As best I can tell, Senator Harry Reid’s beloved Cowboy Poetry Festival is still slated as scheduled.  Yes, it “only” costs taxpayers $50,000 a year, but, why are we spending your money on this event in the first place?

The President has argued repeatedly that he can do nothing to alter how the sequestration is implemented, because, you see, the sequester is an act of Congress, and thus he is powerless to intervene.

To that extent it is refreshing to learn that the President believes he cannot unilaterally overturn an act of Congress with which he does not agree.

And yet, in recent months, the President, by Executive Order, has decided to allow children of illegal immigrants to obtain work permits in this country.  This order violates federal laws duly passed by Congress.

The President also, by Executive Order, has altered the work requirements contained in our welfare laws.  Those laws, too, were duly passed by Congress.

If the President does not like the effects of the sequester, is there some reason why he can’t use an Executive Order to make it less painful to the American public by, let’s say cancelling funding for the Cowboy Poetry Festival, or the thousands of other programs that should not be funded with your dollars?

Am I missing something, or is it the President’s design to make life as difficult as possible for the American public?

Update:

Should you need anymore proof,

On Monday, as flight delays were hitting travelers at airports around the country due to these allegedly unavoidable cuts, the top story on the Department of Transportation’s website announced a $474 million grant program that promises to “make communities more livable and sustainable.”

 

Consider, if you will, a few of the liberties the left has tried to, is trying, or has, wrested from you:

• School choice and/or educating your own children
• self defense
• free speech
• managing your own retirement
• managing your own health care
• buying your own health care
• raising your own children
• buying a vehicle the fits your needs
• determining what news is important to you by deciding whether to report it or not
• selecting our own political candidates
• responsibly voting on VOTING DAY, not weeks ahead
• eating the food you choose to eat
• having the ability to use binding referendum questions (in CT particularly) to check the power of politicians
• the privacy and security of a secret ballot for joining a union (as well as deciding if you even want to join a union)
• using your cell phone in your car
• morality
• choice on the death penalty
• and just basically knowing right from wrong (moral relativism)

Trust is the fundamental basis for liberty, as a government that doesn’t trust you to take care of yourself will give you no liberty.  Remember “a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything you have”?  Jefferson knew this day was coming, stating “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”, as did Ben Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”  If they don’t trust us, there is no reason for us to trust them.

Back in the good old days, people were expected to take responsibility for themselves and their family, their health and their retirement, buy insurance as they felt necessary, educate themselves on the issues of the day or elections etc., or live with the results of their choices.   In other words, stupidity and laziness were supposed to hurt you, not everyone else.  Now, we have to have the clods in government micromanaging every aspect of our lives, regurgitating and distributing information (with the aid of their flying monkeys in the press) and supposedly protecting us from all the bad things (read it: hard choices and sensible decisions) in life in the Quixotian pursuit of some utopian, risk free society that they get to contrive, and ultimately, control.

Now surely, the prime motivator for this is the relatively lousy education students are receiving in most government schools.  And by relative, I mean compared to the rest of the world and the way we educated children prior to the second World War.  Who has been in charge of the schools?  You guessed it: the liberals.  They have tried every crackpot educational theory from the “new math” to “dumbing down” the curriculum in the name of self esteem resulting in a lack of a competitive spirit and a plunge in critical thinking, math and science education.  Go look at graduate school enrollments: STEM majors (science, technology, engineering and math) come from other countries now.

What has all this produced?  The low information voter (read it: Democrat) that cares more for “reality shows” than reality; a population that thinks “gimme” is the first word in the Pledge of Allegiance.  A group that thinks it is too important to do the “menial” labor that they outsource to “insourced” (my word) illegal aliens.  A group of people that vote to take the money from the pocketbooks of others rather than earning it themselves, and a party that promises it to keep giving it to them.  A group that has traded a lot of liberty for less security.  A group that thinks “news” is regurgitated, prechewed, selective pap in 30 second sound bites that the liberal media chooses to give them.  People that think the police will be there before a crime happens, instead of long after.  A group whose apathy is only exceeded by their own infantilism.  People stupid enough to think that a president who has repeatedly demonstrated the epitome of economic incompetence will do a better job in a second term.

In other words, the people that Democrats can cater to for votes.  Or more accurately, people whose votes can be bought.

The United States was built on capitalism and the Protestant work ethic.   These two concepts produced American exceptionalism.  They built this country.  As history keeps showing us, failed ideas like socialism, Marxism, progressivism, communism etc., can only destroy once great countries.  Every time politicians think that their feel good legislation is better than tried and true business, banking and governing practices, chaos ensues.  A prime example is the last housing bust.  You know the story.

Self determination and the freedom to make choices are the very foundation of liberty.  Trading it for free stuff, handouts from the government, and some elusive “safety” has been warned about since the Constitution was written.  So much for the whining “the Constitution was written for the 1700s” or some such pap.  The truth is, the politicians from the 1700′s were just plain smarter and more patriotic than the self important, self interested hacks we see today.

It is time to take back the country from the politicians, the lawyers, the new world order types, and the hangers-on, the parasites, and make sure that the United States remains the greatest country in the world.

This is the national political game as usual. I don’t care if it’s the DNC or the RNC. This is bad.

The Democratic National Committee has no plans to repay Duke Energy for an unprecedented $10 million line of credit it guaranteed to help the Democratic convention’s local host committee put on President Obama’s three-day nominating convention in Charlotte, N.C., last September.

A Duke company official said the company was claiming the money as a business expense for tax purposes, meaning shareholders will foot $6 million of the cost, according to a report in the Charlotte Observer.

The large loan and the secrecy surrounding it have government watchdog groups deeply concerned. They say the arrangement raises serious conflict-of-interest issues for Mr. Obama and challenges his claim to be committed to disclosure and transparency.

This was all for a big, three-day party. Not an entitlement program, not defense spending, not welfare, not Social Security, not Medicare … and it is all perfectly legal. That said, I think it should remain legal since this is just one of the symptoms derived from the real disease. Are we going to continue to bitch and moan about the symptoms, trying to cover them up with new regulations and “transparency” theater, or do we have the guts to treat the disease?

One has to wonder what will happen when Duke Energy visits the White House during the next few years. What will they ask for? What will their access level be? Who cares, it’s only $6 million.

In most states, the numbers are shaping up to be even lower than in 2004, said Curtis Gans, director of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate. Every state is showing lower numbers than in 2008, Gans said…With 95 percent of precincts reporting, The Associated Press figures showed more than 117 million people had voted in the White House race, but that number will go up as more votes are counted. In 2008, 131 million people voted, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Contest Rules:

1. You need to be registered on the site with a valid email address.
2. Submit your Electoral College and Popular Vote predictions.
3. One and only one guess … if you provide multiple predictions all of your entries will be disqualified.
4. In the event of a tie, those subscribers who had the same guess will have their names placed in a hat and we’ll draw.

I’ll run two contests, one for Electoral College (EC) numbers and the other for popular vote. What this means is you can win the EC contest and lose the popular vote or visa-versa. You could also win both. Winners get their choice of RVO T-shirt or a TEA Party hat that we have in stock. I’ll cover shipping anywhere in the USA or an APO box.

My Prediction

We’ll, it’s mine in partnership with AJ Strata over at The Strata-Sphere. I found Rasmussen’s history of party affiliation – all the way back to the 2008 election – compelling to say the least. Rasmussen had Democrats +7.1 percent in October 2008, and Obama won the general election by 7.2 percent. In other words, Rasmussen nailed it.

At the 2010 mid-terms it was Democrats + 2.9 percent and we know how that worked out for the Democrats in Congress. (November quickly flipped to GOP +1.3 percent after the win.) Current results show a huge 12.9 percent change in party affiliation since Oct. 2008, with the GOP currently at +5.8 percent.

When it comes to popular vote, I’ll go with Rasmussen’s 5.8 percent exactly and predict Romney by 5.8 percent. I’ll go with Strata’s EC prediction of 321 – 217 Romney simply because it makes sense and I’m not any good at Electoral math.

So here are my [Strata's] swing state predictions, based on what is a more likely an R+6 nation (not some D+8, D+9 or D+11 nonsense):

Governor Romney will win:

• Florida
• North Carolina
• Virginia
• Colorado
• New Hampshire
• Ohio
• Wisconsin
• Iowa
• Pennsylvania
• Nevada

President Obama will win:

• Michigan
• Minnesota

Therefore, the EC count will be: 321 Romney, 217 Obama

As of November 1, 2012  the total national debt was $16,221,685,381,838.28 (careful now there is a decimal point in there).

On January 20, 2009, when Obama was inaugurated the national debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08.
Obama has added $5,594,808,332,925.20 in less than four years.

Now, I do recall that President Obama said that President Bush’s deficit spending was unpatriotic.  But, I wonder, what adjective President Obama would use to describe his deficit spending.

The 2010 Census said there were 74,181,467 people in the United States under the age of 18.

So if we were to put the entire debt onto the shoulders of all Americans under the age of 18 the amount that they would owe would go like this:

$16,221,685,381,838.28 equals about $218,676 per person under 18, and just the new debt that Obama added would equal about $75,421 per person under 18.

For that amount of money, an 18 year old could afford college and a car, or even a home.

And, should President Obama be re-elected, that number will rise.  There are not enough “millionaires and billionaires” making more than $200,000 per year to off-set the debt even if you confiscated all their income.

So, what do you want for your children?

He received a phone call from someone who claimed to be an investor in Bain Capital who told him that Romney hadn’t paid taxes in 10 years…pretty serious stuff.  Senator Reid never told us who this “source” was but, he presumably felt confident enough in the source that he decided to release this “information” to Americans.  And he did so, both long and loud.

We now know (if we didn’t at the time) that Senator Reid’s assertions were blatantly false.  On Friday, we learned that,

…PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm that prepared the Romneys’ taxes, reported that Romney paid an average annual effective federal tax rate of 20.2 percent from 1990-2009.

Hum. 

Does anyone think Senator Reid will apologize for misleading Americans about something as serious as this? 

Nah, probably not.

Polls are now used to help individual voters form an opinion about a candidate, and that’s disturbing. Seriously, it’s a form of peer pressure. It’s the old adage asking “if all of your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?” Well honestly, many people would do just that simply to avoid being an outcast.

Admit it, your daily life with friends, family and co-workers is like a game of Political Survivor®. You build friendly relationships with everyone, while secretly forming alliances with those you find to be “politically cool” after an inadvertent comment is spoken aloud. A light bulb goes off and the pressure is removed … you’ve found another politically acceptable confidant.

I want to remind those of you who would rather move along with the sheep heard that you can vote for anyone you’d like in the voting booth – including the Romney/Ryan ticket – and lie to your friends if it makes you feel “more comfortable.” I’d be OK with that.  ;)

On to the UCONN – Hartford Courant poll that has Obama up by 21 percent. In 2008, Obama/Biden beat McCain/Palin by 22.3 percent. All things equal between 2008 and current day, the poll sample assumes 1 percent more of the voters will vote Democrat and 3.5 percent fewer will vote Republican in 2012.

(Thanks to Dr. Susan Berry who referenced this post and quoted me on Sept. 21. Unfortunately, there were three spam sites that steal content (in full) from Big Government who showed up in the Trackback links. Those have been removed.)

I just can’t see how that sample is based in any sort of reality. Sure, the way the poll is headlined, it looks like Obama lost 1.3 percent of the voters who picked him last time, but the poll had to over-sample 2008 Obama voters and under-sample McCain voters to get the result.

Hey media … you’re [Obama's] going to win Connecticut so why pad the results? Oh yeah … reinforcement of the Peer Pressure Factor®.

Other poll “findings” that just don’t make sense.

• Supposedly, the poll indicates Obama is favored by one out of five conservatives – 21 percent.
• The poll asks likely voters, but does not ask the first question … are you a registered voter. Likely voters do not equal registered voters.

Many readers know I’ve respected one poll out there asking registered, likely voters consistent questions over a period of time. It’s the George Washington University Battleground Poll which is now “owned” by Politico so they can stamp their name on it. It’s a bi-partisan poll that has always asked question D3. When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be… Very Conservative, Somewhat conservative, Moderate, Somewhat liberal, Very liberal or Unsure.

August 2012 results showed 57 percent considered themselves Very Conservative or Somewhat conservative. The poll has run seven times since Oct. 2010 and for question D3, the results showed between 62 percent and 57 percent – an average of 59 percent - considered themselves conservative. Note the poll gives the perfect out for the respondent if they don’t want to be bucketed … Moderate. (Normally less than 5 percent tick the Moderate box.)

Click here to read more of my past articles on the Battleground Poll, but just imagine if all of those registered, likely voters who consider themselves conservatives pulled the lever for Romney/Ryan. What a landslide that would be!

Read more about polling analysis here. Very happy to see more people asking about the poll cross-tabs and sample breakdowns.

I know what you are thinking.  Yes, even though parts of it read like a Democrat press releases or talking point memos, or a New York Times editorial, once you get past the obvious “why is the DNC citing ChiCom controlled news agencies?”, the rest of the article makes you wonder who is really being criticized.  Sure, they lambasted Romney for “China battering”:

“While addressing a rally in the U.S. state of Virginia on Thursday, Romney, just as what he has done along his campaign trail, opened fire on China, claiming that it was Beijing’s undervalued RMB currency that forced U.S. manufacturers out of job.

What is more sensational is that this millionaire GOP candidate has vowed to declare China a currency manipulator on the first day of his presidency if elected.

Yet it is rather ironic that a considerable portion of this China-battering politician’s wealth was actually obtained by doing business with Chinese companies before he entered politics.”

And the latter is, of course the “money line” that Cutter wants you to hear and stop reading, but if you take the time to actually read the rest of the article, it is a real stretch to apply most of it to Romney: it actually turns out to be a criticism of Øbama’s policies:

“However, the U.S. economy is still undergoing one of the lousiest recoveries in history, while its unemployment rates remain staggeringly high and trade deficits with China continue to rise.”

and,

“It has also become a handy tool for U.S. politicians who try to court the votes and support of ill-informed voters by ratcheting up antagonistic sentiment towards China, while truly serious social and economic woes within the United States have been left unfixed.”

Isn’t it obvious who is really making the “outsourcing” attacks?  Who is supposedly in charge of the economy?  You sure can’t say Romney is.  And more:

“To cure its economic ailments, the United States needs to put its own fiscal house back in order, substantially slash its tremendous military expenditure, and optimize its economic structure.”

Now that sounds more like a condemnation of the past four years of this administration than anything else.  But that isn’t the message Xinhua wants to put across.  Notice how the name of Øbama is only mentioned in a Romney quote?  One can understand why China doesn’t like “China battering”, and seeks to defend against it, but it is the Democrats who squeal loudest about job outsourcing, while Romney’s criticism is focused on the monetary manipulation of the Chinese yuan to further advantage the Chinese economy.

Could the lack of serious criticism of Øbama himself by Xinhua reflect a likely Chinese preference for the acquiescent, apologizing-for-America and bowing-to-foreign-leaders Øbama and his “disarm America” (directly and indirectly) as opposed to a pro military Romney?  Could Øbama’s rank ineptitude in fixing the American economy (ironically borrowing from China to fund his schemes) be more beneficial to China than an economically revitalized economy under Romney?

If, as they claim, “a considerable portion of this China-battering politician’s wealth was actually obtained by doing business with Chinese companies before he entered politics”, that would be in China’s favor.  Why would they be criticizing Romney and not the Democrats and Øbama in particular?

Perhaps because these claims are an exaggeration or aren’t really true?  What is “a considerable portion”?  They don’t say.  Isn’t anyone buying a cheap Chinese DVD player “doing business with Chinese companies”?

Here is an interesting point: a search of Xinhua’s site for “Obama” reveals news from the Middle East, a pro Øbama article, another attack on Romney,  lots more ME news, more pro Øbama post convention news (here and here), and it continues on and on.  Check for yourself.  You really get the impression that the Chinese are hesitant to criticize Øbama too much.  Or at all.

Considering that Øbama has done more than any other president to put us in China’s thrall, and China’s subtle appreciation of that, do you think it might have been a mistake (on several levels) by the Democrats to cite Xinhua?

Maybe they should stick to reading and citing domestic propaganda sources, like the NYTimes and the Washington Post….