Vice President Joe Biden was eager to get moving. In office for only a month, the Obama administration had already passed a monumental economic stimulus plan to address the biggest downturn since the Great Depression.

Now, at the first implementation meeting in 2009, Biden — with a smudged Ash Wednesday cross still on his forehead — declared that the stimulus would “literally drop kick us out of the recession.”

Officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $800 billion stimulus was the largest economic recovery program in history. Adjusted for inflation, it was nearly five times more expensive than the Works Progress Administration. It was bigger than the Louisiana Purchase, the Manhattan Project, the moon race and the Marshall Plan.

Economists and nonpartisan forecasting firms estimate that the stimulus created and saved more than 2 million jobs. It generated an unprecedented buzz around clean energy. A relatively small pot of education grants goaded 32 states to enact major reforms, such as tying teacher pay to student performance or lifting caps on charter schools. When the last dime is spent, more than 41,000 miles of roads will be paved, widened and improved; 600,000 low-income homes weatherized; and more than 3,000 rural schools connected to high-speed Internet.

But despite these achievements, the stimulus ultimately failed to do what America expected it to do — bring about a strong, sustainable recovery. The drop kick was shanked.

Read More at The New York Post By Michael Grabell, NY Post

Alabama and Arizona are being sued by Barack Hussein Obama to farther his insidious plan to erase our borders and allow millions of potential new Democrat voters to flow in and snuff out our liberties.

Both states have taken strong measures to get their illegal alien problem under control and both are experiencing improvements in their unemployment rates, but the results in Alabama have been stunning.

Since putting its tough anti-illegal alien bill (H. B. 56) into effect last September Alabama has seen an overnight increase in the number of her citizens working and a drop in the percentage of Alabamians collecting unemployment benefits.

The numbers tell the story and they are embarrassing for Obama. In the first month after H.B. 56 became law Alabama’s unemployment rate fell from 9.8 to 9.3 percent. Last month the number dropped to 8.1% which is .4% below the national average. Some quick math shows this is a 1.7% drop.

The real life Main Street result of what Alabama’s Republicans have done is visible across their state. Because of H.B. 56 an enraged Barack Obama is suing Alabama. The more than 41,000 Alabama families who now have a bread winner going off to work every day means nothing to Obama because they are not voting for Democrats anyway.

Read More at Coach Is Right By Kevin “Coach” Collins, Coach Is Right

(CNSNews.com) – Pope Benedict XVI warned a group of Catholic bishops from the United States in a speech at the Vatican last week that some cultural trends in the U.S. are “a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself.”

The pope made the observation Thursday, Jan. 19, as he addressed a group of bishops from the mid-Atlantic region, including Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., and Archbishop Timothy C. Broglio, who leads the archdiocese for the military services. The bishops were in Rome for their “ad limina” visits, which they are required to periodically make to the Vatican to meet with the pope.

The U.S. Catholic bishops have been in an escalating conflict with President Barack Obama and his administration over a number of administration efforts that curtail religious freedom in the United States. Among these are the argument the administation is making in federal court likening opposition to same-sex unions to racial discrimination and the Obamacare regulation recenlty issued by the Department of Health and Human Services that requires all health insurance plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and artificial contraceptives, including those that induce abortions. Because the Obamacare law also requires all American to buy health insurance, the new HHS regulation presents Catholics with the choice of either acting against the law or against the moral teachings of their church.

“For her part, the Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering,” the pope said.

“To the extent that some current cultural trends contain elements that would curtail the proclamation of these truths, whether constricting it within the limits of a merely scientific rationality, or suppressing it in the name of political power or majority rule, they represent a threat not just to Christian faith, but also to humanity itself and to the deepest truth about our being and ultimate vocation, our relationship to God,” said the pope.

Read More at cnsnews.com By Terence P. Jeffrey, CNS News