Crashing the Tea Party; Opposition to health care increased after signing; Nuclear posturing

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. - Adrian Rogers Tea Parties today…Did you go? I did! 1) Tea party rally upbraids 'gangster government' WASHINGTON – Tea party protesters marked tax day Thursday with exhortations against "gangster government" … Several thousand rallied in Washington's Freedom Plaza in the shadow of the Ronald Reagan office building, capping a national protest tour launched in the dust of Nevada and finishing in the capital that inspires tea party discontent like no other place. Allied activists demonstrated from Maine to Hawaii in hundreds of lively protests, all joined in disdain for government spending and — on the April 15 federal tax filing deadline — what they see as the Washington tax grab. … Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota won roars of affirmation as she accused President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats of trying to take over health care, energy, financial services and other broad swaths of the economy. "We're on to this gangster government," she declared. "I say it's time for these little piggies to go home." See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100415/ap_on_go_ot/us_tea_party_rally 1a) EDITORIAL: Crashing the Tea Party A group named Crashtheparty.org is planning on attending Tea Party rallies around the country tomorrow pretending to be party members. The strategy is to behave outrageously on Tax Day to provide fodder for the media, which likes to portray opponents to the Obama presidency as fringe radicals. The plot is part of the typical liberal playbook to silence opposition to the left-wing agenda. The party crashers already have dropped into Tea Party meetings and rallies to stake out vulnerabilities. According to Jason Levin, head of Crashtheparty.org, the group has affiliates in 65 cities across the land. He unconvincingly claims that his group's bizarre antics will simply reflect the hidden views of Tea Partiers. "Do I think most of them are homophobes, racists or morons? Absolutely," Mr. Levin told Associated Press. …For the most part, the liberal media plays along with the Democrats' disinformation campaigns. Take allegations by Rep. John Lewis, Georgia Democrat, that he heard protesters chanting the N-word "15 times" at a March 20 protest at the U.S. Capitol. Despite dozens of video recordings of the event, there is no evidence to back up Mr. Lewis' story. Numerous videos show Tea Party members yelling "kill the bill," but none shows a single protester chanting that awful racial epithet. The lawmaker's charge is so dubious that Andrew Breitbart has offered a $100,000 reward to anyone with proof that Mr. Lewis is telling the truth. No one has stepped forward to claim the cash. This lack of verification hasn't kept the media from continuously repeating the prejudicial tale. "They can't actually debate our message, and that's their problem," explains Bob MacGuffie, an organizer for a Tea Party group with members in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. The Democrats' desperation shows that Mr. MacGuffie is right on target. Polls show the American public is angry about the explosion of government power during the Obama presidency and Democratic control of Congress. Liberals in power don't have thoughtful responses to popular criticism, so they are trying to ostracize skeptical thought and intimidate those brave enough to stand against the bureaucratic juggernaut. See: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/14/crashing-the-tea-party/ 2) Opposition to President Barack Obama's health care law jumped after he signed it WASHINGTON — Opposition to President Barack Obama's health care law jumped after he signed it — a clear indication his victory could become a liability for Democrats in this fall's elections. A new Associated Press-GfK poll finds Americans oppose the health care remake 50 percent to 39 percent. Before a divided Congress finally passed the bill and Obama signed it at a jubilant White House ceremony last month, public opinion was about evenly split. Another 10 percent of Americans say they are neutral. Disapproval for Obama's handling of health care also increased from 46 percent in early March before he signed the bill, to 52 percent currently — a level not seen since last summer's angry town hall meetings. …Analysts said the level of public wariness on such a major piece of social legislation is unusual. "The surprise of this poll is that you would expect people to be more supportive of the bill now that it's the law of the land — and that's not the case," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard public health professor who follows opinion trends on health care. See: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i2BvA7d42vZVYA6HxwXp4Si6XYdgD9F3EK580 2a) 47% Say Repeal of Health Care Law Will Be Good for Economy Forty-seven percent (47%) of voters nationwide believe repeal of the recently passed health care law will be good for the economy. …From the moment it was passed, a majority of voters around the country have wanted to see the health care law repealed. See: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/april_2010/47_say_repeal_of_health_care_law_will_be_good_for_economy 2b) Canceled: Hearing That Would Have Grilled CEOs on Health Care Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., has canceled a hearing intended to grill CEOs who took a charge against profits because of the health care reform bill. The cancellation came after they realized what everyone already knew - that the companies were required to do what they did because of accounting rules. Waxman and others had reacted with outrage and accused the companies of doing it - in essence, to make health care reform look bad. …House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, responded to the cancelation saying, "House Democrats canceled this hearing because they don’t want to give America's employers a forum to tell the public how President Obama’s new health care law is already hurting our economy and hampering job creation." "Chairman Waxman thought he could intimidate businesses into keeping quiet about this new job-killing health care law, but when they called his bluff by continuing to speak out, he chose to pull the plug," Boehner said in a statement. See: http://congress.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/04/14/canceled-hearing-that-would-have-grilled-ceos-on-health-care 3) Chris Dodd threatens to cut GOP out of financial reform talks Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd threatened Wednesday to end negotiations with Republicans on a financial regulatory reform bill if they continue to lead what he called a misinformation campaign based on Wall Street talking points. …The GOP points to the inclusion in the bill of a $50 billion fund, which is paid for by the firms and would be used to wind down a failing institution. But Republicans say it will act as a safety net for Wall Street to continue to push their businesses to the brink of collapse. …Dodd’s bill would provide the Federal Reserve with oversight of the country’s largest financial firms, and would allow the Treasury Secretary to initiate a takeover of companies that posed a systemic risk to the economy. McConnell delivered his second consecutive floor speech Wednesday in opposition to the Democratic bill. “The American taxpayer has suffered enough as a result of the financial crisis and the recession it triggered,” McConnell said. “They’ve asked us for one thing: whatever you do, they said, don’t leave open the door to endless bailouts of Wall Street banks. This bill fails at this one fundamental test.” Having Dodd in charge of financial reform is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. See: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/35800.html More on this…Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner later said that the cost of taking down large failing financial institutions will be borne by big banks, not taxpayers (Oooh, communism for banks! Fantastic!). The House and Senate bills call for funds, financed by large financial institutions, to cover the costs of liquidating firms deemed too large to go through bankruptcy proceedings. Republicans have argued that the funds would not be sufficient and that taxpayers could still be on the hook to pay to deal with giant failures. They also argue that emergency loan authority by the Federal Reserve could also amount to a financial bailout. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100415/ap_on_bi_ge/us_obama_financial_overhaul 4) Democrats: The Party of No All that said, the Republican Party has always done better by offering positive alternatives. In Ronald Reagan's last public appearance in 1992, he said he wanted to be remembered as someone who "appealed to your greatest hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts." Mr. Reagan's brand of happy warrior conservatism combined a fundamental faith in the American people and values-based policies that kicked off the largest peacetime economic expansion in American history. Mr. Reagan was an optimist with an unflagging belief in the righteousness of the human spirit. The Democrats, by contrast, are a decidedly pessimistic party. They thrive on sowing class and ethnic divisions and promoting jealously, resentment and a sense of entitlement. For every issue on which Republicans say yes, the Democrats stand in the way. …Democrats say no to balanced budgets. They say no to lower taxes. They say no to smaller government. They say no to states' rights. They say no to gun rights. They say no to the rights of the unborn. They say no to sensible immigration laws. They say no to policies that would encourage private-sector job growth. They say no to tort reform. They say no to sensible, targeted health care reform. They say no to pro-growth environmental regulations. They say no to education reform that rewards results instead of teachers' unions. They say no to bipartisanship. They say no to moderate nominees for federal courts. They say no to ending affirmative-action handouts, preferences and quotas. They say no to welfare reform. They say no to tough laws for criminals. They say no to a strong national defense. They say no to families. They say no to faith (emphasis mine). By putting faith in government above all else, Mr. Obama's Democrats say no to American values. They say no to the American dream. See: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/13/the-party-of-nobama/ 5) 60 plus percent of Americans say they are Conservative Here is what Question D (3) asks of respondents: "When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be ... ?" Then the poll gives respondents six possible answers: very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, somewhat liberal, very liberal, and unsure/refused. Battleground is a bipartisan poll which prides itself on rigorous and open methodology. It has proven to be one of the most accurate of all polls in predicting the exact percentage of the vote candidates receive in general elections. …Since June 2002, the Battleground Poll has asked this same question in its demographics section, and in fifteen consecutive polls, the answer has always been the same. Americans overwhelmingly describe themselves as conservative. What does "overwhelming" mean in this context? The percentage of Americans who call themselves conservative in these polls has never been less than 58% (conservative strength was that at its lowest point through these years in December 2007, when "only" 58% of Americans described themselves as conservative.) There has been a remarkable consistency in the responses to this question. Over the course of these polls, 60.2% of Americans, on average, call themselves conservative. The results of the April 2010 Battleground Poll show that nothing has changed. Fifty-nine percent of Americans in the latest Battleground Poll call themselves conservative; two percent of Americans call themselves moderate; thirty-four percent call themselves liberal; and five percent were either unsure or refused to answer. Remove the "Unsure/Refused," and sixty-two percent of Americans are conservative. See: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/the_battleground_poll_and_the_1.html Rush’s comments on above: Sixty-two percent of the American people call themselves conservative; 2% moderate; 34% liberal. It's not a liberal country. The liberals are a minority in this country. These radical leftists are a minority, governing against the will of the people. They have to! They do not have popular support. All they've got is a popular media that makes it look like they are the norm and that everybody else is the kook and the freak and the fringe. They are the kook, the fringe, and the freaks. Make no mistake. See: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_041510/content/01125104.guest.html 6) Income falls 3.2% during Obama's term Real personal income for Americans - excluding government payouts such as Social Security - has fallen by 3.2 percent since President Obama took office in January 2009, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. For comparison, real personal income during the first 15 months in office for President George W. Bush, who inherited a milder recession from his predecessor, dropped 0.4 percent. Income excluding government payouts increased 12.7 percent during Mr. Bush's eight years in office. "This is hardly surprising," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. "Under President Obama, only federal spending is going up; jobs, business startups, and incomes are all down. It is proof that the government can't spend its way to prosperity." According to the bureau's statistics, per capita income dropped during 2009 in 47 states, with only modest gains in the other states, West Virginia, Maine and Maryland. But most of those increases were attributed to rising income from the government, such as Medicare and unemployment benefits. See: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/13/personal-income-falls-32-during-obamas-15-months 7) Is Government-Subsidized News on the Way? Is the Federal Communications Commission building a case for government-subsidized news? It’s not hard to imagine that will be the outcome of the Commission’s “Future of Media” inquiry. The digital age has produced a “democratic shortfall,” according to one source cited in the inquiry’s public notice. Another scholar working on the project for the FCC has said that today’s media abundance calls for “public media entities” that will serve “as both a filter to reduce information overload and a megaphone to give voice to the unheard.” In other words, a free marketplace of ideas isn’t good enough for some. They want the government to pick winners and losers—as long as the winners express views with which they happen to agree. Care to guess which views those will be? As Randolph May of the Free State Foundation notes, the justifications for a government role in controlling content are ever shifting. Once, alleged scarcity was the reason that the FCC could impose the fairness doctrine on radio without running afoul of the First Amendment. (See, for instance, the Supreme Court’s 1969 Red Lion decision.) Now it’s not scarcity but abundance that government is supposed to fix by acting as a filter. Meanwhile, the FCC has no problem telling private industry that filtering content is a no-no. Disallowing Internet service providers from discriminating among sources or kinds of content is the intent of the Commission’s push for net neutrality. See: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/04/13/is-government-subsidized-news-on-the-way 8) Nuclear Posturing, Obama-Style WASHINGTON -- Nuclear doctrine consists of thinking the unthinkable. It involves making threats and promising retaliation that is cruel and destructive beyond imagining. But it has its purpose: to prevent war in the first place. During the Cold War, we let the Russians know that if they dared use their huge conventional military advantage and invaded Western Europe, they risked massive U.S. nuclear retaliation. Goodbye Moscow. Was this credible? Would we have done it? Who knows? No one's ever been there. A nuclear posture is just that -- a declaratory policy designed to make the other guy think twice. Our policies did. The result was called deterrence. For half a century, it held. The Soviets never invaded. We never used nukes. That's why nuclear doctrine is important. The Obama administration has just issued a new one that "includes significant changes to the U.S. nuclear posture," said Defense Secretary Bob Gates. First among these involves the U.S. response to being attacked with biological or chemical weapons. Under the old doctrine, supported by every president of both parties for decades, any aggressor ran the risk of a cataclysmic U.S. nuclear response that would leave the attacking nation a cinder and a memory. Again: Credible? Doable? No one knows. But the threat was very effective. …This is quite insane. It's like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections (emphasis mine). Apart from being morally bizarre, the Obama policy is strategically loopy. Does anyone believe that North Korea or Iran will be more persuaded to abjure nuclear weapons because they could then carry out a biological or chemical attack on the U.S. without fear of nuclear retaliation? The naivete is stunning. Similarly the Obama pledge to forswear development of any new nuclear warheads, indeed, to permit no replacement of aging nuclear components without the authorization of the president himself. This under the theory that our moral example will move other countries to eschew nukes. On the contrary. The last quarter-century -- the time of greatest superpower nuclear arms reduction -- is precisely when Iran and North Korea went hellbent into the development of nuclear weapons. It gets worse. The administration's Nuclear Posture Review declares U.S. determination to "continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks." The ultimate aim is to get to a blanket doctrine of no first use. …This administration seems to believe that by restricting retaliatory threats and by downplaying our reliance on nuclear weapons, it is discouraging proliferation. But the opposite is true. Since World War II, smaller countries have agreed to forgo the acquisition of deterrent forces -- nuclear, biological and chemical -- precisely because they placed their trust in the firmness, power and reliability of the American deterrent. Seeing America retreat, they will rethink. And some will arm. There is no greater spur to hyper-proliferation than the furling of the American nuclear umbrella. See: http://patriotpost.us/opinion/charles-krauthammer/2010/04/09/nuclear-posturing-obama-style/ 8a) Morning Bell: Obama is No Reagan on Nuclear Strategy …And this Nuclear Security Summit comes less than a week after President Barack Obama released a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and just days after he signed a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. As many of the White House’s allies pointed out last week, President Ronald Reagan wanted a world without nuclear weapons, and he also signed an arms treaty with the Soviet Union. President Obama’s policy goals are just like President Reagan’s. So why is anyone criticizing the White House’s nuclear strategy? Because how we get to a nuke-free world matters. Reagan knew that to eliminate the need for large nuclear arsenals, you must first start to eliminate the dependence — both ours and others’ — on massive nuclear attack as the guarantor of security. That is why Reagan’s first priority was to build up U.S. conventional forces and introduce missile defense. That allowed his negotiators to approach arms control agreements from a position of strength. President Obama has done the exact opposite. He has cut our national defense, including acquisition of the F-22, removed missile defense installations in Eastern Europe, and cut missile defense development programs. His lawyer-like NPR weakens America’s deterrence credibility by broadcasting our intention not to respond in kind if we are hit by weapons of mass destruction. And his New START agreement not only clearly links our missile defense shield with Russian missile reduction, but it also limits our own conventional weapons capabilities as well. Reagan also understood how other nations viewed their own nuclear programs and recognized the limits of unilateral arms reductions. President Obama clearly does not. Russia’s nuclear and conventional weapons arsenals are declining faster than ours, due to age and funding, so of course they want to bring our levels down to theirs. See: http://blog.heritage.org/2010/04/12/morning-bell-obama-is-no-reagan-on-nuclear-strategy 9) Conservative Pediatricians Caution Schools on Gay-Affirming Policies A group of pediatricians that broke away from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is cautioning educators about the management of students experiencing same-sex attraction or exhibiting symptoms of gender confusion. The American College of Pediatricians (ACPEDS) is especially reminding school superintendents that it is not uncommon for adolescents to experience transient confusion about their sexual orientation and that most students will ultimately adopt a heterosexual orientation if not otherwise encouraged. “Adolescence is a time of upheaval and impermanence,” writes ACPEDS President Dr. Tom Benton in a letter to school superintendents outlining his group’s concerns. “Adolescents experience confusion about many things, including sexual orientation and gender identity, and they are particularly vulnerable to environmental influences.” For this reason, ACPEDS says schools should not seek to develop policy which “affirms” or encourages non-heterosexual attractions among students who may merely be experimenting or experiencing temporary sexual confusion. Why is this not OBVIOUS to everyone? ……Such premature labeling, the group adds, can lead some adolescents to engage in homosexual behaviors that carry serious physical and mental health risks. …To make his point, Benton notes one study that was published in the official journal of the AAP in 1992 that found as many as 26 percent of 12-year-olds having reported being uncertain of their sexual orientation. Notably, only 2-3 percent of adults today identify themselves as homosexual. “Rigorous studies demonstrate that most adolescents who initially experience same-sex attraction, or are sexually confused, no longer experience such attractions by age 25,” Benton writes. Over 85 percent of students with same-sex attractions will ultimately adopt a heterosexual orientation, according to ACPEDS. …Furthermore, Benton notes the absence of scientific evidence that an individual is born “gay” or “transgender.” “Homosexuality is not a genetically-determined, unchangeable trait,” the ACPEDS asserts. Instead, Benton says the best available research points to multiple factors – primarily social and familial – that predispose children and adolescents to homosexual attraction and/or gender confusion (emphasis mine). See: http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100408/conservative-pediatricians-advise-schools-against-gay-affirming-policies/index.html