We've got BIG fans...

... because I'm telling you, Paul Ryan must be reading this site.

Literally, within days of F. Ryan posting his bit about being unhappy with the GOP budget cuts, Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI) has submitted his budget for the next year, and it has more than $4 trillion cut out of it, or roughly 33% less than what Obama was planning on for the next year's deficit spending.

It's never going to get past the Senate, of course... but what it will do is force the issue front-and-center on the Dems and bring the budget debate right back into the limelight coming into the opening rounds of the 2012 election cycle.

Ryan's budget includes a return to the 25% top tax bracket (down from the Dem's 35%) for the average Joe... and a 25% top tax bracket for corporate taxes, too (which the Dems had at just under 50%). This cut will keep revenues at very nearly the exact level they are at now... mainly by not waiting for the Feds to pump money BACK into the economy by leaving that same money in the hands and pockets of the people that earn it (namely ME AND YOU). In addition, roughly $1 trillion NEW dollars will be taxable by the Feds through the corporate tax rates because the lower rate will make keeping corporate funds INSIDE the US much more viable, rather than keeping it offshore (in places like Tripoli, Columbia, Venesuala, or Singapore).

THIS is solid, conservative planning and execution. THIS is coming to the table with a plan, and making that plan available to anyone that wants to see it.

Damn, I like this Paul Ryan guy...

Not as clear as I'd hoped...

My last didn't seem to make my point the way I'd hoped, so I'll try again... quickly.

Can anyone really expect actual reductions and substantial budgetary cuts to happen in an economy that is still this soft? Who could do that and hope to win an election? I guess the first thing I'd have thought that the new GOP leadership would have done is return the "Bush Tax Cuts" to the books, but without the Senate, that isn't going to happen either.

I know what I would like to see reduced... but I am not the majority opinion, it seems. What 18 months ago seemed to be "radical socialist agendas" are now the "status quo" in this nation, and changing the status quo is very hard to do in an election year.

Agreed, with caveat...

We've often talked about how the last "New Deal" President was James Earl Carter... but that isn't technically true, is it?

Reagan was not "New Deal"... and neither was Bush Sr. I can't see Clinton fitting that label, either, Democrat or not. Bush Jr, however... New Deal all day long. Between "No Child Left Behind" on one end of the spectrum and his prescription drug program on the other, what President since Carter has done more to prove the maxim that "Big Government does it better"? I think, to give credit where credit is due, that Bush thought he was following the Reagan paradigm... but government grew at a rate of more than 17% each year he was in office, and that is NOT counting his military spending. Yes, he cut taxes... but with the tax cuts came huge increases in government spending (much of it years into the future, too).

Bush Jr. took the New Deal "ideal" in exactly the opposite direction that FDR did: FDR raised taxes and increased spending in order to "stimulate" the economy... while Bush lowered taxes and increased spending, with no apparent intention to reduce that spending... ever. Short term gains... long term pains.

There are no "Tea Party" candidates on the radar yet... unless you count Ron Paul. No mainstream GOP candidate, regardless of promises to the electorate, will actually reduce the size or scope of government... period. They might reduce the rate it grows, but they will NOT reduce the size or cost by one employee or one penny. In fact, I doubt that any will even PROMISE to do so until the economy actually does recover. They will roll back the Obama increases, sure... but the cost and size will be AT LEAST what it was in 2006, and by even my card-carrying-Democratic-Party-member's opinion that is WAY TOO MUCH. If the unemployment rate is still over 7.5% nationally, there will be no change in the 99 week UI benefit extension plan... hell, it might even extend again. If the national rate of uninsured is still above 20 million, no change will come to the MedicAid and Medicare extensions, either. Social Security will NOT be restructured... or even addressed at all. Taxes might be reduced... but to no lower than they were in 2008, and nothing close to what they were in 1982.

Ironically, my 18-year-old received her first voter registration card today in the mail, and was very excited about the prospect of exercising her sovereign franchise as an American citizen as soon as this May (for the primary elections here in PA). I had a brief talk with her about how I will never judge her for how she votes, as long as she takes her vote seriously and learns both sides of an issue before she does so. Once she casts that ballot, though... she will have all the same rights and opportunities to voice her opinion here at the house as her mother or I do. No one can say she didn't do her duty then, as long as she does do her duty.

Imagine how pissed her father would be if he found out she voted "conservative"? Hehe...

Whigging Out

You know how Muslims hold other Muslims, whom have converted to Christianity, in greater disdain then someone born into Christianity, because in a rudimentary way they're suposed to "know better?"

Well let me put the GOP on notice - the history making mid term election, the thousands of Tea Party rallies, the marches, the unprecedented participation, the speeches, the donations, the time spent, DO YOU THINK ALL THAT WAS FOR A LOUSY 4% CUT!?

Boy I'm pissed about this. Boehner & McConnel are going to cave. 50-something billion dollar spending cuts is ALL THE EXCESS YOU COULD FIND in a 2.1 Trillion dollar budget and 14 Trillion dollar deficit????

Do you pubas in the GOP not get it? Do you not know your own history, what party you replaced?

Pay attention kiddies, THIS is how successful 3rd parties are born - the party they replace commits suicide.

My apologies...

I am not so bad a typist that I can't use a "Return" key on a keyboard... but it does not see to work this morning on Blogger. Thus, my entire previous post is one continuous paragraph, rather than the easier-to-read format that included spaces between paragraphs.

Fundamentally wrong...

Qaddafi is a bad man... always has been, always will be. He has ruled Libya with an iron fist for longer than anyone else in the last 200 years, and he has done so without any sort of mandate or election from any of his people. So, I'm not suggesting that working to remove him from power is "wrong". I never felt very good about the "warm and fuzzy" attitude of the Bush and Co. folks after Libya "turned off" its WMD programs in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq invasion... but an evil you know is sometimes better than an evil you don't. I never saw Qaddafi as a regional threat, outside of his ability to fund and train terror from his desert camps in the Libyan hinterland. I found this article in the Guardian... and I thought it rather telling. The author, a Libyan national, seems to feel that the rush to justify Obama's position against Qaddafi is hurting the protest position by making the effort seem an act of desperate, disunified and utterly helpless peasants... rather than the national movement that it really does seem to be. SoS Clinton has as much as said that the Libyan people are a scattered and ignorant populus up against the terror troops of Qaddafi's regime, and that without "Western" support, they cannot hope to survive, let alone win. Looking deeper than the headlines (which the author asks us all to do) shows that the rebels in Libya not only see themselves as "Libyans" first and foremost (putting to bed the notion that they are tribal warriors without order, rank or file), but have had some really huge successes against an army and air force that has worked, trained and equiped itself for exactly this sort of fighting for more than 30 years. It seems Qaddafi's experience as a revolutionary fighter has carried into how the army has trained since his rise to power. Small unit actions, street-to-street fighting, a large focus on crowd and civilian containment... all were huge factors in standard army training in Libya for decades. That's not the sort of training that lends itself to major land contests... that is the sort of training that protects a regime from exactly this sort of uprising. The State Department and the White House keep using terms like "Tripolitania" and "Cyrenaica" like they were actual ethnic centers in modern Libya... but in reality, they are no more applicable to the modern day than terms such as Gaul or Armorica are to France, or Noricum is to Austria. Out-dated geographical labels placed by Imperial Romans who not only never saw the land, but never intended to see the land they were describing. They are letters on the faces of maps in Western books, nothing more. Ask anyone coming from either of these regions what their nationality or ethnicity is... and the response will be "Libyan". It's bad enough that the mainstream media gets this wrong... there is no excuse for the administration to get it wrong, too. Support for the rebels is not out of the question, but I think that before I could willingly and whole-heartedly support such efforts, I'd have to know that this administration (or any that follow) understand that there is a trend emerging in these "popular uprisings" that is terribly disturbing... It is NOT the fundamentalist regimes that are falling to these uprisings... it is the secular or elected regimes that are falling. The nations most at risk (besides Egypt, Tunisia and Libya) are Turkey, Syria, Yemen, Jordan and the PA, which are all elected, secular governments. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE are all relatively quiet right now. The Ba'athists in Damascus are bad folks, too... but they are not the threat to global peace that places like Iran are, either. US (and all Western) support MUST hinge on the facts (certain and verifiable) that all efforts to build a government after a regime is removed are to focus on establishing representative governments that recognize the value of democratic processes and basic human rights... or no support will be given. THAT must be the center of any interventionist policy that any administration (current or future) plans to implement or follow. We must all know that such efforts will be long and rather slow in developing, but they must happen or any support will dry up like a puddle in the Sahara. I think that Libya is capable of this sort of effort, as is Tunisia and Egypt... but should a movement like the Muslim Brotherhood hyjack the effort and begin or attempt to begin a fundamentalist regime that not only ignores these basic human rights but actively tries to deny them, then such support as was offered previously will be turned against the very system it had been supporting.

Responsability To Protect

This is the new buzz phrase emanating from Obama and his apologists.

In fact, from what I can tell it is the emerging, defining foreign policy doctrine of the Obama administration, and is the impetus behind his Libyan intervention argument. This is his "preemptive doctrine", but it's preemption on steroids.

Bush declared that we had an inherent right to attack any nation stockpiling weapons, amassing troops or otherwise preparing their ability to wage war, if the express intent of such action was to attack the United States. Obama's doctrine goes further. "Responsibility to Protect" is the duty to "prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, or ethnic cleansing", up to and including waging war in the effort to effect that prevention. Of course they don't call it war, it's a "kinetic military action" (yes, that's the phrase the White House actually used in place of "war").

So now, even though Bush was an evil war monger for his doctrine of preemption, we now can go to war without there being even a scintilla of a threat to the US. Can someone tell me how that is NOT going further then Bush?

Here's my concern. Various rumblings have it that the US, in conjunction with the UN, is seeking to recognize a sovereign Palestinian state by the end of this year. We all know that the Obama administration represents a fundamental shift in US-Israeli relations. What if Palestine attacked Israel, as a sovereign state? The result will be official declarations of war between nation states. And we all know Israel will win that conflict ... unless the US has a "responsibility to protect."

And before you say "he'd never go that far", let me remind you how many times we've drawn that line and he's stepped over it, with glee.

And it doesn't have to be direct US/Israel conflict. We may simply withdraw our support. Arm the new Palestinian Army. Perhaps in the interest of "fairness" all of our strategic knowledge becomes available to both sides. There are many ways to fulfill this "responsibility." And Samantha Powers, whom is a White House foreign policy advisor and wife to "Regulation Czar" Cass Sustine, advocated that very policy. Divesting the billions in Israeli aide in favor of "investing" in a Palestinian State. She even acknowledged that it would be politically costly in the US. Tough to win Florida under those circumstances. But I'm convinced he'd accept one term in return for seeing his "fundamental transformations" take hold.

Oh, and by the way. If the thought of arming Palestinians is too much to consider, bare this in mind - SoS Clinton is to decide by tomorrow on whether we will arm the Libyan Rebels.

Do you know who they are? Because I don't. I'm sure there's fine people among them, but I also know that Al Qeada now controls a Libyan city to the South after the evacuation of Qaddafi's troops.

Something about all of this just doesn't feel right. Something is "off." My gut sees a bad moon rising.

{by the way - if you're a super computer, pulling key words and phrases out for analysis, you think this post my pop a hit on NSA or some security agency's radar? hehe}