Alex I’ll take “More government!” for 2 Trillion please?

Since American taxpayers practically bought themselves an unprofitable railroad they didn’t need (disguised as a pick-me up) and the government is already busy buying up a few hundred thousand mortgages for us, to save people from suffering at the hands of their own poor judgement, we can now claim significant ownership in two of the most more poorly planned, badly run, and grossly inefficient mortgage lenders in America; once again saving the Federal government from its own folly.  (Which also makes it our folly)

 

Freddie and Fannie are, basically, belly up.   And far too many federal agencies and committees—all competing to save their own butts—have been pointing fingers while the ship sinks, making things that much worse, vying to see who can spend the most tax payer dollars on a bail out, never considering that the government should not be in the business of anything but government in the first place.  (I actually read that somewhere.)

 

Senate “We can’t axe it so let’s tax it! ™” Democrats were already proposing to salvage their favorite mortgage twins with (you guessed it) a tax on mortgages of about 400-500 dollars each.  But that hardly seems responsible when all it would do is continue to stifle real price competition in the market by propping up another competition busting, incompetent federal behemoth.   They’ll do it anyway and justify taking more of our money to prop up something that’s already taking more of our money, but at a discount! 

 

What’s likely to happen?  Well, the feds will use our hard earned cash to save their construct, extinguishing all the bright ideas to woo Franken-Fannie and Franken-Freddie back from the ledge,  with of course promises of additional oversight in the future (at additional taxpayer expense of course).  We’ll buy this for some stupid reason because everyone knows that when the babysitter has been irresponsible the best thing to do is invite her back with a big fat raise.  The Democrats will blame republicans even though they have overseen the entire collapse of the housing market and our economy for the past two years, because small children rarely take responsibility when they can blame others. (While the chorus of left wing prayer continues its endless Gregorian refrain of ‘More Gov-ern-ment.”) And the government will still get bigger, fatter, and deeper, so that next time this happens it will just take more money and more government to fix it again.

 

More proof that government funded by the people, for other people, could soon perish financially, from this earth, if this garbage is not stopped.  But hey, there is that wacky election thing coming up.  Maybe the best investment voters can make now is to vote for the people who want less government.  You know who they are “Right?”

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Conflicts of Interest

Shaheen has made some noise about conflicts of interest, but she has plenty of her own. 

Most obviously, she’s claiming to be fighting for middle class families, but all of her policies , particularly her pandering on energy policy, will remove massive amounts of wealth from of the economy just to give it to the government.  (Hiding behind words like taking profits or cutting funding is a smoke screen.  As we shall see she is in favor of all kinds of unnecessry funding.)  But without private profits we have no jobs.  Without jobs we become slaves to the federal welfare state she favors.  So how can she be for the middle class when all her plans will remove not just income potential, but the freedom of choice from the people she claims to be helping. (see here, here, here, here,….etc.)

 

Another conflict is her obsession with making government bigger which will, by default, enlarge government unions.   Jeanne gets plenty of campaign cash from Unions to support policies they favor, which would only add more government and more government employees to the Union rolls, all to be paid for by us.

 

Next up, Jeanne is a big favorite of trial lawyers, raking in heaps of cash from them.  And it is quite obvious that most of her “energy plans” (past present and future) will enrich lawyers from the state, government, and private and environmental groups, because she plans to use our tax dollars to put windmills all over our touristy New Hampshire landscape.   At $70,000 a piece (for windmills—the lawyers will cost us a lot more than that) you have to ask yourself who is best served by this plan, because it can’t be the taxpayers.  They get to pay whether we waste money on windmills or not.

 

Embryonic stem-cell research would get a 12 Billion dollar raise according to candidate Shaheen, tripling the budget of the government run National Science Foundation (NSF).  Stem cell research gets plenty of private funding already and adult Stem cell research has produced over 70 treatments while Embryonic Research has produced none.  The total failure of Embryonic Research should mark it for a  decreasing role at the NSF so why give them 12 billion more per year for no obviously good reason?  Continuing Embryonic stem cell research furthers the public perception that a human embryo is little more than laboratory tissue suitable for experimentation.  12 Billion (that’s $87,000 per year for every human in New Hampshire that survived past the Embryonic stage) buys a lot of perception, but would be much better served if left in the pockets of private citizens and industries who could then invest it themselves in things with a proven track record for success.   So where’s the conflict?  Jeanne Shaheen got half a million in cash from the abortion lobby during her 2006 run, and should do equally well this time around.  The abortion lobby stands to gain significantly from any increased public perception that takes the morality issue out of the debate.  A massive tax payer funded federal mandate to make embryo’s look more like a virus than a potential person would go a long way to taking the wind out of the Pro-life argument with people who are on still on the fence.

 

These policy positions have no short or long term benefit to New Hampshire or the taxpaying public in general but would each enrich the interests of groups who invest very heavily in Jeanne’s campaign.    Who does Ms. Shaheen really want to serve?  So far it looks like Unions, Trial Lawyers, and the Abortion Lobby.

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Sunday Morning Shaheen

So the oil companies are evil for failing to drill on land of which the US Department of Energy has this to say…

Remaining U.S. oil fields are becoming increasingly costly to produce because much of the easy-to-find oil has already been recovered. 

But the democrats are not evil for refusing to support this now obvious “doubling of domestic production” at any point in say, the past 30 years?  Wouldn’t that have helped the middle class before it was politically convenient?  And shouldn’t we consider this as evidence of very poor planning by Democrats when it comes to short and long term energy management?  So you were just letting energy prices skyrocket until you got good poll numbers?

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Bernie Sanders from the PRV

The “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders from the People’s Republic of Vermont, had this to say regarding Judd Gregg’s vote against amendments to the Heating aide Bill.

“Do we vote to keep the old, the sick, and kids alive when the weather gets cold or very, very hot, or do we spend money on people who make huge campaign contributions?”

Bernie, I’m going to go see who donated to your campaign and then compare it to your voting record, and I bet, I just bet, we’ll find some interesting relationships there. 

 

Bernie’s idea of a competent legislator must be one who, after failing to solve a problem, (or by ignoring it) makes good by bilking taxpayers and playing the poor, old, sick, kids card.  (And I heard he was something of a maverick). Unfortunately, it’s a real problem we need to deal with.  But the problem is based on the cost of energy.  Bernie, you could actually affect that cost by voting to drill.  That would actually deflate the cost almost immediately and save the old, the sick, and the kids, without a massive influx of tax payer dollars.

I know, I know, you must be part of that, “it wont change the price of gas or fuel in time” crowd aren’t you.  Well, here’s the thing.  Looking back at all the “pronouncements” made by the left, and by independents who carry water for them like yourself, they have all been wrong.  All of them.  And you know oil used to go up and down all the time based on production statements, long before production hit the market, even when George Bush was not President.  So why should we believe you or them, about anything now, when history is against you.  Carter (and even Nixon and Ford) tried this same shtick back in the 70’s.  We got screwed, Bernie. Big time.

Just say you’ll drill.  If it will make you happy, start by drilling the existing leases, and then say you’ll drill the new available reserves, and then we can watch what happens.  They can spend some of those profits you’ve all been whining about to get at it.  If it doesn’t work, congress can easily release emergency funding on a dime.   They do it all the time.  So why not wait and see.  We have a few months, do something meaningful today, because if we simply toss out the cash without solving the actual problem that makes this funding even necessary, we’ll just have to do it again next year, when it will cost even more.  Handing money out now just looks like some kind of band-aid political pandering.  Solving real problems however takes courage.  Got any of that handy, because we could use it.

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Kathy Sullivan get’s dizzy from the spin.

Front page, Sunday Union Leader, in an article assessing Sununu’s ability to shake “The Bush effect,” NH State DHC (Democrat High Council) senior adviser Kathy Sullivan sees Sununu as “a big part of the problem.”  So what problem is she referring to?  Let’s deconstruct.

 

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How about a compromise on energy?

How about this?

We are cleaner and more environmentally friendly than just about any other nation when it comes to oil extraction, and the way things are going, the oil will get drilled up by someone, and if we don’t change our thinking that wealth will not come here.  So we drill.  We drill a lot, I mean all of it. Right away. (hear me out)

The existing federal tax structure on energy is already loaded with  enough taxes on oil companies, that this strategy would add significant revenue to the federal government.  But we’d also get increased revenues from construction, transportation, and other forms of related commerce that would create more jobs from upscaled production to meet the new development demands.  That, plus payroll taxes from domestic job growth in all these industries, would infuse the national treasury with even more new cash from new sources.  So instead of what we are doing now, looking to steal cash from places that just don’t have it, and straining existing capital and investment, we’d have all new growth with all new money.  We then use a chunk of that new revenue to stimulate a massive alternative energy research and development project in the US, without having to cripple our economy to do it.

 

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The Lie of Roe v. Wade

The left has been hiding something from you for the past 30 years.  They have done such a thorough job of it that people I have known most of my life, people with doctorates, college professors, businessmen, even a member of the clergy, never knew the truth about Roe v. Wade.  They all believed, as do most Americans, that if Roe were overturned Abortion would immediately be illegal in America.  They believe this because that is what the media tells us.  It is what our educators tell us.  It is what many of our politicians tell us.  It is what they want us to believe, and it is a lie.
 
The left, and their fellow travelers on abortion, need you to believe that overturning Roe would ban abortion. They want you to imagine weeping, troubled young girls, wandering alone into dirty back-alley clinics, in some feeble attempt to regain their “reproductive rights.”  They want you to envision self-mutilation with a wire hanger.  They demand that there is no other sane alternative to Roe.  But this is total fantasy, and proves that the bigger the lie, the easier it is to beleive. 
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Double Standard?

The 10th circuit ruled that the State of Colorado could not (in a nutshell) set itself up in the business of defining what is or is not too religious, and as such, struck down a State law that prohibited financial aid to students applying to certain religious colleges.

…a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Colorado may not distinguish between sectarian and “pervasively sectarian” colleges to deny state funds to students in the latter category. Such distinctions, the court ruled, amount to illegal state preferences for some religious groups over others.

It’s an interesting decision. The article is here, and the circuit court’s decision is here.

But what really caught my attention was this closing statement by Barry Lynn. This from the article linked above.

Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in an interview Wednesday night, agreed that the decision was significant, but criticized it as part of “an erosion” of the rights of Americans not to support religious education and belief with which they disagree.

“This will support universities set up precisely to promote the faith, and now they will be promoting it with tax dollars of people who disagree with their view,” Lynn said.

Really?

So if it is a problem when a student in need of financial aid, wants to use that aid to attend a religious university, why can’t we apply the same metric to other forms of government funding?  I happen to be against corporate welfare, in fact I’m against government welfare almost entirely.  I’m not a big fan of giving cash to people in a farm bill who don’t farm.  Wow, I could do this for days.  Why isn’t that prohibited based on “my views?” Particularlywhen things like farm bills, and Federal welfare are not even protected by the constitution?

But the point I really wanted to make—mostly because it will inflame the left wing masses—is that millions of government tax dollars are spent funding the already profitable Planned Parenthood.  Isn’t this promoting abortion with the tax dollars of people who disagree with that view? 

Based on Barry’s metric I believe it is.  No outrage from the left?  Not surprised.

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Local Newss?

This form the UK on New Hampshire.

I have not honestly looked arond yet to see what local coverage there is on this, I may be way behind as usual, but the fact that his is news in the UK is interesting enough.

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The Dr. Kevorkian energy initiative

The fact is that the current Democrat energy strategy could destroy America before it makes the Left’s blessed sacrament of “renewable energy” a remotely viable alternative. Do you really want to take that chance? Risking our economic freedom to the whims of foreign nations because we like the idea of not needing oil is suicide. This is a Dr. Kevorkian remedy to our economic ills, and the democrats are fully prepared to help us commit suicide to free us from “the sickness” of fossil fuels.

  

We know that Democrats in congress want renewable’s more than almost anything else. We have proof that they want energy to get more expensive so that their beloved renewable’s will finally become competitive with fossil fuels, both politically and economically. But Democrat’s are ignoring a real very problem; as nice as renewable’s would be, they cannot begin to replace fossil fuels for decades (maybe longer).

 

Money to fund such innovation is still bleeding out of our economy as demand for existing oil continues to outpace supply. But instead of bringing some of that money back home, their favored method of “balancing the field for renewable’s” is forcing massive government mandates that will eventually cost the private sector and taxpayers trillions to retool the entire country. And even then they have to accept that you can’t replace everything that relies on oil with renewable’s. But instead of acknowledging these limitations, or that this strategy could cripple the economy, and crush the middle class, they insist that it will save the middle class? Huh?

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