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).

There was a mystery missile (or something) which was fired near the coast of San Diego. Our armed forces in that area say that it is not them.

President George W. Bush is on a book tour. He becomes more ubiquitous than President Obama.

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, still wants to lead the Democrats as minority leader.

It appears as though the Chicago Climate Exchange is not longer a going concern, which knocks climate change legislation right out of the box. That is where a lot of people were going to make millions of dollars, as long as they could pass some sort of cap and trade legislation.

There are over 100 companies which have waivers which get them out of Obamacare (so far).

The Peterson Foundation launched on Tuesday a $20 million TV ad campaign to promote the need for a major discussion on debt and deficit reduction, running candidate Hugh Jidette (vids listed). On board with this is Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and Budget Committee chair Kent Conrad.

13 year old boy in Turlock, CA told to remove the flag from his bicycle by his school principal, because the school is concerned about racial tensions.

Newly elected Republicans are at least acting as if they got the message; there is talk of an earmark moratorium and presumptive Speaker of the House John Boehner will fly commercial and not take a private military jet.

A group of San Francisco Unified School District administrators, including an associate superintendent, have been engaging in a long-running scheme to funnel district money into their personal bank accounts via nonprofit community organizations, according to internal documents.

ACORN supervisor Amy Busefink, 28, plead no-contest in a Nevada court to two misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit the crime of compensation for registration of voters in the 2008 election.

Russian journalist in critical condition after attack; according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 52 journalists have been murdered in Russian since 1992. Wikipedia lists 365 journalists who have died violently in Russia and another 50 which have gone to trial.

President Obama, about religious tolerance in Indonesia: "Those are the spires of the cathedral the Catholic Church over there. See, right next door."

Paul Krugman concerning the President's deficit commission: "Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes"

Kevin Tully of the DailyKos: “The "American Dream" is a worldwide viral phenomenon - with many more potentially dire consequences than AIDS or Avian Flu. We have exported this thing from one end of the earth to the other”

Louise from the DailyKos: “Perry made his final sales pitch to explain why Texas, as he governed it, was a Plutocrat's dream. It had low taxes, "fair" environmental laws, a legal system that was also attractive to business, and some other things that I have forgotten because I was so stunned by his final sales point: ‘...a school system that puts out a skilled worker.’ That's Texas. A whore for business, a land that doesn't value its land, and a factory that produces docile, biddable servants that can read, write, do basic mathematics and follow directions. It ‘puts out’ ‘skilled workers.’ Perhaps it seems like a stretch to call a mere mortal Lucifer, but his creepy persona and relentless boosterism of a place that sounded like Hell brought the analogy to mind.”

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “We didn't lose the election because of me.”

Roland Martin on Anderson Cooper 360, called Sarah Palin "the Kim Kardashian of politics."

Bill Maher: “America's like a dog....it cannot understand actual words. It understands inflection. It understands fear. But you can't actually explain issues to a dog.”

Newsweek on the cancelling of the TV show Undercovers: “Prime-time audiences just weren't ready for "super-negros" on the small screen.”

Chris Christie on running for president: "I can't say this any other way: I am not a candidate for President. I am not a candidate for Vice President. If the Vice Presidency is offered to me, I will turn it down. I don't want it, I want to be here. I know people around the country think that's crazy, but I love this place. I want to stay here. I want to do this job."

Joe Scarborough: “The top Democrats of the United States Senate have all told me individually, ‘this guy [Obama] has no idea what he is doing.’ ”

Dennis Miller on Nancy Pelosi [from memory]: “Billy, she looks like she is perpetually witnessing the Hindenberg.”

“Limited government, the free market, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defense—those are the five basic ideas of conservatism.”

Donald Rumsfeld: “You come away with the sense that free economic systems tend to provide better lives for more people than any other system ever imagined.”

Art Laffer: “The two groups I love are principled conservatives and unprincipled liberals; and Bill Clinton I viewed as an unprincipled liberal, and one of the best presidents we’ve ever had.”

George W. Bush: “The best hope for freedom in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

Dick Cheney: “Barrack Obama will turn out to be a Godsend for the conservative movement in America.”

Rush Limbaugh: “The natural spirit of the human being in freedom and conservatism is simply freedom.”

FoxNews is running a 6 part series on conservatism, and so far, episode 1 (below) was excellent. “The Rise, Fall & Future of Conservatism; The Right, All Along.” This show is airing Sunday evenings, prime time, and is being played at other times as well.

Perhaps Megan Kelly is under too much stress, handling a 2 hour show? Here, she—oh, just see for yourself:

Chris Christie on the new poster boy for all that is wrong with the New Jersey school system:

Greg Gutfeld takes on the cartoonist who comes out in favor of a violent revolution (video and text):

Dennis Miller: “The film on my flight was Iron Man II with Bob Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke; and I remember half way through it, thinking, I wonder if Mickey knows he’s in a movie here, or is this just like Tuesday for him.”

Dennis Miller on Newsweek naming Finland the best place to live: “The best thing about living in Finland is, they don’t get Newsweek magazine.”

Dennis Miller: “Every time I see Nancy Pelosi handling the gavel in the House, I feel like Charelton Heston waking up in the field and the chimp’s on top of the pony”

Jodi Miller: “According to final figures, Democrats actually spent more campaign money than Republicans during this past election cycle. Hmm, spending a lot of money to lose jobs—sounds about right.”

Jodi Miller: “In California, a Republican running for state senate lost to a dead Democrat opponent. That’s strange; Republicans usually lose to dead Democratic voters.”

1) So far, the FoxNews 6 part series, The Rise, Fall & Future of Conservatism has been excellent. There is part which they may skip over, but it is very constructive. During my change from a liberal to a conservative, I listened to some of the conservative voices of that time (this would have been in the 70's), and there were 2 components of conservatism which were dragging that movement down: antis-Semitism and conspiracy theories (like the Trilateral commission). As long as those things were integral to the conservative movement (much of it), it had no future. Many conservatives either stayed home or voted for the Democrat LBJ when Goldwater, a Jew, ran for president. However, through some majic (and I do not know exactly how this happened), the left has begun to champion anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories (e.g., the 9/11 truthers—there was a time when fully a third of all Democrats felt that we did not know the truth behind 9/11 and that, somehow, our government and George Bush were involved).

2) Lobbyists are in Washington for 2 primary reasons: to get tax breaks or to keep the tax breaks which they have; and to keep from being over-regulated. Flatten the tax code and remove deductions, and that rids Washington of half the lobbyists.

3) Those who object to waterboarding based upon, “We can make anyone confess to anything,” totally miss the point. Waterboarding was never used to get someone to confess. In fact, it provided Kalid Sheikh Mohammed moral cover for revealing all of the information that he revealed. He held out until he could not longer hold out, and then he told our interrogators everything that he knew.

4) The second objection to waterboarding is the allegation that we executed WWII Japanese enemies for using Waterboarding against our soldiers. If you google Japanese Waterboarding, you will see that it was dramatically more severe than what we practiced (and, furthermore, there was a terrific amount of angst on the left about the waterboarding of only 3 men).

Government spending in Texas in 2008 was actually a smaller percentage of the economy than it had been back in 1987. Government spending in California grew 34% faster than its economy.

60% in California say it would be better if most incumbents in state legislature are defeated

In the 2010 election, every single incumbent Senator was reelected. If a particular Senator chose not to run or was term-limited out, then the person running from his or her party was elected. The same was almost true for the California assembly; out of the 80 districts, about 3 or 4 broke the mold.

“Prince George's County Executive Jack B. Johnson is accused of accepting cash in return for helping a developer secure federal funding...”

Now, quick, read the article and tell me what party he belongs to. Isn’t that fascinating? We do not find the word Democrat in the entire article.

Tax cuts for the rich = retaining present tax brackets for 750,000 small businesses.

S.F. mayor, Gavin Newsom, has rejected the anti-Happy Meal law. Maybe he is doing this for political reasons and maybe he means it. Still, it was a good move.

President Obama has not ever offered anyone any tax cuts. President Bush was the one responsible for the tax cuts which will expire this December 31^st. Democrats did quite an amazing job branding these as tax cuts for the rich, a phraes I have heard probably hundreds of times, fall out of the mouth of liberals like so much drivel. However, now these tax cuts are about to expire, so President Obama wants to separate in one way or another tax cuts for the middle class (the bulk of the tax cuts) from those for the wealthy (and this is whatever figure the President wants to put on them). Democrats demogogued this issue successfully for 5 or 6 years, and they can get more mileage out of it, as long as they can be separated. That is, make one set permanent and the other set temorary. Make them both temporary, but with different end dates. They have to be separated, and that way, they will be able to demagogue Republican tax cuts for the rich once again (and this time, a little more truthfully). The problem is, more people are paying more attention to what is actually going on in politics (I doubt a majority, but the public is becoming slightly more astute as to what is really going on). So, this time, when Democrats talk about tax cuts for the rich, it has to actually be tax cuts for the rich.

Obama has no idea how to deal with the new Republican majority. At best, he will demonize them and there will be gridlock. Or, he will simply give in to them, after putting up an initial fight.

Obama cannot try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian court, because he would lose practically every moderate who still supports him. He cannot revive the military courts at Club Gitmo because those on his left would hate that (they despise military anything). So, the alternative is to keep Khalid Sheik Mohammed locked up indefinitely. It would be at this point where a real leader would make a decision. Obama’s decision is going to be a non-decision (leave him imprisoned).

Evan Bayh is getting ready to run for president against Barrack Obama. I think this time, the Democratic field will be smaller, since President Obama is president (I would guess Bayh, Clinton, running to his right; and Kucinich running to his left).

Most of the Republican Senators and Congressmen are more politically astute than is President Obama and his team. Therefore, he will put up a fight to separate the tax cuts into those for rich and not rich, but he will fail at this. In fact, even his own party will not support him here (there will be a lot of Democrat defection on this issue—possibly enough to override a veto).

Look for Gavin Newsom to run for Governor of California. Look for him to become more moderate in his views as well.

This past week, the federal reserve printed an additional $600 billion (it’s not actually printed), which they have used to purchase U.S. Treasury bonds, which is known as monetizing the debt. Along with the Stimulus and the Healthcare law, this is one of the most significant things to come out of the Obama administration. Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, the Prime Minister of Japan and the finance minister have all protested this act. It is unclear whether Ben Bernancke is acting on his own or at the direction of President Obama.

U.S. Federal Reserve Wednesday launched the second phase of its quantitative easing program, the so-called QE2, saying it will buy up to $600 billion more in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds to help stimulate a U.S. economy that's growing too slowly.

The Fed said the new asset purchases would take place through June 2011 at about $75 billion per month, and when combined with existing asset purchases, would total about $110 billion per month.

The vote was 11-1, with Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig again voting against the program, dissenting for the seventh straight Fed meeting. Hoenig "believed the risks of additional securities purchases outweighed the benefits" the Fed's statement said.

In its statement, the Fed also maintained its language regarding monetary policy, reiterating that it will likely keep short-term interest rates at "exceptionally low levels" for an "extended period."

The Fed added that considering its dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment, "Although the Committee anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability, progress toward its objectives has been disappointingly slow."

The Fed said it was expanding its asset holdings "To promote a stronger pace of economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate," adding that it will "will regularly review the pace of its securities purchases and the overall size of the asset-purchase program in light of incoming information and will adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability."

The Fed's announcement pushed U.S. stock markets lower, at least initially, with some see-saw action afterward during afternoon trading. The interest rate on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose to 2.61% from 2.54% before the announcement.

Although plenty of economists oppose additional stimulative action by the Fed, many others argue that more action -- conventional policy or quantitative easing -- has become necessary. U.S. GDP grew 2% in the third quarter, after expanding at 1.7%, 3.7% and 5% in the previous three quarters, respectively. The most recent pace is too slow to lower the nation's high 9.6% unemployment.

Growth of at least 2.5% would be needed to do that, and the duration of the expansion required to return the nation to normal unemployment levels of 3.5% to 5% speaks to size of the task at hand for policymakers. About 14.8 million Americans seeking work are unemployed. Another 7 million to 8 million are part-time workers who want full-time work but can't find it. That translates into an underemployment rate of 17.1%.

Assuming 250,000 new jobs per month, it would take about eight years to create enough jobs to employ both those currently out of work and new entrants to the workforce.

Even though not all of those roughly 15 million adults will keep looking for a job. Some will retire. But the economy isn't generating anywhere near 250,000 new jobs per month. The private sector hasn't added 200,000 jobs in any month since the recession started in December 2007. That will have to change if the nation hopes to return to employment levels that existed prior to the financial crisis.

I'm deeply concerned about the Federal Reserve's plans to buy up anywhere from $600 billion to as much as $1 trillion of government securities. The technical term for it is "quantitative easing." It means our government is pumping money into the banking system by buying up treasury bonds. And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this? We're printing it out of thin air.

The Fed hopes doing this may buy us a little temporary economic growth by supplying banks with extra cash which they could then lend out to businesses. But it's far from certain this will even work. After all, the problem isn't that banks don't have enough cash on hand - it's that they don't want to lend it out, because they don't trust the current economic climate.

And if it doesn't work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What's the end game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? Do we have any guarantees that QE2 won't be followed by QE3, 4, and 5, until eventually - inevitably - no one will want to buy our debt anymore? What happens if the Fed becomes not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort?

All this pump priming will come at a serious price. And I mean that literally: everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher. And it's not just groceries. Oil recently hit a six month high, at more than $87 a barrel. The weak dollar - a direct result of the Fed's decision to dump more dollars onto the market - is pushing oil prices upwards. That's like an extra tax on earnings. And the worst part of it: because the Obama White House refuses to open up our offshore and onshore oil reserves for exploration, most of that money will go directly to foreign regimes who don't have America's best interests at heart.

We shouldn't be playing around with inflation. It's not for nothing Reagan called it "as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man." The Fed's pump priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared, and our allies worried. The German finance minister called the Fed's proposals "clueless." When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it's time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist. We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings. We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It's the only way we can get our economy back on the right track.

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, commented on the Federal Reserve's plan to buy $600 billion of long-term assets, saying that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should "cease and desist."

"We shouldn't be playing around with inflation," Palin said in remarks prepared for a Monday speech in Phoenix, according to Reuters.

Any economic boost from the purchases will be "temporary" and "artificial" and will lead to higher inflation, Palin said.

"We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It's the only way we can get our economy back on the right track," Palin said.

Bernanke's plan to buy up assets has encountered fierce criticism at home and abroad.

China, Germany and Brazil have all denounced the plan as harmful to the global economy. Representative Paul Ryan said that it will lead to "a big inflation problem."

Bernanke has defended the plan, dismissing suggestions that he is trying to boost inflation.

"It's critical for us to maintain inflation at an appropriate level," Bernanke said last week.

It would be hard to find two more unlikely intellectual comrades than Robert Zoellick, the World Bank technocrat, and Sarah Palin, the populist conservative politician. But in separate interventions yesterday, the pair roiled the global monetary debate in complementary and timely fashion.

The former Alaskan Governor showed sound political and economic instincts by inveighing forcefully against the Federal Reserve's latest round of quantitative easing. According to the prepared text of remarks that she released to National Review online, Mrs. Palin also exhibited a more sophisticated knowledge of monetary policy than any major Republican this side of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan.

Stressing the risks of Fed "pump priming," Mrs. Palin zeroed in on the connection between a "weak dollar-a direct result of the Fed's decision to dump more dollars onto the market"-and rising oil and food prices. She also noted the rising world alarm about the Fed's actions, which by now includes blunt comments by Germany, Brazil, China and most of Asia, among many others.

"We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth brought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings," the former GOP Vice Presidential nominee said. "We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It's the only way we can get our economy back on the right track."

Mrs. Palin's remarks may have the beneficial effect of bringing the dollar back to the center of the American political debate, not to mention of the GOP economic platform. Republican economic reformers of the 1970s and 1980s-especially Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp-understood the importance of stable money to U.S. prosperity.

On the other hand, the Bush Administration was clueless. Its succession of Treasury Secretaries promoted dollar devaluation little different from that of the current Administration, while the White House ignored or applauded an over-easy Fed policy that created the credit boom and housing bubble that led to financial panic.

Misguided monetary policy can ruin an Administration as thoroughly as higher taxes and destructive regulation, and the new GOP majority in the House and especially the next GOP President need to be alert to the dangers. Mrs. Palin is way ahead of her potential Presidential competitors on this policy point, and she shows a talent for putting a technical subject in language that average Americans can understand.

Which brings us to Mr. Zoellick, who exceeded even Mrs. Palin's daring yesterday by mentioning the word "gold" in the orthodox Keynesian company of the Financial Times. This is like mentioning the name "Palin" in the Princeton faculty lounge.

Mr. Zoellick, who worked at the Treasury under James Baker in the 1980s, laid out an agenda for a new global monetary regime to reduce currency turmoil and spur growth: "This new system is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and a renminbi that moves toward internalization and then an open capital account," he wrote, in an echo of what we've been saying for some time.

And here's Mr. Zoellick's sound-money kicker: "The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values. Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today." Mr. Zoellick's last observation will not be news to investors, who have traded gold up to $1,400 an ounce, its highest level in real terms since the 1970s, as a hedge against the risk of future inflation.

However, his point will shock many of the world's financial policy makers, who still think of gold as a barbarous relic rather than as an important price signal. Lest they faint in the halls of the International Monetary Fund, we don't think Mr. Zoellick is calling for a return to a full-fledged gold standard. His nonetheless useful point is that a system of global monetary cooperation needs a North Star to judge when it is running off course. The Bretton Woods accord used gold as such a reference until the U.S. failed to heed its discipline in the late 1960s and in 1971 revoked the pledge to sell other central banks gold at $35 an ounce.

One big problem in the world economy today is the frequent and sharp movement in exchange rates, especially between the euro and dollar. This distorts trade and investment flows and leads to a misallocation of capital and trade tensions. A second and related problem is the desire of the Obama Administration and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to devalue the dollar to boost exports as a way to compensate for the failed spending stimulus.

As recently as this week in India, Mr. Obama said that "We can't continue situations where some countries maintain massive [trade] surpluses, other countries have massive deficits and never is there an adjustment with respect to currency that would lead to a more balanced growth pattern."

If this isn't a plea for a weaker dollar in the name of balancing trade flows, what is it? The world knows the Fed can always win such a currency race to the bottom in the short run because it can print an unlimited supply of dollars. But the risks of currency war and economic instability are enormous.

In their different ways, Mrs. Palin and Mr. Zoellick are offering a better policy path: More careful monetary policy in the U.S., and more U.S. leadership abroad with a goal of greater monetary cooperation and less volatile exchange rates. If Mr. Obama is looking for advice on this beyond Mr. Zoellick, he might consult Paul Volcker or Nobel laureate Robert Mundell. A chance for monetary reform is a terrible thing to waste.

Regardless of what you think of Palin, who else do you see out in front of this? Mitt Romney? What is the White House saying? Are they out of the country specifically because of this move?

Erskine Bowles and former-Sen. Alan Simpson today released their draft recommendations on how to reduce the country's budget deficit.

● Index the retirement age to longevity -- i.e., increase the retirement age to qualify for Social Security -- to age 69 by 2075.

● Index Social Security yearly increases to a lower inflation rate, which will generally mean lower cost of living increases and less money per average recipient.

● "Increase progressivity of benefit formula" -- i.e., reduce benefits by 2050 for middle, and, especially, higher earners, relative to current benefits.

● Increase the Social Security contribution ceiling: while people only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,800 of their wages today, that's only about 86% of the total potentially taxable wages. The co-chairs suggest raising the ceiling to capture 90% of wages.

● The co-chairs suggest capping both government expenditures and revenue at 21% of GDP eventually.

● In their first plan, called "The Zero Plan," they suggest reducing the tax brackets to three personal brackets and one corporate rate while eliminated all credits and deductions. Without any credits or deductions (including the EITC and mortgage interest deductions), the 3 tax rates would be 8, 14 and 23 percent.

● In their second plan, they would increase the personal deduction to $15,000, create 3 tax brackets (15, 25 and 35%); repeal or significantly curtail a number of popular tax deductions (including the state and local deduction and the mortgage interest deduction); and eliminate other tax expenditures.

● The third plan would force Congress to undertake comprehensive tax reform by 2012 by raising taxes for each year Congress fails to act.

● All their proposals limit Congress to collecting taxes on income made within the United States, reducing or eliminating taxes on American expats and revenues companies earn abroad.

● Accelerate already-planned cuts to Medicare Advantage and home health care programs.

● Create a cap for Medicaid/Medicare growth that would force Congress and the President to increase premiums or co-pays or raise the Medicare eligibility age (among other options) if the system encounters cost overruns over the course of 5 years.

● Freeze federal worker wage increases through 2014; eliminate 200,000 federal jobs by 2020; and eliminate 250,000 federal non-defense contractor jobs by 2015.

● Eliminate subsidized student loans, in which the government makes interest payments while the student is in school.

● Establish co-pays in the VA medical system and change the co-pays and deductibles for military retirees that remain in that system.

● Require the Smithsonian museums to start charging entrance fees and raise fees at the national parks.

● Eliminate funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which many conservatives suggested in the wake of the firing of former NPR contributor Juan Williams.

● Create a Committee to eliminate unnecessary programs to the tune of $11 billion by 2015.

● Merge the Department of Commerce and the Small Business Administration and cut its budget by 10 percent.

● End "low-priority" Army Corps of Engineers programs to the tune of $1 billion by 2015.

● Cut the State Department's overseas budget by 10 percent by 2015; reduce the proposed foreign aid budget by 10 percent in 2015; and cut voluntary contributions to the United Nations by 10 percent in 2015.

● Eliminate the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which provides subsidized financing and political risk insurance for U.S. companies' investments abroad.

● Force airlines to increase their contributions to airline security costs and allow them to increase per-ticket security fees.

● Double the number of defense contractor positions scheduled for elimination from 10 percent of current staff augmentees to 20 percent.

● Halve the number of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters in favor of F-16s and F/A-18Es.

● Cancel the new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), the Ground Combat Vehicle, and the Joint Tactical Radio.

What is shocking is, these dramatic proposals gets us to a balanced budget by 2037 (p. 12). Are you kidding me?

In any case, Senator Simpson said: "We have harpooned every whale in the ocean - and some minnows."

In July, the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored a workshop on "History and Commemoration: The Legacies of the Pacific War in WWII" for college professors in Hawaii. Professor Penelope Blake, a veteran professor of Humanities at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., was one of 25 American scholars chosen to attend the workshop, but was reportedly disheartened to find the conference "driven by an overt political bias and a blatant anti-American agenda."

Professor Blake is now reportedly calling on Congress to implement better oversight over the NEH. In a letter addressed directly to her Illinois congressman, Rep. Don Manzullo, Blake documents conference details and asks him to vote against NEH funding for future events. According to PowerLine, copies of the letter have also been delivered to members of the NEH council and NEH chair Jim Leach.

Dear Congressman Manzullo:

As one of twenty-five American scholars chosen to participate in the recent National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Workshop, "History and Commemoration: Legacies of the Pacific War in WWII," at the University of Hawaii, East-West Center, I am writing to ask you to vote against approval of 2011 funding for future workshops until the NEH can account for the violation of its stated objective to foster "a mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups" (NEH Budget Request, 2011).

In my thirty years as a professor in upper education, I have never witnessed nor participated in a more extremist, agenda-driven, revisionist conference, nearly devoid of rhetorical balance and historical context for the arguments presented.

In both the required preparatory readings for the conference, as well as the scholarly presentations, I found the overriding messages to include the following:

1. The U.S. military and its veterans constitute an imperialistic, oppressive force which has created and perpetuated its own mythology of liberation and heroism, insisting on a "pristine collective memory" of the war. The authors/presenters equate this to Japan's almost total amnesia and denial about its own war atrocities (Fujitani, White, Yoneyama, 9, 23). One presenter specifically wrote about turning down a job offer when he realized that his office would overlook a fleet of U.S. Naval warships, "the symbol of American power and the symbol of our [Hawaiians'] dispossession.I decided they could not pay me enough" (Osorio 5). Later he claimed that electric and oil companies were at the root of WWII, and that the U.S. developed a naval base at Pearl Harbor to ensure that its own coasts would not be attacked (9, 13).

2. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor should be seen from the perspective of Japan being a victim of western oppression (one speaker likened the attack to 9-11, saying that the U.S. could be seen as "both victim and aggressor" in both attacks); that American "imperial expansion" forced Japan's hand: "For the Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western Imperialism" (Yoneyama 335-336); and the Pearl Harbor attack could be seen as a "pre-emptive strike." (No mention of the main reason for the Pearl Harbor attack: the U.S. had cut off Japan's oil supply in order to stop the wholesale slaughter of Chinese civilians at the hands of the Japanese military.) Another author argued that the Japanese attack was no more "infamous" or "sneaky" than American actions in Korea or Vietnam (Rosenberg 31-32).

3. War memorials, such as the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery (where many WWII dead are buried, including those executed by the Japanese on Wake Island and the beloved American journalist Ernie Pyle), are symbols of military aggression and brutality "that pacify death, sanitize war and enable future wars to be fought" (Ferguson and Turnbull, 1). One author stated that the memorials represent American propaganda, "the right to alter a story" (Camacho 201).

4. The U.S. military has repeatedly committed rapes and other violent crimes throughout its past through the present day. Cited here was the handful of cases of attacks by Marines in Okinawa (Fujitani, et al, 13ff). (What was not cited were the mass-murders, rapes, mutilations of hundreds of thousands of Chinese at the hands of the Japanese throughout the 1930s and 40s. This issue is a perfect example of the numerous instances of assertions made without balance or historical context.) Another author stated that the segregation in place within our military and our "occupation" of Germany after the war was comparable to Nazism ('we were as capable of as much evil as the Germans") even though the author admits, with some incredulity, that he "saw no genuine torture, despite all the [American] arrogance, xenophobia and insensitivity." He attributes American kindness towards conquered Germans to our "wealth and power" which allowed us to "forego the extreme kinds of barbarism" (Davis 586). Another author/presenter compared the temporary relocation camps erected by Americans during the war to Nazi extermination camps (Camacho 206). (This is perhaps the most outrageous, offensive and blatantly false statement I have ever read in a supposedly scholarly work).

5. Those misguided members of the WWII generation on islands like Guam and Saipan who feel gratitude to the Americans for saving them from the Japanese are blinded by propaganda supporting "the image of a compassionate America" or by their own advanced age. One author/presenter questioned whether the Americans had saved anyone from anything (Camacho 177, 209), arguing that the Americans could be seen as easily and justifiably as "conquerors and invaders" (199).

6. It was "the practice" of the U.S. military in WWII to desecrate and disrespect the bodies of dead Japanese (Camacho 186). (Knowing this to be absolutely false, I challenged the speaker/author, who then admitted that this was not the "practice" of our military. Still, the word remains in his publication. As he obviously knew this to be false, I can only assume that his objective was not scholarship but anti-military propaganda.)

7. Conservatives and veterans in the U.S. have had an undue and corrupt influence on how WWII is remembered, for example, successfully lobbying to remove from the Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit images of the destruction caused by the atom bomb and the revisionist portrayal of the Japanese as victims in the war (Yoneyama). (What the presenter and author, Ms. Yoneyama, failed to explain was why all representations of Japan's murderous rampages throughout China and the Philippines were removed from the exhibit as well.surely not at the request of American veterans or conservatives. When I challenged Ms. Yoneyama to explain this issue, a tense exchange ensued, but I finally established that Japanese influences had also played a role in "shaping" the exhibit. This never would have been mentioned had I not demanded the speaker address this distortion in her presentation. Ms. Yoneyama clearly intended to present a one-sided attack on those who wanted the exhibit to emphasize the many reasons why the atom bombs were necessary.) Ms. Yoneyama concluded her essay with a parting shot at the veterans, whom she mockingly labels "martyrs of their sacred war," and "conservative elites" who objected to the Smithsonian's revisionist history: "the Smithsonian debate ended in the defeat of those who sought critical rethinking, as well as the defeat of those who questioned the self-evident., and the victory of those who felt threatened by obfuscation of the contours of conventional knowledge" (emphasis mine, 329,339). The author's elitist dismissal of those who questioned the Enola Gay exhibit is representative of the perspectives and tone of much of the conference, as illustrated by the following point.

8. Conservatives are reactionary nationalists (no distinction was made between nationalism and patriotism), pro-military "tea baggers" who are incapable of "critical thinking." Comments were made about "people who watch Fox News" not caring if the news "is accurate or not" (Yoneyama, Lecture). The end result of this deprecation within the conference room was to discourage debate and create an atmosphere of intolerance to opposing views, in direct violation of the stated objectives of the NEH. Several participants told me privately that they considered me "brave" for speaking up, thus begging the question: At a conference supposedly committed to openness and tolerance of all views, why should it take bravery to speak one's mind?

9. Relating to the above, even members of the NEH review board are not immune to "reactionary" pro-military views. One essay recounts how an earlier attempt to receive funding for a similar conference was denied because some NEH reviewers thought the "program lacked diversity and balance among points of view"..and that the organizers possessed "a very specific, `politically correct' agenda," noting that "bias is dangerously threatening throughout." The authors of the essay dismissed and denigrated these NEH reviewers with the same elitist attitude they exhibited towards the "Fox News" viewers: "Clearly this reviewer was unable to comprehend our understanding" of the conference objectives (in other words, he/she is stupid), and "what he or she really desired was the inclusion of defenders of American nationalism and militarism" (Fujitani, et al, 24).

10. Veterans' memories of their own experiences in the war are suspect and influenced by media and their own self-delusion (Rosenberg, 18, 24). Therefore, it is the role of academics to "correct" their history. As one organizer commented, this will be more easily accomplished once the WWII generation has passed away. Another wrote, "America's nostalgic war memories are beginning to fray around the edges" (White, 267).

11. War memorials like the Arizona Memorial should be recast as "peace memorials," sensitive to all viewers from all countries, especially the many visitors from Japan. The conference dedicated significant time to the discussion of whether or not a Japanese memorial in honor of victims of the atom bombs should be erected at the Arizona Memorial site, in order to pacify Japanese visitors who may be offended by the "racism" [anti-Japanese] of the Arizona Memorial. To this end, the conference organizers discussed a revised film (1992) shown to visitors to the Arizona Memorial which removed some of the earlier (1980) film's "Japan-bashing" and warnings about the need for the American military to remain prepared in the future. The new film, which emphasizes the reasons (justifications?) for the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor, includes fewer battle scenes and "transforms the triumphant feelings of victory with a more mournful reflection of losses inflicted by war" (White 285), thus sending a more pacifist, anti-war message and offering a perspective which makes people "less angry" after viewing the film (the author acknowledges that this has worked well, except for "older citizens" who are outraged by the "revisionist" sympathy towards the Japanese) (287). The new, more "inclusive" film features visual images of both American and Japanese dead, Japanese Buddhist monks visiting the memorial, and a culminating text which reads "Mourn the dead" as opposed to "Mourn American dead" or "Mourn our dead" so that "it represented the U.S. and Japanese" (emphasis mine, 288). The memorial's superintendent, Donald Magee, summed up the tone of the new film: "We don't take sides..here at Pearl Harbor we don't condemn the Japanese" (292). Based on the author's description, I refused to attend a viewing of the film, in protest of its appeasement of treachery and attempts to revise historical fact.

As overwhelming and pervasive as these politically-correct and revisionist messages were, the conference did feature a few presentations and articles which represented truly excellent examples of balanced, well-researched scholarship. One highpoint of the conference was a panel of WWII veterans who shared with us their personal experiences of the war. But, given the overall anti-military bias present at this conference, I could not help but shudder to think how these amazing men would feel if they knew the true focus of the conference. I honestly felt ashamed of my profession and my government for sponsoring this travesty.I am aware that my comments may well have been dismissed by the conference organizers in the same manner they dismissed other opposing voices as "nationalistic" or simplistic. So be it. But I am no blind patriot, Congressman Manzullo, nor am I ignorant of the complexities inherent in the telling and re-telling of history. I also acknowledge, research and teach the many mistakes this country has made, and I am as suspect of the extreme right as I am of the extreme left. But I am also a historian who knows that despite all of their mistakes, this nation and its military have defended, protected and freed more people in their comparatively brief existence than all of the nations in Europe and Asia combined. Allied efforts, however imperfect, defended the world against two of the greatest forms of evil the world has ever known, European Fascism and Japanese Imperialism. This perspective was never, not once, offered at this conference except as a concept that will be well-buried with the WWII generation. If nothing else, I have shown that any imminent celebration of the demise of these concepts may be premature.

As a daughter of two WWII veterans and the niece of a man who gave his life to help defend his country in WWII, I simply will not stand by and allow their history to be usurped and corrupted by a revisionist and iconoclastic political agenda within academe.

The NEH is requesting an operating budget of 161 million dollars for 2011, including over 71 million to support conferences like the one I have described. I ask that you do everything in your power to delay approval of this request until the NEH does the following:

1.Reviews all NEH conference and workshop proposals and supporting materials to eliminate any overt political agenda;

2.Illustrates to Congress and the American people an ability to create programs which support sound and objective scholarship and provide forums for debate in which all sides are recognized and encouraged;

3.Eliminates all intolerance and pejorative language towards any group or viewpoint;

4. Commits itself to a fair and balanced view of our nation's history and humanities, acknowledging its mistakes but also honoring its achievements.

To demonstrate the above, any group or institution requesting a grant from the NEH should be required to submit its entire schedule of presenters and a complete list of the literature which will be discussed at the conference to ensure that varied sides of any issue will be represented and respected.

Until these actions are taken, I sincerely doubt that the majority of Americans would approve of their tax dollars supporting this academic attack on American history and culture. I plan to do everything in my power to inform American voters of this issue, and I trust our elected officials will take heed of their constituents' reactions.

Citations for the sources I have used are attached to this letter. Should you wish any further documentation on the issues I have raised or have any questions, feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Penelope A. Blake, Ph.D.

The NEH isn't the first federal agency accused to misusing its funding to pursue a particular agenda. Most recently, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was accused of partisan operations when a recorded conference callrevealed government officials asking artists to design projects in support of the Obama administration's agenda.

Whenever the party that controls the White House does not also control Capitol Hill, political pundits worry that there will be "gridlock" in Washington, so that the government cannot solve the nation's problems.

Almost never is that fear based on what actually happens when there is divided government, compared to what happens when one party has a monopoly of both legislative and executive branches.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, instead of its usual deficits, there was divided government. That was when the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, and Bill Clinton was in the White House. The media called it "the Clinton surplus."

By the same token, some of the worst laws ever passed were passed when one party had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, as well as being led by their own President of the United States. ObamaCare is a product of the kind of arrogance that so much power breeds.

It was the same story back in the famous "first hundred days" of the New Deal in 1933. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 clamped down on the American economy the kind of pervasive government control seldom seen outside of totalitarian countries.

It was the ObamaCare of its time, but covering industries right down to local dry cleaners. One man was sent to jail for charging less than the government-specified price for pressing a suit of clothes. This typified the mindset of the New Deal.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court eventually declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. But, before that happened, the N.I.R.A. probably did more to prevent the economy from recovering from the Great Depression than any other law or policy. Even liberal icon John Maynard Keynes said at the time that the N.I.R.A. "probably impedes recovery."

You cannot tell what effect a law or policy will have by what politicians call it, whether they label it a "recovery" program or a "stimulus" program.

Those who fear gridlock in Washington today implicitly assume that government actions are needed to "solve" the economy's "problems." That assumption has been so pervasive over the past 80 years that many people fail to realize that the republic existed for nearly twice that long before the federal government intervened to get the economy out of a recession or depression.

During all that time, no depression ever lasted even half as long as the Great Depression of the 1930s, when first President Hoover and then President Roosevelt intervened.

For most of the history of this country, there was no Federal Reserve System, which was established in 1914 to prevent bank failures and the bad effects of large expansions or contractions of the supply of money and credit. But bank failures in the 1930s exceeded anything ever seen before the Fed was established. So did the contraction of money and credit during the Great Depression.

The seductive notion that some Big Daddy in Washington can solve our problems for us-- whether healing the sick, preventing poverty or "growing the economy"-- is encouraged by politicians for obvious reasons, and the media echo the idea.

Both in Washington and in the media, there is virtually zero interest in comparing what actually happens when the federal government intervenes in the economy and when it does not.

More than a century and a half of ignoring downturns in the economy never produced a depression as deep or as long as the 1930s depression, with its many federal interventions, first under Herbert Hoover and then under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The unemployment rate was 6.3 percent when the first big intervention took place, during the Hoover administration. It later peaked at 25 percent, but its fluctuations were always in double digits throughout the 1930s, as FDR tried one thing after another. As late as the spring of 1939, nearly a decade after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment hit 20 percent again.

It is not a matter of faith that a market economy can recover on its own. It is a matter of faith that politicians speed recovery. But there is no way that Barack Obama is going to stop intervening in the economy unless he gets stopped. Only gridlock can do that.

Results of the recent elections showed that growing numbers of Americans are fed up with "public servants" who act as if they are public masters. This went beyond the usual objections to particular policies. It was the fact that policies were crammed down our throats, whether we liked them or not. In fact, laws were passed so fast that nobody had time to read them.

Whether these policies were good, bad or indifferent, the way they were imposed represented a more fundamental threat to the very principles of a self-governing people established by the Constitution of the United States.

Arrogant politicians who do this are dismantling the Constitution piecemeal-- which is to say, they are dismantling America.

The voters struck back, as they had to, if we are to keep the freedoms that define this country. The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution, by getting rid of those who circumvent it or disregard it.

The same thing applies to judges. The runaway arrogance that politicians get when they have huge majorities in Congress is a more or less common arrogance among federal judges with lifetime tenure or state judges who are seldom defeated in elections to confirm their appointments to the bench.

It was a surprise to many-- and a shock to media liberals-- when three judges on Iowa's Supreme Court were voted off that court in the same recent elections in which a lot of politicians were also sent packing.

These judges had taken it upon themselves to rule that the voters of Iowa did not have the right to block attempts to change the definition of marriage to include homosexual couples. Here again, the particular issue-- so-called "gay marriage"-- was not as fundamental as the question of depriving the voting public of their right to decide what kinds of laws they want to live under.

That is ultimately a question of deciding what kind of country this is to be-- one ruled by "we the people" or one where the notions of an arrogant elite are to be imposed, whether the people agree or not.

Those who believe in gay marriage are free to vote for it. But, when they lose that vote, it is not the role of judges to nullify the vote and legislate from the bench. Judges who become politicians in robes often lie like politicians as well, claiming that they are just applying the Constitution, when they are in fact exercising powers that the Constitution never gave them.

If they are going to act like politicians, then they should be voted out like politicians.

Media liberals, who like what liberal judges do, spring to their defense. The media spin is that judges were voted off the bench because of "unpopular" decisions and that this threatens judicial "independence."

Since this was the first time that a justice of the Iowa Supreme Court was voted off the bench in nearly half a century, it is very doubtful that there was never an "unpopular" court decision in all that time. The media spin about "unpopular" decisions sidesteps the far more important question of whether the judges usurped powers that were never given to them by the Constitution.

As for judicial "independence," that does not mean being independent of the laws. Being a judge does not mean being given arbitrary powers to enact the liberal agenda from the bench, which means depriving the citizens of their most basic rights that define a free and self-governing people.

While removing three state Supreme Court justices at one time in Iowa is news today, the very same thing happened in California back in the 1970s. Every single death penalty imposed by a trial court in California was overturned by the state Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Rose Bird voting 64 times in a row that there was something wrong with the way each trial had been conducted. That was world-class chutzpa.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that Arizona does not have a right to require proof of citizenship before someone can vote. Where does it say that in the Constitution?

The time is long overdue to stop treating judges like sacred cows, especially when they have so much bull.

Guess who said the following: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work." Was it Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Karl Rove?

Not even close. It was Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of FDR's closest advisers. He added, "after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . And an enormous debt to boot!"

This is just one of the remarkable and eye-opening facts in a must-read book titled "New Deal or Raw Deal?" by Professor Burton W. Folsom, Jr., of Hillsdale College.

Ordinarily, what happened in the 1930s might be something to be left for historians to be concerned about. But the very same kinds of policies that were tried-- and failed-- during the 1930s are being carried out in Washington today, with the advocates of such policies often invoking FDR's New Deal as a model.

Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed the country's woes on the problems he inherited from his predecessor, much as Barack Obama does today. But unemployment was 20 percent in the spring of 1939, six long years after Herbert Hoover had left the White House.

Whole generations have been "educated" to believe that the Roosevelt administration is what got this country out of the Great Depression. History text books by famous scholars like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia have enshrined FDR as a historic savior of this country, and lesser lights in the media and elsewhere have perpetuated the legend.

Although Professor Schlesinger admitted that he had little interest in economics, that did not stop him from making sweeping statements about what a great economic achievement the New Deal was.

Professors Commager and Morris of Columbia likewise declared: "The character of the Republican ascendancy of the twenties had been pervasively negative; the character of the New Deal was overwhelmingly positive." Anyone unfamiliar with the history of that era might never suspect from such statements that the 1920s were a decade of unprecedented prosperity and the 1930s were a decade of the deepest and longest-lasting depression in American history. But facts have taken a back seat to rhetoric.

In more recent years, there have been both academic studies and popular books debunking some of the myths about the New Deal. Nevertheless, Professor Folsom's book "New Deal or Raw Deal?" breaks new ground. Although written by an academic scholar and based on years of documented research, it is as readable as a newspaper-- and a lot more informative than most.

There are few historic events whose legends are more grossly different from the reality than the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And there are few men whose image has been more radically different from the man himself.

Some of the most devastating things that were said about FDR were not said by his political enemies but by people who worked closely with him for years-- Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau being just one. Morgenthau saw not only the utter failure of Roosevelt's policies, but also the failure of Roosevelt himself, who didn't even know enough economics to realize how little he knew.

Far from pulling the country out of the Great Depression by following Keynesian policies, FDR created policies that prolonged the depression until it was more than twice as long as any other depression in American history. Moreover, Roosevelt's ad hoc improvisations followed nothing as coherent as Keynesian economics.

To the extent that FDR followed the ideas of any economist, it was an obscure economist at the University of Wisconsin, who was disdained by other economists and who was regarded with contempt by John Maynard Keynes.

President Roosevelt's strong suit was politics, not economics. He played the political game both cleverly and ruthlessly, including using both the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to harass and intimidate his critics and opponents.

One tragedy of war is that its victors write its history and often do so with bias and dishonesty. That's true about our War of 1861, erroneously called a civil war. Civil wars, by the way, are when two or more parties attempt to take over the central government. Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington, in 1776, wanted to take over London. Both wars were wars of independence.

Kevin Sieff, staff writer for The Washington Post, penned an article "Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers," (Oct. 20, 2010). The textbook says that blacks fought on the side of the Confederacy. Sieff claims that "Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history." William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff said, "It is disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship." Let's examine that accepted scholarship.

In April 1861, a Petersburg, Va., newspaper proposed "three cheers for the patriotic free Negroes of Lynchburg" after 70 blacks offered "to act in whatever capacity may be assigned to them" in defense of Virginia. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass observed, "There are at the present moment, many colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down ... and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government."

Charles H. Wesley, a distinguished black historian who lived from 1891 to 1987, wrote "The Employment of Negroes as Soldiers in the Confederate Army," in the Journal of Negro History (1919). He says, "Seventy free blacks enlisted in the Confederate Army in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sixteen companies (1,600) of free men of color marched through Augusta, Georgia on their way to fight in Virginia."

Wesley cites Horace Greeley's "American Conflict" (1866) saying, "For more than two years, Negroes had been extensively employed in belligerent operations by the Confederacy. They had been embodied and drilled as rebel soldiers and had paraded with white troops at a time when this would not have been tolerated in the armies of the Union."

Wesley goes on to say, "An observer in Charleston at the outbreak of the war noted the preparation for war, and called particular attention to the thousand Negroes who, so far from inclining to insurrections, were grinning from ear to ear at the prospect of shooting the Yankees."

One would have to be stupid to think that blacks were fighting in order to preserve slavery. What's untaught in most history classes is that it is relatively recent that we Americans think of ourselves as citizens of United States. For most of our history, we thought of ourselves as citizens of Virginia, citizens of New York and citizens of whatever state in which we resided. Wesley says, "To the majority of the Negroes, as to all the South, the invading armies of the Union seemed to be ruthlessly attacking independent States, invading the beloved homeland and trampling upon all that these men held dear." Blacks have fought in all of our wars both before and after slavery, in hopes of better treatment afterwards.

Denying the role, and thereby cheapening the memory, of the Confederacy's slaves and freemen who fought in a failed war of independence is part of the agenda to cover up Abraham Lincoln's unconstitutional acts to prevent Southern secession. Did states have a right to secede? At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, James Madison rejected a proposal that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. He said, "A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."

One of the greatest sources of confusion and deception is the difference between leftists, progressives, socialists, communists and fascists. I thought about this as I caught a glimpse of the Oct. 2 "One Nation" march on Washington. The participants proudly marched with banners, signs and placards reading "Socialists," "Ohio U Democratic Socialists," "International Socialists Organization," "Socialist Party USA," "Build A Socialist Alternative" and other signs expressing support for socialism and communism. They had stands where they sold booklets under the titles of "Marxism and the State," "Communist Manifesto," "Four Marxist Classics," "The Road to Socialism" and similar titles.

The gathering had the support of the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union, stalwarts of the Democratic Party such as Al Sharpton and organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club, and the Children's Defense Fund.

What goes unappreciated is that socialists and communists have produced the greatest evil in mankind's history. You say, "Williams, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They're trying to promote social justice." Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, Nazi stands for National Socialist German Workers' Party. Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and in nations they captured. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Socialist Workers' Party pale in comparison to the horrors committed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and their successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tse-tung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii's Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, "Death by Government." A wealth of information is provided at his website.

You say, "Williams, isn't it a bit unfair to lump the "One Nation" communists, socialists and their supporters with mass murderers such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung? After all, they expressed no such murderous goal." When Hitler, Stalin and Mao were campaigning for political power, you can bet they didn't campaign on the promise to murder millions of their own people, and probably the thought of doing so never crossed their minds. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, Russians and Chinese, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for a Hitler, a Stalin or Mao to take over. But as Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

While America's leftists, socialists and communists condemn Hitler, they give the world's most horrible murderers a pass. First, they make a false distinction between fascism, communism and socialism but more importantly, they sympathize with the socioeconomic goals of communism and socialism. The primary goal of communism and socialism is government ownership or control over the means of production. In the U.S., only a few people call for outright government ownership of the means of production. They might have learned that government ownership would mess things up. Instead, they've increasingly called for quasi-ownership through various forms of government regulation, oversight, taxation and subsidies. After all, if someone has the power to tell you how you may use your property, it's tantamount to his owing it.

I believe most Americans find the ideals and principles of socialism, communism and progressivism repugnant, but by our sanctioning greater government centralization and its control over our lives, we become their dupes or, as Lenin said, "useful idiots."

One of President Obama's campaign promises was not to raise taxes on middle-class Americans. So here's my question: If there's a corporate tax increase either in the form of "cap and trade" or income tax, does it turn out to be a middle-class tax increase? Most people would say no but let's look at it.

There's a whole subject area in economics known as tax incidence -- namely, who bears the burden of a tax? The first thing that should be recognized is that the burden of a tax is not necessarily borne by the party upon whom it is levied. That is, for example, if a sales tax is levied on gasoline retailers, they don't bear the full burden of the tax. Part of it is shifted to customers in the form of higher gasoline prices.

Suppose your local politician tells you, as a homeowner, "I'm not going to raise taxes on you! I'm going to raise taxes on your land." You'd probably tell him that he's an idiot because land does not pay taxes; only people pay taxes. That means a tax on your land is a tax on you. You say, "Williams, that's pretty elementary, isn't it?" Not quite.

What about the politician who tells us that he's not going to raise taxes on the middle class; instead, he's going to raise corporate income taxes as means to get rich corporations to pay their rightful share of government? If a tax is levied on a corporation, and if it is to survive, it will have one of three responses, or some combination thereof. One response is to raise the price of its product, so who bears the burden? Another response is to lower dividends; again, who bears the burden? Yet another response is to lay off workers. In each case, it is people, not some legal fiction called a corporation, who bear the burden of the tax.

Because corporations have these responses to the imposition of a tax, they are merely government tax collectors. They collect money from people and send it to Washington. Therefore, you should tell that politician, who promises to tax corporations instead of you, that he's an idiot because corporations, like land, do not pay taxes. Only people pay taxes.

Here's another tax question, even though it doesn't sound like it. Which workers receive higher pay: those on a road construction project moving dirt with shovels and wheelbarrows or those moving dirt atop a giant earthmover? If you said the worker atop the earthmover, go to the head of the class. But why? It's not because he's unionized or that construction contractors have a fondness for earthmover operators. It's because the worker atop the earthmover is working with more capital, thereby making him more productive. Higher productivity means higher wages.

It's not rocket science to conclude that whatever lowers the cost of capital formation, such as lowering the cost of investing in earthmovers, enables contractors to purchase more of them. Workers will have more capital to work with and as a result enjoy higher wages. Policies that raise the cost of capital formation such as capital gains taxes, low depreciation allowances and corporate taxes, thereby reduce capital formation, and serve neither the interests of workers, investors nor consumers. It does serve the interests of politicians who get more resources to be able to buy votes.

You might wonder how congressmen can get away with taxes and other measures that reduce our prosperity potential. Part of the answer is ignorance and the anti-business climate promoted in academia and the news media. The more important reason is that prosperity foregone is invisible. In other words, we can never tell how much richer we would have been without today's level of congressional interference in our lives and therefore don't fight it as much as we should.

Congratulations to all of you for your contribution to this historic election, and for the contributions I am certain you will make to our country in the next two years. Your victory was hard fought, and the success belongs entirely to you and the staff and volunteers who spent countless hours working for this chance to put government back on the side of the people. Now you will come to Washington to serve your nation and leave your mark on history by reining in government spending, preserving our freedoms at home, and restoring America's leadership abroad.

Some of you have asked for my thoughts on how best to proceed in the weeks and months ahead and how best to advance an agenda that can move our country forward. I have a simple answer: stick to the principles that propelled your campaigns. When you take your oath to support and defend our Constitution and to faithfully discharge the duties of your office, remember that present and future generations of "We the People" are counting on you to stand by that oath. Never forget the people who sent you to Washington. Never forget the trust they placed in you to do the right thing.

The task before you is daunting because so much damage has been done in the last two years, but I believe you have the chance to achieve great things.

Republicans campaigned on a promise to rein in out-of-control government spending and to repeal and replace the massive, burdensome, and unwanted health care law President Obama and the Democrat Congress passed earlier this year in defiance of the will of the majority of the American people. These are promises that you must keep. Obamacare is a job-killer, a regulatory nightmare, and an enormous unfunded mandate. The American people don't want it and we can't afford it. We ask, with all due respect, that you remember your job will be to work to replace this legislation with real reform that relies on free market principles and patient-centered policies. The first step is, of course, to defund Obamacare.

You've also got to be deadly serious about cutting the deficit. Despite what some would like us to believe, tax cuts didn't get us into the mess we're in. Government spending did. Tough decisions need to be made about reducing government spending. The longer we put them off, the worse it will get. We need to start by cutting non-essential spending. That includes stopping earmarks (because abuse of the earmark process created the "gateway-drug" that allowed backroom deals and bloated budgets), canceling all further spending on the failed Stimulus program, and rolling back non-discretionary spending to 2008 levels. You can do more, but this would be a good start.

In order to avert a fiscal disaster, we will also need to check the growth of spending on our entitlement programs. That will be a huge challenge, but it must be confronted head on. We must do it in a humane way that honors the government's current commitments to our fellow Americans while also keeping faith with future generations. We cannot rob from our children and grandchildren's tomorrow to pay for our unchecked spending today. Beyond that, we need to reform the way Congress conducts business in order to make it procedurally easier to cut spending than to increase it. We need to encourage zero-based budgeting practices in D.C. like the kind fiscally conservative mayors and governors utilize to balance their budgets and reduce unnecessary spending.

There in the insulated and isolated Beltway you will be far removed from the economic pain felt by so many Americans who are out of work. Please remember that if we want real job growth, we must create a stable investment climate by ending the tidal wave of overly burdensome regulations coming out of Washington. Businesses need certainty - and freedom that incentivizes competition - to grow and expand our workforce.

The last thing our small businesses need is tax hikes. It falls to the current Democrat-controlled Congress to decide on the future of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. If it does not permanently renew all of them, you should move quickly to do so in the new Congress. It would remove from households and businesses the threat of a possible $3.8 trillion tax hike hitting all Americans at the worst possible moment, with our economy struggling to recover from a deep recession! You must continue to remind Democrats that the people they are dismissing as "rich" are the small business owners who create up to 70% of all jobs in this country!

Another issue of vital importance is border security. Americans expect our leadership in Washington to act now to secure our borders. Don't fall for the claims of those who suggest that we can't secure our borders until we simultaneously deal with the illegal immigrants already here. Let's deal with securing the border first. That alone is a huge challenge that has been ignored for far too long.

On foreign policy and national security, I urge you to stick to our principles: strong defense, free trade, nurturing allies, and steadfast opposition to America's enemies. We are the most powerful country on earth and the world is better off

because of it. Our president does not seem to understand this. If we withdraw from the world, the world will become a much more dangerous place. You must push President Obama to finish the job right in Iraq and get the job done in Afghanistan, otherwise we who are war-weary will forever question why America's finest are sent overseas to make the ultimate sacrifice with no clear commitment to victory from those who send them. You should be prepared to stand with the President against Iran's nuclear aspirations using whatever means necessary to ensure the mullahs in Tehran do not get their hands on nuclear weapons. And you can stand with the Iranian people who oppose the tyrannical rule of the clerics and concretely support their efforts to win their freedom - even if the President does not.

You need to say no to cutting the necessities in our defense budget when we are engaged in two wars and face so many threats - from Islamic extremists to a nuclear Iran to a rising China. As Ronald Reagan said, "We will always be prepared, so we may always be free." You will also have the opportunity to push job-creating free trade agreements with allies like Colombia and South Korea. You can stand with allies like Israel, not criticize them. You can let the President know what you believe - Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, not a settlement. And for those of you joining the United States Senate, don't listen to desperate politically-motivated arguments about the need for hasty consideration of the "New START" treaty. Insist on your right to patient and careful deliberation of New START to address very real concerns about verification, missile defense, and modernization of our nuclear infrastructure. No New START in the lame duck!

You can stand against misguided proposals to try dangerous, evil terrorists in the US; precipitously close the Guantanamo prison; and a return to the failed policies of the past in treating the war on terror as a law enforcement problem. Finally, you have a platform to express the support of the American people for all those around the world seeking their freedom that God has bestowed within all mankind's being - from Burma and Egypt to Russia and Venezuela - because the spread of liberty increases our own security. You, freshmen lawmakers, can and will be powerful voices in support of foreign policies that protect our interests and promote our values! Thank you for being willing to fight for our values and our freedom!

In all this, you should extend a hand to President Obama and Democrats in Congress. After this election, they may finally be prepared to work with Republicans on some of these issues for the good of the country. And if not, we will all be looking forward to 2012.

Remember that some in the media will love you when you stray from the time-tested truths that built America into the most exceptional nation on earth. When the Left in the media pat you on the back, quickly reassess where you are and readjust, for the liberals' praise is a warning bell you must heed. Trust me on that.

I and most Americans are so excited for you. Working together, we have every right to be optimistic about our future. We can be hopeful because real hope lies in the ingenuity, generosity, and boundless courage of the everyday Americans who make our country exceptional. These are the men and women who sent you to Washington. May your work and leadership honor their faith in you.

Listen up, California. The other 48 states-your cousin New York excluded-are sick of your bratty arrogance. You're the Lindsay Lohan of states: a prima donna who once showed some talent but is now too wasted to do anything with it.

After enjoying ephemeral highs and spending binges, you suffer crashes that culminate in brief, unsuccessful stints in rehab. This cycle repeats itself every five to 10 years, as the rest of the country looks on with a mixture of horror and amusement. We'd feel sorry for you if you didn't constantly flip us the bird.

Instead, we're making bets on how long it will be before your next meltdown. Oh, wait-you're already melting down.

Opinion Journal's Allysia Finley argues that California is suffering from spending addiction like starlet Lindsay Lohan.

You've racked up nearly $70 billion in general obligation debt, and that doesn't include your $500 billion unfunded pension liability. Your own analysts predict you'll face a hole of at least $80 billion over the next four years.

Your government's run by a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums. When they're not taxing or spending, they're creating regulations and commissions like the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology and the California Blueberry Commission. Many businesses would leave if it weren't for your sunny climate.

Which may explain why you're so obsessed with climate change. If your climate changes, no one, including your Hollywood friends, would tolerate you anymore. So you've created a law to tax carbon emissions-no matter that it will kill jobs.

It's not as if you don't recognize that you've got problems. Roughly three-quarters of you say you're headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. You're even more depressed than Illinois and New York, and you've got sunshine 10 months of the year!

You appropriately give your government low marks-28% approval for outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 16% for the legislature-yet you continue to re-elect the politicians who got you into this mess. Not a single incumbent state legislator lost re-election this year, including one Democrat who died a month ago (no joke). What's scarier is that you've just given almost all of the keys to statewide offices to Democrats.

Jerry Brown will be your new (old) governor. This is the man who acted as a gateway drug to your spending addiction three decades ago when he gave public-sector employees collective bargaining rights. Helping enforce your wacky laws will be Lt. Gov-elect Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who flouted state law by allowing same-sex marriage. On the plus side, he has nice hair and loves you just the way you are. This is what he had to say after winning his race:

"We're nothing but a mirror of our consistent thoughts. You tend to manifest what you focus on. If you look around for what's wrong, you'll find it. But as all we know up here in San Francisco, when you focus on what's right, you see it all around you. . . . There is absolutely nothing wrong with California that can't be fixed by what's right with California. . . . If you're from another state, you'd love to have the problems of California."

You've also just re-elected Barbara Boxer (that's Senator Barbara Boxer) to a fourth term. She boasted on election night that it's her "eleventh straight election victory, and what a sweet one it is . . . [since] everything was thrown at us, including the kitchen sink, and the stove and the oven and everything, millions of dollars of negative ads from known and unknown opponents, millions and millions of dollars."

We've tried to help you, California. Some spent millions on campaigns to entice you to change your reckless behavior. And you told them to kick rocks.

So here's our final warning: When you inevitably crash and burn, don't count on us to bail you out.

Facing a $25 billion deficit for their next two-year budget cycle, Texas lawmakers are considering closing the gap by dropping out of Medicaid. "This system is bankrupting our state," State Representative Warren Chisum told The New York Times. "We need to get out of it. And with the budget shortfall we're anticipating, we may have to act this year," he said.

And Texas is not alone. American Legislative Exchange Council director of the health and human services Christie Herrera tells NYT: "States feel like their backs are against the wall, so this is the nuclear option for them. I'm hearing below-the-radar chatter from legislators around the country from states considering this option."

Medicaid already eats up a huge share of state budgets. In Texas, for example, more than 20 percent of the state budget is spent on Medicaid. The crisis facing states across the country is that Obamacare forces states to massively expand their already burdensome Medicaid rolls. Starting in 2014 states must expand Medicaid to all non-elderly individuals with family incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level. At first, Obamacare picks up the first three years of benefit costs for expansion. But in 2017 states begin to shoulder a larger and larger share of these benefit costs, maxing out at 10 percent by 2020.

But that is just the benefit costs. Obamacare does not pay for any of the costs necessary to administer the expansion of the Medicaid rolls, rolls that are expected to increase by approximately 50 percent in states like Nevada, Oregon, and Texas. The Heritage Foundation's Ed Haislmaier and Brian Blase found that just the administrative costs of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion will cost almost $12 billion by 2020. As Heritage visiting fellow Lanhee Chen details, some states are beginning to add the benefit and administrative costs together, and the picture isn't pretty:

Obamacare's unfunded mandates are a fiscal time bomb set to explode state balance sheets across the country starting in 2014. States can prepare for the worst by slashing discretionary spending where possible and lowering existing health care costs by repealing their own burdensome health benefit mandates. But the only real solution is full repeal of Obamacare.

This week, President Bush is making the media rounds talking about his new book and explaining some of his controversial decisions while in office. I will interview the president later this week.

But Monday night NBC's Matt Lauer got first crack at him. Mr. Lauer is a good interrogator, but he is a liberal guy and his q and a about waterboarding was very interesting. Watch Mr. Lauer's facial expressions:

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Because the lawyer said it was legal. He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer. And -- but you got to trust the judgment of people around you, and I do. We used this technique on three people.

BUSH: Captured a lot of people and used it on three. We gained valuable information to protect the country, and it was the right thing to do, as far as I'm concerned.

BUSH: All I ask is that people read the book. They can reach the same conclusion if they had made the same decision I made or not.

Now from the jump, "Talking Points" has said that in a time of war -- and that's what we're in against Muslim jihadists -- you have to do things you would not ordinarily do. For example, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War.

So to waterboard three high-ranking terror suspects in order to get information that likely saved thousands of lives seems to be logical and responsible, unless you live in a theoretical world where feeling noble is the ultimate objective.

That's where some on the American left live -- in the world of theory -- and they have condemned Mr. Bush, making waterboarding and alleged torture a major deal:

PAUL BEGALA, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: George W. Bush was lying when he said we don't torture. This is not a matter of subjective opinion.

Our country executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime that we are now committing ourselves.

ROSIE O'DONNELL, RADIO SHOW HOST/COMEDIAN: The American government is allowing torture. It comes from the president all the way down.

SEN. HARRY REID, D-NEV.: Anyone that is waterboarded will admit to anything because you basically keep killing that person.

JESSE VENTURA, FORMER MINNESOTA GOVERNOR: It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Ironically, President Obama has not suspended coerced interrogation of terrorists. He just orders it done by non-Americans overseas. That should tell us something.

The danger from the jihadists continues to be enormous and some of these people have to be broken.

Again, I don't understand the moral dilemma here. Self-defense is self-defense. Legally you can kill someone who is threatening you, but we can't dunk three terror guys in water?

Mr. Bush makes a persuasive case, pointing out that those who opposed his policies are entitled to their opinions, but they are dead wrong because by using waterboarding, some of us were most certainly kept alive.

RUSH: I have said in the past that presidents don't go to summits unless they had deals already in place. How could this happen? Well, we're dealing with an entirely different animal. We're dealing here with a narcissist type ego who still thinks that just by showing up he's gonna get what he wants. I mean honest to Pete here, folks. Look, I have been doing some serious thinking about where we are in this moment after the election, especially since this deficit commission panel report has come out. It has focused my view on where we are, and if we're serious about returning this nation to its rightful owners, i.e., those who believe in liberty and freedom, we have a mountainous project ahead of us. And it really became clear as I went through all of the mishmash, the details of the deficit commission panel, as I said yesterday, the whole thing should be ignored. All it does is cement everything that's wrong in place, and that is the premise.

For example, if we're really serious, and we must be, about reducing the size of government, we can't accept the notion that whatever was passed in the past is permanent and can't be removed, and that we can only tinker around the margins. "Well, Rush, you can't do anything about Social Security. I mean it's there, people expecting." If that attitude is prevalent then we're never gonna really get to the meat of the problem. "Rush, you can't really cut the National Education Association. The teachers unions will go crazy." Okay, if we can't, then we're forever gonna be piddling around the margins on this and never really get to the crux of what is wrong. And we're up against people who use government to create loyalty via pressure groups, constituencies, and this is gonna have to be addressed, too. It's not just an important fiscal matter. It's a matter of reestablishing the republic.

The country was never set up and it was never envisioned to have one political party use the public trough as significantly as the Democrat Party has to cement itself in permanent power. The country was not set up for the Democrat Party to use federal tax revenues to buy off unions, to pay union pensions and all this, to buy car companies. That's not what this country was founded to do. We cannot keep funding public sector union campaign war chests. We are allowing tax revenues, income tax revenues to pay for the campaign war chests of unions and other groups. And on the other hand we're trying to slash government. But in the process we are funding, we are paying our opponents. We're paying unions. We are funding their operations and all these other left-wing special interest groups. Now, being serious about reducing the size of government is going to be a mammoth task that nobody's really even talking about now. I'm not trying to be negative. I'm trying to be, in fact, exactly the opposite.

Now, Paul Ryan, I'm happy as I can be that Paul Ryan and people like him are working on the numbers, and that is crucial. But there are broader issues than just the numbers. Strategies that have to be conceived relating to reasserting the Constitution, and chief among them we have to end the whole notion of tax dollars being redistributed to left-wing public interest groups: unions, ACORN, this kind of thing. If we don't do that, we're never gonna really get to the heart of the matter. These people are 20% of our population in any poll you look at, self-identified. But they are made to look more prominent because of where they are. They are in the media, they are in education, they're in academia, and they are propagandizing the youths of this country. From high school and junior high, grade school on, we've all heard horror stories. Kids come home from school and we hear what their teachers are teaching them. And people are afraid to go to school and do anything about it 'cause it might affect the grade. They don't want to cause any trouble, don't want to make any waves and so forth. Meanwhile, kids aren't being taught. They're being propagandized. They're being indoctrinated and that's being done with your own tax dollars.

The solution to it, many people say, "Okay, I want to get my kid out of the public education system. I want to go to private schools." And guess who objects to that? The very people who run the public schools: the government, the unions. We tend to forget, but there was a voucher program of sorts in Washington right when Obama was immaculated, and it was aimed at low income, poor minority students being allowed to attend private schools, the likes of which Obama's kids go to and Algore's kids went to and Chelsea Clinton went to, and it was working. The test scores, the results of these urban kids were going through the roof and the education was being paid for via philanthropy. Obama's immaculated and cancels the program. It wasn't about education. It was about protecting his union buddies, and we all know this. I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

But if we're gonna be serious about slashing government and reducing its size and getting it out of people's lives, this is what we're going to have to attack. Not the deficit commission panel and their ideas. I mean that's just more of the same. As I said yesterday, this draft report, I don't care if the commissioners went out and did it without the knowledge of the other participants on the committee. I don't care if they did it to float a trial balloon. The point is it's nothing different than what's already in place now, just with different numbers. It accepts every premise that has been established, that has built government into the leviathan that it is.

RUSH: Let me get into some of this in detail to give you an idea what I'm talking about. Since the New Deal we have operated from the premise that whatever is in place stays, but we'll work around the edges. We'll try to streamline it, make it more efficient on the margins. If we are serious about reducing the size of government and returning the whole concept of freedom and liberty as founded, we need to go after the foundations of the left. We need to explain to the American people why they are destructive, why they are dangerous, why they spread poverty, why they spread illiteracy, how they destroy the American family. I do it all the time. We talk about a welfare program -- I don't care what it is.

I've railed a couple of times this week about the very thought of all of these supposed programs of compassion just bug me to no end because they destroy. They destroy humanity, they destroy people's dreams, they take away their initiative, creating this dependency all for the sake of one party's political power under the guise of helping people, when in fact it's destructive. They spread poverty. They spread illiteracy. They dumb people down on purpose. This is the kinds of thing that's going to have to be attacked. This is not a time... Since we've won the election, this is not a time to pull back on engaging the public. Who is in charge? Is anybody? Who is in charge of breaking up the NEA? Who's in charge of breaking up the federal unions?

Who is in charge of digging into the bureaucracy and slashing it? Who's in charge of developing a strategy for stopping the confirmation of liberal activists to the court? Who is in charge of eliminating the Internal Revenue Code and making the case for a flat tax or FairTax? Is there anybody on our side doing any of this? You, the American people, are way ahead of the politicians on this. This is what you are expecting. I will bet a dollar to a doughnut that many of you were expecting this kind of plan to be in place and implemented shortly after the election. I can quote you some of my own friends send me e-mails, "All right, Rush, tell me this is what they're gonna do," and they had a laundry list.

I wrote back and I said, "I'm not aware that any of this is going to be undertaken." So you are expecting this kind of thing, whether you're Tea Party or not. The victory on Tuesday, November 2nd, this is what it means to you, not just sit there and say, "Okay, we won, you lost, and we'll tinker around the margins here. We'll talk about the retirement age of Social Security." That's not what you're talking about. That's not what you are expecting. If we allow the mission to be defined too narrowly and then get bogged down in the weeds -- and I'll give you an example of that is earmarks. Earmarks is getting far more attention than it deserves. Earmarks were one of McCain's mantras.

I mean, fine. If you can get rid of them, get rid of them. But it's not gonna do a damn thing to cut the size of government, to cut entitlements, to comply with the Constitution. Getting rid of earmarks distracts our attention. Why do you think Obama is so much in favor of the debate on earmarks and banning earmarks? They're just one part of what we have to deal with here. I don't think we should gear up all of our political capital to fight earmarks, which amounts to, what, a total of $15 billion? Instead of the focusing most of our efforts and resources on an education campaign at the vast array of issues and programs that really are dragging down the nation.

I said the other day that one of the bad things about earmarks is that they are used as bribes, that in a sense they are anti-democratic and that we would not have had Obamacare without them -- the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase and all that. But looked at another way (which I was forced to do) ask yourself this question. Why is it legitimate for a federal agency -- and you pick it: EPA, Fish and Game, Fish and Wildlife, whatever, you picking it from the federal bureaucracy. Why is it legitimate for a federal agency to issue regulations that deny me the use of my property rights?

Why is it legitimate for one of these federal agencies to impose costs, or even create programs outside of Congress, but when an elected congressman or Senator uses the legislative process to do the same thing, that's illegitimate? My point is that the result of earmarks are happening all the time from bureaucracies, EPA, these mandates that come down from Fish and Wildlife Service, how you can and can't use this area of a National Park, where you can and can't go in a National Park, or what kind of lightbulb you're gonna use. Some people raise a little hell about it, but not much. But when an elected official does the same thing via the legislative process, all hell breaks loose. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm just saying earmarks are a symbol, but reforming and getting rid of earmarks is not going to substantively reduce the size of government at all.

The federal bureaucracy... I don't know how many people understand this. The federal bureaucracy is issuing grants for tens of billions of dollars to do all kinds of things. Look at what comes out of the National Endowment for the Arts. They're issuing grant money to left-wing liberal wackos to do whatever in the name of "art," and all it is is moral corruption, perversion. So why should a Senator or congressman who can be thrown out by the voters not be able to do so and let his record stand or fall at the ballot box? You've gotta be consistent about all of this. It doesn't mean I would do it. Don't misunderstand. I'm not saying if it's okay for a bureaucracy to do it, it's okay for a congressman to do it. I don't agree with this. I'm just illustrating a point.

The issue is who decides, and how? Because whether it's earmarks or whether it's the legislative process or whether it comes from a bureaucracy, the fact of the matter is it still happens. The whole argument on earmarks has now become mythical. Maybe I'm wasting my time with the counterpoint here. I just don't think we should be distracted by it. It's symbolic. There's a lot more to go after than earmarks. Now, I just think the left would love it if we spend all of our time on it. I think the left would go nuts. Obama is crazy for and would love for a debate on earmarks, and while we're debating earmarks they'll go out and continue to steal the country. Look at these czars, all these unelected people. We don't know what they're paid. Look at fiats. Look at the drilling ban in the Gulf, and look at the fraud and the hoax that that was.

In fact, worse. They lied in letters and publications about what experts said about the drilling moratorium. That was a purely political mover that cost tens of thousands of jobs. The federal government owns 25% of the landmass of the United States, and it continues to grab more and more of it. Why? Where's the guy with the strategy to sell off a lot of that? Sell off government buildings, close 'em down, cut the federal bureaucracy by 20%, sunset every single independent agency, require Congress to reinstitute them, and on and on. You make sure that all of this is done in the light of day so people see how government is growing. But right now institutionalized liberalism is in the government. It's going to take a serious strategy to weed this stuff out. Just nibbling around the margins like the retirement age on Social Security or cutting defense here and there is playing their game.

RUSH: Look, what I'm saying is that we need to be the ones who move the debate. We need to be the ones who set the terms. It's totally out of hand. Obama ought not be able to dictate one dime's worth of spending. That has to come from Congress. The bureaucracy should not be able to dictate behavior. This is what the elected officials of this country are all about. In fact, you could even make the case that we don't even mess around with debate. Just do it. Just suggest a 10% budget cut. Make them defend all of this rotten stuff. Make them defend the health care bill. Send a veto bill up there every week. Cut federal taxes 10% across the board. Just do it. Issue a bill to eliminate the IRS, go to a flat tax, a FairTax. Just do it and make them defend it.

Make them defend the status quo. Make them defend what it is that's gotten us into this debt. Make the left defend all of it. We don't debate 'em. It's pedal to the metal time here. This is what we talked about all leading up to the election. This is why it mattered. This is what the Tea Party was all about. We, the people, are way ahead of the politicians on this. All this talk about compromise, fine and dandy, compromise from our positions. We run the House of Representatives. That's the people's house. We propose -- how about a 10% across the board income tax cut? Just every rate, every bracket right now, cut it by 10%. Make them defend this debt. Make them defend all of this corruption. Make the left defend all of the programs that have gotten us to near bankruptcy. Make them defend, make them come out and say, "Yes, we believe we ought to be able to take federal tax dollars and give it to the SEIU union thugs. We think federal revenues should be used to fund our community organizing groups, ACORN." Make them say this. "But, Rush, but, Rush, it's so controversial, what are they going to say about us?" What haven't they said about us?

We're either serious about it or we're not. But we set the terms of the debate. Suddenly the Bush tax levels have to be defended by the left. It's happened there. They're the ones out there doing the debate on this. We're the ones that want those tax cuts to continue and now it's Obama and Axelrod that can't get on the same page. Put them on defense and do it on every issue. We're showing how it can be done on the tax cut issue. It can be done on everything.

RUSH: I think it's all fine and dandy that we're defending the Bush tax cuts, 2001, 2003. Let's go for more tax cuts. Let's cut tax further. We all know that's what's gotta be done to revive this economy. We can move the ball forward. Make them defend this stagnation, is all I'm saying. The public voted for massive change. They did. It's time to do it.

RUSH: Does anybody believe -- seriously now -- does anybody believe that we would end our existence, does anybody believe that we would cause massive pain, hunger, starvation with a 10% across the board budget cut, including defense? Does anybody believe we could not do that? How many of you have had to cut your budgets how many times over the course of your lives far more than 10%? And I think you're still alive, and I think you're still eating and I think you were able to then come back and replace it at some point because financial circumstances are always in flux and fluid. The simplest way to do this is the best way. You start nibbling around, "We're gonna cut 10% here, we're gonna eliminate there." No, just cut everything 10%, including defense, cut everything across the board 10%.

I know what's gonna happen. The teachers, the firemen, the policemen, all of these people are gonna raise holy hell. All the public employees gonna raise holy hell because they're not gonna see any cuts in the private sector. Well, there will be cuts in the private sector because how many people in the private sector are living off the public sector? Not just the public sector employees, but there are a lot of sponges that are living off of it. It is ridiculous to believe that we cannot cut 10% in every budget item, and once you do that and then people see that the earth doesn't end, the sky doesn't fall, then you can get even more serious about it. The private sector, by the way, has already been cut far more than 10% by the public sector. What do you think 17% unemployment is? What do you think left-wing economic policies have caused? Left-wing economic policies are causing great harm to the private sector of this country. Left-wing social policy is destroying the lives of everybody those policies touch. Left-wing Democrat Party, liberal, whatever you want to call it social policy is robbing every beneficiary of the opportunity to be all that he or she can be. And it's being done on purpose, to create dependence, to create incompetence, to create need. And the truly offensive part is the people doing this claim to be doing it out of compassion, when they are nothing more than destroyers.

Look at the federal budget, the idea we can't cut 10%, the idea we can't go back to 2008 budget levels or the country would end? The country's on the way to ending the way we're going. We don't have the money we're spending anyway. All I'm saying is if we're serious about this we're serious about it, and we gotta make this debate on our terms, the compromise have to be on our terms. You know something? Look at that deficit commission panel. In their introduction, the preamble, whatever you want to call it, it sounds like Reagan. They talk about simplifying the tax code, go down to three rates, three brackets, broaden the base and so forth. Exactly. Do it. Eliminate the IRS. Instead, why do we need 16,000 new IRS agents for Obamacare? Is that what we need? Do we want that? Do we want 16,000 new IRS agents or do we want to eliminate the IRS and institute a much simpler fair or flat tax. You can argue about what kind it is. There are people that believe FairTax is better than the flat tax or what have you, but simplification is the way to go. Make them defend this, is all I'm saying. I don't see how we can lose if they are forced to defend this.

Now, there are many people on our side, part of the ruling class, that are gonna end up having to defend it. When I say on our side, they are Republicans. But there is a left-wing shadow government that is running our lives in this country, and it's gotta be defunded and these people have to start fending for themselves. Everybody else fends for themselves. Why do these people not have to? How come so many people in this country get to feed off of us? Where is it written that because of their so-called good works, their philanthropic nature, why is it they get to feed off of us? Where is that written? It isn't. Make them feed themselves. Make them become self-feeders. Or better yet, we'll feed off of them for a while. Let 'em see how it feels. I'm just saying, folks, if we're dead serious about this, this is what we're looking at. And it really isn't that hard. The UK is doing 10% across the board cuts now, France and Germany are soon gonna follow. Yeah, we might have riots and protests, but you see who's rioting and protesting. That's gonna happen anyway at the bare mention of cuts, even before they happen. But I have a whole different attitude about them. These protesters are protesting, in essence, for more freebies. I'm happy for them to suffer pain.

I'm getting sick and tired of these people thinking they're entitled to feed off of everybody else, that they're entitled to a life of no charges and no costs simply because of -- well, now, you may think that's cruel, but the people in this country who are not depending on everybody else to eat are experiencing pain of their own. They're losing their jobs; they're losing their freedom; they're losing their liberty because of people like these sponges and others. It's a sad thing, the sponges are being created by the Democrat Party and the American left. People are being born sponges.

Look at this. This is Alan Fram, Associated Press. I predicted this. "People back Republican tax cut plans but not the GOP campaign to repeal President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, according to a poll suggesting that the Republicans' big Election Day win was not a mandate for the party's legislative wish list." Did I not tell you you were gonna see this? That the election didn't mean what it means. The election doesn't mean what it meant. The American people do not want health care repealed. The American people do not want the budget downsized. The American people do want their tax cuts, and AP has come out with a poll and that's the headline: "Public Backs GOP on Taxes, Not Health."

And then we go to TheHill.com: "Grassley: Health Repeal Will Die in Senate," trying to depress us. "GOP Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa) admitted Wednesday that a full repeal of President Obama's healthcare law will die in the Senate." Well, everybody knows that. That isn't news. That's not the point. We know it's gonna die in the Senate this year. But who's to say that it's gonna continue to die as we get closer to the 2012 elections? There is an ongoing effort by the interests on the left to make sure that the election results and returns are not about what they were about. There is an effort out there to convince as many people as possible that overturning and repealing health care was not what this election was about, when it most definitely was. "No, Mr. Limbaugh, no, Mr. Limbaugh," says the New Castrati, "It's clear, Mr. Limbaugh, that the American people simply do not like the size of government, the deficit spending and they want to reduce --" and you can't fix any of that without getting rid of health care, Mr. New Castrati. They are inexorably linked.

"Speaking to Iowa radio station KCIM, [Grassley] conceded that Senate Republicans do not have the 60 votes necessary to force through a full repeal." This is a nonstory, but here it is a headline, The Hill trying to make everybody depressed, think the Senate is selling you out, Senate Republicans selling you out trying to make Grassley look like a RINO, giving up already. "Grassley: Health Repeal Will Die in Senate." It's a nonstory. We know it's gonna die in the Senate. We didn't win the Senate. That's not the point. The point is to make them defend it. Welfare reform died three times on Clinton's desk until the fourth time when it didn't, and we got it. These things can happen.

RUSH: Starting in northern Virginia with Will. Great to have you, sir, and I appreciate your patience.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, I'd like to ask your opinion later on something separate from what I'm calling about, if that's okay.

CALLER: I worked for the federal government for ten years. I'm a mid-level worker bee type.

RUSH: I know you're not. You just do. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead and make your point.

CALLER: -- there was announcement after announcement after announcement for about a good year for high-paying, high-level jobs. This is just at my agency here. We're talking about analyst types, IT types, program manager types. Our mission, our responsibility, our workload, nothing changed. We were getting along fine without these people.

RUSH: Wait. Now, I want to make sure I understand. They were soliciting more employees, hiring more people?

CALLER: Yeah, when I say announcement, that's the first step in the hiring process, and these people have now been hired.

CALLER: No, they announce it like on USA Jobs. Any time a new job comes out they have to announce it.

RUSH: Oh, okay. So what you're saying is as soon as he got into office he went on a federal hiring spree?

CALLER: Big time. And like I said, they're always high-level type jobs. And these jobs you can't really account for what they do or what their productivity is. Unlike a guy like me, who you can. You know, there's a mechanism in place to track what we do and what our workload is. So basically what I'm getting at is, some of the people in my type of positions -- not so much me, but the newer people with less seniority -- they're kinda worried because people are talking about, "Hey, let's cut government employees," et cetera, and like I said there was just a flurry of hiring all these high level, high paying types.

CALLER: You know, from my level, we just kept looking at each other, like, "Why are they hiring all these new people for these high level jobs?" 'Cause like I said we were getting along fine without 'em before Obama came in, and our mission didn't change, our workload didn't change, nothing. So our guys were thinking, you know, we need to look into any new position, especially the high level ones that were filled, not so much filling a vacancy when someone retired or left, but these were all just new -- poof! -- they just popped up out of nowhere, and there really isn't a need for 'em, in our perspective. We're trying to figure out why.

RUSH: Of course not, from your perspective, but from Obama's. I'm just reminded of the story, it backs up what you're saying, May 11th of this year, headline: "Obama Wants Federal Agencies to Hit the Gas on Hiring." This is -- this is even after the period of time where you saw it happening.

RUSH: This is exactly the kind of thing I've been talking about in the first hour and a half of the program, how these people build up the size of government. Whether these new hires are doing anything or not, they are being paid and so their vested interest is to protect the government. I'm sure it's patronage jobs. I'm sure it's payoffs for campaign works and who knows who else. But it's probably... Did these people show up for work, did you ever see them?

CALLER: Well, I work in kind of a satellite office separate from headquarters where all these people are supposedly working. I went down there and actually for a conference, and there was a room full of them, and they were just kind of, you know, during this conference discussing things, but not really doing anything.

RUSH: That's anecdotal. I'm sure some of them were no-show jobs, but this is how you build the size of government, pure and simple. There was no reason to hire these people. There couldn't possibly have been.

CALLER: You're the second person of all the people that I've been wanting to talk to. You know who you come second to?

CALLER: He made a fantastic impression on me in the eighties when I was a young Air Force trooper, and I gotta tell you, he made me proud to be American, and so do you. Anyway, getting to the idea of cutting back on the federal government, you know, I am an employee of such, and it's very frustrating to witness the waste that seems to be an inundation within this entity that we serve.

CALLER: A lot of things can be eliminated. Not just cut, eliminated, which is why I didn't want to tell your screener who I am and have it announced nationally, but anyway, a lot of things can be cut. But I would recommend starting with a lot of the positions that have suddenly come about within the last year or two. I witnessed it, I see it, and it's just maddening. And quite frankly, I would go on record by saying I would be happy to have my pay frozen, but I would put this under a condition. If Congress enacts that, they need to freeze their own, too. They need to be the example of all of this stuff.

RUSH: Well, more power to you. Ten percent across the board budget cut would include a 10% pay reduction, federal employees. These are the kind of things, if we're serious, that are going to have to happen. If we're not, then, you know, we just keep nibbling around the edges here in the margins and think we're going somewhere. It's gonna take a real concerted effort to do this, and there's going to be all kinds of caterwauling. There's going to be people screaming like stuck pigs over it, and that's when you have to have fortitude to stick to it, and a lot of people don't. The first signs of any pain (crying) people will cave and not want to be responsible for all that. People are just conditioned here in our country, there shouldn't be any suffering. That's understandable, but we're not talking about suffering here, we're talking about survival. Survival as we were founded what we're talking about.

We don't want to become a socialist country, and make no mistake about it, that's what Obama is. And they're going out of their way in this administration to do everything they can to cover that up. They don't want to be known as socialists. They try to impugn, laugh at and make fun of anybody who calls them that. And the reason they don't want to be called that is because it means something. A socialist is what a socialist is. It has a definite meaning, and it's not something they want to be thought of as. Obama didn't run as a socialist. He didn't run on a socialist agenda. He did let it slip out a couple of times. Joe the Plumber. "I think we need to spread the wealth around." Look what happened. They had to go investigate Joe the Plumber and try to turn him into a kook because Obama misspoke. Well, that's exactly what we face and socialism is just a step down the road to something even worse. At some point we're gonna have to be serious about stopping and then going the other direction. It can be done. It's just a matter of are we gonna have to guts the stick with it once we start it.

RUSH: Here's just one example -- and there are countless examples like this -- Planned Parenthood got $350 million in tax dollars in this fiscal year that ended June 30th, 2008, and the president of Planned Parenthood was paid $385,000 a year. That's all from your tax money. Why should Planned Parenthood be supported by you, and why should anybody earn 385 grand a year working there paid for by you?

CALLER: Hello, Rush. Oh, my goodness, I don't know what you had for breakfast this morning, but you are right on. And, as I recall, we had control of the federal government under Bush, and we all blew it. Not just Bush, with his book coming out, we got lazy, lackadaisical, and we have almost lost our country. I remember over the last couple of years you kept us going, kept our hopes up, kept us optimistic, and callers calling in almost in tears -- well, some of them in tears -- saying what can we do, Rush, what can we do other than vote? And it wasn't time to vote. And now we are almost back in the saddle and we have got their attention. And you are so right, we need to hammer them, hammer them with our words.

RUSH: But we weren't able to reduce the size of government even under Reagan, so we're gonna have to try another approach. This is not to criticize Reagan. This is to illustrate how challenging it is. Look, in our own party, Susan, there are going to be Republicans who want us to think that they're serious when they're not about this.

CALLER: I know. I know. But no matter how small we, or our idea or our comment or our support, we have just got to tell our representatives, and I don't mean just one, I mean we need to tell all of them. We need to set the agenda, like you said.

CALLER: And we need to over-shout the media, the Drive-By Media with our voices. And, Rush, can I tell you something else since it's Open Line Friday?

CALLER: Well, I wanted to tell you that over the last couple years, when I heard all those callers calling in that were speaking from my heart that were saying, "What can we do? What can we do?" Well, somewhere along the line you planted an idea in my head, and I started a website to help make a breeze out of writing to our representatives and you can write all our representatives one letter. I've designed the whole thing. Can I tell you what it is?

CALLER: Okay. It's called the99centslobby.com. I wasn't gonna call you today, but, oh, my God, you just spoke to my heart.

CALLER: I wasn't gonna call you and tell you about it, I was gonna write you and not call you, but honestly, we have got to tell them. And I was at a fundraiser for my local congressman, and he spoke to the people, and he doesn't even know about the idea yet, but he said, "You have got to tell us what you want us to do. We have got to know that you're behind us." And maybe that was just trying to drum up support --

RUSH: I have a little problem with that. Wait a second. I have a little problem with that. After this election you've got an elected official saying we need to tell him what to do? We need to let him know we've got his back?

CALLER: It was before the election. But I think we need to tell them what we want cut, we need to give them ideas. On our website you can write to just Republicans if you want to, you can write to one person or almost 600.

CALLER: -- or just regular e-mail or we sit down and write 'em a card, we need to tell them.

RUSH: "California -- the Lindsay Lohan of States," this by Allysia Finley. She is "a lapsed Californian" and an assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com, the Wall Street Journal. "Listen up, California. The other 48 states -- your cousin New York excluded -- are sick of your bratty arrogance. You're the Lindsay Lohan of states: a prima donna who once showed some talent but is now too wasted to do anything with it. After enjoying ephemeral highs and spending binges, you suffer crashes that culminate in brief, unsuccessful stints in rehab. This cycle repeats itself every five to 10 years, as the rest of the country looks on with a mixture of horror and amusement. We'd feel sorry for you if you didn't constantly flip us the bird.

"Instead, we're making bets on how long it will be before your next meltdown. Oh, wait -- you're already melting down. You've racked up nearly $70 billion in general obligation debt, and that doesn't include your $500 billion unfunded pension liability. Your own analysts predict you'll face a hole of at least $80 billion over the next four years. Your government's run by a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums. When they're not taxing or spending, they're creating regulations and commissions like the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology and the California Blueberry Commission. Many businesses would leave if it weren't for your sunny climate.

"Which may explain why you're so obsessed with climate change. If your climate changes, no one, including your Hollywood friends, would tolerate you anymore. So you've created a law to tax carbon emissions -- no matter that it will kill jobs. It's not as if you don't recognize that you've got problems. Roughly three-quarters of you say you're headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. You're even more depressed than Illinois and New York, and you've got sunshine 10 months of the year! You appropriately give your government low marks -- 28% approval for outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger," who, by the way, did you see him on The Tonight Show the other night?

He says nobody's going to be bothered if you smoke a joint. Nobody's gonna care if you smoke a joint in California. Probably true, but try lighting up a cigarette and see what happens to you. At any rate, "28% approval for outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 16% for the legislature -- yet you continue to re-elect the politicians who got you into this mess. Not a single incumbent state legislator lost re-election this year, including one Democrat who died a month ago (no joke). What's scarier is that you've just given almost all of the keys to statewide offices to Democrats. Jerry Brown will be your new (old) governor. This is the man who acted as a gateway drug to your spending addiction three decades ago when he gave public-sector employees collective bargaining rights.

"Helping enforce your wacky laws will be Lt. Gov-elect Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who flouted state law by allowing same-sex marriage. On the plus side, he has nice hair and loves you just the way you are. This is what he had to say after winning his race: 'We're nothing but a mirror of our consistent thoughts. You tend to manifest what you focus on. If you look around for what's wrong, you'll find it. But as all we know up here in San Francisco, when you focus on what's right, you see it all around you. ... There is absolutely nothing wrong with California that can't be fixed by what's right with California. ... If you're from another state, you'd love to have the problems of California.'

"You've also just re-elected Barbara Boxer (that's Senator Barbara Boxer) to a fourth term. She boasted on election night that it's her 'eleventh straight election victory, and what a sweet one it is ... [since] everything was thrown at us, including the kitchen sink, and the stove and the oven and everything, millions of dollars of negative ads from known and unknown opponents, millions and millions of dollars.'" So, Miss Finley says, "We've tried to help you, California. Some spent millions on campaigns to entice you to change your reckless behavior. And you told them to kick rocks. So here's our final warning: When you inevitably crash and burn, don't count on us to bail you out," although they are and they will count on us to bail them out.

That's why I suggest an across-the-board massive state tax increase in California. Make 'em pay for it. You know, this is one of these days where my patience is wearing thin. I go in and out of this feeling about this notion that you don't have to pay for what you want or have or need, and California epitomizes this. Five hundred billion dollars of unfunded pension liabilities? Paying people not to work? Health care after they retire? (interruption) I know, Snerdley, me calling for tax increases is simply unbelievable, but, for crying out loud, these are the people calling for tax increases on the rest of us to pay for them. They should pay for it. Make them pay for it. They created their mess. They voted for the people who created this mess.

RUSH: Ray in Livermore, California, great to have you on the EIB Network. Welcome, sir.

CALLER: Rush, it's great to have you, your (garbled) assets. You're busy pointing out how everything Obama is saying is in complete opposition to what he's doing -- or better yet, "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

CALLER: And I want to point to the fact that he keeps saying that he wants to help small businesses, and I am a small business. I've been at this for 20 years, Rush, and I think it's nothing but a damn lie, because what he's doing -- everything he's doing -- is hurting small business, and here's my reasoning. Small business, we're not mandated to give benefits or benefit packages or government controls. Because our size is so small, we come underneath that. We're not beholden to government contracts typically because we're too small to handle some of these contracts and we're not beholden to unions and union contracts. Therefore, that puts a target on our back because we cannot be controlled -- or better said, in the words of Rush Limbaugh, "We are rugged individuals." We don't want government help, and we don't want government intrusion in our lives or our businesses.

RUSH: Oh, no, you got it. They're running your business as it is, and they're coming up with policies here. They're upset with you because you're not borrowing any money. Would you explain to people why that is totally irrelevant to you.

CALLER: Well, because in business you don't -- in a small business especially you don't -- borrow money to make parole. You don't borrow money to grow your business when you don't have any customers going through the door.

RUSH: Right. When you got no demand for your business, why the hell are you gonna borrow money for it?

CALLER: And we don't exist to offer benefit packages and paid days off to people as this administration believes that businesses exist to employ people. American people, we exist to provide you with the best products and services at competitive prices, and government has nothing to do with that.

RUSH: Well, it's not just Obama that believes you exist to provide people health care. It's half the people that work for you. It's a sad reality. I don't know if it's half, but a lot of people think the purpose of a corporation is to keep a town together, the purpose of a corporation is to provide health care benefits, the purpose of a corporation is to have sick days, the purpose of a corporation is to have paid vacations. Talk to some of these human resource people who do the interviewing and ask them the first question the employee asks them.

RUSH: John in Whitmore, California. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Greetings. Hey, I listen to you all the time. I've been listening... You know, I'm 70 years old, and I live -- like you said -- in Whitmore, and you mentioned about the way for California to solve its problems is to raise taxes. Now, they're gonna run with that. We're conservative in Northern California.

CALLER: Well, you've got one town, you're talking Humboldt, yeah, but the majority of Northern California is conservative. You know, we vote conservative, and what they're gonna do is they'll say, "Well, Rush said raise your taxes so they'll raise taxes." We're taxed out of this place already, you know. You can't sell homes here. Their value's gone down so fast we can't move out of California because we can't sell our homes, you know?

CALLER: Well, I like parts of Texas, parts of Arizona. You know, I like all kinds of other places. We're really taxed heavy. I'm a businessman. I'm a retired businessman.

CALLER: And I would never try to start a business in California. I'm surprised Meg Whitman doesn't pull all of her stuff outta here, you know?

RUSH: I don't think you really have anything to worry about. California will always do the opposite of what I say.

CALLER: Well, I don't know about that. You're pretty right. You know, the only thing is, they will run with you. They listen to you, you know, and they'll run with anything you say like the answer is to raise taxes, and all they'll do is hurt the 40% of us that pay taxes.

RUSH: Well, you're not alone. I'm hearing from people like you in my e-mail in large numbers today who are really afraid that I'm going to be listened to or that California authorities will say, "Even Limbaugh realizes now we have no choice but than to raise taxes," and I admit I'm being a little selfish 'cause we're all paying for California now.

CALLER: Yeah. I don't think you can say they do, but I'm sorry that 40 or 45% vote the other way. And when you throw us all into one category, you're talking like we're all a bunch of dumb idiots.

RUSH: Well, I'm sorry. I know it sounds that way, but when not one incumbent in that state loses...

CALLER: Yeah, I agree with that, too. You know, actually 40 years on when he was in last time I can't remember, I actually voted for him back then.

RUSH: Too late. Anyway... I'm sorry. I'm just flippant. I hear what you're saying. I'll think about revising my idea.

RUSH: I think there are some people misunderstanding me on this proposal that I have made to raise taxes in California. I mean on everybody. Everybody! Not just "the rich," everybody. The people that aren't paying taxes now, make 'em pay taxes. If you want to end this, you make this cost people something. I know it goes against the grain of everybody, but California is beyond help. Even when Reagan was out there, when he was governor for eight years, California's budget grew 122%. The bureaucracy grew by 22% when Reagan was governor. He was trying to fight it! So my idea... Look, I know it isn't going to happen.

RUSH: Cheyenne, Wyoming, Travis, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here.

CALLER: I don't even know where to start. First of all, it's an honor to speak with you, but I'm highly disappointed in you today.

CALLER: Turned on the radio, got off from one of my calls, and you're for raising taxes.

CALLER: No way. You've got to unleash this economy before you can see the kind of revenues that'll be able to pay down our deficit --

RUSH: Wait a minute. I am not suggesting we raise taxes to fix deficits. I'm not suggesting we raise taxes for any reason other than to make Californians pay for this profligacy that they're voting for.

CALLER: -- getting the extra benefits and they're the ones that run their deficit into such a big hole.

RUSH: Well, if we don't raise taxes on Californians guess who's taxes are gonna be raised?

CALLER: Oh, yeah, yeah. Gotta be across the board. I'm a flat tax guy, gotta be across the board.

RUSH: Make these people realize what this irresponsibility is costing them and everybody else. My whole point is, there are way too many people going through life who don't want to pay for what they have, pay for what they want, pay for what they get. And it's my tipping point today. If you live in California and you're gonna elect people that are gonna run your state that way, then you pay for it, not us who don't live there.

RUSH: Well, it's not your fault. You caught the tail end of it, and I can understand the shock and awe when you hear El Rushbo talk about raising taxes, I can understand you pulling off the road to call me.

CALLER: Yeah. Absolutely. If I've got the time, I'd like to talk about Social Security as well.

CALLER: I'm 25 years old. I've been told my whole life, I mean literally since I was ten years old that I'd never have Social Security. "You better take care of your retirement, you're not gonna be able to count on Social Security." My whole generation has heard this their entire lives. I think that being told that for as long as we have completely prepared us to not get Social Security. There are people much older than me that have paid into it, you know, 15, 20, 30 years. I think that those people, I think my elders, the older generation deserves to get the Social Security they paid into for much longer time. And I would even be willing to pay the rest of my life into a Social Security system that I saw no benefit from --

CALLER: -- as long as I got one concession. If I got one concession, that is, my retirement does not get taxed a dime, I will pay for everybody older than me to have their Social Security.

RUSH: You can't make that deal because they'll renege on it. You had it right the first time. You had it right the first time. When you said go through your life as though it isn't going to be there, meaning take care of it yourself.

RUSH: Now, every time I say this, I have people sending me vicious e-mails. "Well, easy for you to say," is the reaction. Now, I, in my life have been fired a bunch of times, which those of you who have listened regularly know, and I have been broke a couple of times, and I've had periods of time where my rent, house payment, and my MasterCard bill came in the same two-week period of the month and I couldn't either pay the rent and eat at the same time, and MasterCard wouldn't change my due date to the second half of the month. And I hated it. And I vowed that when that happened to me, I was never, ever gonna be in a situation like that again where I was gonna have to depend on somebody else, particularly for my needs. Wants, that's a whole different thing. Well, I don't want to depend on other people for my wants, either, but needs, I mean, when I am depending on others for necessities, that to me is failure. I'm not gonna do it. I don't want to be dependent. I don't want to be that obligated. So at that point it became a goal of mine that no matter what I wanted, I had to be able to pay for it to get it.

It's interesting, my parents and grandparents who went through the Great Depression, they tried to drill this into me, and I was, you know, a typical kid, in one ear and out the other. "Okay, Dad, fine, yeah, sure, sure, you don't know what you're talking about." But they came from the attitude of thrift. They had gone through the Depression, everybody was in debt, nobody could get a job, and it was an irresponsible thing to go into debt, other than for your house. That was one thing that you couldn't just write a check for. When those set of circumstances happened to me is when I finally said, "You know, I'm gonna not live beyond my means, and I'm certainly not gonna have expectations that others are gonna support me." So I have done that. And every time I bring this up, "Easy for you to say." Well, it wasn't easy to do. It was not easy to do. It might be easy for me to say, but it has not been easy to do, and it has required a lot of commitment. So I do have a bit of a tipping point when I see a bunch of spoiled-rotten people expecting to live off of everybody else simply because they were born, simply because they're alive.

That's why communism and socialism offend me. The idea that it's up to everybody else to take care of everybody else, nobody's gonna get anywhere doing that, and that has never worked for overall prosperity, economic freedom, more opportunity anywhere. It just doesn't work and it creates resentment, it promotes failure, sameness, lack of inspiration. It destroys the human spirit. Liberalism, socialism, communism, Marxism, it destroys the greatest things about humanity, and that's ambition, dreaming, you know, creativity, entrepreneurism, charity, you name it, it destroys all of that. And I get up and I watch these longhaired, maggot-infested ingrate students complaining about how much education costs. Fine. If you can't afford it, don't go to school or find someplace that you can afford. That's what all the rest of us that have had to accept the responsibilities of life have had to do. Why should they be exempt just because they've had a bunch of irresponsible leaders who lied to 'em? It's time to face the piper.

RUSH: Back to this California tax. I'm sure a lot of people misunderstood it. It's just about paying your way. If you want a state that's gonna pay people $40 million bucks a day not to work, fine! Raise the taxes and you pay it. Forty million dollars a day in unemployment benefits in California. Fine. Tax the poor, tax the unemployed, tax everybody, not just the working. Show us how this is done. It's like with anything else: If you want less of it, you tax it. So if you want fewer stupid Californians, you raise taxes on them.

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office:

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.

Conservative blog, but with an eye to the culture and pop culture (there is a lot of stuff here):

Conservative and pop culture blog (last I looked, there were some Beatles’ performances here):

Send this link to the young people you know (try the debt quiz; I only got 6 out of 10 right):

PA Pundits, whose motto is, “the relentless pursuit of common sense” (I used many of the quotations which they gathered)

The anti-Jihad resistence (which appears to be a set of links to similar websites):

Mostly a liberal blogger, who says vicious things about most conservatives; and yet, says something sensible, e.g. posting many of the things which the healthcare bill does to us.

News Organization (I mention them because I have seen 2 honest stories on their website, which shocked and surprised me):

Even though this group leans left, if you need to know what happened each day, and you are a busy person, here is where you can find the day’s news given in 100 seconds:

Weatherman Underground 1969 “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Janine Turner’s website (I’m serious; and the website is serious too). This is if you have an interest in real American history:

Judith Miller is one of the moderate and fairly level-headed voices for FoxNews:

This is an odd blog; conservativism, bikinis and whatever else posted by either a P.I. or the brother of a P.I.:

Info Wars, because there is a war on for your mind (this site may be a little crazy??):

The Magic Negro Watch (this is peppered with obscenities and angry conservative rhetoric):

Do you want to watch what is happening on our border? These are actual videos of observations cams along the border:

No matter what your political stripe, you will like this; evaluate your Congressman or Senator on the issues:

AC/DC economics (start with the oldest lessons first; economics in 60 second bites):

The Freedom Project (most a conservative news and opinion site which appears to concentrate on matters financial)

This appears to be a daily pork report, apparently as pork in Washington bills is discovered, it gets posted at Tom Coburg’s website:

Weekly poll, asking you to identify what we ought to cut in governmental spending:

This is an interesting site; it seems to be devoted to the debate of climate change:

This is indispensable: the Wall Street Journal’s guide to Obama-care (all of their pertinent articles arranged by date—send one a day to your liberal friends):

Obamacare class action suit (as of today, joining in on the suit costs you whatever you want to donate, if I understand the form correctly):

A Muslim apologetic site (they will write out letters to express your feelings, and all you have to do is sign them, and they will send them on):

Since this will be with us for a long time, the timeline of the BP gulf oil spill:

This is cool: a continuous timeline of the spill, with the daily info and the expansion of the oil, and the response:

Army Ranger Michael Behenna sentenced to 25 years in prison for 25 years for shooting Al Qaeda operative

Maybe the White House does not need to hold press conferences? It releases exclusive articles daily right here:

This is quite helpful; it is a list of all leftist groups, with links to background information on each of these groups (when I checked, 879 groups were listed). This is a fantastic resource.

In case you need to reference this, here are the photos of all those on the JournoList:

Are you tired of all the unfocused news and lame talking heads yelling at one another? Just grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and see what is really going on in the world:

Conservative New Media (it is so-so; I must admit to getting tired of seeing the interviewer high-fiving Carly Fiorina 3 or 4 times during an interview):

One of the more radical people from the right, calling for the impeachment of Obama:

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a free enterprise site (there are several videos on the flat tax):

This is a pretty radical site which alleges that Obama is a Marxist hell-bent in taking over our country:

1982 interview with Larry Grathwohl on Ayers' plan for American re-education camps and the need to kill millions

This is a news site which I just discovered; they gave 3 minute coverage to Obama’s healthcare summit and seemed to give a pretty decent overall view of it, without slanting one way or the other:

I have glanced through their website and it seems to be quite professional and reasonable. They have apparently been around since 1942.

This is fantastic; Florida (the Sunshine State) is now putting its state budget online:

Suzanne Somers s supposed to be older than Bill O’Reilly? He interviewed her this week, and she looked, well, hot. She is big into vitamins and human growth hormones.

The National Journal, which is a political journal (which, at first glance, seems to be pretty even-handed):

And I am hoping that most people see this as non-partisan: Citizens Against Government Waste:

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.

We watch FOX so you don't have to). Be clear on this; they do not want you to watch FoxNews.

Conservative Review
Issue #152	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	November 14, 2010