Primary Voters Hungry For Change
The results of Tuesday’s primaries show the public is hungry for the right kind of change. Among other things, we know that voters are willing to put their trust in successful businesspeople who have created jobs, balanced budgets and made a payroll. Americans have lost patience with expensive bailouts and intrusive government interference with our personal lives. These results are great news for our campaign and our message to bring common sense, real world experience to Washington, D.C.
War Through Weakness
Ronald Reagan spoke of peace through strength. It was an effective strategy. Yet the Obama administration is effectively bringing about war through its weak foreign policy of appeasement particularly in the Middle East and most acutely as it relates to Israel.
President Obama is the Neville Chamberlain of our time. He has repeatedly made overtures to extreme regimes like Iran that signal an overall weakness in the United State’s resolve to stand by its allies in the region. This appeasement strategy has given extreme Islam in particular the opening they have needed to begin the next chapter of Jihad and both Hamas and Hezbollah are taking great advantage. In addition, these Obama olive branches have had the effect of fueling a global anti-Semitic movement that feeds a “hypocrisy and a biased rush to judgment” in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Obama administration, through its weakness, has effectively created an extremely volatile situation in the Middle East, giving radical Islam the bold encouragement it needs to act out, forcing Israel into justified unilateral actions. The current scenario, as it is shaping up, will provoke even more violence proving that Barack Chamberlain’s weakness will lead to war. Israel has a right to defend herself and her recent actions against Hamas, who is smuggling Iranian rockets and missiles into Gaza, are more than justified. We owe Prime Minister Netanyahu a public apology for our lack of support but more importantly, we owe Israel our dedicated commitment to stand by her side and be ready and willing to take whatever action is necessary to rid the region of those who profess to destroy her.
We can achieve peace through strength. We need to have the leadership that can understand this strategy and the character as a nation to defend our ally...
Demand Real Border Security
Obama is Throwing us a Bone...Don't Fall for it.
President Obama yesterday announced the deployment of 1200 National Guard troops to our southern border with Mexico.
Let do the math. 1200 troops to be added to southern borders of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. That's 1200 troops to cover 2000 miles. These US soldiers will work in 3 shifts per day. So, no more than 400 per shift per day. If they were equally spaced, that means one soldier covering 5 miles.
We sent hundreds of thousands of our troops in World War II during the invasion of Normandy. If Eisenhower had sent only 1200 to those French beaches, we'd all be talking German today. Who is the President kidding? This is an election year ploy ... an attempt to appease you and me into believing he is taking action. It is a deception of the highest order. Don't' fall for it. Continue to demand realistic numbers....3000 for Arizona's border alone.
National Teacher Appreciation Day
We all have teachers who have impacted our lives, whether we want to admit it or not. And today is a day we should admit it because without great teachers many of us would be in a far different place than we are today.
I remember my first grade teacher, Mrs. Lundgren. She was at the end of her career and, in fact, just a couple of years after she taught me she retired. But she still had the drive and passion even in the twilight of her career to give me the fundamentals I needed to be successful.
I was having trouble in math. Yes, in the first grade. And yes, with simple addition. In fact, Mrs. Lundgren called my mother in and told her that it was a serious problem. My mother was a single mom working full time and my math problems were probably the last thing she needed in her life. She pledged to work with me but the reality was that she was gone by 5:30 in the morning every day and not home until about 4:30 in the afternoon when she and my Grandmother would begin to prepare dinner. She didn’t have much left by about 8pm much less the energy to drill me on addition and get me over the hurdle on my basic understanding.
I think Mrs. Lundgren must have realized this because shortly thereafter she asked me to stay after school a half hour every day and she began to work with...
There You Go Again
It’s uncanny how the Obama administration can continue to pursue an agenda that is diametrically opposed to the correct way to turn around this economy. If Reagan were here you know what he’d say. Mr. President, there you go again.
And so we go with this month’s attempt at further socializing the United States of America. We’re facing Senator Dodd’s Financial Regulation Plan that, if enacted, will continue to smother our free market economy with government over-regulation.
Do we need to learn from what has happened on Wall Street and make the necessary adjustments? Absolutely. But why we need to continually swing the pendulum so far left that it actually comes unhinged and flies off of its axis I’ll never know.
Senator Dodd’s proposal is dangerous for many reasons. Yes it creates a protected class of “too big to fail” firms that in all irony to the problem we’re trying to solve allows these firms to take on undue risk knowing that they will get bailed out in the end.
Yes, the proposal provides for the seizure of private property without the checks and balances necessary to restrain an over aggressive government.
Yes it allows yet another government bureaucracy, the FDIC, to have permanent bailout authority with a fund of $50 billion.
Yes, it...
Charities Lose Out
One of the key losers in the President’s proposed 2011 budget are charities. In his budget he is proposing that the tax break for itemized deductions, including donations to charity, be capped at 28% for families making more than $250,000 per year. This represents a 20% reduction in tax breaks for those in the 33% to 35% tax bracket willing to contribute. As a result, the President claims that this would raise $318 billion over ten years in order pay for the $630 billion reserve fund designated for health care reform.
Ok, let’s see now. For the sake of reforming the health care system with a government-run program that will actually increase costs and decrease efficacy, we are going to penalize those who are most willing to give to charities by reducing their incentive to do so. As a result we will have a health care system that actually exacerbates critical problems and $318 billion less in available funds for charities.
Does that make sense?
July 20, 1969
The President recently announced his budget for 2011. The details are staggering:
- $3.8 trillion in federal spending in 2011
- $1.6 trillion deficit
- $2 trillion in tax hikes over the next ten years
- $14 trillion added to the debt
This budget will more than double the national debt and while the President has called for a spending freeze, it needs to be a real freeze and it needs to start now. It is clear that we cannot borrow, spend and tax our way back to a growing economy and this budget is a far cry from true fiscal reform.
This budget not only lacks the fiscal discipline we need to create jobs, it lacks something equally as important; a vision, a goal and true inspiration.
I remember sitting in my family room as a nine year old glued to the black and white screen of my Mom’s 13-inch Admiral television on the night of July 20, 1969. I remember watching that fateful moment as Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface of the moon capping a decade long national effort to achieve the challenge John F. Kennedy had issued to the nation. I remember feeling a sense of pride and accomplishment. Most importantly I remember being inspired.
And that inspiration for a nation paid dividends through the following decades with innovations in technology and derivative discoveries that stimulated our overall economy. There was a clear vision with a specific mission and an understanding that space exploration was not only noble but also economically sound.
The President’s new budget, in effect, has begun to neuter that clear mission and as a result our inspiration. Some will argue that the cancellation of the Constellation program, which was President Bush’s plan to go back to the moon, is...
State of the Union: Spinning Out of Control
The State of the Union is this. We’re spinning out of control. We’re out of control because we have a President and Congress that are more concerned with spin than with actually creating a successful strategy to solve our economic issues.
As I have said in previous blogs we must simply judge success based on performance versus objectives. And on every count this President and Congress, including Harry Mitchell and Nancy Pelosi, have failed.
Despite a trillion-dollar “stimulus” a year ago we are still asking “Where are the jobs?” Unemployment is up, not down having lost nearly three million jobs since the “stimulus” was enacted. Our national debt hit a record $1.4 trillion just for fiscal year 2009 and has passed $12 trillion increasing 39% since the Democrats took control of Congress three years ago.
And now, the President is in spin mode. But he’s spinning us out of control. He has redirected his focus on the middle class in an attempt to create jobs. Yet, he has spent the last year pushing job-killing legislation like Tax and Trade and government run health care. The President and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Mitchell have been telling us for the past year that government spending would save the economy yet now they finally want to cut spending. But even that smells funny. The President talks about spending freezes yet Democrats in Congress want to raise the debt limit by almost $2 trillion.
We are, as a nation, being subjected to an extreme form of political whiplash as Obama and the Democrats in Congress spin their failed attempts into a new strategy built on rhetoric rather than sound fiscal discipline.
Massachusetts
It’s here. The big day. As I write this we await with baited breath to see if Scott Brown can perform a miracle. Or a massacre from the Dems point of view.
Is this a referendum on Health Care Reform or Obama or Reid and Pelosi or the direction of the country in general? It’s all of the above and it’s just another sign that we are fed up with what’s been going on in Washington D.C.
Honestly, I don’t know who is going to win. Obviously it’s extremely important for the country that Scott Brown pulls through and I hope my contribution to his campaign will help him win in some small way.
But it’s also obvious the point has been made. The fact that he’s this close in the polls (or ahead in some of them) speaks volumes and is truly instructive about the coming tsunami in the Fall.
Harry, are you watching? I’m coming and the people of the 5th Congressional District are going to take back their seat and place their trust in a Candidate that sticks to what he says, believes in individual freedom, personal responsibility, limited government and liberty.
Harry, I’ve got news for you. You can’t make this county or the state of Arizona into Massachusetts. So quite trying and prepare to retire early.
Measuring Performance Based on Results
It’s the beginning of 2010. The question is how is the economy doing as a result of Democratic policies?
I’m a businessman. I have to look at the objective and the results and measure the performance of these policies based on the actual results. The objective of the Democratic policies was to create jobs, lower the unemployment rate and begin to reduce the federal deficit.
Well, as best I can tell, here are the results:
Right now more than 15 million Americans are unemployed.
President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Mitchell promised that borrowing another trillion dollars would create jobs “immediately” and unemployment would not rise above 8%.
As of December, the national unemployment rate was 10%, the highest level of unemployment sine June 1983.
85,000 jobs were lost in December and more than 2.7 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus package, which Harry Mitchell voted for, was signed by President Obama.
More than six million jobs have been lost since Democrats took control of the Congress in January 2007.
In fiscal year 2009, Democrats in Washington spent a record $3.52 trillion and the national debt hit a record $1.4 trillion.
In November, the national debt passed $12 trillion and has increased by 39% since Democrats took control of Congress three years ago.
Now, if we were running the country like a business and these were the results at year-end, the people responsible for these results would be fired. It’s that simple.
So the real question is, do these people deserve to stay in office based on this performance?
I don’t think so.
