|
|
 |
|
“The first Republican I knew was my father and he is still the Republican I most admire. He
joined our party because the Democrats inJim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My
father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I.
“I joined for different reasons. I found a party that
sees me as an individual, not as part of a group. I found a party that puts family first. I found a party that has love of
liberty at its core. And I found a party that believes that peace begins with strength.”
“It’s that expression of the individual and a willingness
to put the educational opportunities before me that led to who I am. Who you are is who you are as an individual.”
Condoleezza Rice National Security Advisor

"As Franklin Roosevelt once reminded Americans, "Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to
birth." And we live in the country where the biggest dreams are born. The abolition of slavery was only a dream -- until it
was fulfilled. The liberation of Europe from fascism was only a dream -- until it was achieved. The fall of imperial communism
was only a dream -- until, one day, it was accomplished. Our generation has dreams of its own, and we also go forward with
confidence. The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable -- yet we know where it leads: It leads to freedom. " George
W. Bush
Lee's Selected Psychobabble and Political Pomp
|
|
|
|
Biden's 14 Lies
JOE BIDEN’S 14 LIES DURING THE DEBATE
1. TAX VOTE: Biden said McCain voted “the exact same way” as Obama to increase taxes on Americans
earning just $42,000, but McCain DID NOT VOTE THAT WAY.
2. AHMEDINIJAD MEETING: Joe Biden lied when he said that Barack Obama never said that he would sit down unconditionally
with Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran. Barack Obama did say specifically, and Joe Biden attacked him for it.
3. OFFSHORE OIL DRILLING: Biden said, “Drill we must.” But Biden has opposed offshore drilling and
even compared offshore drilling to “raping” the Outer Continental Shelf.”
4. TROOP FUNDING: Joe Biden lied when he indicated that John McCain and Barack Obama voted the same way against
funding the troops in the field. John McCain opposed a bill that included a timeline, that the President of the United States
had already said he would veto regardless of it’s passage.
5. OPPOSING CLEAN COAL: Biden says he’s always been for clean coal, but he just told a voter that he is
against clean coal and any new coal plants in America and has a record of voting against clean coal and coal in the U.S. Senate.
6. ALERNATIVE ENERGY VOTES: According to FactCheck.org, Biden is exaggerating and overstating John McCain’s
record voting for alternative energy when he says he voted against it 23 times.
7. HEALTH INSURANCE: Biden falsely said McCain will raise taxes on people's health insurance coverage -- they
get a tax credit to offset any tax hike. Independent fact checkers have confirmed this attack is false
8. OIL TAXES: Biden falsely said Palin supported a windfall profits tax in Alaska -- she reformed the state
tax and revenue system, it's not a windfall profits tax.
9. AFGHANISTAN / GEN. MCKIERNAN COMMENTS: Biden said that top military commander in Iraq said the principles
of the surge could not be applied to Afghanistan, but the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force Gen.
David D. McKiernan said that there were principles of the surge strategy, including working with tribes, that could be applied
in Afghanistan.
10. REGULATION: Biden falsely said McCain weakened regulation -- he actually called for more regulation on Fannie
and Freddie.
11. IRAQ: When Joe Biden lied when he said that John McCain was “dead wrong on Iraq”, because Joe
Biden shared the same vote to authorize the war and differed on the surge strategy where they John McCain has been proven
right.
12. TAX INCREASES: Biden said Americans earning less than $250,000 wouldn’t see higher taxes, but the
Obama-Biden tax plan would raise taxes on individuals making $200,000 or more.
13. BAILOUT: Biden said the economic rescue legislation matches the four principles that Obama laid out, but
in reality it doesn’t meet two of the four principles that Obama outlined on Sept. 19, which were that it include an
emergency economic stimulus package, and that it be part of “part of a globally coordinated effort with our partners
in the G-20.”
14. REAGAN TAX RATES: Biden is wrong in saying that under Obama, Americans won't pay any more in taxes then
they did under Reagan.
Biden Tells 14 Lies During VP Debate
Amanda Carpenter
Senator Joe Biden lied at least 14 times during the vice presidential debate according to those counting at
John McCain’s presidential headquarters.
Tucker Bounds, a spokesman from GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign said in a statement,
“Joe Biden graduated from his trademark verbal gaffe to outright lie in tonight’s debate.”
McCain’s blogger-in-chief Michael Goldfarb chronicled the 14 lies HERE.
On the foreign policy front, Biden challenged Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin when she said
Barack Obama’s pledge to meet with any foreign leaders, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, without precondition
“goes beyond naivete and goes beyond poor judgment.”
Biden lectured Palin, “That's just simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say he'd sit down with
Ahmadinejad.” During the YouTube Democratic primary debate last July Obama was asked if he would meet the leaders of
Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea without “precondition” during his first year in office.
“I would,” he replied.
Biden appeared to attack Obama for making that very statement in August 2007. While Biden was challenging Obama
for the Democratic nomination for president Biden said he would not support such a pledge. “Would I make a blanket commitment
to meet unconditionally with the leaders of each of those countries within the first year I was elected president?”
he said in an appearance at the National Press Club. “Absolutely positively no."
Five of the lies Biden told were related to tax and energy votes. During the debate Biden adamantly claimed
McCain voted the same way as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama did on a vote to raise taxes on those making $42,000
a year. The legislative record shows McCain was not present in the Senate for either of those votes and is recorded as “not
voting.”
The RNC also takes issue with Biden’s assessment Palin supports a “windfall profits tax” and
Biden’s claim McCain voted against alternative energy 23 times. The independent Factcheck.org has previously stated
when Obama and other Democrats made similar charges about the 23 votes “they’re overstating the case.”
The other lies detailed by Goldfarb were related to Biden’s characterization of McCain’s healthcare
plan, stances on bank deregulation and the $700 billion financial bailout that recently passed the Senate.
|
| |
|
|
|
Political Cartoons by Robert Arial
What
is a "Loophole"?
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- How would Barack Obama pay for the $800 billion that John McCain claimed
in the first presidential debate Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss., that his Democratic opponent would spend if he were elected president?
Obama replied, by "closing tax loopholes."
Obama was no more specific in the debate, and tax experts doubt that structural changes without
increasing taxes can raise anything close to that amount of money.
My office asked the Obama campaign for the details, and it responded with a 19-page single-spaced
paper on the candidate's "tax plans."
In fact, there was precious little about tax policy in the paper, which amounted to a repeat
of Democratic campaign oratory that can be heard in 30-second speeches before both houses of Congress daily on C-SPAN.
Obama has made clear that he would try to roll back President Bush's tax cuts, but that does
not come under the definition of a "loophole." A loophole consists of a conniving tax attorney discovering a weakness in the
Internal Revenue Code or such a weakness intentionally legislated by Congress under the instigation of crafty lobbyists. The
only specific tax legislation contained in Obama's paper would raise the capital gains rate for most shareholders, restore
taxation on dividend income to pre-Bush standards and restore the full estate tax.
These were not loopholes but presidential proposals enacted by Congress. The Obama paper paints
a picture of lobbyists running wild on Capitol Hill but neglects to assess the impact on the economy during the current financial
crisis of taking a serious strike against the stockholding public.
Obama's dividends and capital gains proposals appear to be a major attempt at redistribution
of income rather than a serious attempt to pay for the spending that he has proposed.
| |
Rush Quote of the Day
Obama Endorses Church
Rush Limbaugh:
"Senator Obama, if you give this church $22,500,
you are endorsing what goes on there, and you want it to continue."
|
|
| |
|
|
|
IAEA lacks tools to expose secret work: ElBaradei
By Mark Heinrich
VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Tuesday its failure to detect
nuclear arms work in Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s showed his inspectors lacked authority to pre-empt proliferators.
His remark was telling because an investigation of Iran by the agency has stalled over Tehran's failure to explain
allegations of secret nuclear arms research and its refusal to grant inspectors access to military-affiliated sites and officials
they deem relevant.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the crux of the problem was
that some countries under investigation, the latest being Syria, had failed to ratify an agency protocol permitting short-notice
IAEA visits to sites not declared to be nuclear to ensure no bomb-related work was going on at secret locations.
"Our legal authority is very limited. With Iraq, we have discovered that unless we have the Additional Protocol
in place, we will not really be able to discover undeclared activities," he said on the sidelines of the agency's annual 145-nation
General Conference in Vienna.
"Our experience is that any proliferator will not really go for declared diverted activities (that would quickly
reveal them as violators of the Non-Proliferation Treaty), they will go for completely clandestine undeclared activities,"
he said.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq under Saddam Hussein developed a nuclear weapons program hidden from the IAEA because
of severe restrictions on access for inspectors. It came to light only after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War and the IAEA
spent the next seven years dismantling it.
DECLARATIONS NOT ENOUGH
Diplomats say the key to resolving current IAEA inquiries into Iran and Syria is extra access to sites not declared
to be nuclear. Tehran and Damascus have both ruled this out, arguing that such sites involve their conventional military and
so lie outside the IAEA's writ.
Iran and Syria deny having any covert weapons programs or illicitly hiding any nuclear activity from the IAEA.
ElBaradei has called on Syria for greater transparency and access. Damascus has not ratified the Additional Protocol.
ElBaradei said the failure of about 100 countries, including the United States, to ratify the decade-old protocol
handicapped the IAEA's verification mandate.
Since May, the IAEA has been investigating Syria, based on U.S. intelligence allegations that it had almost
completed a secret nuclear reactor that might have made bomb-grade plutonium before the site was destroyed in an Israeli air
strike.
The United States and Western allies have criticized Iran and Syria in the IAEA debate, accusing both of stonewalling
U.N. investigators and demanding unfettered cooperation.
ElBaradei said his job was complicated by loopholes in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which permits states
to develop nuclear fuel enrichment technology even though this can yield material for civilian energy purposes as well as
to make atom bombs, depending on how the process is configured.
He said the seven known nuclear weapons powers were setting a bad example to non-nuclear-armed states by clinging
to doomsday arsenals as the pillar of their security instead of dismantling them according to NPT commitments.
"How can I go with a straight face to the non-nuclear weapons states and tell them these weapons are no good
for you, when the nuclear weapons states continue to modernize and say we absolutely need nuclear weapons?" said ElBaradei.
"So we are seeing a new phenomenon of proliferation of sensitive fuel-cycle activity. Whether you do it for
economic or science reasons ... or as an insurance policy (against attack), you come very close to becoming a nuclear weapons
state."
|
| |


 |
 |
|

LeePButler Opines
|
| |
Lee P. Butler
“Hope is making a comeback, and let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am
proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but because I think people are hungry for change,” stated
Michelle Obama recently.
At first it seemed as though the Obama family just hadn’t adjusted to being in the national
spotlight and as such simply didn’t realize in that unforgiving glare every nuance of what they say will be highlighted
and held against them politically.
Liberal Democrats are notorious for pandering to their constituency groups where
there is no universal policy statement but a cut-and-paste platform of rhetoric that is tied specifically to a certain cause
or group or area of the country and the campaign speeches they give change from day to day based on who they are addressing.
As
a quick aside here, liberals and their media counterparts charge Conservative Republicans with ‘pandering’ to
certain groups yet never show that the message of their ideological principle never changes from one place to the next…
it’s always the same, group to group, city to city, state to state.
But then more information started to trickle
out about the things the Obamas have been saying, some of which goes back to their college years and suddenly it became clear
that they know exactly what it is they are saying and are not concerned about it being highlighted for everyone to see.
When
Michelle Obama made that statement… and repeated it on the campaign trail… she was not concerned about any negative
impact it may have had on her husband’s campaign because she was doing little more than reiterating a belief that all
liberals have pontificated over time.
Which is history doesn’t matter to them. All that matters to liberals is
the here and now. Every day for liberals starts anew with no past baggage and no historical precedent to follow.
When
Mrs. Obama said ‘for the first time in my adult life’ she literally meant ‘starting today’. In liberal
speak you’ve heard this same sentiment expressed many times before, but most people aren’t focused enough on the
political realm to catch it.
The way liberals have expressed it in the past is, ‘what have you done for me lately?’
Commentators
have challenged her contention by supplying a laundry list of historical events that have literally changed mankind and directed
them to a better way of life, but none of that matters because it didn’t directly affect her… in her world view…
and is now in the past so it has become inconsequential.
A perfect example of this was presented by Mrs. Obama in her
senior thesis at Princeton University where she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness'
than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates
try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances
under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student
second."
Sounds eerily similar to ‘for the first time in my adult life’ doesn’t it?
This
is classic pandering. Here is an African-American female who has been afforded an opportunity that only a select number of
human beings have had the honor of accomplishing and instead of recognizing that profound feat and what it meant to have been
able to do it, she has to pander out of what one can only register as guilt.
This is exclusive to liberals, folks.
Hillary Clinton is doing it now saying, “A lot of women project their own feelings and their lives on to me, and they
see how hard this is. It's hard. It's hard being a woman out there.”
Michelle Obama admits that her ‘white’
professors and classmates were ‘liberal and open-minded’ towards her and Hillary Clinton admits that she is the
first female to win a presidential primary, yet both of these liberals claim to not see the positive accomplishment in their
endeavor and use the occasions to do nothing more than pander to the masses for some sort of misguided sympathy.
You’ve
never heard my choice for presidential candidate and the most powerful woman in the world who just happens to be African-American,
Condoleezza Rice, crying about the heavy and undue burden placed on her as Provost for Stanford University or as the U.S.
Secretary of State.
An accomplishment Michelle Obama should have been ‘proud’ of but then it didn’t
have anything to do with her, so it doesn’t count in the Obama world view.
In Secretary Rice’s 2006 Commencement
speech at Boston College she destroyed the pandering attitudes of Obama and Clinton. “The fourth responsibility of the
educated person is to be optimistic. Too often, cynicism can be the fellow traveler of learning and I understand why. History
is full of much cruelty and suffering and darkness and it can be hard sometimes to believe that a brighter future is indeed
dawning. But for all of our past failings, for all of our current problems, more people now enjoy lives of hope and opportunity
than ever before in all of human history. This progress has been the concerted effort not of cynics but of visionaries and
optimists, of impatient patriots who dealt with our world as it was, but who never ever accepted that they were powerless
to change that world for the better.”
At what point are liberals in this country going to stop playing the violin
strings of negativity and defeatism as a method of pandering for sympathy and embrace the power of being positive and accept
that their lives in America are more beneficial and plentiful than mankind has ever been allowed?
Columns I've produced that made recent Quill Pen Ten Lists
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
History Lesson: Why the Republican Party was Formed
Excerpted from the 1998 Encarta Digital Encyclopedia
In addition to adopting a new and harsh fugitive slave law, the Compromise of 1850 brought California into the Union as
a free state, but allowed slavery in the rest of the territories. In 1854 Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska
Act. This law partially repealed the Missouri Compromise by allowing the settlers of the Kansas and Nebraska
territories (which included most of the present day states of Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota) to
decide for themselves if they wanted slavery. This was known as popular sovereignty. Those hostile to this
law and other opponents of slavery responded by forming the Republican Party. Popular sovereignty soon degenerated into a civil
war in Kansas-known as the Border War, or "Bleeding Kansas"-as Southerners
and Northerners battled over the status of slavery.
Dred Scott Case, landmark case of the 1850s in which the Supreme Court of the
United States declared that African Americans were
not U.S. citizens. The court also determined that the portion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that banned slavery in U.S. territories north and west of the state of Missouri was unconstitutional. The
Dred Scott case intensified ongoing debates over slavery that further polarized the American North and South and eventually
gave rise to the American Civil War in 1861.
In 1846 Dred Scott, a slave living in St. Louis, Missouri, sued to
prove that he, his wife Harriet, and their two daughters were legally entitled to their freedom. After being tried in Missouri
state courts and in a federal circuit court, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856. The following year, the
court rejected Scott’s claim. Speaking for the court, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney concluded that blacks, even when free, could never become citizens of the United States and thus did not have a right
to sue in federal courts. Taney also declared that Congress lacked the power to prohibit slavery in federal territories, a
ruling that invalidated the part of the Missouri Compromise that banned slavery in the western territories.
The Dissents Justices John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts issued dissenting opinions. Curtis
attacked Taney’s historical arguments, showing that blacks had voted in five states at the founding of the United States.
Thus, they were citizens of the nation from the beginning and could not now be denied citizenship.
Republicans also opposed the court’s decision. In speeches and throughout his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln alleged a conspiracy to nationalize slavery that had been hatched
by Taney, Douglas, former U.S. president Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, then the president of the United States (see Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln-Douglas Debates).
On May 26, 1857, shortly after Taney’s decision, Scott gained his freedom when the sons of his first owner, Peter
Blow, purchased and freed Scott and his family. Scott remained a free man until his death a few months later, on February
17, 1858.
His case, however, remained a key issue in American politics and law until the outbreak of the Civil War. Taney’s
controversial decision in the case widened the breach between the North and South and further aggravated debates over slavery.
It also played a decisive role in the emergence of Lincoln as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1860
and his election later that year. Despite the decision in the case, Dred Scott and the Civil War ultimately helped
to usher in the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 and what
Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom" for African Americans. In 1865 the nation adopted the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution, which ended slavery. In 1868 it adopted the 14th Amendment, which declared that all persons born in the United
States are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live. These two amendments effectively reversed Taney’s
assertions that the U.S. Constitution protected slavery and that African Americans could never be citizens of the United States.
This is a history lesson that is factually accurate and proves that the Republican Party
is the party of civil rights. This history lesson has been purposely excluded from the class rooms of our children for too
many decades.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright © 2008 Lee P Butler. All Rights Reserved.
|
|
|
 |