The rapid-fire succession of floor votes in the House this year has triggered lawmaker confusion and mistakes.
With dozens of votes stacked in a lengthy series on recent bills, a number of House lawmakers have cast the wrong votes.
Read More at the Hill by Molly K. Hooper, the Hill
The jobless rate in America hovers at 9.1 percent. The national debt ticks upwards of $14.3 trillion and small businesses collapse daily due to costly bureaucratic regulations. The President has failed to offer a viable plan that will put America’s economy back on a path to prosperity. It is in this context that President Obama invites questions about jobs and the economy via Twitter tomorrow afternoon for the nation’s first presidential Twitter town hall.
If you ever wanted to put President Obama on the spot for these things and more, the Twitter town hall may be your opportunity. The President will sit in the East Room of the White House for a live webcast answering the selected Twitter questions in a forum moderated by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey recently announced that Larry Summers, the President’s former economic adviser, will join the board of directors of another company he started, Square.
The handle @townhall will summarize the President’s answers, though he will not respond via Twitter to the questions. According to the New York Times: “Twitter will select the questions, using curation tools and a group of Twitter users to help identify the most popular questions raised both before and during the event. Twitter will be relying on its own search and curation features as well as a company called Mass Relevance to help find questions and topics that are most frequently mentioned.”
So using the hashtag #AskObama, you should have the opportunity to ask the President all those burning questions you have about the broken economy, especially if enough of you ask the same question. The Heritage Foundation has a few questions for the President. We’d love for you to follow suit, or tweet these. It is important that conservatives make their voices heard using #AskObama tomorrow.
1. Background: Conservatives in the House of Representatives passed a serious budget proposal with necessary reforms and responsible steps. Liberals haven’t passed—or even offered—a budget in over two years, making their concerns voiced about America’s fiscal future seem false. The President’s own budget was defeated 97–0 in the Senate.
Read More at Heritage by Ericka Andersen, Heritage Foundation
On a sparkling Independence day in Clear Lake Iowa, Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachman worked a parade crowd and asserted a bit of independence from the GOP pack of candidates. Bachmann, along with Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, is one of only two Republican contenders not to sign a pledge to cut, cap and balance the federal budget. That pledge, the brainchild of the Republican Study Committee, has been gaining steam in recent days as another litmus test for Republican candidates. It calls for immediate spending cuts to reduce the deficit by half next year. It would also impose enforceable caps that bring spending in line with average revenues at 18 percent of the GDP. And finally, it would require House and Senate passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution. Some say the pledge offers an escape from the debt ceiling gridlock presently paralyzing Congress. But Bachmann wants it to go further, by defunding President Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act. She says she’s “mulling over” signing the pledge. Huntsman, the other pledge resister, prefers a stand-alone balanced budget amendment. Seven other Republican candidates, as well as over a hundred members in the House and a half dozen Republican Senators, see the pledge as a way out of repeated legislative snafus over budget problems. “If we could for the first time in American history, pass through the House and the Senate a balance budget amendment, send it to the states for ratification, that’s historical,” says Jim Jordan, Republican Congressman from Ohio. “This could be one of those defining moments in American history, where we get the right things put in place so that we never get to this point again where we’re on the verge of a debt crisis.”
Read More at Fox News by Doug McKelway, Fox News
This Fourth of July we are reflecting on the Founding Father’s intensive study of the Roman civilization. Knowing history, they embraced Rome’s virtues and eschewed her vices. The Founders understood the currents of history which gave us a collective heritage unrivaled. Sadly, we as a nation are turning our backs on the morality that made America special. The country has convulsed in the past 30 years as a new modern morality has supplanted the currents of culture built nearly two thousand years ago along the shores of Galilee. This new culture is not yet fully defined, but we stand horrified as we peer into the future. The culture of the Roman world was brutal and nasty. Ironically, we see its worst practices reviving with vigor. Please give us a moment as we recount a history seldom taught today’s students. The Roman Empire had a twisted view about the value of human life. These views were banished by the ascendency of Christ’s teaching. Infanticide was both legal and encouraged in ancient Rome. Pagan societies, such as the Carthaginians, Romans and Greeks went so far as to kill their children outside the womb, sometimes as a religious sacrifice to their gods. According to Plutarch, the Carthaginians “offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs of young birds; meanwhile the mothers stood by without a tear or moan.” We see a modern American society which looks at children as a burden, and a generation of mothers who have decided by their own “choice” to sacrifice a generation. Population control is now an international objective.
Read More at Floyd Reports by Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, Floyd Reports
On the Fourth of July, many of us are used to the typical written fare, celebrations of the undeniably extraordinary birth of our great Republic. We read motivating patriotic themes of sacrifice, democracy, and love of country.
But what we hear less frequently is the hard truth of our contemporary crisis, and how the sacrifices of yesterday are on the verge of being forever lost to the excesses of today.
Although I’m tempted to diverge into a litany of federal excesses that are killing the country, I’m not going to take my own bait. Rather, let’s take a little stroll down memory lane and consider where we’ve come from and try to stoke the embers left from the greatest Revolution on earth.
Our Founders hailed from countries with tyrannical central governments that had little regard for fundamental freedoms. Driven by a desire to worship free of persecution, many of our ancestors were willing to suffer incredibly high mortality rates rather than the heavy hand of government. Jamestown lost about 80% of its original inhabitants. Their descendants formed the backbone of the Revolution.
The Founders were not ignorant of this history. They were intimately familiar with the extreme sacrifices of their ancestors and why they sought out this special land. So when the heavy hand of Britain began to squeeze ever so tightly, these exceptional families made the only moral choice: confront the evil no matter the cost.
When you hear the stories of bare-footed patriots barely surviving through the vicious winter in Valley Forge and wonder what motivated them, think back through the history, and thousands that sacrificed before them. They knew the motto, “Live free or die.” Their ancestors lived the motto. As did ours.
Why, then, do we seem so complacent? Perhaps we’re the frog in the pot that’s been slowly heated to a catastrophic boiling point, not recognizing the tyranny until it’s almost too late.
But there’s hope. The same freedom-loving spirit that drove persecuted thousands to our shores, and motivated the sacrifices of life, liberty, and property in our Founders’ pursuit of Independence has not disappeared. Join a local tea party and catch the Spirit. We will save this nation.
Happy Birthday, America!
As if the American public’s tolerance for political chicanery hasn’t been tested beyond the breaking point, now comes news that several shyster Progressives and Democrats are floating the notion that the debt ceiling is – get this – unconstitutional. Far be it from me to ask, but why is it the only time Progressives and Democrats concern themselves with the constitutionality of issues is when its concern their ability to spend money?
US Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) – you remember him, he’s the candidate that Delawareans deemed better suited to represent them than Christine O’Donnell; the one who wrote an article for his college newspaper, entitled “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist” – is quoted as saying:
“This is an issue that’s been raised in some private debate between senators as to whether in fact we can default, or whether that provision of the Constitution can be held up as preventing default…I don’t think, as of a couple weeks ago, when this was first raised, it was seen as a pressing option. But I’ll tell you that it’s going to get a pretty strong second look as a way of saying, ‘Is there some way to save us from ourselves?’”
Great choice, Delawareans…you should be proud.
Now, most clear thinking Americans, when examining the depth of the financial crisis – the deficit spending and the debt accrued – have already come to the overwhelming conclusion that our elected officials – and the apparatus they have constructed in the federal bureaucracy – have taken to outrageous, unacceptable and, in no uncertain terms, grotesque spending habits. They have created such a financial catastrophe that in poll after poll, the American public agrees that spending by the US federal government must be not only reined in, but limited from this point forward so that the ideologues and social engineering zealots can’t bring our nation to the brink of non-existence, such as we find ourselves today.
Make no mistake, when I say federal government I am not just speaking of Democrats; many Republicans and, without question, each and every Progressive are included. In fact, where Progressives are concerned – seeing as their ideology is basically Marxism with a Madison Avenue sell job – spending other people’s money “for the good of the people” is in the DNA.
Read More at GOPUSA by Frank Salvato, GOPUSA
If the GOP is really serious about winning back the presidency, it needs to win the deficit debate. The government of these United States is broke — flat broke — and if the nation is to survive as the prosperous nation it has long been, Republicans must restore fiscal sanity and call a halt to spending money we don’t have!
That’s what the Republicans promised us they would do last November, and largely on the strength of that pledge we let them take back the House. After all, it’s obvious that we can’t trust the Democrats to spend the public’s money wisely and well.
President Obama is promising to seek $3 in spending cuts for every $1 of new taxes, exactly as my father Ronald Reagan sought to do. When my dad passed away in 2004, he was still waiting for that $3. Barack Obama can expect the same dismal outcome.
Ask the first President George Bush how it worked out when he cut a deal with the Democrats in 1991 to reduce the deficit by $500 billion. All he had to do was go back a little on his “Read my lips — NO NEW TAXES” pledge and raise taxes just a little bit.
The Democrats promised not to use the tax issue in the 1992 elections. They promptly hung President Bush with it. So I say to the Republican leadership, as Margaret Thatcher once said to GHW Bush, “Now is not the time to go wobbly.” Stick to your guns and call a halt to spending nonexistent dollars.
Read More at Floyd Reports by Michael Reagan
If you’re like me, you’re terribly concerned about the direction of our nation. Whether it’s impending national bankruptcy, eroding personal liberties, or the incessant attacks against the traditional family, the bedrock of civilization, it seems everything is falling apart.
So what do we do? We throw everything aside and immerse our efforts and finances into democratic change. We identify elected leaders that are co-conspirators in our national destruction and target them for defeat. We work day and night, shoulder-to-shoulder with other grassroots activists to upend the establishment with constitutional conservatives.
Sometimes, these Tea Party insurgencies elect patriots to office.Other times, the reform movement loses a race but manages, in the process, to drive the dark, bipartisan forces controlling much of our political processes into the light. When that happens, we have the exceptional opportunity to discover answers to why the U.S. political system, no matter the party controlling the White House or Congress, continues to move us in the same direction.
A great example is my 2010 US Senate race where the NRSC, under Senator John Cornyn’s leadership, raised literally hundreds of thousands of dollars under my banner but then promptly spent the money attacking Democratic candidate Scott McAdams, knowing full well that every vote peeled from ultra-liberal McAdams would go to almost-as-liberal Murkowksi. The end result? McAdams’ candidacycollapsed to the direct benefit of Murkowski.
All along Senator Cornyn falsely promised to do everything possible to ensure my victory. But he recently “insisted” in an interview with Politico that “the NRSC ‘did not go after [Murkowski]’ last cycle, since it stayed away from direct attacks on her campaign.” He concluded that the 2010 race “turned out well. It had a happy ending.”
Senator Cornyn is part of the Ruling Class that intended to perpetuate the membership of his colleague, Lisa Murkowski. Both Cornyn and Murkowski embrace the model of government that we’ve grown accustomed to in DC: ever-expanding bureaucracies, a federal government that knows no constitutional limits. I explicitly threatened this model, having the gall to suggest that the Constitution be followed as it was intended.
What’s the solution? Understand that compromise is killing the country and that your 2012 vote can only be cast for constitutional conservatives who embrace the Founders’ vision of limited government.