Biden has weakened the country

 The irony, in my opinion, is that the owners/investors of the fossil fuel industry are or will be the same who control the so-called "green" sources of energy. Sunlight and wind still have to be converted (controlled) into useable fuel just as crude can't run a truck or furnace.

Sean Hannity: Biden is doing 'exactly' what he promised with the fossil fuel industry | Fox News

https://youtu.be/uqoNzFv_rDk  Bill O'Reilly weakened the U.S by trying to destroy the industry.

The critics of Trump need to look in the mirror

The same people who scream and cry at Trump's behavior and claim he doesn't have American values (like my cousin Ron and former tenant Vern) and should be impeached are the ones lusting after every crazy program the 2020 candidates can come up with to distinguish themselves from the next socialist on the ballot. Green new deal. Death to the unborn. Confiscate the guns. Destroy free speech. Force the NFL to have 20% LGBTQ (I made that one up, but it they want it for TV why not football?). Tax wealth, not just income. Legalize and encourage homelessness with increased housing regulations. Start more forest fires with bad environmental rules. Fly in the illegals--don't make them walk; and force all artists and doctors to violate their religious beliefs.

President Trump as defender of religious freedom

I was puzzled that the Washington Post editorial board was attacking the Bible as literature in schools today; after all, you can't read a history of rock or pop music or understand Shakespeare if you are illiterate in the Bible. But the attack by its "editorial board" is tied to Trump. He tweeted it is a good idea, therefore, it must be awful, oppressive and fascist.

The president made promises as a candidate about restoring our religious freedom, and it was one of the earliest promises he kept and with little fan-fare. The MSM haven't said a lot, but the left continues to attack nuns, bakers, and Catholic school kids at a march for life even after the Supreme Court returned to them their constitutionally protected rights.

I urge you to go on line and print out "Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty" from the Office of the Attorney General, Oct. 6, 2017. Give it to your pastors, priests and professors. No other country has this; and no other U.S. president has told his AG to compile an easy to understand guide of laws, regulations, court cases and litigation results concerning that most precious of all our freedoms.

During the eight years of Obama, our freedoms were eroded in small but alarming ways with, "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone" to "fundamentally change" our nation. From announcing embryonic stem cell research at a Catholic university to setting up bureaucratic regulations in various agencies which bullied people of the book to using a website announcing which religious schools were receiving exemptions from Title IX, President Obama, a professed Christian, ground his heel on religious liberty in the United State.

Slowly the agency actions which were chipping away at our freedoms are being undone. That website which was used by the left to harass and mock people of faith, has been taken down. Other changes are being made in hostile bureaucracies in the Department of Labor and State Department and there is an ambassador at large for international religious freedom. HHS now has a division devoted to conscience protections and religious freedom.

Use it or lose it applies to religious freedom, too.

For more on this important issue see May 2019 issue of First Things. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/05/trump-and-religious-liberty

Obama hits the dusty trail . . . again

The White House has nothing. And it's campaign season again. So . . . roll out climate change, racism, income inequality, and rape. Of course, there has always been climate change; Donald Sterling has always been a racist; in the same position with same life choices, there is no inequality; and the definition of rape keeps getting redefined. Never you mind. I know some voters who will fall for this.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/6/obama-hits-campaign-trail-wary-democrats/

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/03/the-public-square

http://blog.heritage.org/2014/01/29/u-s-debt-poses-greater-barrier-economic-opportunity-income-inequality/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/06/politics/white-house-climate-energy/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/29/living/campus-sexual-violence-report/

Ohio and coal

“In Ohio, coal provides heat and light for more than 4.5 million homes and jobs for nearly 28,000 Ohioans. It may come as little surprise that Ohio ranks 10th in the nation in coal production and 4th in the nation in coal use.

But that's not a concern for the regulators in Washington, D.C. For them, coal is just another opportunity to test unproven environmental policies. For example, see the Environmental Protection Agency's new CCS regulations, which were unveiled last month. CCS stands for "Carbon Capture and Storage" — a pleasant-sounding policy that hits Ohioans twice, first on their tax bills and then again on their utility bills.

CCS is the fulfillment of President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign pledge that, "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can — it's just it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum." “

Read more here.

What he does best is campaign; least is lead

While Obama vacationed in expensive luxury in Hawaii, his minions shivered in DC and scrambled to put a happy face on Obamacare, and appeal to disappointed supporters for money to run against the evil Republicans or lose the Senate. We know he'll take his failed economic policies, blame them on the Republicans and campaign against the evil rich--and why not, the stock market soared at the end of 2013, and blacks and minorities are still looking for work. So let's raise the minimum wage and bring in more illegals to further mess up the job market for the less skilled and less educated. I can't wait for the wagging finger and angry face--but will he be able to still fool that many people?

When Obama was an Illinois senator, he had nothing but bad things to say about the Iraq War, but the Afghanistan War was the "good war." As a U.S. senator he gave comfort to the enemy by criticizing Bush and the war. When he ran for president the wars were virtually over removing one of his talking points and both countries were on their way to freedom from extremists, although not to the democracy Bush has envisioned. Bush freed more women than Lincoln did slaves (Atlantic monthly). So he really had little to say about it in 2009 except to follow Bush's plan of orderly withdrawal and support (with a lot of criticism from the leftist supporters). Now Obama is throwing it all away. He doesn't lead; he's returning to his roots.

Afghanistan U.S. military deaths under Obama and Bush

This was dated February 2013, so Obama’s would now be higher.

http://icasualties.org/oef/

This is for all my Democrat friends and relatives, and those Republicans who gave up on Bush and decided to vote for “hope and change.” Remember, Bush had the Congress behind him to go to war.  Obama has just done what he pleased, and not what he promised.

The Boyfriend

Ladies—you deserve better!

Can we hold him to his promises?

No. "I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less - because we cannot meet twenty-first century challenges with a twentieth century bureaucracy."

Actually, reading a bill line by line isn't the same, is it?

Or this one?

Third debate: ". . .what I've done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut.... What I want to emphasize ... is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches."

Rich Lowry RealClearPolitics:
If he had pledged in October to double federal domestic discretionary spending in a matter of weeks—including increasing the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts by a third, spending hundreds of millions more on federal buildings and throwing tens of billions on every traditional liberal priority from job training to Pell Grants—he'd have been hard-pressed to win at all.

The president should read the transcript of the third presidential debate. He claimed his program represented "a net spending cut." He called himself "a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I've proposed, I've proposed an additional cut so that it matches." He added, "We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work."

Actually, I don't believe that if he told the truth he wouldn't have been elected. He made it over the finish line on white guilt, and blacks were voting for him 99%, and the press fell down and played dead. No, it wouldn't have mattered at all.

And not a word about married parents

The number one reason for children growing up in poverty is their parents: unmarried young mothers who didn't finish their education. A child whose mother didn't have her first child until she was out of her teens, who finished high school, and got married before she started a family has a very small chance of growing up in poverty. But here's what Obama said he would do--and none of this is original to him--we've been goosing this problem with government money (and good salaries for the bureaucrats in the programs) since the 1930s when social workers decided Uncle Sam could be a step-father to millions, thus keeping them in poverty and on the rolls for the Democrats for a life time.

"My anti-poverty plan will significantly improve opportunities for millions of poor children and their parents by strengthening the economy for working Americans and providing additional resources to programs that have proven to be effective in reducing poverty. For example, my plan will expand the EITC, which is considered one of the most effective pro-work anti-poverty programs to date, to 5.8 million more Americans. Additionally, my EITC plan will increase EITC benefits for another 6.2 million Americans. I will also extend affordable, quality and portable health insurance coverage to every American and make significant investments in early childhood education to help low-income families. I will invest $1 billion over five years into transitional jobs and career pathways programs to engage more Americans into the workforce and help them succeed. I will also work to tackle chronic poverty in urban neighborhoods across American by creating Promise Neighborhoods in 20 cities to provide new hope and opportunities to residents of concentrated poverty." Spotlight on Poverty

William Galston, a Democratic strategist and former domestic affairs adviser to President Clinton is usually acknowledged as the source of the statistics on the relationship between poverty, education and marriage. But it's been confirmed many times either in research or in personal experience by people who work with the poor. Even divorce lowers a child's economic level. Only 8% of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79% will be poor. The evidence that mother-only families contribute to crime is powerful. When two scholars studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found that, after holding income constant, young people in father-absent families were twice as likely to be in jail as were those in two-parent families. And their lives did not improve if their mother had acquired a stepfather for them. Fill-in dads don't improve matters any more than do fatter government checks.

Will more money in the form of EITC help? More health insurance? Vinyl siding and new windows on the home bought with a government grant? Not if marriage is left out of the poverty solution. Poor and low income women already have access to many government programs--most of which hold them hostage. I know a married mother of a school age child who doesn't work because the family would lose its EITC and SCHIP. It will also never get beyond "low income." During the year before their babies were born, 43% of unmarried mothers received welfare or food stamps, 21% received some type of housing subsidy, and 9% received another type of government transfer (unemployment insurance etc.). For women who have another child, the proportion who receive welfare or food stamps rises to 54%. (McLanahan, Sara. The Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study: Baseline National Report. Princeton, NJ: Center for Research on Child Well-being, 2003). Unmarried parents put children at risk for high rates of asthma (Harknett, Kristin. Children’s Elevated Risk of Asthma in Unmarried Families: Underlying Structural and Behavioral Mechanisms. Working Paper #2005-01-FF. Princeton, NJ: Center for Research on Child Well-being, 2005: 19-27.). In a study of INTERPOL crime statistics of 39 countries, it was found that single parenthood ratios were strongly correlated with violent crimes. (Barber, Nigel. “Single Parenthood As a Predictor of Cross-National Variation in Violent Crime.” Cross-Cultural Research 38 (November 2004): 343-358.)

Putting himself out there to the public as a married family man may be the number one thing President Obama can do bring down poverty. This he needs to say before every speech on proverty. Bring Michelle and the girls on stage and say proudly, "Here is plan A. Now for Plan B. . . "

Outsourcing the news to India

Apparently the Times of India is tracking Obama's revisions of his pledges and promises, even if the U.S. media aren't. According to them, via Hot Air, in just 2 weeks there were 17 promises of hope and change that were tossed. I doubt that the U.S. press will ever allow Obama's ratings to drop--they've invested so much energy and money in getting him elected.

HT Recliner Commentaries

Just give him a chance!

Why? He's already gone back on most of his campaign promises and hired all the old Clinton retreads--not even the left can trust him, let alone the right. (OK, so it's a bit of hyperbole--he hasn't broken ALL 510 campaign promises.) And spend? Oh my goodness! His $150 million inaugural makes Bush and Clinton look like pikers! Where, oh where, are all those progressive / liberal / marxist pundits and bloggers of 2004-2005 who moaned and groaned about Bush's extravagance? And tax us? Whew! Out the wazoo! And the arrogance. Strutting around and giving orders like he was the president the last two months. Didn't grandma teach him manners? Don't they have guidebooks for guys on a steep learning curve? Now he's stroking and snuggling up to a tax crook who doesn't know how to file quarterly the way the rest of us with self-employment income are required to do? And he's the guy who supposedly knows how to turn the economy around!! Perhaps we follow suit and see if President Obama gives us a job. Usually presidents wait 100 days before it's obvious they are clueless. So why wait? Why give him a chance when by Jan. 20 he will have already used up 77 days proving his worth?

"Before President Bush took office, the federal government took in $2 trillion in revenue in 2000. As Bush leaves office, the federal government is expected to take in $2.4 trillion in 2009. In other words, after eight years under President Bush, the federal government is taking in $400 billion more a year in revenue. So why did Congressional Budget Office project a $1.4 trillion deficit for the 2009 budget? Massive spending increases. In 2000, the federal government spent just $1.8 trillion. Now the CBO estimates that the feds will spend almost double that, $3.5 trillion, in 2009 . Oh, and by the way, these figures do not include the nearly $1 trillion in new deficit spending that President-elect Barack Obama wants to throw at our struggling economy." Heritage Foundation, Morning Bell, January 16, 2009

". . . if you are one of the people who is sitting back waiting for Obama to ride in and clean up the mess his party has helped to create, quit holding your breath. You might as well exhale...it will be business as usual. You know, throw some money here and throw some money there. Blow some smoke and blame the other party while perpetuating the problem. After all, our legislators created a crisis and want you to think we need them to resolve it. What we need is for them to go home, leave our taxes alone and let us upright the economy. Whoever heard that the wise thing to do when you are in debt is to go further into debt? The more money they blow the longer and more expensive the recovery! Obama has already expressed that this crisis will take years to resolve thus implying that we will probably need him and his party for another term or longer. They can milk the Bush blame game forever." Murray Sez

Chad, aka Murray, guest blogger

Obama didn't know his aunt was living in this country illegally. An immigration judge ORDERED her to leave the United States years ago after denying her request for asylum. Now that Obama does know, what's he or anybody else doing about it?? I guess that tells us something about how he feels about illegal immigration. Of course, the media brushed this off already. I found out from a little blurb in the local newspaper. Can you imagine the headlines if this were McCain or Palin? Now the government is investigating whether any laws were broken in the disclosure that Obama's aunt was living in this country illegally!

Obama wants to raise taxes on corporations and hit the big oil companies with a windfall profit tax. I mean, you just know before you get to economics 101 that the end result of this is higher costs to the consumer and they actually pay the price. Plus some companies will layoff people or the larger ones will plant their business in another country where taxes are lower. Now that's what I call a great economic stimulus plan!

Obama is going to lower income taxes for 95% of the population. Well, he better import some people cause 95% of the people don't pay taxes anyway. You supposed the tax break includes his illegal aunt?

Obama is going to share the wealth so that all the non- contributors do not have to worry, they will get more of the money that you contributors earn. This continues a trend that we already have going for us. Encourage people not to work.

Obama cannot tell you where all the campaign donations have come from nor will he even try. No one is even investigating. He claims the money is coming from small donors like you and me. Yeah right! Here we're going through the toughest economic times of our live time and he wants us to believe that the little people donated hundreds of million dollars to his campaign. Tells you how he feels about campaign finance reform. If you do not have to prove where the donations come from then there are no rules.

Obama wants us to believe that the entire economic mess is Bush's fault. Bush hasn't done everything right but he certainly isn't responsible for the crash. Obama doesn't mention that it was his party that stopped all attempts to head off the housing bubble and the demise of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae while taking campaign in donations from them. So how can he help resolve it if he doesn't know who or what caused it?

Obama has a lock on this state. I'm registered in Illinois. As far as the election goes it's not because he is the best man for the Presidency it's that the voters do three dumb things that perpetuate getting idiots and morons elected. They vote their party or in this case because Obama is an Illinois Senator and black. These types of voters made their decision months ago. Now since Obama has a lock on Illinois and since we still have this idiotic electoral college, my vote means nothing thank you very much!

From now on call me Chad.
Murray

Five myths about Obama's health care

Sally Pipes article in Forbes dated Nov. 1 is not an eye opener, if you’ve been paying attention. But she does use Obama’s own words and then debunks them. She is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute and author of the newly released book Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide.

MYTH #1: "If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system."

A single-payer system is a great idea--until you get sick.

MYTH #2: "One of the issues we must face and can't ignore is the explosion of health care costs that is crushing families and businesses across our country."

. . . the longevity gains associated with medical innovation are currently worth $2.8 trillion annually. That's larger than the GDP of the U.K.

MYTH #3: "Under my plan, we'll make sure insurance companies cover evidence-based, preventive care services--weight loss programs, smoking-cessation programs and other efforts to help people avoid costly, debilitating health problems in the first place."

Contrary to popular belief, medical spending on the average smoker is $100,000 less than that on the nonsmoker. An ounce of prevention may help Americans live longer. But it certainly won't lead to reduced health care spending.

MYTH #4: "[John McCain] loves to talk about his tax credit. But what he doesn't tell you is that he taxes health care benefits for the first time in history. "

By combining a credit with the modified tax treatment of employer benefits, as the McCain plan does, families at all income levels would pay lower taxes on average. Obama can't say the same about his health plan.

MYTH #5: "I know the outrage we all feel about the 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance."

Foolish as it may seem, a sizable number of financially comfortable individuals--particularly the young---opt against owning insurance. Another 12 million are eligible for government programs and haven’t signed up.

There’s much more detail in the article than what I’ve included.
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/10/31/obama-health-care-oped-cx_scp_1101pipes.html

Is Obama still smoking? Just asking. Maybe it's like the brother and auntie living in poverty. Do as I say, not as I do?