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See It For Yourself January 28, 2009

Posted by The Underground Conservative in Barack Hussein Obama, Economy, Spending, U.S. Congress.
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Thanks to the Senate Conservatives Fund (via Michelle Malkin) we now have online a searchable version of the almost 100 percent pure pork Non-Stimulus Bill, which at last count has exceeded $1 trillion in what is essentially pork projects and payoffs to Democrat interest groups like Big Labor, the National Extortion Association, ACORN (the Association of Corrupted Organization Registering Non-Voters), etc.

Yes, the Congressional Budget Office has confirmed to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that this bill is now in excess of $1 trillion — the debt service alone is almost $350 billion — and no doubt growing as members of Congress look for ways to slip earmarks and other pork projects for their districts into the bill. Like hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree. Oops, I forgot. You can’t say “Christmas” in the Brave New World of the United States of Obama.

Read The Stimulus is another excellent place to see just what they’d doing with our money, And it ain’t a pretty sight, folks. For example, here are 20 facts about the so-called stimulus. One of them is:

The plan establishes at least 32 new government programs at a cost of over $136 billion. That means more than a third of this plan’s spending provisions are dedicated to creating new government programs.

How does creating new bureaucracies with thousands of new bureaucrats stimulate any economic growth? Answer: it doesn’t. It just pays off a key Democrat constituency, the federal employees’ union.

Here’s another fact:

Here are just a few of the programs and projects that have been included in the House Democrats’ proposal:

  • $650 million for digital TV coupons.
  • $600 million for new cars for the federal government.
  • $6 billion for colleges/universities – many which have billion dollar endowments.
  • $50 million in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts.
  • $44 million for repairs to U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters.
  • $200 million for the National Mall, including $21 million for sod.

Once again, how do any of those huge expenditures stimulate economic growth? Once again, the answer: they don’t. Either big payoffs to key Democrat constituencies or just plain members of Congress spending your money like a drunken sailor. Actually, worse. I’ve just insulted drunken sailors everywhere. At least a drunken sailor spends his own money.

Here’s yet another interesting fact:

The bill provides enough spending – $825 billion – to give every man, woman, and child in America $2,700. $825 billion is enough to give every person in Ohio $72,000.

But we’ll never actually see any of it, of course.

And it’s only the beginning:

$825 billion is just the beginning – many Capitol Hill Democrats want to spend even more taxpayer dollars on their “stimulus” plan. In fact, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), told Roll Call earlier this month, “I would not be surprised to see us go further on some of these programs down the line.”

How many of these mayors, county executives and governors that are looking for a nipple on the new symbol of the United States of Obama, a dilapidated old sow, are going to get stuck with stimulus money that once it runs out will force them to raise state and local taxes to pay for programs that can’t be eliminated? See “Rail, Light” and other forms of mass transit as an example.

The answer to that dilemma is in Obey’s statement: Uncle Sucker will fork out more bailout money once the original handout money is spent, which won’t take long at all.

All of these new programs will come with much larger price tags than their advocates claim they will now. They always do. And once a government program is in place, it’s impossible to shut down, especially when it creates dependency. And that’s the goal: to make more than half of Americans dependent in some way, shape or form on government programs funded by the slightly less than half who will actually be paying federal income taxes. That eliminates the possibility of real tax cuts, which are already in the process of being redefined as transfer payment checks to non-taxpayers.

Welcome to our new socialist world with our new overlords. We can bend over and grab our ankles. If we’re lucky, they’ll only smack us with a pledge paddle. But it looks more and more like a game of Drop The Soap in prison, with taxpayers being forced to bend over and pick up the soap.

Where The Votes Are January 28, 2009

Posted by The Underground Conservative in Elections, RINOs, Republican Party, Republicans.
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Martin Knight at RedState looks at where the votes are and why the Republicans haven’t won them in the past two election cycles. It’s not a pretty picture, and after reading it, it doesn’t look like they will be swinging back to the GOP any time soon.

Here’s a look at a profile of those voters:

Where the votes are is in the “middle” – that undefined muddled plurality of the electorate that is at best marginally informed, that only really pays attention to the “issues” in the last few weeks (when its actually too late) of the campaign, but that has been passively absorbing what they’ve been seeing in the news, on the headlines at the newspaper/magazine stand, in their favorite television shows, at the movies, in novels, etc.

Make no mistake; these folks mostly have no idea what is going on except at the most superficial level. They don’t know who their US Congressmen (i.e. Reps and Senators) are, their local representatives they also don’t know, and far too many don’t even know the name of their Governor. The idea therefore that they have the knowledge to have a “moderate” opinion on wasteful spending, eminent domain (as if they know what that means) enough to be “frustrated” or “concerned” about it doesn’t really comport well with reality.

They operate on perceptions and impressions and go to the polls on Election Day with that to inform their votes. They vote based on their impressions of the issues, of the candidates, of the policy proposals from what they see in the news and from what their more knowledgeable (or equally clueless) family, friends and neighbors tell them. Note that these are not unintelligent people, these include people with Masters and Ph.Ds in useful subjects like Engineering and Medicine (not idiotic nonsense like Transgender Studies), people who have lived admirable productive common-sense guided lives.

I’ve said this many times before; the problem is not a lack of intelligence, it’s a lack of knowledge and an opposition with the wherewithal (thanks to their dominance of the spheres of news media and entertainment) to fill the vacuum.

Hint: it’s not what the Drive By Media will say. In fact, the Drive By Media has played a critical role in perpetuating through media bias the inaccurate stereotypes of Republicans that have driven swing voters toward the Democrats.

Essentially, Knight writes that the framing seminars conducted by George Lakoff (“Rhymes With”) and the urging of Steven Spielberg for Hollywood to incorporate leftist political propaganda into movies and TV paid off royally.

The result?

A person that I know is so completely apolitical he probably can’t tell the difference between a Senator and a Representative, was spitting mad at Bush for “illegally” replacing US Attorneys who were “investigating his corporate friends at Enron.”

My response was; huh?

Knight’s conclusion bears examination:

What is happening here, and what the other side has recognized is that we’re in a battle for the narrative i.e. the “middle ground.” And we’re not even on the battlefield. The mistake we continue to make is assuming that there is a defined “middle” of the electorate that is in favor of specific defined “centrist”/”moderate” policies and/or approaches to address specific issues. No. The battle for the narrative is the battle to define where the “center” and what a “centrist”/”moderate” policy is; to establish what is reasonable and what is beyond the bounds of reason in voters’ minds.

The Left was successful over the past four years in cultivating, through the news, through pop-culture, through the posturings and false outrage of liberals and Democrats in and out of Congress, the idea that the Bush Administration’s decisions on … well, everything, were beyond the bounds of reason. And they’ve been at it for much longer that being a Republican is something you do not reveal in polite company.

If you want to know why Republican “moderates” seem to be such squishes, so apologetic about being Republicans, so quick to launch missiles at their own side and believe the worst about the Republican base while Democratic “moderates” seem to have no doubt that they’re on the side of the angels, a huge part of it is this.

Unfortunately, I doubt the upper echelons of the GOP would soon comprehend this … and it’s going to hurt us until they figure it out. I don’t know who said it; but I do know it bears the ring of truth that he who controls the past controls the future. Likewise he who controls public perception controls the present.

After 2004, too many of us became over-confident, convinced that the Press has lost its ability to influence the public, that they would soon “implode”. 2006 and 2008 (most especially) proved us dreadfully wrong.

I’ve encountered far too many people, most of them distressingly young and supposedly educated (the voters of the future), who believe, thanks to what they see on TV, what they read in their magazines and watch in movies, that Lincoln was a Democrat and that George Wallace was a Republican, that the Civil Rights Acts were passed over Republican opposition, that the “Southern Strategy” actually is still (or was ever) employed by the GOP.

There are people who believe that jailing women who have miscarriages (not just abortions) is part of the GOP platform, that Republicans want to make Christianity a condition of citizenship, that we want to imprison homosexuals and prohibit certain sexual acts in the privacy of people’s homes. I literally heard an African American woman with a year of college under her belt wail after the results came in on Election Night 2004 that Bush was going to make slavery legal again.

It’s so pervasive in American pop-culture that the GOP is a racist, sexist hate-fueled party that it is something I’ve heard from the mouths of people from the United Kingdom to South Africa, people who have never been to the United States. Worse, I’ve heard it from newly arrived immigrants hoping to become citizens to people just coming to study who have not yet spent one week in the United States.

This can’t be emphasized enough; the Republican Party is in serious trouble because of this failure to engage.

The Republican Party is perfectly content playing defense. And in politics like in football, your side rarely if ever scores while playing defense. The current state of the Go Along Get Along Gang in Washington implies that not only are Republicans in Congress perfectly content on playing defense, they even want to be little Me Too’ers and are like the pledges in Animal House are perfectly willing to assume the position and say, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”

Of course, their unwillingness to stand up for anything right prevents them from protecting the taxpayers who very soon will be ordered to assume the position and have something completely different happen to them.