   When Ronald Reagan spoke in 1983 his words were exhilarating to Americans sick of the Soviet quest for dominance, and to captive nations behind the Iron Curtain. When Barack Obama has spoken,  we have ambiguity and weakening of the traditional role that America has played in the world, and which, if truth be told, most people want us to continue playing.

Just thought you might like to know.
 

Obama Plans to Nationalize Student Lending

   Now that Pres. Obama has approved the necessary legislative sleight of hand required, it's pretty much a done deal that Democrats will use the arcane reconciliation procedure to ram their healthcare plan down the throats of an unwilling American public.

   What is just coming to light this morning is a Democrat plan to use the reconciliation process to enact their other leftist priorities-priorities that are so unpopular that they could never garner the 60 votes needed in the Senate to break a Republican filibuster. Their MO: sneak their leftist priorities into law as part of the healthcare  bill.

   First out of the chute looks like it will be the rewriting of the Higher Education Act. The Democrats want to privatize student lending by making it part of healthcare legislation.  That's right, the Democrats plan to use the Senate's anti-filibuster law to make it illegal for banks or other private companies to lend money to college students. This according to the Wall Street Journal today.

   Only the 1970s era Stalinists who control Congress would see as progress a plan to rob American families  of freedom of choice by making the Kremlin, excuse me, Washington, the only place to get a student loan.

   This move is part of Pres. Obama's continuing plan to cover up his inability to deal with a bad economy by blaming all the nation's troubles on "Big Banks." With Pres. Obama, there's always someone else who's the bogeyman and the bogey is always BIG.

   The president's gofer in this is Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a normally level-headed guy, who lamely claims that the move will eliminate "subsidies" to the banking industry and net the government $70 billion in savings. But, as with all new Democrat plans, to save that $70 billion will cost $80 billion in new spending.

   But wait, that's not all. Sen. Judd Gregg  (R-NH) and John  Kline (R-MN) say that the Obama estimates are inflated to begin with because the government's own accounting rules lets them sweep the impact of loan defaults under the rug. (Can you say "Fannie" and "Freddie"?) And they say that the administration has purposely kept the new spending guesses artificially low. (Let me see...What does it cost to launch a new bureaucracy nowadays?)

   Here's the most dishonest part: Pres. Obama is engineering this scam so that it will fly under the radar. The use of reconciliation by Congressional Democrats  to pass their healthcare debacle will create a diversion. While the American public is wrapped up in the final chapter of the healthcare debacle, the President's plan to put student lenders out of business will slip through without the debate that he undoubtably knows he'd lose. Nice, huh?

   The Democrats have already, for all intents and purposes, nationalized the banking industry. They've nationalized two-thirds of the American automotive industry. They are about to nationalize 18% of the U.S. economy with the takeover of healthcare. Now the nationalization of student lending. Connect the dots and tell me what you see.

   Don't let it happen. Pass around this post, especially to the parents of prospective college students.  Take it viral. Get mad as hell. Get this post to your congressman. Because if they can sneak something like student lending past the watchdogs of freedom, they can sneak anything through.

Just thought you might like to know.
  

A Little "Chin Music" for the Senate

   Obstructionist. Heartless. Defiant. These are just some of the more polite epithets hurled at Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning this week as he temporarily blocked a bill that would authorize $10 billion in additional benefits for the unemployed.

   Sen. Bunning, a former Major League Baseball pitcher of great distinction, was vilified for bucking even his own party to hold up the benefits. But the only U.S. senator (in fact, the only baseball player) to have authored a no-hitter in both the American (Detroit Tigers) and National (Philadelphia Phillies) leagues was trying to make a simple point: The U.S. government is broke. Any money for the unemployed will have to be borrowed or paid for by cutting some existing program.

  Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, have no problem with the former. It's the latter that they can't bring themselves to do.

  At age 77, the trim, athletic Bunning still looks like he could still walk in from the bullpen in the 8th or 9th inning and get you a couple of outs.  In making a point about a $10 billion bill, he laid to waste the myth of the"pay as you go" pledge Democrats made when they took over Congress in 2006. "Paygo," as it is called, is as much a sham as the party's current healthcare bill. It's a sham because excluded from the paygo rules is the fastest growing area of federal spending: entitlements, or social spending, including unemployment compensation.

   So Sen. Bunning, for many years a thumbtack under the ample rear ends of senators from both parties, held up the bill to confront his colleagues with the fact that they are addicted to spending other peoples' money in an effort to curry favor with voters and be reelected.

   For that the retiring lawmaker was verbally abused by the media and his senate colleagues.


   Maybe the fact that he's not running for reelection in Kentucky gave Sen. Bunning the courage to stand up to the profligate spenders in Congress. Who knows. What we do know is that this can't go on. Under the last two Democrat Congresses the national debt has doubled. As a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) the debt is higher than it has been since we began paying off the money we borrowed to win World War II.

   Only one of three things can happen at this point: Taxes must be raised to epic levels to begin paying for all of this borrowing; Spending must be cut on everything from Medicare to Food Stamps to college loan programs to printing posters of the food pyramid; or, the worst but most likely option: The Treasury and the Federal Reserve must begin "laundering" the debt. That is, cheapening the dollar through inflation. Since each dollar will be worth less, the same amount of greenbacks will pay down the debt faster as well as providing more currency to pay for more entitlements. The perfect solution for congressmen who have no stomach (or anything else) for making the hard decisions on taming the debt and saying no to more spending.


   Jim Bunning saw this coming. Like the crafty pitcher he was, he fired a high, hard one under the chins of his colleagues. Chin music, the baseball players call it.

   Good thing for them he's retiring. Baseball players know that unless a batter back away from the plate  after the chin music, the next pitch is a fastball that somehow always ends up in the hitter's ribs.

   Just thought you might like to know.

The Post Partisan President

Pres. Barack Obama campaigned as the "post-partisan" presidential candidate. But he has been anything if not more polarizing as the nation's chief executive than even Pres. George W. Bush was.

The president has said, come hell or high water, he wants a vote on his healthcare deform bill by the end of March. The time for talking is over, says Mr. Obama. Everything that can be said about the bill has been said. Well, not exactly.

The president conveniently overlooks the fact that, unlike his healthcare bill, every piece of major social legislation, as well as most major budget bills in our lifetime enjoyed bipartisan support. The latest maneuver is to use the Senate's Budget Reconciliation process to pass the health bill with a bare minimum (51) votes limiting debate to 20 hours. This will eliminate the threat of a filibuster, which will take 60 votes to break.

Pres. Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid say that this has been done before. But they can't point to one piece of major social legislation  where the reconciliation process, appropriately nicknamed "the nuclear option," has been used to bypass the opposition party. Not one.
Take a look:

• Welfare Reform. Almost as polarizing in its day as healthcare is now. Republicans pioneered the concept; Democrats hated it. But in the end 78 senators voted yes. This included half of all Democrats--including current Vice President Joe Biden.
• State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP): Yes, S-CHIP was passed through the same budget reconciliation process that Democrats want to use to cram healthcare down the throats of the American public. Democrats use this example as a precedent for justifying sneaking the bill through the Senate on a simple majority vote. But they also fail to tell you that S-CHIP passed easily with 85 votes--overwhelmingly supported by Democrats and Republicans (43 of them) alike.
• The 2001 Bush Tax Cuts. Again, Democrats, to hide the truth as they often have done on this bill, point to the use of reconciliation in 2001 to pass what have come to be known as the Bush tax cuts. But they fail to mention that 12 Democrats joined Republicans to create the majority that passed the bill.
• The 1981 Reagan Budget. It is true that budget reconciliation process was used to pass Pres. Reagan's first budget. But, again, the Democrats hide the truth about reconciliation. The Reagan Budget passed the Senate overwhelmingly with 80 votes--many of them Democrats. Citing it as an example of how reconciliation can be used to get a controversial bill through the Senate is dishonest.  A four-fifths majority hardly qualifies as controversial.

The only situation that comes close to what we have now is Pres. Clinton's attempt to ram HillaryCare through the Congress is 1993. HillaryCare was as unpopular as ObamaCare is.

But Pres. Clinton had the good sense to back off after a discussion with liberal Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV). Sen. Byrd is the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and the foremost Senate parliamentarian. In 1993 he counseled Pres. Clinton that to use reconciliation to cram down an unpopular bill that had no bipartisan support would be an abuse of the reconciliation process.

Of course, it typical Democrat fashion, the former Ku Klux Klansman from West Virginia now says that reconciliation is OK. Like the white sheet escapades of the Exalted Cyclops from Appalachia himself,  it looks like reconciliation has been rehabilitated.

So to the list of middle-of-the-night votes, shady back room deals (the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, the Florida Flim-Flam), and fuzzy math you can add partisan misused of Senate rules to pass this stinker of a bill.

 Barack Obama is far from the post-partisan president. He will go down in history as the president that took bare knuckles partisanship to a new depth.

Just thought you might like to know.

Lt. Col. Allen West

Allen West is a retired Army officer who spent 21 years in military service, including combat tours in Operation Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2003 he faced a potential court martial for conducting what is now euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation tactics" in Iraq. Col. West had been interrogating an Iraqi police officer who was reluctant to give up details of a plot against several of Col. West's men, as well as himself. Col. West's crime? Squeezing off a couple of rounds near the police officer's head to jog his memory. "If it's about the lives of my men," this real-life Jack Bauer told investigators, "I'd go through hell with a gasoline can." In short, Col. West is one tough son-of-a-bitch.

After Iraq, he spent some time as a high school teacher but gave that up to go back to Afghanistan as a civilian advisor to the Afghan army. In 2008 he ran against first-termer Ron Klein in Florida's 22nd Congressional District. Despite having no support from the Republican National Committee, Col. West garnered 45% of the vote against the Democrat incumbent in a year in which  Barack Obama had very long coattails.

Col. West, a recipient of the Bronze Star, is back running against Rep. Klein in the 2010 election. Klein has refused to debate Col. West on healthcare or to hold a town hall meeting on the subject this past year. One would assume that the reason he has avoided Col. West is that West is a no-nonsense speaker whose words electrify conservatives in the same way that Barack Obama energized liberals in 2008. His campaign video, shown below, has received more than 1.5 million hits in the short two months it has been posted to You Tube.

 More than that, Allen West has a passion that has been missing in conservatives for many years. He speaks with a clarity and conviction that the political classes and academics rarely do. Take a look:


Few candidates, his opponent included, can match Col. West's chops in national security and defense issues. But in domestic policy he excels. Allen West grew up the child of lower-middle class parents in the segregated South. He speaks from experience about economic opportunity and education. For too many politicians on both sides of the aisle domestic issues such as the economy, education and healthcare are academic exercises. Most members of the political class have never experienced poverty, or if they did, it's now been replaced by the trappings of power. But Allen West speaks from experience on both domestic and foreign policy.

Allen West may not win, but he will not be ignored. And conservatives who have been dying for a passionate, experienced, articulate spokesman since Ronald Reagan, could do worse that Col. Allen West.

Just thought you might like to know.