If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list (which is almost at the maximum anyway).

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 2 or 3 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).

You certainly recall the 2 people who crashed the White House party a week or so ago. The same party was attended by Robert Creamer, who wrote Stand up Straight while in prison, which is a game plan for how progressives can win the election. It should not be a shock that he has ties to ACORN and SEIU.

The House just passed a financial reform bill, which allows them to seize any business they believe is in trouble and regulate and control it.

The House also passed a 1088 page $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill. $600 billion in payments were approved for Medicare and Medicaid and other federal benefit programs; 10 cabinet departments receive an average of nearly 10% increases over the previous year.

When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama makes a speech, the first third of which is pleasing to many conservatives. He acknowledged that evil exists and that you cannot negociate with it.

Brooklyn judge overturns the de-funding of ACORN. Doesn’t matter what they have done; we will continue to pay for them with our tax dollars.

Moody’s, which has given a AAA credit rating to the United States since 1917 has warned that we may be reduced to a AA rating by 2013 because of current financial policies.

Although Sarah Palin’s article on Copenhagen and Climate Change actually got a comment from Al Gore, do not expect Gore to debate her or anyone else anytime soon (or ever).

FoxNews uncovers a 2–5 year exit plan for Afghanistan written by a Marine Colonel describing in 10 pages the 4 phase plan of handing off the responsibility of the police and military to the Afghans.

Some public schools in Missouri found notebooks and pencils in their school supplies dispensers with logos and slogans as our President used during his campaign.

It was reported that Mark Penn got $6 million to run ads to tell us the television was going digital. He claims that it was only $4.3 million. Oh, Mark worked for Hilary Clinton as the chief strategist on her campaign.

The IRS has recently hired hundreds of new employees who will specifically target the holdings and income of the wealthy, focusing on their complex business arrangements which may be designed to hide wealth.

The EPA Endangerment Ruling assigns to the agency authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions not included under that law's purview (i.e., greenhouse gases, like CO₂, which we all exhale and plants inhale).

When speaking of Ahmadinejad, Charles Krauthammer said, “Stalin has his bad points but he did not believe in an imminent apocalypse.”

Bill O’Reilly to Dennis Miller about Obama getting the Peace Prize: “I agree, he didn’t earn it, but, so what—it’s Norway...it doesn’t matter.”

John Fund, on ACORN’s tangled web of 200 organizations: “Its left hand does not know what its extreme left hand is doing.”

Judith Miller argued that Climategate should have inspired more public debate among scientists -- which could then have been covered by the media. Cal -- Thomas responded: “Well, one of the reasons it didn't happen, of course, is because of the oppression of much scientific opinion. I've talked to scientists who say they can't get the grants if they don't toe the line. And many in the media [simply] don't ask those kinds of questions.”

Steve Moore, of the Wall Street Journal, said, “This is a Congress of fiscal sociopaths.”

And an older quote, but very applicable to today: “Raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure." Senator Barack Obama from a speech he delivered on the Senate floor, March 16, 2006.

Al Gore responding to the Climategate emails: “I haven't read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.” 3 times, Gore has been quoted as indicating that the most recent Climategate email is 10 years old; the most recent email is actually dated Nov 12, 2009, from a month ago.

This is rather funny. William Shatter has been reading bits and pieces from Sarah Palin’s book to a beat band on the Tonight Show, so Sarah came out and did a bit from Shatter’s book.

William Shatter (Captain Kirk and Denny Crane) interviews Rush Limbaugh (this is quite good, and there is more here than you would expect):

“Please Help Save the World” the film which will open up the Copenhagen Conference:

2 FoxNews anchors go after a Republican Senator and a Republican Congressmen for their earmarks. If you don’t believe that FoxNews is reasonably fair, then read this article and watch the video.

Senator Inhofe (R) tells how he came to change his mind about global warming (this is a story and a vid):

“Police in Texas have arrested drug dealers selling ecstasy pills with pictures of President Obama on them. Not surprisingly, those who take the Obama pills say that first they feel tremendous euphoria and then they come down and feel extremely disappointed.” Jodi Miller.

1) I don’t know if you watched any part of the global warming demonstrations at Copenhagen, but the first thing I noticed was, they almost all had pre-manufactured signs (unlike those of the TEA party goers); and a huge number of them carried a red flag with a hammer and sickle. For most informed conservatives, the close bond between greenies and reds should not be a shock.

2) Speaking of the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, there area was filled with private jets and limousines. Public transportation was provided for the attendees, which was empty most of the time.

3) A simple observation I heard the other day: recession is a normal business cycle and it helps to eliminate weak and poorly run businesses. It is called survival of the fittest and it insures maximum productivity in the private sector.

4) Is the NY Times or ABC news taking President Obama to task on his carbon footprint in flying twice in one week to Europe? As if...

5) The government provides Medicare for the elderly; CHIPS for the young; and Medicaid for the poor—just who exactly is being left out here that a $1 trillion healthcare plan will solve?

6) When President Bush began his presidency, there were no applicants for nuclear plants; when he left office, there were 22 applicants being processed. Also, under President Bush, the United States was the only economy to both expand and cut greenhouse gases during one of his years as president.

7) I do not have high hopes for some agency which is partially run by the government and partially private. Do you remember FNMA and FHLMC? This is why we are in a recession.

8) Will Tiger Woods’ tryst with less-than-super-attractive Mindy Lawton give us the new term, skuzilicious?

9) This is an important point and worth repeating: Congress and Obama are bailing out and meeting with huge conglomerates because they can control them. They give them money and work out deals behind closed doors. Obama may throw a few thousand dollars at this or that small business, but he will throw a few billion at whatever company he can buy (with our tax dollars). In case you do not believe me, simply pay attention with whom Obama meets and where the bulk of tax dollars are sent. ACORN, SEIU, GE, GM, AIG etc. are all in Obama’s pocket (as are several medical organizations, including some of the big insurance companies which he demonizes). Do not ever expect to see any of this wheeling and dealing done out in the open, despite all of his campaign promises (unless he is smart enough to choreograph it first—and he might figure out how to do that, as Obama is an intelligent man). If you are confused about why, it is all about power and ideology. I would not be shocked if Obama, in his own soul, believes that he is doing the right thing, regardless of public sentiment.

During the first 18 months of the recession, federal employees who make $100K/year or higher jumped from 14% to 19% of all federal employees.

The Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more in December of 2007. 18 months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

It is estimated that this Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen will produce about 40,000 tons of CO₂, which is equivalent to the carbon footprint of a small country like Morocco.

Americans prefer Barack Obama as president over George W. Bush by a margin of only 50 percent to 44 percent. This is quite dramatic, as, if you will recall, there were dozens of articles written, listing Bush as one of the worst presidents in American history (Rolling Stone had one of those articles). How does it feel to have the worst president in America’s history (not my opinion) nipping at your heels?

The EPA coming out and saying that they are now ready to regulate greenhouse gases may be a bluff designed to get us to go along with Congress passing Climate Change legislation. They know that Climate Change legislation is opposed by a large majority of Americans; so this pronouncement may be to push us in that direction. Agree to global warming legislation, or the EPA is going to do a lot of things that you don’t like. They know that the first time they try to regulate CO₂, lawyers are going to be all over that ruling, which could end up weakening the EPA, if the courts rule against them (the Supreme Court today will rule against them).

The public is opposed to the present incarnation of healthcare reform 2 to 1; what do you think will happen if Congresses passes this massive bill and you sign it?

You would think that predicting whether a healthcare bill will pass or not would be an easy call. I am still on the fence on whether the Democrats will do this (they will do anything to seize control of a sixth of the nation’s economy, no matter what). And President Obama will sign anything put before him, no matter what. There could be a provision in the bill saying, first serious medical problem incurred over the age of 65 and we shoot you, and Obama would sign it. It is clear by almost every survey which has been run that the American people oppose the congress’s approach to healthcare 2 to 1, and they have made this known in every way possible—phone calls, faxes, demonstrations, TEA parties, and even going to Washington: I think there could be some violence, and I say that knowing that those on the right tend to be the most law-abiding and the most nonviolent. In many demonstrations, ETA party goers actually picked up their own trash after the demonstration was over (in contrast to almost any other demonstration). Here is what I predict, as a possible scenario, that there could be violence. Let me be clear: I am not recommending violence nor do I know anyone who would take the offensive against the government. However, if Congress, over the overwhelming wishes of the public, goes ahead and transforms a sixth of the nation’s economy on a party-line vote, some people may take the law into their own hands (which would be unfortunate, as the crazies on the left will respond in kind, as violence is not outside of their comfort zone). I hope instead that, if a healthcare bill passes, that Republicans will run on the platform, “We will repeal this bill and all associated taxes and fees” and that may assuage an angry public. However, if that is not the clear and immediate message of conservative Republicans for 2010, this could be a bad year for democracy in the United States.

However, this is one thing which I can easily predict about this healthcare bill—no matter what Democratic Congressmen say, they will vote for the bill. No matter how loudly some call out for the public option, or take some stand, pro-abortion or anti-abortion, the loudest of these Democrats will vote for whatever is put in front of them. The only hope I see is in the handful of Democrats who continually talk about fiscal responsibility. It is possible that a few of them actually mean it, and will vote against this unbelievably irresponsible bill.

White House spokesman Larry Summers proclaimed every bill a job’s bill. Remember what I said? Dems will pass bills called Job’s Bills which will have nothing to do with jobs (except they will slow down the job market).

One more full year of uncontrolled Congressional spending. I am also concerned about the amount of anger that this is going to generate.

As I have argued on many previous occasions, the new healthcare bill in any incarnation will end up costing much more than the CBO numbers indicate. There are several, easy-to-understand reasons for this:

1) It is a government run program with over 100 new agencies (I have heard 111, 112 and 117). You cannot add on additional federal agencies and expect the cost curve to go down.

2) Approximately 30,000 more people are going to be covered. Now, the quickest easiest way to do this would be to give these people free catastrophic health care coverage, and everyone could be insured at a fraction of the cost of either the House or Senate healthcare bill. However, even that simplistic approach would cost more money. However a full-on government insertion of government control and regulation increases the cost about 20-fold, which I have shown in previous issues.

3) Government programs are filled with waste and abuse. Medicare is a prime example.

4) Government entitlement programs tend to move toward bankruptcy (FNMA, FHLMC, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security). Why should be assume this is any different?

5) The cost of almost every government program ends up being much more than the original estimates (exception: George Bush’s drug benefits bill).

6) When the government squeezes the physicians when it comes to payments for Medicare and Medicaid, they have ot get their money elsewhere, or they go broke. So, private insurance is charged more in order to balance out being shortchanged by the government.

No one can point to a large governmental program which is efficiently run as the model for a national healthcare program.

No politician can point to this or that nation and say, “This is the model we want to use.” They cannot point to any state which has tried state-wide medical coverage and say, “This is the model we want to use.” If they do that, we conservatives have a stable target we can poke a million holes through.

Finally, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has come out and confirmed what should be have been obvious all along (if the government does it, it is not just going to be expensive, but it is going to run up our debt and our taxes both). CMS tells us that healthcare costs will go up by $289 billion over the next 10 years. So what happened to that oft-quoted phrase bending the cost curve down, which I have heard nearly every prominent Democrat say, without offering up any rational argument to support this foolish assertion?

Everything that we have been told about government health care has been a lie. If we like our insurance, we may or may not get to keep it. It will not bend the cost curve down. There will be rationed health care and death panels, although, of course, it will not be called that. Maybe it will be called NICE, as they call it in Great Britain.

One last thing: what about the arguments (1) healthcare costs are going to go up no matter what and (2) it’s healthcare; it should not matter what it costs.

(1) Healthcare costs may or may not keep going up. It will never be free, however. We know about a half-dozen individual things which Congress can do to reduce medical costs: torte reform, selling insurance across state lines, deregulation of insurance, pay medicare and medicaid doctors what they are owed. A majority of Americans would support those proposals, and they could be done one at a time, without any cost to the government (apart from the last one). Costs would go down, catastrophic insurance would be more readily available, and this would solve many of our current healthcare problems without costing tax payers any additional money.

(2) There is also the ridiculous mental attitude that healthcare should be free and that, when we walk into a medical office, we should be able to get whatever we want, regardless of the cost. Cost does matter. Maybe I wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, and maybe I was intelligent enough to go. However, my parents did not have enough money to do this, nor did I. If money is involved, not everyone can get the best thing available, no matter how good it is. However, what studies have shown is, if you belong to a government program, you are twice as likely to be turned down for a medical procedure than under a private plan.

There is one more thing: money drives innovation. We have already seen that, government money cannot buy good science (the latest example of climate change science should come to mind). Even though it shouldn’t have happened, climate change became a political issue, not a scientific one; and money from the government was squandered on this so-called science.

Today, if a person invents this or that prosthetic or a cure or treatment of a disease, they receive great acclaim and a lot of money. Drug research is going on all of the time with private money. Take away the profit from medical research and you reduce medical research. Are the great medical breakthroughs coming out of Canada, Cuba, Britain or France? Damn few. The greatest medical research in the world takes place in the United States.

This is a problem we can fix...but the Democrats will have to let go of their desire to take over the medical industry, which is strictly power lust. They were unable to run Cash for Clunkers; don’t let them run healthcare.

Senate Democrats on Tuesday night reached a tentative deal aimed at assuaging moderate Democrats' concerns about creating a new government health insurance option, but the so-called "compromise" would actually move the nation much closer to a government-run health care system than the public option itself.

Under the terms of deal, as reported by the Washington Post, Democrats would drop the current incarnation of the public option and instead allow the Office of Personnel Management, the entity that runs the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, to oversee the creation of privately administered plans that would be offered on the new government-run exchanges.

But in a major concession to liberals, the agreement would expand Medicare to Americans over the age of 55, and thus potentially add millions of people to a system that is already on course to bankrupt the country, with a long-term deficit of $38 trillion (or as high as $89 trillion by some measurements). And the deal still leaves open the possibility that a public option would be "triggered" if the new Office of Personnel Management plans don't materialize.

It's worth keeping in mind that the "public option," as originally conceived, was much more of a threat to the private market than the version that ultimately ended up in the Senate bill. Liberals envisioned the public option as a government-run plan modeled after Medicare that would use its bargaining power over health care providers to drive down the cost of insurance premiums. Though the plan's purpose was ostensibly to "compete" with private plans on the new government exchanges, in reality, liberals hoped that over time, the lower premiums would gradually shift more people to the public option, so that eventually they could achieve their ultimate goal of a government-run, or single-payer, health care system.

The public option became a flash point in the health care debate, as critics noted that no private plan would be able to fairly compete against a government plan that could dictate how much they would pay doctors, hospitals and other providers. The government would also be setting the rules for the insurance exchange and if the government plan were to fail, there would be every reason to believe that future lawmakers would use taxpayer dollars to bail it out. A Lewin Group analysis estimated that as originally envisioned, the public plan could attract 131 million people, shifting two-thirds of those enrolled in private plans to government-run health care as businesses dropped their coverage and dumped workers on the government to save money. It also found that as a result of the government's bargaining power, doctors stood to lose $33 billion in income and hospitals would lose $36 billion -- costs that would result in decreased services and shift more costs onto those left with private health coverage.

But over time, the public option was scaled back. In the Senate bill, the government plan could not set reimbursement rates at Medicare levels, and it would not be available to large employers -- only to some small employers and individuals without insurance. And states would at least have the theoretical possibility to "opt out." According to the Congressional Budget Office, total enrollment would only be three million to four million. That doesn't mean the plan still wasn't worth opposing -- along with the rest of the bill -- but simply that it wouldn't be as damaging as when it was originally conceived.

However, expanding Medicare would go further to advance the original aims of liberals than the watered down version of the public option. By definition, the Medicare option (which would eventually be offered on the exchange to those over 55) would set reimbursement rates at Medicare levels, thus putting the squeeze on doctors and offering lower premiums that would make it more difficult for private insurers to compete. As with the public option, liberals will try to argue that the Medicare expansion will be funded by the premiums it collects, but it will benefit from the taxpayer-funded infastructure that is already in place to support Medicare -- not to mention potential subsidies down the road.

As part of the pact, according to the Washington Post, Democrats would impose a new rule that insurers have to pay out 90 percent of the money collected in premiums to fund medical payments.

Proponents of the government plan mockingly question how anybody could be opposed to offering a plan that would offer lower premiums. The problem is that the lower premiums for some impose burdens on others -- reduced services, a shortage of primary care physicians, a shift in costs to those with private insurance, and greater risk to taxpayers. While Medicare's defenders tout the program's low administrative costs, that comes at a cost, too -- massive fraud that, by some estimates, tops $100 billion a year.

The Mayo Clinic, which has been praised by the Obama administration and has supported some aspects of the health care legislation, blasted the Medicare expansion idea as "disastrous." A post on the blog of its Health Policy Center argued that, "The current Medicare payment system is financially unsustainable. Any plan to expand Medicare, which is the government's largest public plan, beyond its current scope does not solve the nation's health care crisis, but compounds it."

Mayo went on to predict that, "Expanding this system to persons 55 to 64 years old would ultimately hurt patients by accelerating the financial ruin of hospitals and doctors across the country." The Mayo Clinic alone, it said, lost $840 million last year under the existing Medicare system.

The CBO has not yet evaluated the current proposal, but according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study, there are about 4 million uninsured Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 -- so that would probably be the minimum amount of people eligible to buy into the expanded Medicare program. Yet according to Census data, the entire 55 to 64 population is 33 million, so there's plenty of room for growth if future lawmakers open the exchanges to more people.

For liberals who view a single-payer, or government-run, health care system as ideal (and that list begins with President Obama), the goal of health care legislation was to move the nation as far as they could in that direction, knowing that the best way to achieve their goal over time was by building on the current system with which people are familiar.

"Extending this successful program to those between 55 and 64, a plan I proposed in July, would be the largest expansion of Medicare in 44 years and would perhaps get us on the path to a single payer model," Rep. Anthony Weiner, a proponent of a government-run health care system, boasted to the New York Daily News. Weiner told the Associated Press that it was "an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me who have been arguing for a single-payer system."

If Democrats unite behind this "compromise" and the broader legislation becomes law, liberals will have largely succeeded. The legislation already expands Medicaid and S-CHIP by 15 million people and coupled with the Medicare expansion, most newly covered Americans would simply be added to the rolls of existing government-run programs. Millions more would be using government subsidies to purchase government-designed insurance policies on a government-run exchange. And the rest of the system would be subject to so many taxes, penalties, and mandates that it wouldn't resemble a private market in any meaningful sense of the word.

Have your checkbooks and credit cards ready. There's a price for health care security -- particularly for solid middle-class households, who wouldn't get much help with premiums.

WASHINGTON -- Health care overhaul now looks like it really will happen, with a compromise coming together in the Senate to give uninsured Americans options they've never had before. But it won't be a free ride.

Have your checkbooks and credit cards ready. There's a price for health care security -- particularly for solid middle-class households, who wouldn't get much help with premiums.

President Barack Obama hailed the Senate agreement Wednesday, building expectations that the yearlong fight over revamping health care had finally come down to the bill now emerging.

That measure, like the Medicare prescription drug benefit that passed when Republicans ran Washington, would offer consumers a dizzying lineup of health plan choices -- with different costs and benefits.

"People who need to buy coverage as individuals and small employers are going to have a lot more in the way of attractive health insurance options, and they won't have to worry about whether their medical condition precludes them from being covered," said policy expert Paul Ginsburg, who heads the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change.

For example, people in their 50s and early 60s, when health problems tend to surface, are likely to pay less than they would now. Those in their 20s and 30s, who get the best deals today, will face higher premiums, though for better coverage.

The tentative deal by Democratic senators would give millions of Americans the option of signing up for private plans sponsored by the federal employee health system, which covers some 8 million, including members of Congress. The compromise, which also offers people age 55 to 64 the option of buying into Medicare, appears to have given Democrats a way around the deal-breaker issue of a new government plan to compete with private carriers. Senators continued to debate for a 10th day, with Democrats pushing to pass the bill by Christmas.

The 2,074-page Senate bill will grow even longer as amendments are considered, but the basic outlines of the legislation most likely to pass are becoming clearer.

The overhaul will be phased in slowly, over the next three to four years. But eventually all Americans will be required to carry coverage or face a tax penalty, except in cases of financial hardship. Insurers won't be able to deny coverage to people with health problems, or charge them more or cut them off.

Most of the uninsured will be covered, but not all. As many as 24 million people would remain uninsured in 2019, many of them otherwise eligible Americans who still can't afford the premiums. Lawmakers propose to spend nearly $1 trillion over 10 years to provide coverage, most of the money going to help lower-income people. But a middle-class family of four making $66,000 would still have to pay about 10 percent of its income in premiums, not counting co-payments and deductibles.

No dramatic changes are in store for most people who get coverage through their jobs -- about 60 percent of those under age 65. The Congressional Budget Office says the bill wouldn't have a major effect on premiums under employer plans, now about $13,000 a year. Parents would be able to keep dependent children on their coverage longer, age 27 in the House bill.

One benefit for people with employer coverage is hard to quantify: It should be easier to get health insurance if they're laid off.

The real transformation under the legislation would come for those who now have the most trouble finding and keeping coverage: people who buy their own insurance or work for small businesses. About 30 million could pick from an array of plans through new insurance supermarkets called exchanges.

To pay for expanded coverage, the House bill imposes a 5.4 percent income tax surcharge on individuals making more than $500,000 and families earning more than $1 million. The Senate slaps a 40 percent tax on insurance plans with premiums above $8,500 for individual coverage and $23,000 for family plans, among other levies.

The rest of the financing would come mainly from cuts in federal payments to insurers, hospitals, home health care agencies and other medical providers serving Medicare.

Preventive benefits for seniors would be improved. So would prescription coverage. But people enrolled in private plans through the Medicare Advantage program are likely to see higher out-of-pocket costs and reduced benefits as overpayments to insurers are scaled back.

The latest big wrinkles in the debate involve intriguing opportunities for consumers. But even there, it may be less than meets the eye.

Lawmakers have been talking for years about giving average Americans the option of coverage through the federal employee system, "just like members of Congress." The compromise among Senate Democrats would make plans certified by the federal employee system available nationwide, bringing competition to states in which one or two large insurers now control the market.

The other big new idea is to allow people age 55 to 64, one of the groups now most at risk for losing coverage, to buy into Medicare.

Yet from the inside, the federal employee health benefits plan isn't looking all that great these days. Federal workers do have a wide choice of insurance plans, but they're looking at hefty premium increases next year. Individual coverage under the most popular plan is going up 15 percent.

"I don't think you'll ever find someone satisfied with the price," said Jacqueline Simon, policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees. "And you've got people who are priced out." The union estimates that 250,000 federal workers are uninsured, mostly because they can't afford the premiums.

And what about Medicare? It is widely accepted, with 74 percent of doctors saying in a recent survey that they're taking most or all new Medicare patients. But buying into Medicare won't be cheap, about $7,600 a year not counting out-of-pocket costs for deductibles and copayments.

Ginsburg, the policy expert, says he's puzzled as to why anyone in their late 50s would want to buy into Medicare instead of picking a plan offered in the new exchanges, the insurance supermarkets. His reasoning: The exchange plans should have lower premiums since they would also include younger people who don't go to the doctor that often.

"The legislation already solved the problem by offering them coverage through the exchange," he said. "A Medicare buy-in based on the older age group is going to cost a lot more."

Details are diabolical. Very soon, the fine print of the latest Senate scheme on the government-run health plan will be unveiled. If the Senate leadership has its way, the newly hatched "compromise" on the "public plan" will move quickly by the fleeting light of day toward passage.

In their relentless drive to overhaul one sixth of the American economy, Senators are obviously making it up as they go along. In the latest desperate search to find some form of government-run health plan to compete against

private health plans that is somehow acceptable to Senate liberals and moderates alike, the Senate Democratic leadership is entertaining the idea of stripping the existing "public option" from the big Senate health bill ( H.R. 3590), and replacing it with a combination of public options: an OPM/FEHBP sponsored plan ( that will be "private" in name only) and an expansion of the two giant- and financially troubled or debt ridden- Great Society entitlements: Medicare and Medicaid. If the original idea of the public option was to keep costs down, As its champions have tiresomely insisted, a proposal to expand Medicaid and Medicare is curious to say the least: Both are major drivers of the health care spending curve upwards- well into the stratosphere.

More Debt. Medicare and Medicaid expansions are nothing new. The latest proposal to expand Medicare, a program for senior and disabled Americans, down the age scale was proposed by the Clinton Administration in the late 1990's, after the collapse of its 1342 page health care bill. The same proposal is under consideration now, expanding Medicare to cover people between the ages of 55 and 64 years of age. Depending on how the amendment is written, this could jump start a massive enrollment of the Baby Boom generation before 2011, when the first wave of Boomers is set to retire. No details are available, nor is there any kind of cost estimate. Medicare already has a long-term debt of $38 trillion.

Higher State Costs. A major Medicaid expansion is already embodied in both the House and Senate bills. The Senate bill would expand Medicaid up the income scale to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, and the House bill would expand it to 150 percent of the poverty level; in both cases there would be massive erosion of private health insurance among families in these income categories. Which is the key point, apparently. For those who are enrolled in it, Medicaid delivers poor quality care compared to private health insurance. But Senate liberals are undeterred, and the issue of poor quality is rarely even discussed in the largest of the government's health programs.. Of course, the problem with the massive Medicaid expansion is that it will also add to the already burdensome Medicaid costs on the states.

More Central Control. The more interesting element of this proposal is the creation of an "FEHBP Plan" administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). OPM is the agency that runs the popular and successful Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) that covers members of Congress and federal workers and retirees. There are no details about any of this yet, beyond some discussion of broad concepts in the media. However, it appears that under the Senate Democrats' compromise proposal, OPM would be given authority to contract with private, non-profit insurers( such as Blues and Kaiser ) to compete in the federally -designed health insurance exchanges that would be erected in each of the states under the Senate bill. It appears that the government would sponsor certain favored health plans to compete against the private health plans in the states. It is not clear how a restricted set of plans would add much to competition or to expand personal choice of benefits, particularly if the benefits are politically standardized.

The key question is what authority OPM would have in the negotiation of rates and benefits, and in the financing and the administration of the program. These details are crucial. If OPM were given absolute authority to set premiums and benefits, it could conceivably set premiums below the market prices, thus undercutting private health plans on an un-level playing field, leading to the kind of erosion of private health coverage that was envisioned under the "robust" public plan favored by the Left. If it sets rates and benefits on the basis of the market rates, of course, it would fail to achieve the Left's goal of a "robust:" administered pricing system, a central rationale for the public plan in the first place. But, of course, that could change over time. The key issue in health care policy is the infrastructure of power and control; the levers of power and domination, additional staff and funding, can be always added later, especially if an artificially low priced, government-sponsored health plan (or plans) starts to run deficits.

Meanwhile, consider the existing power of OPM. Under current law, the Director of OPM has plenary authority in negotiating rates and benefits with private health plans, a vast authority repeatedly upheld by the federal courts. The OPM Director reports to only one person: The President of the United States. If the goal is for government to dominate the health insurance markets through the creation of a new "public option" - private health plans that are private in name only- the end result could be a national health insurance market literally run out of the West Wing of the White House.

This is clearly the way this administration is planning to run a lot of their programs. "Thinly-veiled" to say the least. It's an end around. Just like the EPA CO2 decision.

The majority of the American people DO NOT want a government controlled health care system. They do not want a public option that leads to a one-payer system. Private enterprise cannot compete with government. The fact they are writing this nonsense PROVES IT.

It appears that the Democrats are going to try to slip a "revised??" Senate bill through so as to quickly get it in the hands of a "democratically controlled" conference committee. Therefore, I think it is now time that we demand that any Senator who votes for this reform plan must be willing to have a little "skin" in the game. For example, in the event that ten years from now that the reform plan does not meet the stated benchmarks and goals in the bill, then, those supporting Senators have to "forfeit" their special federal pension and health insurance benefits and have to go on SS and under the new health/medicare plan that all the rest of us are stuck with.

December 8, 2009 A Thinly-Disguised Power Grab: The Latest Senate "Compromise" On The Government-Run Health Plan « writes:

Does anyone out there see that the HR3590, whatever form it takes, continues violation Article V: Checks & Balances between the 3 branches of government which allows encroachment with too much power in the hands of to few men - especially like Mr. Obama & czars!? That is because Mr. Obama won the election and even though he knows better, he feels he can alter `We the people's' Constitution by shifting the overlapping powers & thereby altering the balance which helps protect our liberty from a Federal government which wants to justify `Supplying' 100% of all health-care from before birth to death with all providers including the business' that provide the providers! And Save money!? That is also why the Patient Protection Plan is Not about Medical Care it will not be successful at providing at the monstrous size & cost, but will solidify power in the Executive Branch of Government. Also expands the Executive Branch's power into all areas of government. Think about what is already law with this Administration - then think about the businesses that supply providers of medical care; then think about standardization of each individual's data about themselves & their family - far away from any medical need! This is a government of force; or we wouldn't be having talks about the above power-grab.

If you don't see, please read Federalist Papers #47 and read G. Washington's Farewell Address approx. the 16th through the 23rd paragraphs or New Constitution, Rule of Law, Faction, opposition to Constitution, liberty, Rights, spirit of Party, separation of power and love of Power.

I distinctly recall the President calling this "my plan." Also stating "my plan will pass." The President is the seed of this corruption.

As a compromise why not propose this plan for 18 months? Then if it doesn't work by July, 2011, we will have an exit strategy.

Time is running out to write your Senators & Congressperson. Tell them we are watching and will not be fooled by these tricks.

Rationing of care does and will continue to happen regardless of the outcome of the bill. Demand will continue to outstrip supply and funding no matter what kind of system is in place.

The public option is a non-issue where insurance companies are concerned. Eliminating the pre-existing condition exclusion will be the death knell for the industry. They will not be able to maintain profits without this highly effective, albeit socially and morally repugnant, cost control.

Subsidies and mandates will be accompanied by increasing government control that will lead to an eventual de facto single payer system, with insurance bureaucracies competing for administration contracts only.

This is a prediction, not an endorsement. This particular bill is a travesty, but the system is headed for collapse. Uncomfortable changes are in the future, no matter what we do.

December 10, 2009 Will Obamacare Be Run from the West Wing? | Fix Health Care Policy writes:

[...] Part II of the compromise consists of an expansion of Medicare (including people as young as 55). And it's big entitlement expansion. (That's how the Congressional liberals now define

"reform.") Not surprisingly, Rep Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has applauded this part of the compromise as a big step toward the single payer option, and told the Los Angeles Times: "Expanding Medicare is an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me. It's the mother of all public options." Not to be outdone, the editors of The Washington Post said this morning: " The irony of this late breaking Medicare proposal is that it could be a bigger step toward a single payer system than the milquetoast public option plans rejected by Senate moderates as too disruptive of the private market." [...]

Government can't create wealth, but it can prevent the private sector from doing so.

President Obama keeps talking about the jobs his administration is "creating," but there are more people unemployed now than before he took office. How can there be more unemployment after so many jobs have been "created"?

Let's go back to square one. What does it take to create a job? It takes wealth to pay someone who is hired, not to mention additional wealth to buy the material that person will use.

But government creates no wealth. Ignoring that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do in fact. Without creating wealth, how can they create jobs? By taking wealth from others, whether by taxation, selling bonds, or imposing mandates.

However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector, not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy.

If that was all that was involved, it would be a simple verbal fraud, with no gain of jobs and no net loss. In reality, many other things that politicians do reduce the number of jobs.

Politicians who mandate various benefits that employers must provide for workers gain politically by seeming to give people something for nothing. But making workers more expensive means that fewer are likely to be hired.

During an economic recovery, employers can respond to an increased demand for their companies' products by hiring more workers - creating more jobs - or they can work their existing employees overtime. Since workers have to be paid time-and-a-half for overtime, it might seem as if it would always be cheaper to hire more workers. But that was before politicians began mandating more benefits per worker.

When you get more hours of work from the existing employees, you don't need to pay for additional mandates, as you would have to when you get more hours of work by hiring new people. For many employers, that makes it cheaper to pay for overtime. The data show that overtime hours have been increasing in the economy while more people have been laid off.

There is another way of reducing the cost of government-imposed mandates. That is by hiring temporary workers, to whom the mandates do not apply.

The number of temporary workers hired has increased for the fourth consecutive month, even though there are millions of unemployed people who could be hired for regular jobs, if it were not for the mandates that politicians have imposed.

Economists have long been saying that there is no free lunch, but politicians get elected by seeming to give free lunches, in one form or another. Yet there are no magic wands in Washington to make costs disappear, whether with workers or with medical care. We just pay in a different way, often in a more costly way.

Nor can these costs all be simply dumped on "the rich," because there are just not enough of them. Often people who are far from rich pay the biggest price in lost opportunities. A classic example is the minimum-wage law.

Minimum-wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing - and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes.

People with low skills or little experience usually get paid low wages. Passing a minimum wage law does not make them any more valuable. At a higher wage, it can just make them expendable. Raising the minimum wage in the midst of a recession was guaranteed to increase unemployment among the young - and it has.

None of this is peculiar to the current administration. The Roosevelt administration created huge numbers of government jobs during the 1930s - and yet unemployment remained in double digits throughout FDR's first two terms.

Constant government experiments with new bright ideas is another common feature of Obama's "change" and FDR's New Deal. The uncertainty that this unpredictable experimentation generates makes employers reluctant to hire. Destroying some jobs while creating other jobs does not get you very far, except politically. But politically is what matters to politicians, even if their policies needlessly prolong a recession or a depression.

Every serious person should welcome the president's proposals to lift the dormant economy and reduce unemployment. Not because every serious person would agree with them but because they are a clear test of how a left-wing government would run the American economy.

If this works, hats off to them and we become France. If not, Americans may finally dump left-wing economics into the ash heap of history, starting next November and then in the next presidential election, which can't come soon enough.

The first purpose of the jobs proposals Mr. Obama announced Tuesday-TARP money for Main Street, tax credits for new hires, more infrastructure spending and the weird weatherization program-is to bail out Democratic incumbents. The underlying strength and resilience of the American economy may yet produce enough headline growth the next 11 months to slow the panic over employment levels by next fall.

No Democratic president, though, can just say, "I'm doing this to save the Pelosi majority and to protect the state and local jobs of Andy Stern's dues payers and party regulars in the Service Employees International Union." Mr. Obama's saving grace is that no matter how political his initiatives, the reasons he offers for what he's doing generally do describe what is at stake.

And so he did at the jobs summit: "We've got the most entrepreneurial spirit in the world, and we've got some of the most productive workers in the world. And if we get serious, then the 21st century is going to be the American century, just like the 20th century."

Too true. This global competition is what lies beyond the politics of next November's employment rate. Still, one must ask: Can weatherization save us from a billion Chinese workers?

Apologies for the glibness, but I don't see how one can sort through the Obama economic policies and conclude that we have a strategy for sending America's best and brightest entrepreneurs onto the battlefields of Asia. It looks instead like we're going to spend a generation looking for jobs in Uncle Sam's hiring hall of targeted tax credits and industry-specific subsidies.

Everyone in politics genuflects in the direction of the job-creation powers of "entrepreneurs" and their ideas. But the generation of Democrats who rose to power with the Obama presidency and the current House majority don't really trust or much like real entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship, the kind that creates industries and jobs on the scale we'll need in the next century, is about two things: Ideas that spring randomly from some slightly crazed dreamer's head; and worse, they often get filthy rich if the dreams are real. The left likes neither.

In their country, government guides capital to ideas prewashed for goodness. As to letting guys get rich, we know about that problem. Hating it isn't just political. It's cultural.

But unless these Democrats can reverse habits of history dating to the Renaissance, entrepreneurship's new men not only will build businesses and create new jobs, they'll still tend to measure their self-worth with outsized yachts, mansions and other crimes against prevailing norms of taste. The new Democrats bear a visceral antipathy toward these people, whom they've reduced to the lumpen "Republicans."

Barack Obama campaigned for a year against "the top 1%" and "the wealthiest." It sounded like more than economics to me. But a nation can't have entrepreneurs and eat them, too. Asia is overflowing with rich entrepreneurs. Google "China's auto industry." They have more new auto manufacturers than you can count. If the U.S. has any hope of competing long term with this rising force, it will have to let some Americans get as rich as nouveau riche Asians. This presidency won't do that.

At the jobs summit, Mr. Obama said "I want to hear from CEOs what's holding back our business investment." Really?

How about the world's highest corporate tax rate? How about the 5.4% health-care surtax on top of the expiring Bush tax cuts, which will push the top marginal individual rate, paid at the outset by many entrepreneurs, well over 40%?

Set aside income taxes as the unransomed hostages of progressive dogma. Justify this: The Senate health-reform bill imposes a $4 billion annual excise tax on medical devices and diagnostic equipment. In a slow-innovation economy, which is what we have now, medical and diagnostic miracles sit at the intersection of American science, technology, education and IQ. That stuff defines American entrepreneurship and ingenuity. If the Obama Democrats will tax these people, they'll tax anything that produces income, no matter how innovative or job-creating.

The Obama bet is that the U.S. can be a Franco-German welfare state, with a mammoth public sector, and still compete with China, India, Brazil, Korea and the rest. This is a pipedream. We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation.

The notorious tea partiers are mobilizing, and their clout has already been determined the second most powerful voting bloc in our political system! They polled 23% in a Rassmussan poll that identifies voter priority. The Dems polled 32%, and Republicans a dismal 17%.

Violent, gun clutching, bible hugging, outlaw citizens are gaining steam, and Republicans have been served notice..."Shape up or ship out!" No phenomenon in my lifetime has been so startling, and so immensely encouraging, than this movement. These millions of Americans are crossing party lines, from both sides, and joining ranks with the disgruntled GOP supporters, and independent voters. Together they already command an 8% advantage, and Obama is pissing off more people every day.

If the far left majority of our Congress is not sweating, they aren't paying attention! Even liberal Dems are frantically conducting polls to determine how much of their support has fled to the tea party ranks. What they are finding is not comforting. The momentum of the astroturf crowd has already swept away a large portion of their dupes, and the party is only started! These people are MOTIVATED!!!!

The Battle Royale that is shaping up pits the omnipotent government with the huddled masses, and you know what? This is one underdog that can bite! In fact, the tidal wave of dissatisfied and frustrated voters will only gain power in the months ahead, and this is inevitable, because the Obama juggernaut has ridden roughshod over our voices, our public outcry, and our earnest attempt to fulfill our role as the masters of our destiny.

No issue is so precious as this to free men and women, the fundamental right of self-determination. We understand the correlation between freedom and well being, and we believe in free enterprise. Obama's unprecedented explosion of spending also expodes the illusion they have been presenting for decades, that the evil GOP are spending us into economic decline! Obama has ALREADY spent 3 times what Bush did in his entire presidency, and Barry has only been in power for 11 months. Such stark hypocrisy throws the shadow of doubt about all their slanders and low ball trickery. Their flimflam strategy isn't playing well at the kitchen table, and in America's neighborhoods.

The driveby press has yet to align themselves with mainstream America, and they will continue to go fallow as a result. Citizens are seeking honest, conservative oriented news. They have been driven to Fox, and conservative talk shows, because they have turned to the polar opposite of this new regime. They have not respected these sources in the past, but hearing plain, down to earth conservative views is changing the complexion of this society. This transformation is gradual, because most of the newest recruits have been liberal all their lives, and it took so flagrant a violation of our Constitution, and such absolute disgraces as the upcoming trial in New York, to galvanize them into action, and it has. In fact, they are the most committed, for their trust has been betrayed! The One that they trusted to deliver salvation has shown himself to be the most aggressive of his Marxist advisors!

The momentum grows.....fair minded, objective citizens are beeing shocked awake! Who can sit calmly, watching TV, when an 18 foot allegator drops through the roof? It would appear that millions are doing just that, and still doggedly support Obama. The fact that he comes across as a nice guy has them drooling at his every flap of an eyelash. But even The Devoted are crumbling. We are all being united by one issue... freedom. Through all the clever propaganda, and reams of words, 2,000 page bills, and the blizzard of legislation, we sense danger. All of these sweeping programs are not only about limiting our free choices, but spending us into poverty, a debt our great grankids will be struggling to pay. In their future time outrageous taxes will consume half of their incomes, possibly more, and their lives will be slavery to the all-seeing, all-powerful federal government.

To achieve the goal of a universal, single-payer health system, the White House must secure the power it needs by amending the Social Security Act to transfer pivotal controls from Congress to the executive branch. This transfer of power would ultimately give the President and the majority party, in this case the radical left Obama White House and Pelosi-Reid led progressive Democrats, the authority to frame and manipulate new policy, coverage options, and reimbursements, ultimately reshaping the future US health care system into a something unrecognizable in this country.

The deliberate setup for the White House power grab is built into the each of the health care bills and, if they fail, little-known twin bills called "MedPAC Reform of 2009" are waiting in the wings. The bills, S.B. 1110 and H.R. 2718, craftily amend the Social Security Act and transfer the Medicare guideline and rule setting processes, from the legislative branch to the executive branch. These bills offer cover to one another in case one doesn't pass the House or Senate, respectively. Remember, Democrats need to gain executive branch authority by amending the Social Security Act over Medicare regulations and physician fee schedules to transform the health care system in a single-payer, socialized system.

More importantly, Medicare's regulations and physician fee schedules are the keystone to developing payer systems and reimbursement models across the entire health care industry. And where Medicare goes, insurers follow.

To underscore the far-reaching power, a bulk of the states already reference or utilize the Medicare guidelines and fee schedules in determining policy, coverage, and payment, which impacts certain state-specific plans, including, but not limited to, self-funded plans, automobile insurance payers, and state workers' compensation funds and plans - affecting even Big Labor. For the executive branch to have such authority over Medicare regulations with little oversight is alarming. This raises further issues of the powerful impact these federal mandates could potentially have on the states in stripping them of their own management of their respective insurance industries.

Specifically, the language in the Reid bill intentionally places unlimited power directly in the hands of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, including the ability to designate covered services, or rationing. The Pelosi bill creates a Health Choices Commission and its "commissioner" is empowered to make the same decisions. More alarming, both will have to take direction from the White House-and its unconfirmed czars-due to their executive branch affiliation.

In retrospect, Obama's pick of Sebelius as HHS Secretary is obvious. Aside from being a governor, Sebelius is the former Kansas insurance commissioner and has the ability to identify the strongest and weakest links-navigating her way quite expeditiously throughout the health care system. And she'll never disavow one of her first career choices - executive director and chief lobbyist for the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association. That explains the blatant omission of tort reform, in addition to the fact that the trial lawyers are the biggest Democrat donors.

Another disturbing Obama appointee is health care czar Nancy Ann DeParle, who remains unconfirmed, and was the administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), now known as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In short, she "owns" Medicare. And if you put Sebelius and DeParle together in a room for a few hours, you'll get a formula for a single-payer government-run health care system - with Obama's wish list met.

These designed appointees make sense of the intentions at hand to frame a universal or single-payer health care system. Everything in this administration makes sense when you look at the overall agenda. Even the branding makes sense. The urgency, caring for the uninsured, taking advantage of the uninsurable, proclaiming it's paid for, packaging it as deficit-neutral, and amplifying that people are `dying' in the streets.

The aforementioned MedPAC Reform of 2009 bills give the executive branch power it so dearly covets to devise the single-payer system. Currently, MedPAC-the Medicare Payment and Advisory Committee (MedPAC)-is a Clinton-era independent Congressional agency established by the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 that advises the Congress on issues affecting the Medicare program, including payments to private health plans participating in Medicare and providers in Medicare's traditional fee-for-service program. MedPAC also analyzes access to, quality of, and cost of health care.

The MedPAC bill designer, progressive Senator John Rockefeller (D-WV), has strategically branded the need for the bill by calling Congress "inefficient" and "inconsistent" -and who wouldn't agree with that?

Therefore, the MedPAC Reform bill creates a new MedPAC-the Medicare Payment and Access Commission-and gives the Obama White House and its advisors over-reaching control of several factors governing the economy of the health care system. The new MedPAC, which is exempted from judicial review, would have the authority to rewrite physician fee schedules, redefine medical necessity, evaluate coverage of treatment options, rewrite beneficiary definitions and coverage, and redesign diagnostic definitions and coverage.

The new MedPAC's mission would also be to inform new research in health services to adequately address deficiencies in the evidence. However, in reality, this would apparently cripple new treatments and technologies by overshadowing progressive research and treatment algorithms by apparently emphasizing the deficiencies, not the benefits, equaling a denial of care and arresting development of burgeoning technologies.

Rockefeller also confirms that the new MedPAC will evaluate and test new and innovative payment models for provider reimbursement. The MedPAC reform is being packaged under the guise of efficiency; however, by maximizing the volume of care delivered at the lowest possible cost, it appears that the payment and utilization schedule is a mechanism to control the pressure that would build when the health care system is overloaded with millions of new patients.

Finally, Rockefeller highlights another intention of MedPAC, which is to expand the capacity to evaluate basic and health services research for reimbursement. This is the pinnacle power grab because this gives the new MedPAC and the executive branch the power to ration or deny care and decide what treatment options are available or acceptable as a whole.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, commented, "As a congressional support agency, MedPAC's mission is to advise Congress on Medicare payment issues. If MedPAC were to become part of the executive branch as contemplated in the Rockefeller bill, then Congress would no longer have this support agency to provide technical support when making policy decisions." Senator Grassley also confirmed that he is not willing to abdicate congressional responsibilities for Medicare payment policymaking to a body that does not hold certificates of election. He is correct that Congress wouldn't have the support agency's advice, but misses that it wouldn't be Congress's responsibility anymore-the policy decisions would be the responsibility of the new MedPAC-under the direction of the Obama White House.

What's inherently disturbing is the fact that Rockefeller has been very outspoken in support of the public option and knows that this transfer of power must take place via the Social Security Act-in any form. He even confirms that health care reform will not be successful, unless all authority is shifted to the executive branch. He also rightly chooses his words-the "healthcare delivery system," which is code for the public option.

Additionally, Rockefeller confirms the overall task at hand by stating, "Establishing MedPAC as an independent executive branch agency - which can only change through an act of Congress - is the cornerstone of improving our delivery system reform. Health care reform will only be successful if we craft transformative changes." Transformative, as in a government-run health care system.

If there are any questions if the White House would flex its executive branch authority over an agency, just look the way of the EPA. Congress stalled on cap and trade and Climategate has proven to be a problem, so the White House and EPA took matters into their own hands to keep moving on the agenda-to intentionally put regulations in place that further strangle American businesses, create unemployment, and further destabilize the economy.

Furthermore, with most of the Obama administration graduates of the Saul Alinsky school of thought, of course the main goal of all legislation and policies would be to support the overall intention of Alinsky, which is for the "have-nots on how to take it away."

In any of these legislative scenarios-Pelosi, Reid or MedPAC bills-the White House gets the power it seeks-and needs-in order to accomplish the task at hand-a single payer, government-run health system.

These bills must be defeated; the power grab thwarted because after the Social Security Act is amended in any form these bills present and the rule changes take effect, it is not likely for the Act to be reopened and amended again. The problem is Congress doesn't even comprehend what's at stake in either of the health care bills or MedPAC Reform-and you can't stop something you don't see.

The next time you hear a politician use the Word 'billion' in a casual manner, think about Whether you want the 'politicians' spending YOUR tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, But one advertising agency did a good job of Putting that figure into some perspective in One of it's releases.

C. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, At the rate our government Is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain... let's take a look at New Orleans ... It's amazing what you can learn with some simple division.

Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D) Is presently asking Congress for 250 BILLION DOLLARS To rebuild New Orleans . Interesting number... What does it mean?

A. Well .. If you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, and child), you each get $516,528.

B. Or... If you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets $1,329,787.

And yet, with all of these taxes, Washington D.C. has us further in debt than ever before (not in just overall debt, but debt as a percentage of the GNP). Just an increase in the interest rate to around 6–7% would mean that we do not collect enough taxes to just pay the interest on our debt. That is interest only; no debt reduction and no other government services (like the military or highway construction or social secuirty) included. Just interest.

This is not including our unfunded liabilities ($54.6 trillion)—things which politicians have promised to pay—e.g., Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—but do not have the money to pay for. What politicians have promised to pay in the future makes our present debt ($12 trillion) seem small by comparison.

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago.... And our nation was the most prosperous in the world.

We had absolutely no national debt... We had the largest middle class in the world... And Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

Before Thanksgiving, the Senate voted to opening debate on President Obama's health-care bill, and that debate has begun in earnest this week.

Well, if they want a debate, let's let them have it. But let's not get distracted by the sideshows Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has planned for us.

Forget about abortion. Of course the left will accept restrictions on funding for abortion, because they want to keep moderate Democrats on board for the goal they know is really important: giving the government a dominant role in health care. Everything else is just details, and funding for abortions is an issue to which the left can return at leisure later on-once government is firmly in charge of everything.

And don't bother debating the "public option," either, because it's already dead; enough Democratic senators have come out against it. But Harry Reid is all too happy to have a debate over the public option so he can make a show of "compromising" and giving it up. And while we're having that fake debate, he's hoping that we won't be challenging everything else in the bill.

So let's get straight what the real essentials of the bill are-and how disastrous they are.

Three provisions constitute the vicious heart of the Democrats' health-care overhaul.

The first is "guaranteed issue" and "community rating." This is the requirement that insurance companies have to offer coverage to people who are already sick, and that they be limited in their ability to charge higher rates for customer who pose a higher risk. The extra expense to the insurance companies of covering people with pre-existing conditions will get passed on to existing customers in the form of higher premiums. But why spend years paying these inflated premiums for insurance you're not using, when you can get exactly the same benefits by waiting until you actually fall ill? The obvious result is that million of people, especially healthy young people, will quickly realize that there is no reason to buy health insurance until they get sick.

Rather than increasing the number of insured by making health insurance more affordable, this bill makes health insurance more expensive and increases the incentive to simply drop your insurance until you need someone to pay for your medical bills. It is an attempt to turn health insurance into what the left really wants: another welfare program in which everyone is entitled to free benefits, mandated by the government. But this would wreck private health insurance, making the whole industrial financially unsustainable.

Following the usual pattern of government intervention, the health-care bill offers another intervention as the solution for the problem created by the first. The "individual mandate" requires everyone to buy health insurance and subjects us to a tax if we fail to do so. But this is an especially onerous new tax, the first tax not tied to any kind of income or activity. It's not a tax on stock-market profits, say, or a tax on buying cigarettes. It's just a tax for existing.

So fearing a public backlash, Congress didn't have the guts to make this new tax very large-only $750. Yet actual insurance can cost more than $3,000 per year-and as we shall see, this legislation goes out of its way to drive up those rates by mandating more lavish coverage. So we end up getting the worst of both worlds. This provision won't actually drive anyone to buy health insurance and prop up the risk pools for those who are insured. All it will accomplish is to create a brand new form of tax.

But the biggest power-grab in the bill is the government takeover of the entire market for health insurance. The bill requires all new policies to be sold on a government-controlled exchange run by a commissioner who is empowered to dictate what kinds of insurance policies can be offered, what they must cover, and what they can charge.

Right now, your best option for reducing the cost of your health insurance is to buy a policy with a high deductible, which leaves you to pay for routine checkups and minor injuries (preferably from savings held in a tax-free Health Savings Account) but which covers your needs in catastrophic circumstances-a bad car accident, say, or expensive treatment for cancer. This is the kind of coverage I have.

But the health-insurance exchange is intended to eliminate precisely this kind of low-cost catastrophic coverage. Its purpose is to force health-insurance companies to offer comprehensive coverage that pays for all of your routine bills-which in turn comes at a higher price. So under the guise of making health insurance more affordable, this bill will restrict your menu of choices to include only the most expensive options.

So there we have the real essence of this bill. It restricts our choice of which insurance to buy and pushes us into more expensive plans. At the same time, it destroys the economic incentive to purchase insurance in the first place and replaces insurance with a free-floating tax on one's very existence.

When you understand what this bill does, you can see why the Democrats would be happy to compromise and drop the public option-for now. This bill so comprehensively wrecks private health insurance that pretty soon a "public option" will seem like the only alternative, and they will already have put into place one of the new taxes needed to pay for it. If the left's goal is to impose socialized medicine in America, this bill does it in the most callous and destructive way possible. It smashes private health care-then leaves us stranded in the rubble, at which point we will be expected to come crawling back to the same people who caused the disaster and ask them to save us.

That is the final and perhaps most compelling reason to kill this bill: the sheer arrogance of the whole enterprise. It is the arrogance of stampeding an unwilling public toward a monstrous 2,000-page piece of legislation while admitting that it still has huge problems, but promising that it will all somehow be fixed later on. It's the arrogance of selling us a bill that expands government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while telling us that it will reduce the deficit. It is the sheer unmitigated gall of appointing a bureaucrat to run a government-controlled insurance market that takes away all of our health choices-and then calling this bureaucrat the Health Choices Commissioner.

That's the kind of government arrogance that has to be smacked down hard, and that alone is reason to demand that your senator reject this vicious bill in its entirety.

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.

This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, I took a stand against politicized science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled. I got clobbered for my actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but I stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of "climate change impacts" was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act. This would have irreversibly hurt both Alaska's economy and the nation's, while also reducing opportunities for responsible development.

Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda. That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate -- far from it. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. I was one of the first governors to create a subcabinet to deal specifically with the issue and to recommend common-sense policies to respond to the coastal erosion, thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice that affect Alaska's communities and infrastructure.

But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs. And those costs are real. Unlike the proposals China and India offered prior to Copenhagen -- which actually allow them to increase their emissions -- President Obama's proposal calls for serious cuts in our own long-term carbon emissions. Meeting such targets would require Congress to pass its cap-and-tax plans, which will result in job losses and higher energy costs (as Obama admitted during the campaign). That's not exactly what most Americans are hoping for these days. And as public opposition continues to stall Congress's cap-and-tax legislation, Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats plan to regulate carbon emissions themselves, doing an end run around the American people.

In fact, we're not the only nation whose people are questioning climate change schemes. In the European Union, energy prices skyrocketed after it began a cap-and-tax program. Meanwhile, Australia's Parliament recently defeated a cap-and-tax bill. Surely other nations will follow suit, particularly as the climate e-mail scandal continues to unfold.

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.

(Washington, D.C.) - Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today released the 2009 Congressional Pig Book, the latest installment in the group's 19-year exposé of pork-barrel spending. The Pig Book revealed 10,160 earmarks worth $19.6 billion.

"Everyone in Washington has promised a new era of transparency and restraint in earmarks, from President Obama to the leaders of both parties in Congress," said CAGW President Tom Schatz. "Sadly, the hard numbers from the 2009 appropriations bills tell a different story. The current Democratic congressional majority is following the same trajectory as their Republican predecessors. They came into power promising to cut earmarks, and made a big show of it during their first two years. However, as the 2009 Pig Book amply illustrates, pork-barrel spending is growing fast."

While the number of specific projects declined by 12.5 percent, from 11,610 in fiscal year 2008 to 10,160 in fiscal year 2009, the total tax dollars spent to fund them increased by 14 percent, from $17.2 billion to $19.6 billion.

Much has been made of reforms that require members of Congress to identify earmarks they request and the intended recipients of earmarked funds, but CAGW uncovered 221 earmarks worth $7.8 billion that were funded in circumvention of Congress's own transparency rules. These stealth earmarks were particularly prevalent in the 2009 Defense Appropriations Act, which included 142 anonymous earmarks worth $6.4 billion, a staggering 57 percent of the earmarked tax dollars.

The Pig Book Summary profiles the most egregious examples, breaks down pork per capita by state, and presents the annual "Oinker" Awards. All 10,160 projects are listed in a searchable database on CAGW's website www.cagw.org. Examples of pork in the 2009 Pig Book include:

• $143,000 for the Greater New Haven Labor History Association in Connecticut;

• $71,000 for Dance Theater Etcetera in Brooklyn for its Tolerance through Arts initiative.

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.

It's been used to buy one car company, give another to union allies, punish non-union workers, undermine the bankruptcy code, enrich Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, keep unionized Zombie firms from dying, and generally terrorize the world economy. Now the left in Congress wants to use it again, this time as a slush fund for a third round of stimulus funding. The AP reports:

Democrats are looking to tap as much as $70 billion in unused funds from the Wall Street bailout to pay for new spending on roads and bridges and to save the jobs of firefighters, teachers and other public employees, officials said Thursday.

After talks with the administration officials such as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Democratic lawmakers are eyeing what remains from last year's $700 billion financial rescue package as a way to finance job-related legislation. Two House Democratic aides said the figure could be as high as $70 billion.

The economic crisis that led to the adoption of TARP is over. Rather than serves as a necessary tool to avoid an systemic collapse of the financial system, TARP has become at best just another source of stimulus spending, and at worst a slush fund providing ready cash, with little or no accountability, to whatever industry or firm the Treasury Department chooses to support. The continued existence of TARP does nothing but enable the completely undemocratic and unaccountable Obama Czar State.

This is outrageous! The American people deserve, indeed, demand, an accounting of every single penny!

Bush never intended for the money to be used in this way. Trying to save Capitalism, he sure gave the left wingers an opportunity they could have only dreamed of.

Now that "precedent" has been set, when will it end? It is not "criminal" to be "political" although millions often have a difficult time separating the two.

Well TARP of course has turned into a political tool for Obama and his slew of cronies in the "Dumbocrat" congress. He thinks by shifting untold (B)illions to everyday folks he can carry favor meaning votes when the time is right or perhaps he just wants people to like him. Not likely he needs to be loved by all and attacks anyone who says otherwise from Joe the Plumber to Fox news etc.

He thinks he can TARP us all and we want be able to see what's truly taking place but in this he's sadly mistaken. I just hope there's enough fine Americans out there that still care and are willing to stand up and NOT give him the votes he's BANKING on with our money mind you.

It's funny he takes your money with his right hand and gives it back to you in some other form with his left, (haha) remember folks he's left handed. I can think of many better ways to spend $700billion, (1)pay down the debt or (2)cut every American a check and allow us to make our own decisions etc, etc, etc. The list is endless but bottom line this vote buying nonsense has got to stop.

TARP has created precious few jobs. Instead, it is being used to ensure politicians jobs come next election. Bottom line, why throw good money after bad? All this money is not free; it comes from the taxpayers who find themselves paying for someone else's benefit. Sounds a lot like taking another person's private property and that person receiving no benefit (might we call this robbery?).

Any and all unused TARP and/or Stimulus money that has not been spent should be used to pay off our national debt.

Leaving any of those unused funds lay around for any length of time is like leaving the dinner meat loaf at the edge of the dinner table, where the dog can reach it. The second you're not looking, the dog will gobble it up. He can't help it, it's just a dog's nature. The same is true of Congress; it's their nature.

Tarp, Stimulus, Cophenhagen, all pursue the same thing. Spend to destroy! mandates the Woman.It's not good in her eyes to change what works.

Patriots be Ready for what it takes to Turn all this Mess Around and have the Country back. It's gone for long,gone so long.

Darn right, Louis! It just occurred to me what "tarp" is coded for.TRAP! What relevance does the term "tarp" have in GOVERNMENT!?

Use it to pay off the national debt? We'd be lucky to put a small dent in just the interest payments on that, and now I'm reading they plan to increase the debt limit again. It's going to take a generation and huge tax increases just to pay off the current budget deficit!

H.L. Menken wrote: "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

Now, WHY in the world would that fave just pop into my head today? Could it possibly be anything to do with an Executive that just keeps popping open the seven seals of the apocolypse like Chinese cookies? I believe we're up to seal #3 today.

Talk is cheap. Actions are costly. Has anyone added up the Bribes in these so called "stimulus packages"? I am referring to all the earmarks ( embezzling of public funds) that are intended to buy votes? How much more effective and less costly would the stimulus be without the bribes? We need the power of recall petitions and term limits!

I'm not an economist, but, uh, we're in debt, so, uh, thus, why is Washington debating about money we don't have?

The slush fund will die after one of the two scenarios happen. Under the first scenario the dollar is rendered worthless and then abandoned along with our freedoms. Under the second scenario congress is made relevant once again over the next two elections and is able to control the purse strings to the satisfaction of their constituents. I don't see any other way.

Almost exactly one year ago, on a cold winter's day, I met with my new economic team at the headquarters of my presidential transition offices in Chicago. Over the course of four hours, my advisors presented an analysis of where the economy stood, accompanied by a chilling set of charts and graphs, predicting where we might end up. It was an unforgettable series of presentations.

Christy Romer, tapped to head the Council of Economic Advisers, and Larry Summers, who I'd chosen to head the National Economic Council, described an imminent downturn comparable in its severity to almost nothing since the 1930s. Tim Geithner, my incoming Treasury Secretary, reported that the financial system, shaken by the subprime crisis, had halted almost all lending, which in turn threatened to pull the broader economy into a downward spiral. And Peter Orszag, my incoming Budget Director, closed out the proceedings with an entirely dismal report on the fiscal health of the country, with growing deficits and debt stretching to the horizon. Having concluded that it was too late to request a recount, I tasked my team with mapping out a plan to tackle the crisis on all fronts.

It was not long after that meeting, as we shaped this economic plan, that we began to see these forecasts materialize. Over the previous year, it was obvious that folks were facing hard times. As I traveled across the country during a long campaign, I often met men and women bearing the brunt of not only a deepening recession, but also years - even decades - of growing strains on middle class families. But now the country was experiencing something far worse. Our Gross Domestic Product - the sum total of all that our economy produces - fell at the fastest rate in a quarter century. $5 trillion of Americans' household wealth evaporated in just twelve weeks as stocks, pensions, and home values plummeted. We were losing an average of 700,000 jobs each month, equivalent to the population of the state of Vermont. The fear among economists across the political spectrum was that we were rapidly plummeting toward a second Great Depression.

So, in the weeks and months that followed, we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome. And we were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.

We acted to get lending flowing again so businesses could get loans to buy equipment and ordinary Americans could get financing to buy homes and cars, to go to college, and to start or run businesses. We enacted measures to stem the tide of foreclosures in our housing market, helping responsible homeowners stay in their homes and helping to stop the broader decline in home values which was eating away at what tends to be a family's largest asset. To achieve this, and to prevent an economic collapse, we were forced to extend assistance to some of the very banks and financial institutions whose actions had helped precipitate the turmoil. We also took steps to prevent the rapid dissolution of the American auto industry, which faced a crisis partly of its own making, to prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs during an already fragile time. These were not decisions that were popular or satisfying; these were decisions that were necessary.

Now, even as we worked to address the crises in our banking sector, in our housing market, and in our auto industry, we also began attacking our economic crisis on a broader front. Less than one month after taking office we enacted the most sweeping economic recovery package in history: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Recovery Act was divided into three parts. One-third went for tax relief for small businesses and 95 percent of working families.

Another third was for emergency relief to help folks who've borne the brunt of this recession. We extended or increased unemployment benefits for more than 17 million Americans; made health insurance 65 percent cheaper for families relying on COBRA; and for state and local governments facing historic budget shortfalls as demand for services went up and tax revenues went down, we provided assistance that has saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and public school workers, firefighters and police officers.

The last third is for investments to put Americans to work doing the work America needs done: doubling our capacity in renewable energy like wind and solar; computerizing medical records to save money and lives; providing the largest boost to medical research in history; renovating classrooms and school laboratories; and upgrading roads and railways as part of the largest investment in infrastructure since the creation of the Interstate Highway System half a century ago.

And even as the Recovery Act has created jobs and spurred growth, we have not let up in our efforts to take every responsible action to get the economy growing and America working. This fall, I signed into law more than $30 billion in tax cuts for struggling businesses, extended an effective tax credit for homebuyers, and provided additional unemployment insurance for one million Americans. And the Treasury is continuing to adapt our financial stability plan, helping to facilitate the flow of credit to small businesses and families. In addition, we are working to break down barriers and open overseas markets so our companies can better compete globally, creating jobs in America by exporting our products around the world.

Partly as a result of these and other steps, we're in a very different place today than we were a year ago. We can safely say that we are no longer facing the potential collapse of our financial system and we've avoided the depression many feared. Our economy is growing for the first time in a year - and the swing from contraction to expansion since the beginning of the year is the largest in nearly three decades. Finally, we are no longer seeing the severe deterioration in the job market we once were; in fact we learned on Friday that the unemployment rate fell slightly last month. This is welcome news, and news made possible in part by the up to 1.6 million jobs that the Recovery Act has already created and saved according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But our work is far from done. For even though we have reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who have been swept up in the flood. There are more than seven million fewer Americans with jobs today than when this recession began. That's a staggering figure and one that reflects not only the depths of the hole from which we must ascend, but also a continuing human tragedy. And it speaks to an urgent need to accelerate job growth in the short term while laying a new foundation for lasting economic growth.

My economic team has been considering a full range of additional ideas to help accelerate the pace of private sector hiring. We held a jobs forum at the White House that brought together small business owners, CEOs, union members, economists, folks from non-profits, and state and local officials to talk about job creation. And I've asked people to lead forums in their own communities - sending the results to me - so we are hearing as many voices as possible as we refine our proposals. We've already heard a number of good ideas, and I know we'll learn of many more.

Today, I want to outline some of the broader steps that I believe should be at the heart of our efforts to accelerate job growth - those areas that will generate the greatest number of jobs while generating the greatest value for our economy.

First, we're proposing a series of steps to help small businesses grow and hire new staff. Over the past fifteen years, small businesses have created roughly 65 percent of all new jobs in America. These are companies formed around kitchen tables in family meetings, formed when an entrepreneur takes a chance on a dream, formed when a worker decides its time she became her own boss. These are also companies that drive innovation, producing thirteen times more patents per employee than large companies. And, it's worth remembering, every once in a while a small business becomes a big business - and changes the world.

That's why it is so important that we help small business struggling to open, or stay open, during these difficult times. Building on the tax cuts in the Recovery Act, we're proposing a complete elimination of capital gains taxes on small business investment along with an extension of write-offs to encourage small businesses to expand in the coming year. And I believe it's worthwhile to create a tax incentive to encourage small businesses to add and keep employees and I'm going to work with Congress to pass one.

These steps will help, but we also have to address the continuing struggle of small businesses to get the loans they need to start up and grow. To that end, we're proposing to waive fees and increase the guarantees for SBA-backed loans. And I am asking my Treasury Secretary to continue mobilizing the remaining TARP funds to facilitate lending to small businesses.

Second, we're proposing a boost in investment in the nation's infrastructure beyond what was included in the Recovery Act, to continue modernizing our transportation and communications networks. These are needed public works that engage private sector companies, spurring hiring across the country. Already, more than 10,000 of these projects have been funded through the Recovery Act. And by design, Recovery Act work on roads, bridges, water systems, Superfund sites, broadband networks, and clean energy projects will all be ramping up in the months ahead. It was planned this way for two reasons: so the impact would be felt over a two year period; and, more importantly, because we wanted to do this right. The potential for abuse in a program of this magnitude, while operating at such a fast pace, was enormous. So I asked Vice President Biden and others to make sure - to the extent humanly possible - that the investments were sound, the projects worthy, and the execution efficient. What this means is that we're going to see even more work - and workers - on Recovery projects in the next six months than we saw in the last six months.

Even so, there are many more worthy projects than there were dollars to fund them. I recognize that by their nature these projects often take time, and will therefore create jobs over time. But the need for jobs will also last beyond next year and the benefits of these investments will last years beyond that. So adding to this initiative to rebuild America's infrastructure is the right thing to do.

Third, I'm calling on Congress to consider a new program to provide incentives for consumers who retrofit their homes to become more energy efficient, which we know creates jobs, saves money for families, and reduces the pollution that threatens our environment. And I'm proposing that we expand select Recovery Act initiatives to promote energy efficiency and clean energy jobs which have proven particularly popular and effective. It's a positive sign that many of these programs drew so many applicants for funding that a lot of strong proposals - proposals that will leverage private capital and create jobs quickly - did not make the cut. With additional resources, in areas like advanced manufacturing of wind turbines and solar panels, for instance, we can help turn good ideas into good private-sector jobs.

Finally, as we are moving forward in these areas, we should also extend the relief in the Recovery Act, including emergency assistance to seniors, unemployment insurance benefits, COBRA, and relief to states and localities to prevent layoffs. This will help folks weathering these storms while boosting consumer spending and promoting jobs.

Of course, there is only so much government can do. Job creation will ultimately depend on the real job creators: businesses across America. But government can help lay the groundwork on which the private sector can better generate jobs, growth, and innovation. After all, small business tax relief is not a substitute for the ingenuity and industriousness of our entrepreneurs; but it can help those with good ideas to grow and expand. Incentives to promote energy efficiency and clean energy manufacturing do not automatically create jobs or lower carbon emissions; but these steps provide a framework in which companies can compete and innovate to create those jobs and reduce energy consumption. And while modernizing the physical and virtual networks that connect us will create private-sector jobs, they'll do so while making it possible for companies to more easily and effectively move their products across this country and around the world.

Given the challenge of accelerating the pace of hiring in the private sector, these targeted initiatives are right and they are needed. But with a fiscal crisis to match our economic crisis, we also must be prudent about how we fund it. So to help support these efforts, we're going to wind down the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - the fund created to stabilize the financial system so banks would lend again.

There has rarely been a less loved or more necessary emergency program than TARP, which - as galling as the assistance to banks may have been - indisputably helped prevent a collapse of the entire financial system. Launched hastily under the last administration, the TARP program was flawed, and we have worked hard to correct those flaws and manage it properly. And today, TARP has served its original purpose and at a much lower cost than we expected.

In fact, because of our stewardship of this program, and the transparency and accountability we put in place, TARP is expected to cost the taxpayer at least $200 billion less than what was anticipated just this summer. And the assistance to banks, once thought to cost the taxpayers untold billions, is on track to actually reap billions in profit for the taxpaying public. This gives us a chance to pay down the deficit faster than we thought possible and to shift funds that would have gone to help the banks on Wall Street to help create jobs on Main Street.

Small business, infrastructure, clean energy: these are areas in which we can put Americans to work while putting our nation on a sturdier economic footing. That foundation for sustained economic growth must be our continuing focus and our ultimate goal. For even before this period crisis, much of our growth had been fueled by unsustainable consumer debt and reckless financial speculation, while we ignored the fundamental challenges that hold the key to our economic prosperity. We cannot simply go back to the way things used to be. We cannot go back to an economy that yielded cycle after cycle of speculative booms and painful busts. We cannot continue to accept an education system in which our students trail their peers in other countries, and a health care system in which exploding costs put our businesses at a competitive disadvantage. And we cannot continue to ignore the clean energy challenge or cede global leadership in the emerging industries of the 21st century. That's why, as we strive to meet the crisis of the moment, we are laying a new foundation for the future.

Because an educated workforce is essential in a 21st century global economy, we've launched a competitive Race to the Top fund through the Recovery Act to reform our schools and raise achievement, especially in math and science. And we've made college more affordable, proposed an historic set of reforms and investments in community college, and set a goal of once again leading the world in producing college graduates by 2020.

Because even the best trained workers in the world can't compete if our businesses are saddled with rapidly increasing health care costs, we're fighting to do what we have discussed in this country for generations: finally reforming our nation's broken health insurance system and relieving this unsustainable burden.

Because our economic future depends on a financial system that encourages sound investments, honest dealings, and long-term growth, we've proposed the most ambitious financial reforms since the Great Depression. We'll set and enforce clear rules of the road, close loopholes in oversight, charge a new agency with protecting consumers, and address the dangerous, systemic risks that brought us to the brink of disaster. These reforms are moving through Congress, we're working to keep those reforms strong, and I look forward to signing them into law.

And because our economic future depends on our leadership in the industries of the future, we are investing in basic and applied research, and working to create the incentives to build a new clean energy economy. For we know the nation that leads in clean energy will be the nation that leads the world. I want America to be that nation. I want America's prosperity to be powered by what we invent and pioneer - not just what we borrow and consume. And I know that we can and will be that nation, if we are willing to do what it takes to get there.

There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other. But this is a false choice. Ensuring that economic growth and job creation are strong and sustained is critical to ensuring that we are increasing revenues and decreasing spending on things like unemployment so that our deficits will start coming down. At the same time, instilling confidence in our commitment to being fiscally prudent gives the private sector the confidence to make long-term investments in our people and on our shores.

One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility. Even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term, we have begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run. Despite what some have claimed, the cost of the Recovery Act is only a very small part of our current budget imbalance. In reality, the deficit had been building dramatically over the previous eight years. Folks passed tax cuts and expensive entitlement programs without paying for any of it - even as health care costs kept rising, year after year. As a result, the deficit had reached $1.3 trillion when we walked into the White House. And I'd note: these budget busting tax cuts and spending programs were approved by many of the same people who are now waxing political about fiscal responsibility while opposing our efforts to reduce deficits by getting health care costs under control. It's a sight to see.

The fact is, we have refused to go along with business as usual; we're taking responsibility for every dollar we spend. We've done what some said was impossible: preventing wasteful spending on outdated weapons systems that even the Pentagon said it didn't want. We've combed the budget, cutting waste and excess wherever we could. I'm still committed to halving the deficit we inherited by the end of my first term. And I made clear from day one that I would not sign a health insurance reform bill if it raised the deficit by one dime - and neither the House nor Senate bill does. We have begun to not only change policies but also to change the culture in Washington.

In the end, the economic crisis of the past year was not just the result of weaknesses in our economy. It was also the result of weaknesses in our political system. For decades, too many in Washington put off hard decisions. For decades, we've watched as efforts to solve tough problems have fallen prey to the bitterness of partisanship, to the prosaic concerns of politics, to ever-quickening news cycles, and to endless campaigns focused on scoring points instead of meeting our common challenges.

We have seen the consequences of this failure of responsibility. The American people have paid a heavy price. And the question we'll have to answer now is if we are going to learn from our past, or if - even in the aftermath of disaster - we are going to repeat it. As the alarm bells fade, and the din of Washington rises, as the forces of the status quo marshal their resources, we can be sure that answering this question will be a fight to the finish. But I have every hope and expectation that we can rise to this moment, that we can transcend the failures of the past, that we can once again take responsibility for our future.

Almost every night, I read letters and emails sent to me from folks across America - people who share their hopes and their hardships, their faith in this country and their frustrations with what's happened in this economy. I hear from small business owners worried about making payroll and keeping their doors open. I hear from mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, who have seen one or two or more family members out of work. The toughest letters are in children's handwriting: kids who can't just be kids because they're worried after mom had her hours cut or dad lost his job and with it the family's health insurance. These folks aren't looking for a hand out. They're not looking for a bail out. They're hoping for a chance to make their own way, to work, to succeed using their talents and skills. All they're looking for from Washington is a seriousness of purpose that matches the reality of their struggle.

Everywhere I've gone, every stop I've made, there are people like this, men and women who have faced misfortune, but who stand ready to build a better future. There are students ready to learn. Workers eager to work. Scientists on the brink of discovery. There are entrepreneurs seeking the chance to open a small business. And once-shuttered factories just waiting to whir back to life in burgeoning industries. There is a nation ready to meet the challenges of this new age and to lead the world in this new century. And as we look back on the progress of the past year, and look forward to the work ahead, I have every confidence that we will do exactly that.

These have been a tough two years. And there will no doubt be difficult months ahead. But the storms of the past are receding. The skies are brightening. And the horizon is beckoning once more.

There are many lessons we can learn from Climategate. Environmentalism has become an intolerant religion rather than a rational movement seeking limited goals; the unsavory priests of environmentalism have no qualms about tricking people; and these fanatical clerics also preside over an inquisition of those who profess a different sort of climate study from the one which has become the formal dogma of the faith.

One of the costs of freedom is tolerance of foolishness and even of malice. If individuals privately want to worship pagan religions and embrace a sort of silly Gnosticism, they may do so without government stopping them. Likewise, if individuals want to proclaim a "new science" or a "new religion" -- the two are almost identical -- and then seek acolytes from among the general population, that too is tolerated by governments that cherish freedom.

Because both science and religion are ongoing explorations for truth, no one has the right to declare a particular frontier of either true. We grasp this easily enough with religion, but the same goes for science. The history of science is largely one of blunder to blunder to grain of truth. Cosmologists have no perfect theory for how the universe was born or how it will end, and physicists have no absolute theory to explain how relativity and quantum mechanics operate together at the subatomic level. No one even has a real explanation for such odd ideas as the uncertainty principle.

Does this mean that science is simply opinion and that there is no mechanism to separate good science from junk science? No; science, like business and like every other type of human interaction, has an inherent safeguard. Liberty, which is another way of saying the market of free, individual interactions, naturally lifts what is true and honest and sinks what is false and deceptive.

Credibility is often the most valuable asset of any successful enterprise. What does credibility mean? It's when no matter the intentions of the managers, their business behavior comprises honest internal operations and open, truthful communication with those outside the enterprise. Large corporations are extremely sensitive to their public image and grasp just how much their success in a free market depends upon their credibility.

Scientists were once the ultimate "free marketers." When Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, he was a clerk in a Swiss patent office. Einstein won international acclaim -- not because he was an insider in any academic bureaucracy, but because his theory actually described the world better than existing theories. Science which prescribes results beforehand is not really science at all. It is simply government bureaucracy masquerading as independent thought.

These pseudo-scientists need not seek success in the free market of ideas. They crush competition and subsist on the taxpayer's coerced nickel rather than produce something which can withstand the pressures and challenges of opposing forces. Put another way, it does not matter to them if their science is true or their methods honest. All that concerns them is the coercive power of government and its largess of tax dollars.

Government is always the antithesis of free competition, which is why we need so little of government in our lives and so much of market forces. Science behaves almost exactly like Walmart or General Foods or McDonalds. When challenged every day by competitors, these enterprises must ruthlessly expunge wishful thinking, white lies, and the power of brute size. These businesses are, in fact, mirror images of good science. Each bad idea is exposed as a fraud; each more efficient answer is soon rewarded; and the "peer review" process of each business operation comes from many millions of independent analysts, each passing judgment on the different aspects of the business.

We have been told that good science requires vast government support. Actually, only bad science requires vast government support. Good science can get by very well in the marketplace. As much as anything else, Climategate is a textbook example of the dangers of having government prop up those people who ought to make their case successfully without our public dollars.

Science works this way. Aside from giants like Einstein or Newton -- men who had no public help at all -- private organizations like Bell Laboratories made many breakthroughs with not a single tax dollar. More importantly, Einstein, Newton, and Bell Laboratories had to make a compelling case for the integrity of their research. Bad science almost never gains much traction without government help.

End public support for climate research, and what happens? Scientists who believe that the data indicates man-made global warming would have to leave their ivy-walled bunkers and engage in robust, very public debate. That does not mean that these scientists would lose their arguments. It means that they would lose their arguments if they tried to smother opposition, hide research data, and pretend that everyone agreed with them.

Government-supported global warming research does what government always does: it discourages any true independent thought, and because political muscle rather than scientific truth decides all issues, it encourages everyone to climb on board the same bandwagon without much discussion or dissent. It may be that there is man-made global warming, but the malign influence of uncompetitive government treasure and power corrupts the whole area of study. Science rests upon independence and integrity or it rests upon nothing at all. As the sewage seeping out of East Anglia shows, right now we have no real "study" of global warming at all. What we have instead resembles more the dreary memos of dull bureaucrats: just what one would expect from government-driven science.

Regardless of what the politicians decide at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the game has changed.

Thanks to the e-mail exchanges and other documents hacked from computers at the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, we now know there has been a conspiracy among some in the science community to spread alarmist views of global warming and intimidate, if not silence, those who disagree.

Let's hope these revelations result in a sober reassessment both of academia, generally, and the scientific enterprise specifically.

For far too long, science has been shrouded in a cloak of unquestionable authority as the final arbiter of all knowledge (except, of course, when the research has been funded by business, which for some makes it necessarily suspect).

Such a status has resulted in the creation of enormous, government-funded institutions to examine seemingly every aspect of human existence, with climate science alone receiving $7 billion annually from the U.S. government - more than is spent on cancer and AIDS research.

Unlike business- or even independently funded research, the findings and recommendations of government-funded researchers has been viewed by many as sacrosanct.

The mania regarding "global warming" is Exhibit A, in which the alleged "peer-reviewed" findings of a "consensus" of scientists claim to have found the "fact" that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are creating an ecological holocaust, and only draconian controls on various areas of human activity can avert this calamity.

In the process, ethics, economic principles, contrary evidence and common sense are all swept aside.

As my colleague Robert Higgs noted last year in Nature magazine: "The peer-review process is not, contrary to popular belief, a nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny. Any editor of a peer-reviewed journal who desires, for whatever reason, to reject a submission can easily do so by choosing referees who will knock it down."

Unfortunately, Higgs wrote, science, like other enterprises, can fall victim to "personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and irresponsibility."

With the revelations from what is now being called "Climate-gate," many people are beginning to see a grand scam in which data were deliberately distorted; peer review was gamed by manipulating and stacking the process; critics were smeared, black-balled, de-funded and even fired; opposing papers were kept from publication; and politically savvy scientists worked in concert with journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups to deceive both opinion leaders and the public to further their agenda.

Reagan deliberately confronted criminal regimes with what they fear most: the publicly spoken truth about their moral weakness.

Ronald Reagan would embarrass himself and the country by asking Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which was going to be there for decades. So the National Security Council (NSC) staff and State Department had argued for many weeks to get Reagan's now famous line removed from his June 12, 1987, Berlin speech.

With a fervor and relentlessness I hadn't seen over the prior seven years even during disputes about "the ash-heap of history" or "evil empire," they kept up the pressure until the morning Reagan spoke the line. "Is that what I think it is?" I asked White House communications director Tom Griscom about a cable NSC Adviser Frank Carlucci had been nudging at us across the table during a White House senior staff meeting at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice. (Reagan had been attending a G-8 summit there and would shortly fly to the German capital.) With a shake of his head and a smile, Mr. Griscom confirmed the last-minute plea from State to drop the key sentence.

In the Reagan Library archives, similar documents chronicling the opposition's intensity surface from time to time. I was gratified though not surprised to hear a few years back about one NSC staffer's memo to Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell complaining that on multiple occasions, perhaps as many as five or six, I had declined as head of speechwriting-the writer talked about "a heated argument" between us-to remove the offending sentence.

And not only me. Shortly after the speech draft began making its review through the bureaucracy, the speechwriters, as Reagan true-believers, had deployed to do the interpersonal glad-handing that sometimes eases objections to speech passages. The Berlin event for us was the quintessential chance-in front of Communism's most evocative monument-to enunciate the anti-Soviet counterstrategy that Reagan had been putting in place since his first weeks in office.

Well before a draft was circulated, I called the writer who had the assignment, Peter Robinson, and told him I was going to an Oval Office meeting.

Shortly before we walked to the West Wing, Peter told me what he wanted in the draft: "Tear down the wall." I pushed back in my chair from my desk and let loose "fantastic, wonderful, great, perfect" and other inadequate exclamations. The Oval Office meeting agenda went quickly, with little chance to pop the question. But the discussion ceased for a moment toward the end, and I crowded in: "Mr. President, it's still very early but we were just wondering if you had any thoughts at all yet on the Berlin speech?"

Pausing for only a moment, Reagan slipped into his imitation of impressionist Rich Little doing his imitation of Ronald Reagan-he made the well-known nod of the head, said the equally familiar "well," and then added in his soft but resonant intonation while lifting his hand and letting it fall: "Tear down the wall."

I had refused to talk to Peter until I was back in my office, such was my excitement. Slamming the door I shouted: "Can you believe it? He said just what you were thinking. He said it himself."

So it was "the president's line" now. And that made it easier, though not dispositively so, for the speechwriting department to fight off objections. But this is where the Berlin address was about more than the killer sentence.

As commentators have noticed, much of the rest of the speech is also memorable, with enduring ideas and stately cadences. Mr. Robinson, a Dartmouth and Oxford graduate, had been mentored in his career by such writer-luminaries as Dartmouth Prof. Jeffrey Hart and William F. Buckley Jr. This pedigree helped him understand how Reagan's own conservatism, while less formally instructed, was powerfully ideational. Closer historical scrutiny of Reagan's writings before the presidency, as well as the extent of his involvement in his presidential speeches, has revealed that he was more than merely a Great Communicator but also a man of ideas, a cerebral president.

And part of Reagan's caring about larger ideas had to do with the nature of his foreign policy and the often overlooked rubrics he adopted. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the Reagan years show that "containment" worked. In fact, Reagan explicitly and repeatedly rejected containment as too accommodationist, saying "containment is not enough."

As part of this strategy, Reagan established offensive-minded, victory-conscious rubrics like "forward strategy for freedom," "not just world peace but world freedom," and "expanding the frontiers of freedom."

Part of this was Reagan's attempt to codify while in office a Cold War narrative developed by the anti-communist conservative movement that formed him over three decades even as he helped form it. That narrative saw liberal notions about how to handle communist regimes as provoking aggression or causing catastrophe: Franklin Roosevelt's Stalin diplomacy, Harry Truman's Marshall mission to China, John Kennedy's offer of a "status quo" to Khrushchev in Vienna, Jimmy Carter's statement that we have an "inordinate fear of communism."

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind's abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity, their ontological weakness. This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most-their own oppressed people. Reagan's understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall's collapse 20 years ago today.

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran's rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan's. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration's systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what "good vs. evil" rhetoric can do.

Next week Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is expected to attach a provision to the Department of Defense appropriations bill that would increase our national debt limit by $1.925 trillion. This debt limit raise would authorize the U.S. Treasury to borrow as much as $14 trillion, which is 30% higher than the $10.8 trillion limit that was in place when President Barack Obama took office.

Defending the unprecedented size of the debt limit, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told The Examiner: "There is no doubt the debt ceiling will have to be at that level in order to meet our financial obligations at this time next year. This is not creating new debt." Not creating new debt? Hoyer speaks as though he and his Speaker are completely powerless to control all the federal spending that is driving up "our financial obligations." In fact, Hoyer's statement comes on the same day that he and Speaker Pelosi forced through a $447 billion "minibus" spending bill that every single Republican and 28 Democrats voted against. Filled with 5,224 earmarks, this merged appropriations bill provides an 8% hike in discretionary spending for the third consecutive year since Pelosi took over Congress in 2007. Altogether, discretionary spending has jumped 25% since Speaker Pelosi took the gavel, and Congressional Democrats have spent $561 billion more in discretionary spending than if they had limited federal spending growth to the baseline inflation rate. Despite a $1.4 trillion deficit, appropriations bills passed this year have included:

* A 67% increase for the Environmental Protection Agency's State and Tribal Assistance Grants;

This is not the budgeting of a Congress even minimally serious about the budget deficit. And each large annual discretionary spending increase becomes part of the permanent discretionary spending baseline. In fact, the steep increases over the past three years have added $1.7 trillion to the 2011-2020 discretionary spending baseline - nearly $1,500 per household annually. In the past year, Pelosi's House has passed a $700 billion financial bailout and a trillion dollar stimulus, a $1.5 trillion health care expansion, a $200 billion Medicare "doc fix," and an $800 billion cap-and-trade bill. There is no increase to domestic federal spending that Speaker Pelosi can say "no" to.

It is far past time for responsible leaders in Congress to rein in Pelosi's profligacy. At a bare minimum, lawmakers should demand that any debt-limit increase also statutorily cap discretionary spending growth at the inflation rate (approximately 2.5 percent annually) for the next decade. Even better, a return to federal spending levels of just a decade ago could go a long way towards solving our debt problem. Heritage's Brian Riedl explains:

In the 1980s and 1990s, Washington consistently spent $21,000 per household (adjusted for inflation). Simply returning to that level would balance the budget by 2012 without any tax hikes. Alternatively, returning to the $25,000 per household level (adjusted for inflation) that Washington spent before the current recession would likely balance the budget by 2019 without any tax hikes.

* According to a USA TODAY analysis, while the private sector has shed 7.3 million jobs, the number of federal government workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession.

* According to The New York Times, Americans who buy the same health benefits as members of Congress, or buy coverage through Medicare, will have to fork over a large chunk of cash under the latest Senate Democrat health plan.

* The Washington Examiner reports that only one fourth of AARP revenues come from membership dues, while the rest come from selling AARP's name to businesses, including businesses that would benefit from Obamacare, which the AARP has endorsed.

* According to a new report, climate change criminals have pocketed almost 5 billion Euros by manipulating Europe's carbon trading "market."

More has been coming to light about Kevin Jennings, President Obama’s safe-school czar. Jennings founded and was head of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educational Network). The White House lists this as his foremost achievement in his government bio. GLSEN puts out recommended book lists for reading at various levels in public schools, from kindergarten on up through 12^th grade. The sexual content of these books is far more graphic than I feel comfortable including here and these books clearly appear to me an attempt to sexualize young people at all ages as early on as possible. The guise here, is to teach children tolerance toward sexual deviants, but the nature of these books is more to teach sexual behavior than it is to simply teach tolerance. If you want to know more or read specific passages, google Kevin Jennings, GLSEN, booklist or check these two references:

http://therobalution.com/2009/12/07/obamas-safe-schools-czar-reccomending-child-porn/

http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/video-michelle-malkin-discusses-kevin-jennings-on-hannity/

This is being called fistgate by some:

http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/07/fistgate-barack-obamas-safe-schools-czars-2000-conference-promoted-fisting-to-14-year-olds/

http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/08/fistgate-ii-high-school-students-given-fisting-kits-at-kevin-jennings-2001-glsen-conference/

Just go to http://biggovernment.com/ for more (there are several articles there)

This is an evil man, and he should have absolutely nothing to do with children. This highly-sexualized background is why he went through no formal confirmation process—even with liberal Democrats, he would not have passed any sort of scrutiny.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124882375969988353.html (personally, I think that this is rhetoric and a smokescreen; Democratic Congressmen howling about the public option will vote for this bill no matter what form the public option takes)

There are a huge number of liberals who are acting as if this trillion dollar healthcare bill does not go far enough. Is this just for show? Or are these people such insane ideologues that they do not recognize what a tremendous government takeover that this is, even in its most watered-down form?

Here is a story you probably did not read, if you get your news from the alphabet media: food which is government approved for public school consumption would not pass the rigorous tests and sampling of McDonald’s, KFC or Jack-in-the-Box:

One of the many articles proclaiming President Bush as the worst president ever:

Stand up Straight author Robert Creamer, tax cheat (he served time), progressive, and White House dinner guest.

Sen. Landrieu Declines to Say Where Constitution Authorizes Congress to Force Americans to Buy Health Insurance, Saying She'll Let 'Constitutional Lawyers on Our Staff' Handle That

RUSH: It is a crying shame, ladies and gentlemen, that that economic speech at Brookings that President Hoax and Change just gave was not in primetime. Hoax and Change. It's a shame it was not in primetime so all of America could have the choice of listening to his latest version of "I inherited and I am great." That is the theme of his speeches, I inherited, and I'm great. He dumped all over the Bush administration. TARP was flawed, his treasury secretary designed it! His tax cheat secretary designed it! It was flawed? My God, it is unbelievable what an immature little kid this guy is, bumping and blaming everything on prior administrations. I tell you, folks, it is breathtaking to watch this. Now, when the speech began, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 80. When it ended it was down 72. I just checked five minutes ago and it was down 80. By the way, greetings, Rush Limbaugh, you know that. It's down 84. EIB Network, telephone number, 800-282-2882, if you want to join us; e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

Now, if these proposals that he announced today were gonna excite the private sector, investors will vote with their capital and they're not voting with their capital. Hoax and Change does not sell in the Universe of Reality, and we got a Universe of Lies speech today at Brookings on the economy that's breathtaking. It was so sweeping a series of lies that it's hard to start with which one first. His words, his ideas are what have resulted in the loss of millions of jobs, and yet we've had a turnaround, we are growing, we are out of the recovery now, we have the best job report news we've had in three years. It was as though we are now into a new era of prosperity the likes of which this country has never seen before. There's absolutely no credibility. He can give speeches all day long, but this isn't a campaign. He's not running against anybody anymore. He's running against his own lousy record and the blame game does not wash. Obama voted for everything that caused these deficits when he was in the Senate. And he sits there like a spoiled rotten school kid blaming it on somebody else.

I can't wait 'til Karl Rove shows up on Fox to respond to this because these guys ought to be livid. This ought to bring George Bush out of the woodwork and start defending some of this stuff because this is getting out of hand. And then he says he's reading children's letters every night. It's pathetic. The total silence, there was no applause during this speech. I know he was up there at an academic think tank and these people probably think they're above applauding. But there were no columns, no screaming crowds, and without that, President Obama is nothing. The University of Lies has met the Universe of Reality. The reality is we've got 17% of the working population unemployed. The reality is that Obama has created deficits that cannot be paid, and it's silly. He's got $200 billion of unspent TARP money, he talks about, "Well, banks are going to be repaying this stuff, profits to the taxpayers," and then that profit's going to be what? Recycled and spent back on more stimulus creating jobs that have not been created by stimulus?

This economy, if it is fighting back, this economy, if it is showing some sort of a trend and a positive, is happening in spite of him, not because of him. Obama, by the way, his approval number is down to 47%, as I told you yesterday, 47% in a Gallup poll and they react to this at the White House, they don't like this. Gibbs says, yeah, well any kid with a crayon could do that. This is not a bunch of happy campers. Let's go to the audio sound bites. This is the president summing it all up here blaming George W. Bush.

OBAMA: One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility. The deficit had been building dramatically over the previous eight years.

RUSH: In one year Barack Obama has added more to the deficit than George Bush did in eight years. Recue that to the top. I mean this is an example of I don't know where to begin. I could start-stop this whole speech. It would take me three hours to do it and by the time I finished, I'd need blood pressure medicine. I could do a start-stop on every sentence of this abomination today. All right, here. Try it again.

OBAMA: One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility.

RUSH: Stop the tape. I'm sorry, but you have destroyed it! There is no fiscal responsibility. He's back to the old, "Don't listen to what I say; listen to how I say it." Cue it back to the top again. I promise I'm going to try to get through this without too many stops.

OBAMA: One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility. The deficit had been building dramatically over the previous eight years. Folks passed tax cuts and expansive entitlement programs without paying for any of it, even as health care costs kept rising year after year. These budget-busting tax cuts and spending programs were approved by many of the same people who are now waxing political about fiscal responsibility while opposing our efforts to reduce deficits by getting health care costs under control. It's a sight to see.

RUSH: Do you see what I mean? He voted for all of it! Well, he didn't vote for the tax cuts because he wasn't there, he was community organizing. He voted for all of this stuff that he's decrying! He supported all of it, and he is the single biggest spender in the history of American presidents, out-of-control spending.

RUSH: Let's not forget also, my friends, as I have just recently been reminded that the Democrats have been in charge of everything on Capitol Hill since 2006 -- everything since 2006. And remember: George W. Bush was going along with them for much of it. So Obama trying to blame all this is just -- I don't know what it is. It's unbecoming somebody who holds this office. I don't know what else it is. It's childish, it's immature, it's arrogant, it's conceited.

RUSH: Here's more from the Brookings Institute address, President Obama this morning.

OBAMA: Our economy is growing for the first time in a year, and the swing from contraction to expansion since the beginning of the year is the largest in nearly three decades.

RUSH: You -- stop it! Do you believe what you just heard? The economy, the swing from contraction to expansion since the beginning of the year is the largest in nearly three decades. The problem is, there is no expansion. Zip, zero, nada. I mean, the audacity of this is breathtaking.

OBAMA: Finally, we're no longer seeing the severe deterioration in the job market that we once were. In fact, we learned on Friday that the unemployment rate fell slightly last month.

RUSH: Stop the tape. That's because the figures were taken over two days of the Thanksgiving week where people were not working, were not looking for work, were not filing claims and so this -- wait 'til that number is revised. Wait 'til the number ends up being revised, it's going to go up. Anybody that thinks there's an expansion underway -- it's not possible. Business cannot and will not expand 'til they know what the rules of the game are going to be, and they're not going to know that until health care is disposed of one way or the other, and the same thing on cap and trade. I mean this is just myth making.

OBAMA: This is welcome news, and news made possible in part by the up to 1.6 million jobs that the Recovery Act has already created and saved, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

RUSH: We have lost seven million-plus jobs. There are almost a million people, according to statistics, who have stopped looking for work. The real unemployment number in the country is about 15%. There is no way to calculate a "saved" job or even a "created" job in the recovery program, and the CBO also said that in the same report. There's not one word of truth in that sound bite you just heard. Not one. Let's try another one.

OBAMA: We held a jobs forum at the White House that brought together small business owners, CEOs, union members, economists, folks from nonprofits, and state and local officials to talk about job creation. And I've asked people to lead forums in their own communities sending the results to me. So we are hearing as many voices as possible as we refine our proposals. We've already heard a number of good ideas and I know we'll learn of many more.

RUSH: Lead forums in their own communities? Sending the results to him? Are any of you in this audience participating in a jobs summit in your local community, and if so, with who? With whom are you conducting talks about jobs and you are going to send these reports to Obama? My God, I feel like I'm in a social studies class here. One of the attendees at the jobs summit was Fred Smith, the chairman and CEO FedEx. Here's what he said: "I urge the president to accelerate the expensing the capital investment, reduce the corporate income tax rate, and champion free trade. As detailed by former Treasury officials Ernie Christian and Gary Robbins, every dollar of tax cuts for expensing adds about nine dollars of GDP growth. Allowing companies to expense more of their capital outlay is an inexpensive way to create jobs because the only cost to the government is the time value of money." Now, here's a guy in the -- none of what he suggested will be implemented, none of what he suggested was even listened to.

RUSH: The market's down 95 points, ladies and gentlemen, in response to President Obama's second attempt to destroy prosperity. Here's a story. We've gone from the largest contraction to expansion in three decades, he said today. And yet Reuters, State-Controlled Media, has this: "Hunger is spreading while the number of homeless families is increasing as a result of the recession and other factors, according to a report on Tuesday. The US Conference of Mayors said cities reported a 26 percent jump in demand for hunger assistance over the past year," and there's of course food insecurity out there. We've heard that term being bandied about. So there's more homelessness out there, and it's getting colder out there, and we are somehow hearing fewer reports of people dying from exposure, but, anyway, the news just does not jibe with the rhetoric that the president uttered today. This is the TARP comment that nearly sent me through the roof when I watched it live.

OBAMA: Launched hastily under the last administration, the TARP program was flawed, and we have worked hard to correct those flaws and manage it properly. TARP is expected to cost the taxpayers at least $200 billion less than what was anticipated just this past summer. And the assistance to banks, once thought to cost taxpayers untold billions, is on track to actually reap billions in profits for the tax-paying public. This gives us a chance to pay down the deficit faster than we thought possible.

OBAMA: And to shift funds that would have gone to help the banks on Wall Street to help create jobs on Main Street.

RUSH: Launched hastily under the last administration. He demanded it! He urged the president to do it. It was to save the financial system of the entire world, we had to vote on it in 24 hours, this is what they were telling us. Launched hastily and then it ended up being flawed? Let me tell you something, the whole thing is nothing but a slush fund. It was nothing but a slush fund from the get-go. Let me explain this, folks. If you are an incoming president and if you want some money to pass around for whatever reasons, you got this financial crisis that comes up, you can't go in and say, "Pass me a slush fund." But you say, "Pass me a TARP plan, a troubled asset program so that we can save the financial system and we gotta do it in 24 hours," bam, bam, bam, do it, and now after a year of this massive, massive emergency, $200 billion of this remains unspent. And we're going to now take that $200 billion and do a second stimulus with it, which is against the law, by the way, the TARP law is very specific about what that money can be spent on. And, remember, even that was changed. It was originally to buy up toxic assets and then Henry Paulson changed that to, well, we're going to get the banks to get a little bit more free lending, get credit activity," and what was predicted happened, the banks simply invested the money, rather than putting it in circulation.

Now we've got $200 billion of it unspent, we had about $600 billion unspent of the Porkulus bill, folks, and he says, "Well, this has already been allocated so it's not a deficit buster to not pay the money back," and then he talks about profits to the taxpayers. There aren't any profits to the taxpayers. He has spent three-and-a-half trillion dollars this year. I really do not know where to stop talking about this. I could analyze this till the end of the day about what chock-full of lies this is and how childish and immature. Launched hastily under the last administration? His Treasury secretary, the tax cheat, the guy we were told was the only person capable of dealing with this problem, so we had to overlook his tax cheating. Timothy Geithner designed it. We have worked hard to correct those flaws and manage it properly? Here, got two more.

OBAMA: Even before this particular crisis, much of our growth had been fueled by unsustainable consumer debt and reckless financial speculation while we ignored the fundamental challenges that hold the key to our economic prosperity. We cannot simply go back to the way things used to be. We can't go back to an economy that yielded cycle after cycle of speculative booms and painful busts.

RUSH: So that's the official proclamation that capitalism is finished in this country. We're going to end capitalism. We're going to have no more risk-taking; we're not going to have any up and down cycles; we're going to have a straight line of mediocrity, managed by me, praising myself while blaming my predecessor. Much of our growth had been fueled by unsustainable consumer debt, reckless financial speculation. Why was that? You know what that's primarily in reference to is the subprime mortgage crisis, again brought to us by people like Barack Obama: Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, forcing banks to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back. Reverend Jackson and the sound bite we played of him basically accused the banks of redlining blacks, browns, and minorities. But if they were redlining them they wouldn't have got loans, and they did get loans, and now the Reverend Jackson's upset the loans they got, they're in foreclosure so they could not have been redlined. They were lent money. We had people who had no business borrowing money, they were throwing it at them in the guise of affordable housing and ending the inequities of the American dream, and the banks were forced to do this. They were forced to make loans that were worthless.

The paper was worthless. They knew they were never going to get the money back so they tried to create new investment products to give themselves insurance on this bad paper and they started buying and selling that. No money down, derivatives, all this sort of stuff. The government is at the forefront of all of these problems. The government created all these problems. I'm not saying that Wall Street's blameless. Plenty of risk takers up there and so forth, everybody plays games. But my gosh when you're forced to make investments that were worthless by government policy, when the door's closed you're gonna try to come up with a way to insure yourself you don't lose money, you pass the loss on to some other sucker. People are always going to find a way around oppression and tyranny in a country like this where we have never experienced it.

We're getting our first taste of it and you're going to see people not react to it the way Obama thinks. But I mean this is just the death of capitalism, no more reckless financial speculation. You could define that as small businesses saying, "Okay, it's a risk to borrow money to grow my business. Not going to do it. It might not work, I can't do it anymore, the president says we're going to get rid of these cycles." See, these business cycles, that's the free market at work, that's capitalism, and Obama thinks that's a sin, he wants to end all that, manage it, control it, command-and-control economy, and wherever you look in the world where this has been tried it has never resulted in prosperity for anybody. Here's the final Obama bite. This is the one with the kids' letters.

OBAMA: Every night I read letters and e-mails sent to me from people across America. The toughest letters are in children's handwriting. Kids who can't just be kids because they're worried about mom's having her hours cut or dad losing her job or a family without health insurance. These folks aren't looking for a handout. They're not looking for a bailout. All they're looking for is a chance to make their own way, to work, to succeed, using their talents and skills. And they're looking for folks in Washington to have a seriousness of purpose that matches the reality of their struggle.

RUSH: And this is pure Alinsky. He doesn't believe any of this. He's simply speaking in the language his audience understands and believes to try to convince us that he's one of us. But he doesn't believe in people succeeding, making their own way, using their talents and skills because the people who do are people he ends up resenting. And Mr. President, the people writing you letters, I venture to say the vast majority of them just want some money from your stash. I'll bet you most of the letters he gets are from people asking him for money. I'll bet he's not getting a whole lot of letters from people saying, "Would you please get out of my way so that I can go back to work?" It's Obama's stash that these people are seeking in their letters. But anyway, he tells us he's reading these letters from these kids and he's making economic policy out of it, or wants people to think so.

RUSH: Wallingford, Connecticut. This is Sharon. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Oh, good. I just wanted to make a comment. I was watching the Obama speech, and after it ended I was almost in tears. I'm a small business owner. He's clueless. There is absolutely nothing that he outlined today that is going to help small businesses.

RUSH: Really? The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down 107, it was down 80 when Obama started. I guess Wall Street's reacting the way you on Main Street are. I thought he offered some sort of a capital gains tax to small business. Did he?

CALLER: Well, I could tell you this. I know most of what I had heard was about loans, small business loans. Small businesses, the last thing they want to do right now is take out a loan with all what's going on with cap and trade, we don't know where anything's going to happen --

CALLER: -- as far as that goes. And if a small business is brave enough right now to take out a loan, they're not going to take out a loan and hire people because they don't know what's going to happen.

RUSH: Excellent point. It's not just cap and trade. You don't know what health care is going to foist on you.

CALLER: Exactly. And I just can't see any small businesses right now that are going to take a loan out to hire people when we don't know what's going to happen.

RUSH: See, once again, I mean the hoax continues. This speech was not about jobs. Everybody thinks it's about jobs. This speech was about: I am great, my predecessor was horrible, I inherited a mess, and I make really good speeches, and we've turned the corner, and we've had the biggest recovery in 30 years, from contraction to expansion. It's all a lie. You can stop this speech after every sentence and point out something about it that was not true.

CALLER: As far as our business, we're struggling, and in fact we've been in business for 20 years and it's the first time where I actually have -- because we can't afford a salary for me -- I'm going to have to look for a job, and with the employment numbers, it doesn't count, I can't collect unemployment because I own a business.

RUSH: Right. Exactly. Self-employed people do not qualify for unemployment compensation. They don't want you being self-employed out there. They don't want to encourage that. They want to encourage dependency. Thanks, Sharon.

CALLER: Glad to talk to you, and also I want to thank you for your efforts in trying to open up the American eyes.

CALLER: My question is, currently the banks are paying back the stimulus package with interest to the feds. Why aren't the feds paying off the trillions of dollars that we owe the Chinese with this money?

CALLER: I know why they're not doing this. They have too many petty projects to take care of.

RUSH: They are, I like Levin's words, statists. I think this is further evidence that what's happening here is purposeful and is strategic. He goes out there today and says we gotta reduce our deficit, we going to do it by having health care, we had the greatest contraction to expansion in 30 years, while we still got 10% unemployment, gonna lower our deficits, while he has busted, he has bankrupted this country for decades. It was a sight to behold to watch this speech. So here's this $200 billion in unspent TARP money, and, by the way, TARP money that's being paid back. I want you to think about this. When the TARP money was allocated, we were in a 24-hour emergency. We had 24 hours to save the US financial system and maybe the global financial system. We had 24 hours. We had to bum-rush everybody into this vote. And the Republicans didn't go along with it at first and it was a week or two delay, and the panic built and built and built. The banks we then learned were forced to take the money, even banks who didn't want to take the money, they were forced to, that gave the government control over their operations.

Now the banks are paying it back and we're told, "Hey, the economy doing so great the banks are paying it back." The banks are paying it back because they don't want Obama running them. But at the end of the day, at the end of this crisis, this emergency, this 24 hours away from disaster we have $200 billion of it unspent? Huh? Say what? What would the Reverend Wright say about that? (imitating Wright) "The white bankers of America are coming home to roost!" So now we have the $200 billion unspent, and we're going to do more job creation. But we're not creating jobs. We're losing jobs! Somebody goes out and says we had the best jobs report in three years at 10% unemployment? Does anybody remember it was mere years ago, a few short years ago that we were at 4.5% unemployment. Not that many years ago, two or three years ago, and now we're at 10% and we're talking about a great economy we've got? This is on purpose. He's not going to pay down any debt. He's going to keep running debt up. When you are in debt you lose your freedom, you lose liberty. That's what this is all about. Don't doubt me.

RUSH: But I noticed that the TARP extension money, the TARP extension by the tax cheat, Timothy Geithner, that extended TARP until 2010 -- I happened to notice that they extended it in 2010 to right before the congressional elections. So I've always known, I have always -- 'cause I know these people. These are slush funds, both the stimulus and TARP, slush funds for the election of Democrats.

Now, here's a story from CNNMoney.com. "Fourteen months and $700 billion later, did the federal TARP bailout do the job? A bailout watchdog group, addressing those questions in a report released [today], gave the Troubled Asset Relief Program a mixed report card. The Congressional Oversight Panel found that TARP stopped the financial panic and stabilized the banking system after the once-in-a-lifetime measure was hurriedly enacted in October [last year]. But, the panel wrote, that the bailout failed to stem problems like lackluster lending and growing foreclosures that still plague the economy. It even suggests that TARP may have done harm by making some banks and firms, considered too big for regulators to allow them to fail, even bigger and be creating a new expectation that banks will always be saved." So the watchdog group says (paraphrase), "You know, on balance, it isn't any good. On balance it may have done harm." This should be ended as quickly as possible. And Obama is salivating at the chance to get his hands on this money to, quote, unquote, create jobs. This is going to be one of the biggest stashes of walking-around money that any politician has ever had to dispense.

"The main committee report lays out the key areas where TARP has missed its mark: Many consumers and businesses are still having trouble getting loans. Banks are still failing at a fast pace. Toxic assets remain on balance sheets of large banks. Foreclosures continue to grow, and jobs remain scarce." Now, TARP stands for Troubled Asset Relief Program. Do you remember when it was originally for, Snerdley? What was the original stated purpose of TARP? Right. To buy toxic assets from the banks left over from the subprime mortgage crisis, worthless paper that they created, new investment products to try to give themselves a little insurance with and get those off the books of the banks. They're still there. And then the Treasury secretary was given sole discretion how to use the money. After it was then signed and authorized, Henry Paulson, the Bush Treasury secretary said (paraphrase), "Hey, you know what? We're going to change this, we're going to give money to some of these banks so they can start lending." And, remember, some institutions were not chartered as banks, so they changed their charter to become banks so that they could get some of the money. Some Wall Street firms became banks so that they could get some of the money. I always thought that one of the things going on here was Paulson taking care of his buddies who also have homes in the Hamptons and didn't want to lose 'em. I mean, these people do tend to hang together.

Here's another CNNMoney.com story. "Residential real estate owners suffered through another down year, but losses were much lower than 2008." I have discovered the media trick here in reporting this bad news. The trick is that they report things as being not as bad as last year. I have seen articles saying retail is not down as much as last year. What is not said is that last year and this year are all down from record lows. It doesn't matter. They're using last year as a benchmark: "It's not quite as bad as last year, so things are improving." They're not. Both years are at record lows. They can spin it all they want, but the news is bad.

Here's how they do it. "American homeowners will have lost nearly $500 billion in home value by year's end." Poof! Gone, after one year of Obama. Five hundred billion dollars in home value, gone. "Still" -- next paragraph -- "that's a big improvement over 2008, when values fell by $3.6 trillion, according to a report released" -- So the total now then would be $4.1 trillion in two years, and they want to try to spin that as good news! And, by the way, you watch these job numbers that gave us 10% unemployment -- they're going to be revised. The Labor Department's already admitted that they undercounted some 400,000 people out of work. It's not 10%, it's much higher, they're going to revise those numbers. They're going to be revising these numbers all the way through the spring, by the way. "The gigantic Los Angeles market suffered the largest total loss in home value, at $60.8 billion. Metro Chicago values fell $49.6 billion and New York dropped $49 billion." Negative equity is the most important predictor of default.

And here it is. "Administration Warns of 'Command-and-Control' Regulation Over Emissions -- The Obama administration is warning Congress if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a 'command-and-control' role over the process in a way that could hurt business. The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA administrator Lisa Jackson's address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen[.] Jackson, however, tried to strike a tone of cooperation in her address Wednesday, explaining the EPA's new powers to regulate greenhouse gases will be used to complement legislation pending in Congress, not replace it. 'This is not "either-or" moment. It's a "both-and" moment'. [But the official said,] 'If you don't pass this legislation, then. the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. and it's not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.'"

This is exactly what they want. They're holding this out here: "You guys in Congress, you better act or we're going to have to do it." Basically what's happening here is that the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate are being blackmailed by Barack Obama through Lisa Jackson at the EPA: "If you guys don't do it, we are. You don't pass cap and trade it won't matter, because we're going to implement it anyway by fiat." United States of America. Home of the free, land of the brave -- but not for long.

RUSH: Here's Mark in Waterbury, Connecticut, Mark, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Longtime listener, first-time caller, very nervous, so bear with me.

CALLER: It just seems to me that the common denominator of all these compromises are unfunded mandates. I mean now they're going to say, okay, private insurance companies, yeah, we can involve them but they gotta be nonprofit private insurance companies. Well how are they going to stay in business if you can't make a profit?

RUSH: Well, the government. A nonprofit insurance company overseen by the government is the government.

CALLER: They're also saying that the insurance companies will have to cover preexisting conditions. So if your house burns down then you can get house insurance and everything will be taken care of, or as Obama said in his speech in Colorado, the government will make it so that people can't pay more than such-and-such out of their pocket. I mean it just seems to me that the premiums are going to increase to the point of, you know, there will be no option but the public option. So all these compromises, it just seems that all roads lead to the public option.

RUSH: Exactly right. You've got it. You've nailed it. And you did it even while you were nervous.

CALLER: And I mean just as they did to the banks, I mean they mandated banks out of businesses by making them, you know -- telling them to lend to unqualified borrowers, you know. And so they went out of business, or else they were accused of predatory lending because they couldn't pay it back, you know? Mandates alone kill all these businesses, banking and insurance, you know?

RUSH: Look, you're saying things here to which there is an obvious conclusion, and you probably have arrived at it on your own, but if not, let me help. What you have just described is liberals lie. It's no more complicated than that. Whenever any liberal politician or leader announces a plan, it's a lie. They also, in order to move their agenda, have to have at least one demon, preferably several. In this cycle, they have demonized doctors; they have demonized pediatricians; they have demonized the insurance companies; they demonize every entity or as many entities in the private sector as possible to convince people they're being ripped off by people in order to get people to side with government solutions to problems. Everything is a lie! You can go into as much detail to point it out to people as you want but the simple way to understand these people is: they lie.

RUSH: Some updates on health care coming in just a second, but let me get a couple things out of the way here. Algore, according to a blog here by Andrew Bolt at the AustralianHeraldSun.com, is just -- well, they say here falsifying the record. I think he's lying about these Climate Research Unit e-mails. "Al Gore has studied the ClimateGate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle: Question: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University? Al Gore: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven't read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus."

Now, here again, we are in the Universe of Lies. I mean it's just stunning. "And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue: Question: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate. Al Gore: I think it's been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you're referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn't be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago," blah, blah, blah, blah. At any rate, the point here is that he's lying through his teeth about this. The most recent e-mail was November. They're not ten years old. They're Unix time stamped. They go through a long period of almost ten years with the most recent e-mail being in November. We've got e-mails from an AP reporter, Seth Borenstein, who is asking the people at the Climate Research Unit, (paraphrasing) "How do I handle this journal here that's got a lot of credibility that says that you guys are full of it, how do I handle this?" We've got the media asking for advice from the hoaxers.

"These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus." There are about 450 academic peer reviewed journal articles questioning the importance of man-made global warming. I mean the sheer number of scientists rallying against a major intervention to stop carbon dioxide is remarkable. It's like Harry Reid is doubling down on the slavery comment. It's like Dianne Feinstein says it is entirely moral that pro-life American taxpayers should pay for abortions for people who want them in this country. It's not a moral question. These people are so radical that most people do not know how to deal with this. It's clear that the Senate Republican leadership doesn't know how to deal with this in the health care fight. Delay, delay, add amendments and so forth. This is unlike anything we've ever seen before. This has to be stopped. And, by the way, do not believe these stories that Reid's close to a deal. He's not close to a deal. He's at least four votes short. He's not close.

The game plan in this health care business all along has been to dispirit you, to cause you and others like you to not even try to stop it, to protest, to show up at rallies or any of that because they want you to think it's a fait accompli, a done deal. And it's not. This is all part of the strategery. There are stories out there today, "Reid announces deal," blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not the case. In fact, the Heritage Foundation today, and the reason I'm interspersing these two is because it's the same issue. Climate change, global warming, health care, it's all the same people doing it the same way, it's the Universe of Lies. There's nothing about any of this that is real except that it might happen. But nothing that they're saying about it to advance it is real.

Now, the Heritage people: "If you are one of the few Americans who still subscribes, your morning newspaper probably has a headline like this: Democrats Reach Deal on Health Plan. Don't believe it. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is still light years away from producing the 60 votes necessary to pass Obamacare out of the Senate." And whatever he's doing on the floor of the Senate is irrelevant and whatever Republicans are doing on the floor of the Senate is irrelevant because they don't have the votes to stop Reid. Reid is trying to blame all this on Republicans not going along. He's working the back of the room trying to make deals and buy off however he has to all of these recalcitrant senators on the Democrat side. That being said, our party is in a huge mess. Do you realize we're down to having to be concerned with what Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson does? I have to tell you how offended I am over that, that we are held hostage to what Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson does because our leadership has blown this in not taking it on ideologically. All kinds of parliamentary steps could have been taken, and I'm not talking about reading the bill. They coulda done that, but there are all kinds of steps that could have been taken to slow this down, to stop it, and to alert and educate the American people as to what's going on here.

But as usual it's left to us in the so-called New Media to accomplish this, and the Heritage Foundation is a great help today. "The few details that have leaked out about this new 'broad agreement' only reveal just how desperate Reid is to get any bill on to President Obama's desk by the New Year," and that's what this is about. It's about Obama building a monument to himself, the Democrats believing that they lost the House in 1994 because they didn't get this passed. "As leftist columnist E.J. Dionne has frankly admitted, the December deadline is a purely political invention, created for the sole purpose of enabling President Barack Obama to point to at least one accomplishment during his State of the Union speech in January." The ramifications of the passage of this, nobody's talking about. On the Democrat side, in the mainstream, it's an utter disaster, as you and I all know.

"Details of the agreement have not been made public, and Senate Democrats are refusing to make them public, and Senate Democrats are refusing to make them public until they hear back from the Congressional Budget Office," which is also being set up for a false score to show that this is revenue neutral, deficit neutral, it might even actually reduce the deficit. How stupid do they think we are? "Judging from what little has been selectively leaked to the public, this idea deserves to die: Doubling Down on Debt: Medicare is already bankrupting our country. In 2007 alone, Medicare was forced to draw $179 billion from the general revenues of the US Treasury. ... Death Sentence for Hospitals: The Reid Health Bill already delivers a huge blow to our nation's hospitals by cutting Medicare reimbursements to hospitals by hundreds of billions of dollars. ... That is why both the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals sent alerts yesterday urging their members to oppose the new Senate deal. A government-run health care coup."

Now, one of the things they're saying today is, "We're going to get rid of the public option, we're going to get rid of the public option. That's the only way we can satisfy a senator here or a senator there." They're not getting rid of the public option. "You might think that leftists who have been dreaming about single payer, government run health care for years would be upset about the new Senate deal. They are not. The existing Medicaid expansions in the bill, and the new Senate deal Medicare expansions, are just a continuation of the left's health care agenda since the defeat of Hillarycare: Slowly expand existing government programs so that all private health care is strangled out of existence." This is what I mean when I say the Universe of Lies, it's a tsunami of them. It is a veritable tsunami of lies. It's like Obama saying yesterday, "We've seen the largest contraction to expansion of our economy in my administration in more than the last 30 years." Sorry. We're still spiraling out of control economically in the private sector. There's no indication that it's going to get any better.

Meredith Whitney went on CNBC yesterday saying the government's out of bullets, meaning there's nothing left to spend and she's worried that consumers, because of lack of available credit, are going to effectively drop out of the financial system. You've got all these houses that are underwater, foreclosures continue, and he's out there talking about the largest contraction to expansion. They're out there saying, "We struck a deal here, we're not going to have the public option." If they're not going to have a public option then there's no reason to do this. And if they're not going to have a public option that was genuinely true, then you would have Democrats all over this country livid and doing their own protests. But they're not 'cause they understand the game and what's headed here. And then Dianne Feinstein said that using tax dollars from pro-life Americans to pay for insurance plans that cover abortion is morally correct. To say that that is morally correct, I mean that is an in-your-face, that is a thumb in your eye, that is a shut up, get outta here, and stop bothering me.

"When President Barack Obama gave one of his first national health care addresses in June, he instructed Congress: 'As we move forward on health care reform, it is not sufficient for us simply to add more people to Medicare or Medicaid.'" But that's what Obamacare has turned out to be, that's the sum total of what's happening here. In the midst of these mythical $500 billion cuts in Medicare, we'll see if those things ever actual materialize as well.

One more thing. Algore was on CNN yesterday warning the two or three people that watch CNN about imminent planetary doom at the hands of his favorite bogeyman, global warming. It was just seconds before the anchorette infobabe, Kiran Chetry, reported the monster storm paralyzing travel in more than a dozen states with winter still two weeks away. He's out there, "We face imminent destruction from global warming." Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and now for the next story, Global Warming Snowstorm Algore, paralyzing the upper Midwest two weeks before winter. Every time he shows up someplace, every time, it's almost comical, every time he shows up someplace there's either an outbreak of weather that is the exact opposite of what he's talking about, he never does seem to get embarrassed. That's why they stopped calling it global warming and now call it climate change so that virtually every perceived abnormality can be said to be caused by climate change.

RUSH: Back now to Dingy Harry, audio sound bite number five. This is important. He announces a deal, but he can't expose the details. So much for transparency. This is last night in Washington. He had a press conference out there.

REID: Tonight we've overcome a real problem that we had. I think it's fair to say that the debate at this stage has been portrayed as a very divisive one, and many have assumed that people of different perspectives can't come together. But I think that what we were able to work out the last few days which culminated tonight belays that fact. We have a broad agreement. We can't disclose the details of what we've done, but, believe me, we've got something that's good and I think is very -- for us it moves this bill way down the road.

RUSH: And, of course, now, the State-Controlled Media dutifully falls in line. Politico: "Reid: Dems Reach 'Broad Agreement,'" and the broad agreement has leaked and that is the public option will be replaced by a new national insurance plan offered by private insurers. (laughing) If private insurers don't want to do it then it doesn't happen. It's all smoke and mirrors anyway. Politico dutifully steps in line. LA Times: "Senate Democrats Reach Healthcare Deal on 'Public Option.'" And there's very little clarity in this story. The national plan would be issued by some nonprofit insurer and the government would oversee the plan. A nonprofit insurer that the government oversees? Sounds like the government to me. If this unknown nonprofit doesn't materialize, and we're led to believe here that somebody, some nonprofit has to step up, then an honest up front government plan is triggered. Folks, and this is his big deal because there are Senators who don't want the public option. So Reid is saying, (paraphrasing) "Okay, we won't have a public option. What we're going to have is a nonprofit insurer that we would oversee from the private sector," but if one of those private sector insurance companies doesn't step up or if a nonprofit doesn't step up then that triggers the public option. I mean, it's ridiculous. It is absolutely ridiculous.

They do not and, by the way, the main point here is do not fall for this business that they are close to a deal, that they had a major, major bridge that they crossed. That is not the case, as the Heritage Foundation says today: If you are one of the few Americans who still subscribes, your morning newspaper probably has a headline like this: Democrats Reach Deal on Health Plan. Don't believe it. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is still light years away from producing the 60 votes necessary to pass Obamacare out of the Senate." That's what is so frustrating. The reality here is so frustrating. I hate to say this 'cause I like these people, but the Senate Republican leadership strategy here was flawed because it allowed the Democrats to take the offensive, buy time to work out a deal. I don't know. I've never been in the Senate. I've never been elected. I'm not a parliamentary expert. But I know a disaster when I see it. And I know that it's gotta be stopped, and whatever parliamentary steps are available to people who do know what they are should have been taken, every blocking tactic they had at this. Push this past the end of the year. Make sure that nothing does happen before Christmas.

I get frustrated. I know you are, too. You're probably more frustrated than I am of these old Bob Dole types. Nothing against Bob Dole but it's a different era now. They have no idea what we are facing. They act like this is just another day at the office. And maybe in a couple years Republicans will get the power back and then we'll go back and be convivial and all get along and so forth. This has to be stopped. Millions of Americans feel this way. They don't have faith in our principles. They don't have the will or energy to go on offense. I'm talking about the Republican leadership, wherever you find it. And they're incapable of explaining our philosophy or our purpose. I really believe that the way to fight this is on pure ideological terms. Liberals are liberals, and it's not helpful to them when they are so identified. They go out of their way to avoid being called liberal. They don't like it. They talk about Republican versus Democrat, voter identification, conservative versus liberal is where you need to look.

Forty percent of Americans describe themselves as conservative, 36% independents, and 20% liberal. And these independents are abandoning the Democrat Party in droves. And a key point, they're abandoning the Democrat Party without the Republican Party giving them any reason to go to them. They're just abandoning the Democrats because they don't like what they see. There's a gold mine of an opportunity here to draw distinctions and contrasts rather than offer amendments to try to improve the bill and accept the premise that this is going to happen, we just gotta make it as less damaging as we can. I want you to look at it this way. We cannot allow our party to be based on what Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson or Blanche Lincoln may or may not do. What's smart about that? You do that, build a strong future on a foundation with unreliable keystones.

RUSH: Anyway, back to this health care business, folks, our guys do not seem to understand that this is a new era. We are fighting radicals who will stop at nothing. Our guys are still living in the Bob Dole, Howard Baker days. Look, we cannot outvote Harry Reid. We can't outvote Harry Reid, so voting on one amendment after another sends the message that compromise in a deal are fine. No, no, no, it's got to be stopped. This bill needs to be killed and you use whatever tactics you have to expose the entire game and the process that they're doing, the substance. You go down fighting, not amending. There's a new poll out and it's the Politico: "The second leg of Quinnipiac's big national poll dropped this morning -- and it shows a serious erosion of support for Congressional health reform efforts and the president's performance on the issue -- along with an all-time low 46 percent approval rating, 46-44 approval-disapproval. Voters disapprove 52-38 percent of the health care reform proposal under consideration in Congress." Only 38% support health care, and yet they claim they're doing this for the people. Fifty-two percent want no part of it.

This is Pollster.com, another poll. "Do you support or oppose President Obama's health care plan, or do you not have an opinion? Thirty-nine percent support; 52% oppose." Nobody wants it. Well, not nobody, but the vast majority of do not want it. Senator Reid, why are you doing this? Why are you doing it? Don't tell us it's for the people, for our health care and our health insurance because the jig's up, people don't want any part of this. They know what it is.

RUSH: Laurie in Phoenix, thank you for waiting, I appreciate your patience very much. Hello.

CALLER: I just have a simple question that I've asked quite a few people and haven't gotten an answer, and all it is is, if we are not going to be paying for a public option, if that's off the table, what exactly is it that we're going to be paying a trillion dollars for?

RUSH: Well, that's a brilliant question. There will be a public option. This is all smoke and mirrors when they say they've got a deal here that eliminates it because it doesn't. It sets up a government-supervised nonprofit insurance company to start selling this. The answer to your question is found in the truth. It's not a health care bill. It is a massive expansion of government bill, I think 111 new bureaucracies, 118 new bureaus are created, it's a tax increase bill. There are tax increases throughout this thing. It is just an expansion of government for the purposes of redistribution of wealth, and it's being said it's a health care bill to improve the lives of the American people and provide more access to the health care system for the American people who were denied it. It's all a sham. It's all a giant hoax just like this climate change thing is. Your question alone even without the answer is a brilliant illustration of that. If there's not going to be a public option, like Harry Reid's saying today, then what the hell do we need a trillion dollars for? What are we spending it on?

CALLER: So you didn't really answer me, either, other than just more government.

CALLER: I have no idea. I know that I pay for my health care, I'm a breast cancer survivor, my husband works two jobs so that we don't have to go under so that I can be taken care of, and I look at the amount of money that they want to spend and I think to myself, "Well, if it's really about taking care of a person like me who really needs to have some kind of help, wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to say, you know, these 13 or 25 or 30 million people that don't have coverage, let's just start a plan for them."

RUSH: You know what? With the $200 billion of unspent TARP money, you could insure the 30 million people who are uninsured, who want it, for four or five years, maybe more. We've run the numbers on this, 28 to $30 billion a year. So you could insure them for quite a while. No, your instincts on this are exactly right. I'm shocked and saddened, however, that you claim I didn't answer your question when I thought I brilliantly dove into it.

CALLER: Well, you did on the surface, but it still doesn't tell me where the money is going. If all it is is a bunch of new government programs, then how can they possibly call it a health care program? If it's not giving health care to people, a health care program --

RUSH: Because they're leftists! Because they're Democrats, liberals lie, that's all you need to know any time they tell you anything.

Rush Crushes Seminar Caller who Reads Lib Talking Points on Bush Tax Cuts and War

CALLER: Yeah, thanks for letting me be on your show. I'm a Democrat and I was just looking up some information here. The Congressional Research Service says the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is gonna cost us over $1 trillion. And President Bush started those wars. Instead of asking the public to make sacrifices, he cut taxes.

RUSH: Wait a minute. Bush didn't start the wars. Al-Qaeda started the wars. We were attacked and for repeated times. That was the tail end of our being attacked and we finally got some guts and did something about it. Saddam Hussein had violated 14 UN resolutions to disarm and stop his weapons of mass destruction program. But we didn't start any wars.

RUSH: You have forgotten we were attacked. By the way, that number, the trillion dollars, that's a jimmied number so that Obama's health care number of $898 billion can magically be said to cost less than these two unjust wars that Bush started and didn't ask any sacrifice for. What kind of sacrifice were you prepared to make, sir?

CALLER: Well, that information actually was published by Bruce Bartlett, who was an advisor to the Republican Party and Bush, so he's one of your people that stated that. And like I said, the fact of the matter is, you know, cutting taxes at a time of war has never been done in American history. And the idiocy of the Republican Party is, instead of -- you're screaming around, screaming and talking about a president that's trying to spend money on a decent health care program, that to me is where the idiocy is, sir.

RUSH: I really don't blame you for thinking the way you think, as corrupted as your mind has become by whoever has been responsible for educating you.

CALLER: I'm just getting the information from your Republican source here, Bruce Bartlett. He's one of your people. You can go to Forbes.com and see the information.

RUSH: Now, every group of people has its people that deviate from whatever the perceived norm is, but you say that taxes have never been cut during time of war.

RUSH: My question to you is, I want to know, you personally, what is your knee-jerk reaction that causes opposition to tax cuts? What is the problem you have with tax cuts? And the second question, how can you look at this abomination of a health care bill and think that it's actually about compassionately providing health insurance to people that don't have it? It's not what it's about. I don't understand people who hear tax cuts and get mad. I don't understand it.

CALLER: Well, the fact of the way it is, you gotta have a way to finance a war. That's a fact. And you guys didn't have a way to finance the wars when you got us into it. That's the Republican Party's cross to bear and that will go down in history.

RUSH: Well, would you agree with the concept that you cut taxes in a recession if you don't like cutting taxes in a war?

CALLER: Would I agree with that concept? The fact of the matter is, here we are $1 trillion later, and you guys are screaming about money now on somebody that's trying to develop a health care program. I'm a cancer survivor, sir. I'm a cancer survivor.

RUSH: President Obama is seeking to destroy the American health care system and the American private sector. President Obama has spent more in one year than George Bush deficits added up over all eight. Now, those are facts.

CALLER: I'll tell you another fact. We had a budget surplus before Bush came into office.

RUSH: No, we did not. Again, that was a massaged figure from the Clinton Commerce Department. There was no surplus. What was the term they had for it, Snerdley, the peace dividend? There was no peace dividend. The federal budget has never been smaller one year than it was the year before. The national debt has never gone down. And if there was a surplus anywhere, it's been spent ten times over. Look, you and I are going to be at loggerheads all over the place because you have Bush Derangement Syndrome, and you have the belief that the only bad money spent by government is money spent to defend the country after it's been attacked. You seem to be in favor of all kinds of wasteful, redundant social spending, and you fall prey to the well-articulated crap put out by the left that it's all for compassion. You're a citizen, and you sound like a good guy, but we can't count on you. You're lost, you're gone. So people like me will try to save the country for you, because left to your own devices you would help facilitate its destruction, at least as we know it. But we'll try to save it for you, sir, whether you ever thank us or not.

RUSH: All right, you know, we have liberals that call this show now and then. And, by the way, every time -- what would you say the percentage of liberals who call here that you put up? It's very high, right? You put up -- 95% of them get on. We don't get that many, but we don't limit 'em. We certainly do not -- we move 'em to the front of the line. That's a policy that we put in place waaaay back there in the late eighties when the first round of criticism -- "Limbaugh never takes calls from people who disagree with him." We do it all the time when they call. Generally what happens is within 30 seconds they descend into name-calling and we just have to get rid of them. They can't stay on topic or anything of the sort. But every time they do call, it's generally the result of some sort of. Well, we call them "seminar callers," but there's -- it's a movement. Somebody on some website sends out marching orders: "Okay, here's what we need to say about health care versus war versus taxes. You guys need to flood the talk shows with this."

So we got our obligatory call today about taxes and war. Now, the latest talking point, this whole business that Bush did not ask people to sacrifice, Bush ran up a trillion dollars worth of debt in Iraq and Afghanistan and didn't ask anybody to sacrifice and pay for it and so forth, and now everybody's saying that health care, which is of noble, compassionate for American idea, has to be paid for. The left is trying to make us think that we were immoral and unjust spending all that money, and losing all those lives, for something that was irrelevant and made no difference, it wasn't paid for, and now here comes the Wondrous One, Obama The Messiah, the Most Merciful, who just wants every American to have health care and to never get sick. And if he gets sick, he gets well, and you idiots on the right, you are making it sound like he doesn't pay for it, it's going to ruin the deficit and so forth and it was your wars. That's the talking point. And its origins are from the New York Times economic columnist Paul Krugman.

Here's what he wrote November 29th. "This is a lot of money" -- actually, he said it on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. "This is a lot of money. And the point is, we should have been paying for these wars to begin with, right from the beginning. I mean, this was, if you want to talk firsts for Bush, this was the first time in American history that a president took us into war and cut taxes." Now, that was probably cribbed from the Urban Institute study, war and tax. See, the left is -- they're linked together. All of which was just used as an argument for a new war tax. Who was it, was it Baucus who put that out there? Who, Obey? Yeah. Yeah, David Obey. David Obey in the House. A war tax. A war tax. But the guy who called here neglected to mention that there were no major tax cuts during a time of war, but that's not even true, because Kennedy and Johnson cut taxes in 1964 during the Vietnam War. Johnson eventually raised them again. And look, we fought a Cold War. Now, I don't know with the Soviet Union, that went on for years, folks, and it cost a lot of money, the nuke buildup, and Reagan cut taxes in the Cold War. So, once again, it's a false choice, a flawed premise that relies on hatred of George W. Bush in order for it to work. And as we can see as we go through the Stack of Stuff here, that's getting harder and harder and harder for Obama to continue to sell.

RUSH: Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal has another great piece, and I want to excerpt it. It reminded me, and I say this with all due respect to Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal, it reminded me of my piece from almost a year ago and things that I've said and explained for a long time on the Limbaugh bipartisan stimulus plan that I offered to President Obama at the time last January or February when he said he was open to all ideas. So I wrote that op-ed and presented my idea. My proposal was written for the first Porkulus bill, and Henninger here is writing his reaction to the proposed second stimulus bill, the taking of $200 billion unspent TARP money. I'm not trying to embarrass Mr. Henninger here; I'm trying to praise him. He writes a terrific column. It does stand on its own. I just find it interesting to compare it to mine.

Here's Henninger: "Every serious person should welcome the president's proposals to lift the dormant economy and reduce unemployment. Not because every serious person would agree with them but because they are a clear test of how a left-wing government would run the American economy. If this works, hats off to them and we become France. If not, Americans may finally dump left-wing economics into the ash heap of history, starting next November and then in the next presidential election, which can't come soon enough. ... No Democratic president, though, can just say, 'I'm doing this to save the Pelosi majority and to protect the state and local jobs of Andy Stern's dues payers and party regulars in the Service.'" In other words, Henninger is saying the Democrats cannot be honest about what their objectives really are here.

"Mr. Obama's saving grace is that no matter how political his initiatives, the reasons he offers for what he's doing generally do describe what is at stake. ... At the jobs summit, Mr. Obama said 'I want to hear from CEOs what's holding back our business investment.' Really? How about the world's highest corporate tax rate? How about the 5.4% health-care surtax on top of the expiring Bush tax cuts, which will push the top marginal individual rate, paid at the outset by many entrepreneurs, well over 40%?" Now, that was the purpose of the Limbaugh plan.

Here's what I wrote: "There's a serious debate in this country as to how best to end the recession. The average recession will last five to 11 months; the average recovery will last six years. Recessions will end on their own if they're left alone. What can make the recession worse is the wrong kind of government intervention. I believe the wrong kind is precisely what President Barack Obama has proposed. I don't believe his is a 'stimulus plan' at all -- I don't think it stimulates anything but the Democratic Party. This 'porkulus' bill is designed to repair the Democratic Party's power losses from the 1990s forward, and to cement the party's majority power for decades. ... In this new era of responsibility, let's use both Keynesians and supply-siders to responsibly determine which theory best stimulates our economy -- and if elements of both work, so much the better.

"As a way to bring the country together and at the same time determine the most effective way to deal with recessions, under the Obama-Limbaugh Stimulus Plan of 2009: 54% of the $900 billion -- $486 billion -- will be spent on infrastructure and pork as defined by Mr. Obama and the Democrats; 46% -- $414 billion -- will be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me. Then we compare. We see which stimulus actually works. This is bipartisanship! It would satisfy the American people's wishes, as polls currently note; and it would also serve as a measurable test as to which approach best stimulates job growth. I say, cut the U.S. corporate tax rate -- at 35%, among the highest of all industrialized nations -- in half. Suspend the capital gains tax for a year to incentivize new investment, after which it would be reimposed at 10%. Then get out of the way!"

"But, Rush, but, Rush, did you hear President Obama did suspend the capital gains tax for small businesses for a year?" I saw that, but two things about that. First off, what is a capital gains tax? You have to sell an asset at a gain before there's a tax involved. What small business has gains that they're selling? Meanwhile, the House came out and said, screw it, they proposed legislation to double it or triple it. I'll get the details in a moment. Anyway, Daniel Henninger says, "look, every serious person in the world --" I've heard this argument expressed in many different ways: Hey, get out of the way, let the left do what they're going to do, and people will find out how rotten it is, and then they'll never vote for it again. It doesn't work that way, because if it did, if it worked that way, then no Democrat would have ever been elected after Ronald Reagan. It would not have happened because the eighties were the most prosperous decade that led to prosperity all the way through the late nineties, with a couple blip, minor little economic slowdowns in the early nineties during the campaign of 1992.

It doesn't work that way, especially in this case, if we just sit idly by and let President Obama get all this stuff done, we're cooked, because this is not just standard left-wing politics. This is radical left-wing Marxist socialism, fascism, whatever you want to call it. This is designed to forever remake the United States and to destroy the prosperity generating capitalist system in the private sector. So it's hard to sit by and let that happen, for people to say, "Oh, my God, this is horrible, we're not going to vote for this again." Well, I've never heard of an entitlement being rolled back once they get it, like this health care bill. This has to be stopped. Cap and trade has to be stopped. The EPA, somehow there has to be pressure mounted to see to it that they do not by fiat unilaterally implement cap and trade. This is serious stuff. I think people are already seeing the flight of the independents away from Obama, his cratering in the approval polls, cratering in the approval of health care. We don't need the stuff to pass and get signed into law before people understand what a disaster it is. I actually think it's kind of uplifting in a way that even before it is passed and with no attention being paid to the truth of what these pieces of legislation are from the mainstream media, a majority of Americans want no part of any of it.

CALLER: I go to Hillsdale College and this is one of my goals I wanted to do before I graduate, to call you. I am calling about a children's book that I ran across while babysitting this semester. It's called "How to Get Married ... by Me, the Bride," and it's by Sally Lloyd-Jones and Sue Heap. And it's full of --

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, hold it. You're speaking faster than I can keep up with. You were babysitting, it's called How to Get Married --

CALLER: It's called "How to Get Married ... by Me, the Bride." It's a little girl. And then the book is actually by Sally Lloyd-Jones and Sue Heap.

CALLER: And it just came out this year, and I started reading it to the girls I was babysitting, and I'm horrified by what is in it. It basically completely redefines marriage. It says that you can marry anything, basically. It says you can marry an animal; you can marry a flower; you can marry your dad. It says you can marry lots of people at once. It even shows the little girl in the book proposing marriage instead of a guy proposing marriage. And it never even says once that you get married to someone of the opposite sex, like never. It never says a boy to this little girl, it says everything else imaginable. And I just couldn't believe how blatantly obvious it was that they're trying to indoctrinate children with the book by telling them you can marry anyone.

RUSH: -- but it's mild compared to some of the stuff that's been discovered recently that the safe schools czar for Obama is doing. This guy back in the early part of this century, in the year 2000-2001, was actually in charge of a curriculum that taught various techniques of homosexual sex, including fisting.

RUSH: If you don't know what it is I'm not going to tell you, go ask your mom and she might not even know.

RUSH: But you gotta wear a latex glove for that. I mean it's just pervasive throughout -- it was predicted, when the whole gay marriage matter started, one of the things that people, including me, said, well, wait a minute, if marriage traditionally has a specific definition, between a man and a woman, if that no longer matters, then you could marry your dog. And people said, "Oh, no, no, no, no, Rush, you're being extreme. We're not asking for that, we just want the equal rights of marriage." Wait a minute, if marriage isn't what it is and you're going to redefine it then you can marry anything and so now you've got a book, you've got a book that basically --

CALLER: Yeah, no, it's just a children's book. It would be anywhere from the age of like two to about eight years old, is the age-group they're targeting, and they're targeting little girls.

CALLER: Yeah, there's a lot of pictures, and then there's all this explanation of like how to get married, how to play marriage and all this kind of stuff, and I just couldn't believe it. I thought this is not how you play marriage.

RUSH: This is about destroying all of the traditions and institutions which have defined not just America, but civilized culture throughout the history of the world. If you blow up the concept that marriage is between a man and a woman, then the next thing you do is redefine the family. Why can't there be three parents in a family? And why can't you adopt a dog and so forth. There's no end in sight. Once they break down all these barriers they can then redefine them any way they wish. You're dealing with a bunch of godless people out there, Emily. She mentioned that she's from Hillsdale, Michigan. That's where Hillsdale College is, Larry Arnn runs Hillsdale. I've talked to Larry Arnn. Hillsdale is a sponsor here. She goes there. I know she said she's a senior there. Larry Arnn has described the learning process, the teaching process at Hillsdale, and one of the funniest things he told me was that even when the students are right they're wrong, that even when they answer a question right they are still probed and demanded to say more. It is a university which teaches thinking, critical thinking, as well as the teaching of factual knowledge about American history.

They have a publication called Imprimis, and it's one of the best and most important publications that I read. And it's free. It's a monthly speech digest from Hillsdale College. Every member of the EIB audience should read Imprimis, because Imprimis, it features visionary speeches by the world's top conservative leaders, speeches that they have made at Hillsdale and elsewhere, Reagan, Thatcher, William F. Buckley, and including me. In fact, one of my best speeches was a Hillsdale speech. I had a bad cold when I gave the speech, but it was a home run. And you know what? You can get Imprimis for free every month. Go to rush4hillsdale.com and sign up. They deal with issues like limited government, traditional values, free markets, the importance of religious faith. You know, we, as conservatives, need to know how to be inspiring, how about the visionary and the best way you can do that is by reading the speeches of real, true leaders of conservatism.

Now, if you don't want to go to Rush4Hillsdale.com, you can call 1-866-HILLSDALE to receive Imprimis today. It doesn't cost you anything, you're not going to end up on a mail list, it's not a ruse, they're not going to ask you for money. They just want to let you know who are they at Hillsdale College. Dr. Arnn, who is a brilliant man, actually cares about the end product of his graduates, he actually cares about the kind of human beings, the kind of minds that they have and he wants people to know about Hillsdale College and what they do, and he's giving away Imprimis every month to anybody who wants a copy. Rush4Hillsdale.com.

RUSH: I went to Amazon.com to look at that book: "How to Get Married ... by Me, the Bride," by Sally Lloyd-Jones and Sue Heap, and I've got it here. If I can hold this up for those of you Dittocammers, a page of it right there. Let me zoom out here and read this to you. "You can marry your best friend or your teacher or your pet or your daddy, and sometimes you can marry a flower. You can marry someone who is just like you or somebody who isn't." And that's a kid, baby looking at himself in the mirror. And the girl marrying a flower is black, and the girl that looks like she's marrying her best friend looks like a Tiger Woods woman, or Barbie doll. "How to Get Married ... by Me, the Bride," by Sally Lloyd-Jones and Sue Heap.

Remember, you can keep your health coverage if you like it? The CBO estimates 10 million will lose their insurance with Obamacare goes through.

Updated daily news about Climategate (since this information will not be found in the alphabet media):

Harry Reid proclaims that the Senate that Democrats have reached a broad agreement:

GE’s Jeffrey Immelt attacks executive greed (GE is the company which has been accused of doing business with Iran, and a company which Immelt and driven into the ground; and a business which will make millions if not billions if climate change legislation is passed:

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

This website reveals a lot of information about politicians and their relationship to money. You can find out, among other things, how many earmarks that Harry Reid has been responsible for in any given year; or how much an individual Congressman’s wealth has increased or decreased since taking office.

This is an outstanding website which tells the truth about Obama-care and about what the mainstream media is hiding from you:

Politico.com is a fairly neutral site (or, at the very worst, just a little left of center). They have very good informative videos at:

On Obama (if you have not visited this site, you need to check it out). He is selling a DVD on this site as well called Media Malpractice; I have not viewed it yet, except pieces which I have seen played on tv and on the internet. It looks pretty good to me.

Conservative Review
Issue #105	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	December, 12, 2009