How to downsize the federal government

Conservatives need to turn the table on the debate. Instead of arguing that entitlements will soon swallow everything else, so let's cut them, let's work on cutting all the rest. House republicans should consider making every cut a tradeoff versus cutting Social Security/Medicare. For instance, either downsize the EPA...or cut Social Security/Medicare. Reduce the Energy department...or reduce Social Security/Medicare. Scale back the Department of Education...or trim Social Security/Medicare. The list is endless. A lot of Americans have more affection for Social Security/Medicare than any government agency. This could be a stealth way to pursue some healthy de-regulation. Would this meaningfully reduce the deficit? Of course not.

But, to paraphrase Reagan, "entitlements are a big enough problem to take care of themselves." In the meantime, maybe conservatives can win some other battles.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/12/how_to_downsize_the_federal_government.html

From The Heritage Foundation:

Conservatives Stand Their Ground

"When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat."

President Ronald Reagan’s sound advice rang true yesterday. Grassroots activists and conservative groups, led by Heritage Action for America, derailed a plan to raise taxes on some Americans and small businesses.

Lacking votes from his own party, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) called off consideration of “Plan B” last night, sending lawmakers home for Christmas instead. When the dust settled, conservatives stuck to their principles: to cut spending without raising taxes.

When they return to work, all eyes will be on President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Their failure to act has left the nation on the brink of the fiscal cliff.

It didn’t have to come to this. Nearly five months ago, on August 1, the House of Representatives voted to prevent a tax hike on all Americans. The measure passed on a 256-to-171 vote, winning the support of 19 Democrats.

Meanwhile, as Obama divided the country with his class-warfare campaign, Reid sat idle.

Heritage’s Patrick Louis Knudsen, the Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs, wrote last month about the Senate’s failure to act:

Although the House passed legislation this year replacing the across-the-board cuts with specific policy changes, the Senate refused to act, forcing any resolution to wait until after this year’s election. Now this large problem joins with other unresolved issues, such as the “doc fix” (extending Medicare physicians’ payment rates) and extended unemployment benefits—and another debt-ceiling increase looms early next year as well.

Now there are just 11 days left before Americans face a massive slate of tax hikes and reckless defense cuts. The fiscal cliff will affect all American taxpayers, with an average increase of more than $4,100 in taxes.

This is unacceptable.

Reid could have brought the House-passed measure to the Senate for an open debate and vote. He could have instructed Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) to produce a budget. Instead, Reid did neither. The Senate has now gone 3 years, 7 months, and 22 days without a budget.

Boehner, who oversaw passage of Republican-drafted budgets in 2011 and 2012, was right to place blame on the Senate for failing to act:

Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff. The House has already passed legislation to stop all of the January 1 tax rate increases and replace the sequester with responsible spending cuts that will begin to address our nation's crippling debt. The Senate must now act.

Heritage Action, our sister organization, has urged lawmakers to remain true to their principles. Earlier this week at a Capitol Hill press conference, Heritage Action chief executive Michael Needham led a group of conservative leaders, including Representative Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), to voice opposition to a tax increase.

In a statement last night, Needham commended the House for acting months ago and urged Obama and Reid to “reject the political gimmicks and demonstrate that same level of seriousness.”

Throughout the fiscal cliff negotiations, Obama has demonstrated a lack of seriousness. Heritage’s Alison Acosta Fraser recounted earlier this week that Obama initially wanted an $800 billion tax increase, only to later double that demand to $1.5 trillion. His plan lacks any substantive spending cuts, insisting on tax hikes first. And to top it off, the more concessions Republicans have made, the more Obama wants to take from the American people.

Enough is enough.

Conservatives stood their ground last night and sent a powerful message. Now it’s time for lawmakers to take the “least repugnant remaining resolution to the fiscal cliff,” as Heritage’s J.D. Foster wrote earlier this week, and pass a temporary measure that extends all tax rates and all spending policy without sequestration cuts through March 31, 2013.

That’s the best possible outcome in this unfortunate situation.

http://links.heritage.org/hostedemail/email.htm?CID=14070453891&ch=5871BD373B7BFCB778698644E59CECC9&h=3b9d83ef172a6c059598f0b04441fe83&ei=WNnYEWkoN

Whittling Away our Freedoms

In the aftermath of the tragic murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Barack Obama, together with a supportive left-wing media, has called for "meaningful action" to address the problem of mass shootings. Since that heartbreaking episode, the president has been publicly weeping, praying, pontificating, quoting Scripture, and poetically sharing verbal vignettes on the responsibilities of fatherhood. He's been so convincing that pro-gun Democrats are abandoning their former commitment to the Second Amendment, crossing over, and siding with liberals on gun laws.

Meanwhile, despite all the passionate rhetoric, except for passing blame, Obama has yet to fully acknowledge his administration's participation in the failed gun-walking operation called "Operation Fast and Furious."

The orchestrated scheme called "Fast and Furious" started in the first year of Barack Obama's presidency. That year, federal officials decided to allow straw buyers to visit gun stores in Arizona and Texas, load up vans with weapons like the AK-47 and drive them back across the border into México, straight into the hands of vicious cartels.

Rather than arrest the "trafficking kingpins" and confiscate the guns, the federal authorities that conducted the operation were instructed to allow "straw gun buyers for a smuggling ring to walk away from gun shops in Arizona with weapons,"so they could then be tracked. The problem is that, as usual, inept government bureaucracy lost track of the weaponry and the guns purchased illegally have been showing up at crime scenes along with dead bodies ever since.

The gun used in the shooting death of former Marine/U.S. Border agent Brian Terry was traced back to an Arizona gun shop. ICE agent Jamie Zapata was murdered by a drug cartel and the gun that took his life was traced to a gun shop in Dallas.

In total, "Operation Fast and Furious" allegedly allowed approximately 2,000 still unaccounted-for weapons to walk across the southern border. México's former Attorney General Victor Humberto Benítez Treviño guesstimates that "Fast and Furious" guns, to date, have also killed more than 300 Mexicans.

The irony is that Mexican drug cartels sought out guns in the U.S. because Mexican gun laws are restrictive. Cartel members from a country with the same kind of laws currently being proposed murdered two U.S. Border agents and shot to death hundreds of Mexican civilians and soldiers with firearms obtained with the full knowledge and permission of the U.S. government.

At the Sandy Hook vigil, a teary-eyed Barack Obama stressed that "[t]he majority of those who died were children -- beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own."

Yet, after tugging at America's heartstrings, it appears the president's gun safety concerns remain exclusive to American guns, gun owners, and people.

If that weren't true, then why, in 2010 when "Fast and Furious" weapons gunned down 14 teenagers and wounded 20 attending a birthday party in Ciudad Juarez, didn't Barack Obama -- who is now so concerned about missed "birthdays, graduations, weddings" -- address the Mexican bloodbath? Why hasn't the Obama administration accepted any responsibility or even suggested locating the still missing U.S. weapons?

As Obama manipulates tragedy to advance Second Amendment restrictions in the U.S., guns walked across the border with his approval are still taking lives.

Case in point: another "Fast and Furious" gun was recently found at the scene where a beauty queen died as a result of a shootout between a Mexican drug cartel and soldiers.

The day after Thanksgiving, in the mountainous area of Sinaloa, México, home to México's most powerful Sinaloa drug cartel, 20-year-old Maria Susana Flores Gamez's body was found together with an assault rifle that has since been revealed was walked across the border.

In February, the beauty pageant winner was awarded the title of 2012 Woman of Sinaloa. By November she was riding in a vehicle that engaged Mexican soldiers in a gun battle. Just as the 20 children who died in Newtown, Connecticut had nowhere to hide from Adam Lanza's bullets, neither could Maria Susana Flores Gamez hide. Police believe she was used as a human shield and perished when Mexican police returned fire on gang members using an illegal firearm provided compliments of the gun-control obsessed Obama administration.

In the meantime, for four months, former U.S. Marine Jon Hammar is chained to a bed in México's notorious CEDES prison. Jon is being held for declaring a legal antique Sears Roebuck shotgun to Mexican customs officials on his way to surf and hunt in Costa Rica. What is curious about Hammar's situation is that after México was systematically flooded with illegal weaponry, the Obama State Department now claims they are powerless to help.

Maybe that's because after the horrendous nature of the shooting in Connecticut, Barack Obama would rather not spoil the mood by calling attention to a legal gun owner rotting away in a Mexican jail on trumped-up gun charges. After all, why chance losing the emotional capital he needs to convince America that it's time to moderate firearms?

Nonetheless, for the president to exploit tragedy for political gain while knowing full well that innocent people are being killed with the guns his administration placed in the hands of dangerous gang members is downright reprehensible. Someone needs to ask President Obama to clarify how he justifies condemning assault weapons, especially after his administration intentionally armed Mexican drug kingpins with the weaponry he now blames for the chaos and death we recently witnessed in Connecticut.

Therefore, rather than sitting idly by while freedom continues to be whittled away, it's up to Americans to demand accountability. It's time that Time magazine's Person of the Year explains why he continues to insist that stricter gun control laws will save American lives when he's well aware that his Justice Department, headed up by Attorney General Eric Holder, purposely and illegally furnished lethal firearms to murderers in México.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/whittling_away_our_freedoms.html

Blameless New World

We have moved from everyone gets a trophy to "no one is to blame" These are essentially the same concepts.

The "everyone gets a trophy" model began appearing in our society about two decades ago. Via the Little League, other children's sports, and the classroom, a generation was taught that merely existing entitled you to some type of reward. Inclusiveness was the watchword. Having a birthday party for your 9 year old? Well, you better invite the entire class. It is mean spirited to distinguish between who is a friend and who is not.

Individual achievement is downplayed. "You didn't build that business" is offered up reminiscent of the "There is no "I" in team" cliché, but driven on a grand and ideological scale. (Though the President's speeches have an abundance of "I's" as if by special dispensation.) As in everyone get a trophy, the "pass/fail" grading concepts came into vogue at roughly the same time and are also nothing more than forays into communal socialism. Now we are getting a dosage in a different fashion.

The "no one is to blame" game we routinely hear from Washington is merely an extension of that frame of mind. From the DOJ on Fast and Furious and the State Department on the Benghazi incident, we are told that "no one is to blame". And then there is the accusatory "return fire". "Why must someone always be blamed?" One does not have to be discussing politics to hear that mantra. It is slowly becoming part of the culture. No fault. I'm okay, you're okay. We are all okay together. Hug.

Why must someone be blamed? Because, in a far away galaxy long ago, there was once responsibility coupled with accountability. Performance and ability mattered. Competition existed in order to hone efficiencies. None of these concepts reside in the socialist attitude nor do the words appear in their vernacular. Rather we are all 5's on a 1 to 10 scale. Trophies for all regardless of contribution or participation. No one is to blame and, by the way, why do you think there should be someone to blame? Everyone is equal except those who are more equal.

No one being blamed is also good politics. The responsible tend to remain nameless, are held close, sheltered rather than being cast off to write books and exposés. It's about control. Good politics indeed.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/12/blameless_new_world.html

Culture War -- with Guns

The left has literally and publicly declared open season on the NRA and gun owners who want to protect their homes and schools. This has been done without any justification or explanation as to why they make a call for what is, for all practical purposes, summary executions.

For example, Michelle Malkin reports this:

In Texas, state Democratic Party official John Cobarruvias threw fuel on the fire. Cobarruvias is the Democratic Party precinct chair in Houston, Texas, and holds a seat on the Texas State Democratic Party's executive committee. On his Twitter feed, Cobarruvias labeled the NRA a "domestic terrorist organization" and called for the assassination of NRA leaders and supporters: "Can we now shoot the #NRA and everyone who defends them?"

So, it's come to this: Advocating beheadings, beatings and the mass murder of peaceful Americans to pay for the sins of a soulless madman. But because the advocates of violence fashion themselves champions of non-violence and because they inhabit the hallowed worlds of Hollywood, academia and the Democratic Party, it's acceptable?

Blood-lusting hate speech must not get a pass just because it comes out of the mouths of the protected anti-gun class.

Malkin precedes this passage with an update of tweets from University of Rhode Island history professor Erik Loomis retweeting (i.e. advocating) a message he received that says "First f**ker to say the solution is for elementary school teachers to carry guns needs to get beaten to death." Author Joyce Carol Oates also is quoted as accusing the NRA of "felony homicide", and popular television star Marge Helgenberger, has stated her agreement with Ms. Oates.

I thought liberals were against the state-ordered death penalty? Actually, they still are and, in a narrow sense, there is no logical contradiction here. When liberals call for NRA members' deaths without a trial, no state-administered lethal injections are involved. What they are calling for is mob action, pure and simple. This is neatly compartmentalized thinking, not so much a slippery slope as a Great Adventure waterslide towards anarchy and violence.

Days before the December 14th killings at Newtown, actor Jamie Foxx joked on Saturday Night Live about "killing all the white people" in his new movie. No doubt he would be comfortable with also killing the white majority of NRA members. One wonders if Adam Lanza, the deranged young Newtown killer, watched this performance of "Saturday Night Live" on December 8th. Lanza may well have heard about it afterwards in the media and perceived it as social permission from "hip, trendy happening people" like himself to go out and murder. And one wonders if Joyce Carol Oates, Cobarruvias the Texas Democratic Party official, Professor Loomis, or Marge Helgenberger have any anger to direct against NBC or Jamie Foxx.

Years ago a liberal made a joke that I considered wickedly funny. They stated that they were against the death penalty for everyone except the person who invented the idea of putting those postcards (and other inserts) in magazines. It was funny because, despite this common annoyance, one could assume the jokester didn't really mean they should go out and shoot some advertising agency owner or copywriter.

Today, the assumption that the left does not really want citizens' executions is largely gone. The left is as serious as a heart attack in its calls for the deaths of those who oppose its orthodoxy. Just because something is said on "Saturday Night Live" or in a Tweet doesn't mean they are "just kidding." The left is attempting to change what is socially acceptable in America within an impressionable segment of society -- teenagers who watch the shows and communicate via Twitter -- and conservatives and others who differ from the left's orthodoxy had best openly oppose it, before the "new normal" looks like the old tyranny.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/12/culture_war_--_with_guns.html

Useful Idiots and the Newtown Massacre

I have a strong hunch that people who are commonly referred to these days as "useful idiots" don't like that term. That shouldn't surprise anyone because no one likes to be thought of as an idiot, any type of idiot.

That said, the useful idiots who gave us four more years of Obama probably don't realize that he's using the Newtown massacre right now to manipulate them. He's playing them like a fiddle hoping to savage the Second Amendment to the Constitution and restrict gun ownership and use by sane, law-abiding citizens.

Does anyone think that criminals will have any trouble getting guns and ammunition and lots of both regardless of the laws that our elected officials pass? I hope not.

Does anyone believe that the roughly 250 million to 300 million guns that are in private hands today in this country will miraculously disappear if our government tries to restrict them? Again, I hope not.

Curtailing alcohol use in the U.S. is a shining example of what happens when do-gooders (i.e., useful idiots) have their way. They gave us prohibition and ushered in organized crime as we know it. Prohibition didn't eliminate drinking alcohol any more than restricting guns, magazines, and ammunition will solve our violent crime problem. All it will do is create a black market and make criminals richer.

Blaming guns for senseless killing is like blaming cars for deaths due to drunk drivers. In South Carolina, the state where I live, lawmakers passed legislation that actually helped to reduce our drunk driving problem. It works like this: if you are caught drinking and driving, you go to jail. You don't pass "Go" and you don't collect $200--no exceptions.

It's amazing what can happen when you target the guilty instead of the instruments they use. If you want to reduce violent crime, target the criminals and the mentally deranged people who commit violent crimes. A side benefit of targeting the guilty instead of the instruments they use is that you avoid punishing the innocent who have never committed a violent crime and never will. The problem is the person committing the crime, not the instrument he used.

Unfortunately, I think that most of the people in our country who are jumping on the bandwagon where restricting guns is concerned are useful idiots and/or opportunist politicians who are taking full advantage of the senseless deaths of those innocent children in Newtown to enhance their political careers. Opportunist politicians are shameless. They don't really care about the problem or the children, but they desperately need useful idiots to succeed. I hope that the useful idiots, or most of them, wake up and realize that the problem with the president's plan can and will affect them personally. By that I mean that it will improve the odds of them becoming victims of violent crimes.

As Thomas Sowell said,

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.
If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Thinking is not a bad thing. God gave us brains for a reason.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/12/useful_idiots_and_the_newtown_massacre.html

Maya Expert: The 'End Of Times' Is Our Idea, Not The Ancients'

Update at 7 a.m. ET, Dec. 21: We're All Still Here.

Our original post continues:
It is Dec. 20, 2012 — and citizens of Earth are panicking, consumed by the idea that the world will end Friday, something they say was predicted by Mayan astronomers. Of course, most people are not panicking, and Maya expert David Stuart says no one should. The calendar, he says, has plenty of room to go.

In an interview airing on Thursday's Morning Edition, David Greene asks archaeologist Stuart, who helped translate influential ancient Mayan hieroglyphs in 1996, if he thinks the world will end on Dec. 21.
"Absolutely not," is Stuart's answer, dashing the hopes of students eyeing a three-day weekend, and any consumers who maxed out their credit cards in the belief that all history — not just their credit history — would come to an end.

"The Maya never, ever, said anything about the world ending at any time — much less this year," says Stuart, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "So, it's sort of bizarre to be living through this time right now, when so many people seem to be worked up."

And worked up they are. Apocalyptic rumors and doomsday preparations have preoccupied people on seemingly every continent. In Russia, citizens are stocking up on vodka; in China, nearly 100 people were arrested for spreading the rumors, which officials said were partly to blame for an attack on elementary students Friday.

In an international poll of more than 16,000 people, Reuters found that 1 in 10 respondents worried that the Mayan calendar could signal the end of the world. The poll, which was taken in May, also found that 15 percent of those responding said they "believe the world will end during their lifetime," Reuters reported.
The current panic has been bolstered by theories that might charitably be deemed "sciencey."

Under one scenario, the Earth would not survive a rare galactic alignment that would subject it to the powers of not only the sun but also Sagittarius A — a massive black hole in the heart of the Milky Way. In a related scheme, the planet's magnetic poles will reverse — possibly as a result of the alignment.

Some doomsayers even claim to know the exact time the bell will toll for Earth: 11:11 UTC — a nicely evocative time, yet one that the U.S. Naval Observatory says is off by one minute. If you're in the Eastern U.S. time zone, the facility says, you should expect the solstice to occur at 6:12 a.m. Friday.

The fuss stems from the fact that "an important cycle of the Maya calendar which is turning over," Stuart says, "called a baktun."

Each baktun represents 144,000 days — or nearly 400 years. The 13th (and, some say, final) baktun of the Mayan calendar is slated to come to an end on the solstice marked on Dec. 21, 2012.

"It's a big deal — if you're an ancient Maya astronomer priest," Stuart says. "But apart from that, they didn't say anything about ... what will be happening."

Stuart and other researchers have compared what's about to happen to the Mayan calendar to an odometer on a well-driven car: The years will simply click over. If the car's odometer runs past its complement of numbers, you can still drive it.

The end of the calendar cycle is a cause for celebration in Guatemala, home of the famed Tikal Mayan temple. The country is already welcoming an influx of leaders from the region, as well as around 200,000 foreign tourists, reports the Prensa Latina news agency.

On his blog, Stuart has admitted that he inadvertently helped to fuel the 2012 doomsday movement when he labeled his analysis of a glyph found at Tortuguero as the "Tortuguero Prophecy," a title that fueled ideas of a revolutionary dawning of a new age. But in a recent post, he projects that the Mayan calendar has at least 2,400 more years to go.

"I think in our culture, too, or maybe globally — humans like to come up with excuses, sometimes, just to freak out," he tells David. "I think the Maya have become an excuse for something a bit larger. ... It's a reflection of a lot of tension, a lot of anxiety in our society. And Lord knows, there's a lot of real problems out there. But this isn't one of them. You know, the Mayan calendar is certainly not something we need to worry about."

So, David asked, how will Stuart spend Dec. 21?

"I'll be here in Austin that night," he said, "and probably raise a glass of wine to the end of the baktun, and the beginning of a new one."

But not everyone will be as relaxed as the professor. The website Off World Backup pokes fun at the trend of "doomsday preppers," offering what it calls "quantum bilateral encryption" and the assurance that "your data will be secure no matter what happens on Earth."

As the group's terms of service show, they're not taken in by the hype:

"I acknowledge that my files will not actually be backed up off world.
"I also acknowledge that it is silly to believe that the Mayans correctly predicted the end of the world will occur on Friday (especially since they don't even believe that).
"Furthermore, I acknowledge that no such thing as a multiphotonic phase inducer exists outside of this website and possibly Star Trek."

Anyone who needs further convincing may want to consider the Mayan calendar's start date: Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. While few people can say what happened on that day, it's doubtful that any of them would say it's when the world suddenly sprang into being — along with a handy calendar.

And Stuart says not to expect any major changes on Dec. 21, either.

"Nothing is really fundamentally going to change, in terms of the world coming to a standstill," he says.
"That is very reassuring," David tells Stuart. "I'm going to hold you to that."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/12/20/167626648/maya-expert-the-end-of-times-is-our-idea-not-the-ancients?ft=1&f=1001

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