14th Amendment Gives President Authority to Raise the Debt Ceiling: Another Socialist Taradiddle

Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Majority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin, Representative Peter Welch, and numerous Progressive Elitist columnists have called upon Obama to raise the debt ceiling himself using the 14th Amendment as the basis for his power to do so.  Examining this claim of presidential power by the socialist left will inform us greatly about their values and how seriously they take the Constitution.

In Article 1, Section 8, the Congress is given its powers.  It says:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States; ....

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, ...

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States; ....

Section 8 also goes on to describe its role in the defense of the country, including that of providing for military forces and placing a two-year appropriations limit on its doing so.

The powers of the President are given in Article 2, Section 2.  There is no mention of any power to appropriate money, to issue debt, to issue coin or bonds, or any other power pertaining to the use of the People's money.  This is not surprising given that control over money, taxes, and debt were the primary powers that the Congress was invested with for the purpose of limiting the power of the Executive.  We have to remember that Americans had just fought for their independence from a much too powerful King of England.  They had also faced too powerful governors in the colonies in most cases who ruled those colonies for the King's advantage, not the People's welfare.  The Executive under the Articles of Confederation had been nearly non-existent and was much strengthened under the Constitution, but was still subject to great distrust.  Were we as wise today, we would still view the Executive with great distrust.

The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868 to deal with issues resulting from the outcome of the Civil War.  In Section 4, it says:

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.  But neither the United States or any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or the emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section 5 of the 14th Amendment says "Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

So whatever power is granted here is granted to Congress.  There is no mention of the President.  What is more, the debt to be honored without question, was only such debt as had been authorized by law, which only Congress can do.  One can go further in understanding this amendment's requirement about the debt.  It is clear that it imposes an obligation upon Congress to pay its debts in full and without dilution.  A rational person would question repayment of a debt with a devalued currency, for instance.  Therefore, if Congress, or in our present condition, the Federal Reserve is printing money to make up the difference between tax revenues and government spending, then Congress itself is in violation of the 14th Amendment.  Any rational broad interpretation of the 14th Amendment would note that Congress is constrained in its spending to a sustainable debt.  It cannot default on the debt, but it also cannot allow the debt to rise to such heights that a rational person would question that it can be repaid in full with a fully valued coin.

As we see, it is a ludicrous taradiddle that the President can raise the debt ceiling without an act of Congress.  There is no such power in the 14th Amendment.  This is why even Obama has been disinclined to claim this power.  Even though he dislikes the Constitution and holds it in low regard, even he dares not traduce it is such a blatant manner.  Not only would he have to assert a power he clearly does not have, but he would also have to violate multiple acts of Congress, duly passed.  First, he would have to break the law setting the current debt ceiling, as Congress has been doing since 1917.  Second, he would have to violate the Antideficiency Act which states that the President or any government official must have an appropriation from Congress before he can authorize payments.  It could not be more obvious that the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the President.

This being such an open and shut case, it is very revealing that so many of the top leadership of the Democrat Party are so eager to subvert the Constitution and support such an egregious taradiddle as the claim that the 14th Amendment gives their great socialist leader the power to raise the debt ceiling by himself.  This is an attempt to claim dictatorial powers.  If Republicans had made such a claim when the Democrats controlled one of the houses of the Congress, you can be certain they would have been screaming in opposition.  It is way beyond time for the American People to understand that their dominant party is one eager to subvert the Constitution and thereby the control the people exercise by choosing their representatives to the Congress.  There is an eagerness for dictatorship, so long as the dictator is a Democrat Socialist.  This is a predilection to be feared and against which we must stand in firmest opposition.

taradiddle: 1) a trivial or childish lie, a fib, or 2) pretentious nonsense.

Solar Power Increased Cost for German Electricity

Both the federal government and many of the state governments are mandating much increased use of so-called renewable power such as solar and wind generated electricity.  We should be very aware of the costs of doing this.  Germany has gone far down this road.  What are the results in Germany?

Germany makes Germans pay high levies on their electricity bills to pay people to invest in offshore wind turbines and roof-mounted solar panels.  These levies are guaranteed for 20 years.  Offshore wind turbine generated electricity is supported with a levy of $0.21 per kilowatt-hour and roof-mounted solar panels are given $0.46 per kilowatt-hour!  As a result, Germans have rushed to put solar panels on their roofs and the levies paid for wind, solar, and hydro power will be $11.3 billion this year, which is a 55% increase from last year.  About 8 gigawatts of new solar panel installations are projected for this year.  This is the electricity output of 4 large nuclear power plants, or would be if the sun always shone brightly in Germany 24 hours a day.  Those installing solar panels after this summer, will be paid 16% less for the electricity they produce.

The result is that on a German's electric bill, taxes and levies are now 41% of the bill and that percentage has been climbing rapidly.  VZBV, the German consumer association, says the solar panels installed in 2010 alone will cause additional electricity charges of $36 billion over the next 20 years.  Similar mandated renewable energy is constantly being advocated by Democrats, our version of socialists, in the U.S.  Our costs, especially if you live in California, have been cranked up as a result also.  Texas and Colorado are other states where the cost of electricity has been cranked upward significantly.  Read more about this here.

Incurring these increased energy costs is pointless.  Political central planners are frightening people around the world with stories of almost immediate failures of our energy supplies and catastrophic man-made global warming which require us to turn to incredibly expensive renewable energy.  The renewal they are talking about is apparently the renewed poverty of people around the world, who have often been improving their standards of living recently.  Their improved standard of living is offensive to Democrats and will be greatly impeded by nonsensical requirements to drive energy costs sky-high in accordance with the otherworldly dreams of Obama, Pelosi, Waxman, Markey, and others of the lunatic fringe of American socialist politics.

The September Jobs Horror Story - As Dismal as Dismal August

In September, 204,000 fewer people were employed than in August.  In August, 215,000 fewer people were employed than in July 2010.  Meanwhile, the working age population has been growing.  The September working age population grew by 223,000 people compared to August, at least 60% of whom want jobs.  Yet the usually stated seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained about the same as it has been for several months.  This is because the number of people the government thinks want work shrank by 619,000 people in September compared to August.  In August the number of people supposed wanting work shrank by 378,000 compared to the number looking for work in July.  As always in a long recession or depression, the shrinking numbers of people known to be looking for work do not mean that more people are not looking for work or wanting work which is hopelessly unavailable.  Obama's promised change has brought an end to the hope for employment.  Many people, especially many of the young people who are coming into the working age now or recently, face horrible odds in finding a job.  They should be attributing this to Obama's transformation of America.  His many anti-business attitudes have certainly had destructive consequences.

The table below presents the jobs numbers taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report for September 2010.  The important ones are that the working age population is growing and so many new jobs need to be created for the majority of that increased number who want a job.  The next number of great importance is the number of people employed.  That needs to increase greatly simply to keep up with the population growth.  When it is falling, that is a disaster.  As noted above, it fell badly in both August and September.  The so-called unemployment percentage is not very meaningful in a long recession.  What is meaningful is the calculation of the number of jobs needed so that as large a percentage of the working age population has jobs as had jobs when the economy was in much better shape, such as in January 2000 when 67.49% of the work age population had jobs or were actively looking for them.  The unemployment rate then was only 4.04%, which was a figure with some meaning in those circumstances.  Of course some of the unemployed then were actually transitioning from one job or career to another and were anything but the long-term unemployed who dominate today's Obama World.

During this recession, the number of missing jobs grew until it reached a maximum number of 23,108,000 jobs in January 2010.  The number of missing jobs then started to decrease and reached a minimum in July of 20,418,000 jobs.  Since then, the number of missing jobs has grown to 21,129,000!  The % Missing Jobs number is less important because that has a similarity to the usual unemployment number: it depends upon the number employed plus the number actively known to be looking for work.  It is of some significance however that that number is considerably higher than the usual unemployment number.

Here are a few interesting employment changes from August to September:

• The number of employed men fell by 633,000.
• The number of employed women increased by 461,000.
• The number of white Americans employed fell by 41,000.
• The number of black Americans employed fell by 161,000.
• The number of Hispanic Americans employed grew by 93,000.
• The number of full-time employed Americans fell by 1,123,000!
• The number of part-time employed Americans increased by 919,000.

It is clear that the changes were very unfavorable to full-time employment, to men, and to black Americans.  They were relatively favorable for women and for Hispanic Americans, though it is likely many of their gains were for the increased number of part-time jobs, rather than in full-time jobs.

This is the last jobs/unemployment report before the election.  Obama's, Pelosi's, and Reid's economic policies and anti-business policies have certainly had a transformative impact on employment.  The impact of ObamaCare on business costs has begun.  The cost of doing financial transactions due to the Dodd-Frank legislation is already going up.  We still wait for news on what taxes will be next year, which is already almost immediately upon us.  Will personal income tax rates go up, will capital gains taxes go up, and will the death tax be collected again as a mechanism to destroy businesses?  We know that the EPA wants to put draconian requirements and costs on using energy that generates CO2, but how expensive will that be in the near future and then in the longer term?  Will the Obama administration ever allow drilling for oil and gas again?  There are many, many business uncertainties and hurdles that the Democrat presidency and Congress have created.  The current dismal jobs situation is the very predictable result.

I will point out explicitly that men and black Americans should be especially eager to see the present Democrat tyranny replaced and punished in the up-coming election.  Most white men will do just that.  Someday, one cannot help but believe that black Americans will catch on to the fact that the Democrats are poison to them and understand that the free market is their only real friend.  Meanwhile, Obama continues to tell us that transferring wealth from the private sector to the public, government sector will somehow create more jobs.  How could he be more wrongheaded on this critical issue?  We are now in a situation in which local and state governments are letting their employees go because the private sector cannot supply the taxes it could in better times, before business fell prey to the Democrat super-majority in Congress and to Obama.

The Myth of the Fiscally Conservative Blue Dog Democrats

The Club for Growth has done an excellent review of the actual voting record of the Blue Dog Democrats and has found it to be a myth that they are fiscally conservative or responsible.  Among the major findings in their report are these:

• In 1995, when the Blue Dog Coalition was started, the National Taxpayer's Union rated the Blue Dogs aggregate score as 52%, but that score has fallen greatly since then.  By 2007, the year the Democrats took control of the House, the Blue Dog aggregate score was a mere 10%.  In that year, the number of Blue Dogs greatly exceeded the 15-vote majority held by the Democrats, so the Blue Dogs could have stopped much fiscally irresponsible nonsense.  Even in the 2009 Congress, the Blue Dogs outnumbered the 40 seat Democrat majority.
• Blue Dog support for Fannie & Freddie Bailout, 100%
• Blue Dog support for TARP, 63%
• Blue Dog support for 2009 Stimulus Package, 91%
• Blue Dog support for Cash for Clunkers, 85%
• Blue Dog support for 2009 Obama Budget, 74%
• Blue Dog support for Car Company Bailout, 73%
• Blue Dog support for ObamaCare, 54%
• The Blue Dogs voted with Nancy Pelosi 80% of the time in the present 111th Congress.
• PAYGO was the signature Blue Dog commitment.  It promised that new programs would be paid for.  Only entitlement spending is covered, however, while annual discretionary appropriations bills and emergency spending bills are not.
• The PAYGO rule can be waived by a mere majority vote.  Since 2007, the Democrats have waived or ignored it 31 times.  Blue Dogs agreed to this 86% of the time.
• 52 of the current 54 Blue Dogs love earmarks.

The Blue Dogs are simply pretenders or poseurs.  They talk like middle-of-the-roaders when talking to the bulk of their constituents, but they vote like socialists whenever they think the voters are not paying much attention.  Apparently, they have come to believe that the voters are not paying attention most of the time.

The Pro-Democrat and Socialism Washington Rally

Take a look at these photos from the pro-Democrat and Socialism rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, 2 October 2010.  They make clear the widespread open advocacy of Socialism and the determined anti-capitalism of many, many participants.  Notice the lack of handmade individualistic signs and the many manufactured, on-message signs of the sponsoring organizations who also provided many demonstrators with free bus fare, free Metro tickets, and food.  Afterward, notice the incredible amount of trash left strewn across the grass, which none of the Tea Party rallies I have been to has done.  We have always left the demonstration areas remarkably clean.  This surely indicates the sense of entitlement that socialists feel.  Why should they be bothered by carrying their signs home or putting them into trash cans?  It is easier to just drop them and leave the problem for someone else to take care of.  Just one of many indications of the ugliness of socialism and its believers.

I wonder that anyone is ever attracted to socialism.  The philosophy behind it is so childish, so full of envy, materialism, and factional divisiveness and hatred that I just cannot see its appeal.  Yet, it has a strong hold on the Democrat Party.  I believe the reason is that socialist motivational claims are needed to justify the big government and social engineering central ideas of the Democrats and because the Socialists are always relentlessly seeking power, they soon take up most of the positions as the foot soldiers and advisers to the Democrat political front men and women.  Over the years, virtually every Democrat politician has become very comfortable with these foot soldiers and advisers and more and more, they have come to think just like them, even as they maintain an appearance of being respectful of American values.  Since Obama has taken office, that appearance of respect has slipped.  More and more, being filled with a sense of their power and how unstoppable they were, the Democrat leaders made it clear they had no respect for the Constitution and its limits on their power.  They also made it clear that they were an aristocratic elite who were needed to correct our poor choices of our own values and to manage our lives, which they were sure we did badly as well.  In other words, they made it clear that they had no respect for the American People, who they said sadly and pathetically clung to their guns, religions, and prejudices.

Many American voters who vote for these useful idiot Democrat politicians do so because they just cannot imagine the evil of the people behind the scenes who largely control them.  When the Democrats in our Congress in these recent sessions voted to pass major, life-changing bills they had not read, who do you think wrote these bills and did read them?  It was those controlling advisers and foot-soldiers highly committed to socialism!  They are the ones who knew what the bills were about and what their long-term purpose is.  They are the ones who understand how the Obama-Pelosi-Reid strategy, which was really theirs, will prepare the way for an ever-enlarged government which will respond to every failure of newly imposed socialism with a proposal to fix the problem with more socialism.  Soon, the problem will be fixed as well as it was in Castro's Cuba, in Stalin's USSR, and in Mao's China.

Unless we are truly awake to their threat against our individual rights and our lives and vote their useful idiot political front men and women out in the November 2010 and 2012 elections, that is.  It is all up to the American People to defend their own liberties, their rights, and their lives by forcing the politicians to return to constitutional law-making within their very limited powers.  There is no Democrat who understands this and has the courage to stand up in the fight against the socialists.  Yes, there are some Republicans who are hardly the stout defenders of individual rights they ought to be, but many of them will have some use as useful idiots in the meantime and we will replace them in future elections.  We have made a start by eliminating many of them in the Republican primaries already in this election go-around.  We will replace many more of them in the 2012 election in the primaries as well.  This crusade to revive American ideals will require our high-level attentiveness for many years and more attention than Americans had given it for about 100 years forever into the future.

Congressional Idiocentricity -- Tax Reporting Paperwork Landslide

Buried in the ObamaCare bill that had to be passed so we could learn what was in it, is a change to Section 6041 of the tax code which requires businesses to file 1099 forms with the IRS for almost any vendor they deal with and pay more than $600 in a tax year.  This means that payments for property or for services are covered by the mandate whether the company to whom the payments have been made is a corporation or not.  The paperwork and the nuisance are unbelievable.  Congress has lost its senses entirely.  This is the sort of systematic wrongheadedness combined with a complete disregard for reality that I have coined idiocentricity.  Well, Pelosi, you passed the ObamaCare bill and we just keep on learning what was in it.  No matter how idiocentric I believe Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Waxman, Franks, Dodd, and others of their ilk may be, they just keep surprising me over and over again.

Before a company submits the 1099 Form to its vendor and to the IRS, it must have its vendor fill out a Form W-9 with its address, contact information, and the company taxpayer identification number.  The total amount of work involved is huge.  As a business owner, I will be receiving many more requests to fill out W-9 Forms and I will have to fill out many 1099 Forms early in the new year when I am trying to catch up after my busiest time of the year in the Fall.  I will resent every moment spent in this way immensely.

Why did this idiot plan get foisted on us?

• The wording changes were slipped into the unread ObamaCare bill late in the process so they would not be discovered until after it was passed in accordance with Pelosi policy.
• Congress is desperate to eke out every last dime, no make that $0.04 given the Utah case of huge penalties and interest based on a claimed overdue payment of $0.04, to pay for its wild, drunken overspending.
• This is an underhanded way to help the Post Office with its deficits.
• It is a subsidy program for lumber and paper companies.
• It is a subsidy for tree farms.
• Transporting the billions and billions of forms will provide more income for truckers.
• Increased truck traffic will destroy the roads and bridges faster, leading to more construction and repair work.
• America will import more oil to operate more trucks, which will help the underdeveloped world by transferring American wealth to them.
• It is a plan to increase man's emissions of CO2 so Congress will have more of an argument for cap and trade taxes on the increased fuel imports and use and the CO2 will help corn grow better to produce more subsidized ethanol.
• Its a make-work project for accountants, a profession much-beloved by Congress.
• This will make businesses much more inefficient, thereby reducing the huge advantage in efficiency of the private sector compared to the public sector.  Reducing that difference will make it easier for the government to push for more socialism.
• Companies will try to concentrate their business on a smaller number of vendors to reduce paperwork.
• Small businesses will be both more burdened with the owner doing this paperwork and they will be preferentially shut out of business by larger companies trying to reduce their paperwork.

Of course, it may be that Congress in its haphazard sloppiness did not think of some of these obvious effects.  It is unwise to give them too much credit for any thought, however twisted.  But, it does seem clear that this Congress has an affinity for the line of thinking of that it is a good thing when a window is broken because the repair of the window generates business.  No one in Congress ever asks what tasks did not get done because the window had to be repaired, despite Bastiat having destroyed this line of thinking long ago.  No, that would require that those who think islands float and who do not care about the constitutionality of laws to be capable of thought and then to actually do it.  What an imposition that would put on these rulers who fancy themselves the elite and the aristocrats of American society.  How unfair and unjust of us mere peasants to expect them to think about the consequences of their laws as an essential part of their service to us.

The Time-Tested Socialist Big Lie Gambit

There are many lies in the Obama - Pelosi - Reid plan to exercise fascist controls over health care insurance and through that mechanism over the entire health care industry. Whether they succeed in getting their "public option" or not, they may get the biggest plum of all, which is the power to set the requirements for what is a legal health insurance plan in the United States. In the effort to do this, Obama has said over and over,

If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period.

Well, no you cannot. The media has often backed Obama on this assertion, but nothing is further from the truth. This is an overt lie, except in the childish sense in which he can say this in the context of a short period of time. The law does not take effect immediately, so you can keep the insurance you like until then. Or, in some cases you can keep your insurance for up to 5 years. But, most Americans will not be able to keep the insurance they now have into the slightly longer term future. Period. Do not take just my word for this, but read Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute on this here.

According to the House bill HR3200, an approved plan must cover

• hospitalization
  
• outpatient hospital and clinic services
  
• services by physicians and other health professionals
  
• supplies and equipment incidental to their services
• prescription drugs
• rehabilitation services
• mental health
• substance-abuse treatments
• preventive services, a list of which will be determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force
• maternity, well-baby, and well-child care
• dental, vision, and hearing services for children under 21
• additional requirements set by the Health Benefits Advisory Committee

Now, if you lose your present insurance coverage or significant changes are made to the plan you have now, you will be required to get an approved plan. The onset of this new legislation is going to change the health insurance market so greatly, that it is very unlikely that plans will not have to change significantly, so you cannot count on a unchanged plan for protection.

70% of those now covered by a health insurance plan get that plan through their employer, and all of these plans will have to meet the federal requirement in five years. This means your plan will change. Of course, your plan may also change because the new legislation is predicted to cause as many as 89.5 million workers to lose their coverage from their employer, according to the Lewin Group.

Many others will lose their current plan because it is a high deductible plan. This was the kind of plan I had in the earliest years when I started my business. It was all we could afford for my family at the time, but it served us well under the circumstances. Now, such high deductible plans are often very beneficially combined with Health Savings Accounts, which the new bills will almost eliminate. The new bills do not allow high deductible plans, since they require that 70% of claims be paid by the insurance in the House bill and that 76% be paid by the Senate bill. No deductible or co-pay is allowed at all for preventive care! So, you lose this kind of plan, no matter how well it suits your needs!

Seniors on Medicare can participate in the Medicare advantage program and 10.2 million now do so. This program may be ended by the Obama - Pelosi - Reid bills also.

So, "If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it" is a blatant socialist lie, in the great tradition of the Big Lie Told Over and Over Again of the fascists and the communists. Besides which, the dedicated socialists define the truth as that which leads to socialism, so they really do not think this is a lie. But, those of us who live in the real world, must recognize this as the cruel and brutal fraud it really is. And we are not the ones who say, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." We will leave that otherworldly nonsense to the socialists.

Those of us who recognize our own existence and our own uniquely individual characters and lives, must be adamant in demanding our right to exercise control over our life, most necessarily including our individual control over our personal health.

The 90% Axis Powers Tax

The Obama - Pelosi - Reid Axis Powers combined and voted a 90% retroactive tax on the bonuses of employees earning more than $250,000 who work for firms receiving more than $5 billion in Federal bailout money. Some of these companies were basically forced by the government to take bailout money, even many which were in no danger of failing. Others were failing companies which should have been allowed to go bankrupt, which would have terminated the contracts that required the failing companies to pay out the bonuses now being paid out. Obama, Geithner, Chris Dodd, Pelosi, and many others in the Democrat administration and Congress were well aware of these bonuses, but pretended they were not. They were caught in this transparent lie. They had foolishly circumvented the system long established for dealing with failing companies whose management had proven that they did not warrent bonuses, benefits, and other remuneration they would have had by contract if they had done their jobs well. Bankruptcy properly terminates such contracts as now have to be honored, though that is clearly unfair to the taxpayers.

The government is clearly incapable of running these companies and should clearly have stayed out of their business. The more healthy companies have learned now just how critical it is to try to get out from under the smothering, oppressive weight of the government. Those that would have squeaked through the banking problems without government help are now likely to fail as they lose all of their best employees. No capable manager will tolerate working under the oppressive, mean-spirited dictatorship of this government.

Legislation applied to prior events is clearly unconstitutional, yet this is not the first time that retroactive laws have been allowed to stand despite that fact. The Supreme Court does not enforce the Constitution's limits on the power of the Federal government and neither the Congress or the President take their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution at all seriously. Our politicians are very rarely men of principle.

Pelosi's Version of Change in the House of Representatives

The 1994 GOP "Contract with America" changed the seniority system that often left committee chairman in place until they were quite senile. Pelosi and the Democrat leadership of the House have changed the rules to return the seniority system. The younger, more conservative Democrats who have been essential to the Democrat new majorities, will have no say in how the House is run. John Fund wrote an interesting article on this and the other changes I will summarize and discuss below in the Wall St. Journal on 9 January 2009 called "Pelosi Turns Back the Clock on House Reform."

According to the House Rules, you have no right to any of your income or property at all. The minute some robber baron of the House puts together a bill which is designed to take your income or your property, no opponent in the House can offer a simple motion to remove the proposed tax increase without making up for the "lost revenue." Offering a spending cut as an offset to the proposed tax increase is not even allowed. Thus, the House Rules now mandate tax increases and basically will not allow any tax cuts, except those that increase taxes in some way to offset a decrease in taxes elsewhere. As I said, any proposal to take your income or wealth is now essentially guaranteed success. You will have no effective champion for your rights in the House.

This is one very dramatic refusal to recognize that the way to increase government revenues in this overtaxed world has been to decrease tax rates so that people will increase the number of transactions per unit time which are subject to taxation and so economies will grow. Throughout the world, it is now recognized that tax cuts are bringing increased revenue to governments and most nations have been busy cutting their tax rates. But our idiocentric House Democrat leadership has a dinosauric view of taxes and with their new seniority favoring rules, we will stupidly remain one of the world's most highly taxed people. This is punishing both to our economy and to our freedoms.

Medicare is one of the fastest growing expense items among Federal programs. This House Democrat leadership has decided to suspend all cost containment measures for this program in this Congress. How can this be wise? This is a very well-known highly wasteful program.

A century ago, Democrats were given the motion to recommit, which provided them a procedural safeguard after a period in which GOP Speaker of the House Joe Cannon had railroaded bills through the House. In the last Congress, Republicans used the motion to recommit to send 50 bills back to committee for reconsideration. This often required Democrats to take responsibility for items in the bills which they wanted to get passed before anyone had time to read the bill and publicize what was in it. Of course, much of what they wanted to railroad through on these bills was clearly not in the public interest. This was often documented by the fact that many recommitted bills were never brought back out of committee. Too many eyes were by then aware of what was in the bill and too many minds now knew what the consequences of the bill really were.

The Democrat idea of "change you can believe in", is clearly to make our gargantuan, bloated, incompetent, rights-violating government ever larger and ever less subject to the oversight of the people. It is clearly intended to primarily feed those special interests which will in turn be most gracious in bed in with the Democrat politicians. Of course, the Republicans have not proven to be very substantial foes to this same process. They are just a little less committed to the same outcome with a slightly different set of preferred special interests. It is way past time that we Americans remember the principles of limited government and why they are essential to our retaining our individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I for one am not happy with having Nancy Pelosi dictating what my happiness should consist of and how I can pursue it. I am constantly amazed that so many other Americans want to put her in charge of their pursuit of happiness. This clearly implies that they believe they are incompetent to live and manage their own lives.

68 million acres of non-producing oil leases

Nick Snow in the Oil and Gas Journal says that "the independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States charged on 28 August that government red tape and environmentalist hindrances are the primary causes of lease development delays, and it urged Democrats to cease the inflammatory and erroneous claim that US producers are just 'sitting on' 68 million acres of leased land as the fall campaigns get under way." The article is entitled "IPAMS to Democrats: Quit promoting dishonest energy claims."

IPAMS Executive Director Marc Smith says House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Polosi (CA) and Chief Deputy Whip Diana DeGette (CO) made this false claim at the Democrat national convention in Denver.

Smith said that 100% of the Bureau of Land Management oil and gas leases in the Mountain States region have been protested by environmental groups. He says "Industry is in a classic Catch-22 situation whereby the government has created a cumbersome process that takes years to complete, environmental groups exploit the process to throw up legal roadblocks at every stage, and then Congress and the environment lobby turn around and blame the industry for not 'diligently drilling.'"

When Obama calls for producing more natural gas and reluctantly allows a wee bit of drilling, it may mean nothing, since he may simply be counting on the bureaucracy and environmental groups to keep any additional oil and gas from being supplied. Until the politicians do something to speed up the process of bringing new finds to production, the granting of a few leases may mean nothing. We must remember that the Democrats have nearly uniformly decided that any use of carbon-based fuels is bad because they result in CO2 emissions. Consequently, they want carbon-based fuel costs to go up, which delays in production accomplishes by delaying production and raising the costs of production.

Thanks to Lemuel Linder for pointing this article out to me.

Iran at War with U.S., Pelosi Spokesperson for Iran

For many months, it has been clear that Iran has been waging war upon the United States. They have provided training, supplies, money, medical support, and safe havens for forces fighting American troops in Iraq. Weapons supplied by Iran have been used, with their knowledge and their intent, to kill American soldiers. Iran has been the chief supporter of the Shiite Mahdi militia, which long controlled the very important port of Basra and cut-off much of the flow of oil out of that port. The Mahdi militia also played the major role in creating friction and fighting with the Sunnis, thereby bringing Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war. The recent crack-down of the Iraqi government to oust the Mahdi militia from control of Basra and its surroundings did much to improve Sunni cooperation with the government and to recently increase the flow of oil. This flow of oil is extremely important as a means to put Iraqis back to work and to give them a means to concentrate on re-building the country Saddam Hussein destroyed in decades of looting, neglect, and legal instability.

But, for all of its nefarious activities, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is acting like a spokesperson for the theocratic tyrannical government of Iran. Here is her perspective of the situation in Iraq and the role of Iran:

"Well, the purpose of the surge was to provide a secure space, a time for the political change to occur to accomplish the reconciliation. That didn’t happen. Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn’t accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians-they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities-the Iranians."

How wrongheaded. Yes, Iran did seek to have hostilities cease when their proxy forces were too hard-pressed by the Iraqi government and the American troops. But, there is no indication whatsoever that they did this as a matter of goodwill. Our Speaker is clearly disassociated from this world. How can one so readily describe a country at war with us throughout most of the surge as being responsible for its success because of their goodwill as evidenced by a partial surrender. This is as ridiculous as describing Japan as being responsible for our success in the Pacific campaign of WWII because hostilities ceased due to Japan's goodwill!

The leadership of the Democrat Party is utterly astounding. Yes, the leadership of the Republican Party is often incompetent, but mostly there is evidence that they live in this world. Nancy Pelosi seems rarely able to observe reality without coming up with some incredibly wrongheaded assessment of it. Is she a holographic projection created by beings from a far off anti-matter galaxy for the purpose of subjugating the United States and then the Earth? What can explain such distortions of reality? I really want to know. Is there anybody out there who can explain this to me? I really am completely befuddled by it.