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Posts tagged ‘Ted Kennedy’

Sunsetting Federal Spending Programs Is A Fantastic Idea


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | FEBRUARY 09, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/09/sunsetting-federal-spending-programs-is-a-fantastic-idea/

Rick Scott
Why do Americans have to live with legislative decisions made nearly 90 years ago?

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When Joe Biden accused Republicans of planning to “cut” Social Security and Medicare during his State of the Union address, it was — like virtually all the other things he said — a lie. His claim was tantamount to accusing Democrats of supporting a “plan” to shut down air travel because Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once proposed it.

The president was referring to Rick Scott’s ill-timed “12 Point Plan to Rescue America,” which included, among numerous other nonstarters, a proposal to sunset all federal spending programs every five years. The proposal, contra Biden’s contention, had no support from Republicans and nothing to do with the debt ceiling fight.

None of that means that asking Congress to reauthorize federal spending bills every few years isn’t a great idea. Why would stalwarts of “democracy” oppose revisiting spending decisions made by legislators nearly 90 years ago? No living person has ever voted on them. And though “liberals” are generally more protective of Social Security than the Bill of Rights, entitlement programs aren’t foundational governing ideas, they do not protect our natural rights, nor are they at the heart of the American project. Government dependency is, in fact, at odds with all of it.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of private-sector establishments go out of business, and yet not a single federal government program ever does. While nearly every facet of society embraces cost-saving efficiencies, the federal government perpetually grows. It is madness. Simply as a function of good governance, it would be reasonable for Congress to review the efficacy and cost of existing federal programs, and then make suggestions for reforms or elimination or — yikes — privatization. Forget entitlements. Is there any reason we shouldn’t revisit the billions spent on the obsolete Natural Resource Conservation Service (created in 1935 to help farmers deal with soil corrosion) or the Rural Electrification Administration (created in the same year, when large swaths of rural Americans did not have electricity) or the counterproductive Small Business Administration or the subsidy sucking Amtrak corporation?

Indeed, there is widespread support for Social Security — a Bismarckian import, first championed nationally by corrupt populists like Huey Long to augment retirement. One suspects this is largely because Americans have been compelled by the state to pay into the pyramid scheme. Many people build their retirements around the program. They have no choice. Compulsion is a hallmark of leftist policy, from entitlements to Obamacare to unionization to public school systems. And by forcing participation, we’ve created a generational trap. Voters have been fearmongered into believing that any reform means something is being stolen from them, when no serious proposal has ever cut existing benefits.

In the 1970s, Biden supported re-upping federal spending authorization every four years and requiring Congress to “make a detailed study of the program before renewing it.” Obviously, Biden hasn’t stuck to a single principled position in his entire career. But it is worth noting there was plenty of bipartisan support for sunsetting bills from 1970 through the 2000s — including from Ed Muskie, Jesse Helms, liberal “lion” Ted Kennedy, and George W. Bush.

Until very recently the center of both parties also agreed entitlement reform would be necessary to keep Medicare and Social Security solvent. In today’s Idiocracy, we have a president who argues that a $5 trillion spending bill costs “zero” dollars, so we’re about a zillion lightyears away from responsible governance.

If Social Security is so deeply popular — and everyone saw cowardly Republicans promise Biden they wouldn’t do anything to fix these programs that are bankrupting the country — what’s the problem? Even with the highly remote chance of a sunset law, the chances of reform would be still more remote. Look at how Washington almost perfunctorily lifts the debt ceiling. The only shared principle in D.C. is risk aversion.

Still, if Congress were automatically impelled to vote on existing law, it would create more political space to at least suggest changes and perhaps revisit mistakes. If nothing else, Congress would be marginally more “productive” if it was forced to occasionally deal with existing problems rather than concocting new ways to create them.


David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

Yo, Liberal Dumbasses: Which ‘Collusion’ Story Is The Greatest Threat To Democracy?


Published by ClashDaily.com | July 20, 2017

URL of the original posting site: http://clashdaily.com/2017/07/yo-liberal-dumbasses-collusion-story-greatest-threat-democracy/

It looks like all of the ‘journalists’ in The Media (D) completely forgot about THESE stories amidst the Don Jr.-Russia Hysteria.

ClashDaily has already pointed out the Hillary-Russia connection that the Media (D) ignores.

And of course, there’s the Hillary camp’s ‘collusion’ with the Ukraine that the Media (D) ignores.

Instead, we’ve all heard about Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer and several others during the campaign to get dirt on Hillary.

It’s driving the ratings of the Media (D) these days, but even they know it’s B.S.

As one CNN producer said, ‘It’s business’.

Besides, we’re not actively hostile with Russia, are we? Obama and Hillary did a ‘reset’ and everything.

The Don Jr. story has been thoroughly covered, so we won’t get into all the nitty-gritty. If you need catching up, watch CNN for 5 minutes and you’ll be up to speed. It’s like 90 percent of their coverage.

If you don’t want to subject yourself to CNN for any length of time (which is understandable), here are Mark Steyn and Tucker Carlson doing a great job summing up:

Instead, we’ll take the ‘Way Back Machine’ and check out some other ‘collusion’ stories that The Media (D) seem to forget about.

Ted Kenned And The KGB

Moscow. General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev meets with US senator Edward Kennedy.

In 1991, a reporter for the London Times, Tim Sebastian, found a memo while he was searching through Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had opened up. He found something that was shocking. A memo from 1983 from the head of the KGB.

Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”
Source: Forbes 

Kennedy had some specific proposals for Andropov. He suggested:

– he would visit Moscow

– he would assist the Soviets in brushing up their propaganda against Reagan

– he would give Soviet leaders arguments against nuclear disarmament so they would be more convincing to Americans

– he would make arrangements for Andropov to be interviewed by the Media (D) to be aired on American TV

– he insisted the interviews look as though they were initiated by the American media, and would ‘rig’ them to look like ‘honest journalism’

Why did he do it? The memo says because of his ‘concern’ for the rising tensions between the US and the USSR. Oh, and he wanted to run for President in 1988.

But that’s a minor factor, amirite?

When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.

Just think of what would have happened if had Kennedy succeeded.

Nancy Pelosi And Bashir al-Assad

I’m old enough to remember when Bashar al-Assad was viewed as a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad man. But not to Nancy Pelosi in 2007.

Nope.

Pelosi, who was Speaker at the time, decided to go to Syria and chat with Assad herself — because it was time to negotiate. She did so against the wishes of President Bush. Here she is showing her full denture smile as she meets the barbaric murderer that gasses his own people and gives ‘safe passage’ to terrorists Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad (R) shakes hands with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in Damascus April 4, 2007. REUTERS/SANA (SYRIA)

“The road to Damascus is a road to peace.” Those were damning words. When Nancy Pelosi embraced Bashar al-Assad in April 2007, she wasn’t simply challenging the commander-in-chief during a war; she was propagandizing for a dictator who was killing Americans

…With the tacit approval of the Syrian regime, between 2005 and 2008, foreign jihadists flooded along the arterial highways that connect eastern Syria and western Iraq. Once in Iraq, they joined up with facilitators from the Islamic State’s precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The zealots were then assigned to murder American soldiers and Marines. And AQI was responsible for particularly gruesome crimes…

…Granting AQI safe haven and supply routes, Mr. Assad was complicit in their crimes. As speaker (entitled to near-highest level intelligence), Pelosi knew this

President Bush was (for the reasons outlined) firmly against Pelosi’s trip. Second, State Department briefings do not signify endorsement of travel. They simply reflect State’s rightful need to inform U.S. representatives and ensure their safety. Nothing changes the fact that Speaker Pelosi — third in line to the presidency — praised an American enemy while he was helping to murder Americans and attack U.S. interests.
Source: National Review

Pelosi has continued with her bizarre behavior and is shockingly still holding public office despite her strange press conferences and near-constant messing up of the language. Half the time she refers to President Trump as President Bush.

Seriously, folks, there’s got to be somebody in California that can run against her. She’s a mess!

Looks like the Media (D) has amnesia about these incidents of ‘collusion’.

Maybe they need a reminder.

Ann Coulter Letter: “The War on America Turns 50”


Authored by  Ann Coulter  | 

URL of the original posting site: http://humanevents.com/2015/09/30/the-war-on-america-turns-50/?utm_source=coulterdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

The War on America Turns 50

Half a century ago, Democrats looked at the country and realized they were never going to convince Americans to agree with them. But they noticed that people in most other countries of the world already agreed with them. The solution was obvious.

So in 1965 — 50 years ago this week — Sen. Ted Kennedy passed an immigration law that has brought 59 million foreigners to our shores, who happen to vote 8-2 for the Democrats.

 

Democrats haven’t won any arguments; they changed the voters. If anything, the Democrats have stopped bothering to appeal to Americans. The new feminized Democratic Party says, That’s too bad about those steelworkers in Ohio losing their jobs, but THERE’S A WOMAN AT A LAW FIRM IN NEW YORK CITY WHO DESERVES TO MAKE PARTNER!Picture1Republicans should be sweeping the country, but they aren’t, because of Kennedy’s immigration law. Without post-1965 immigrants bloc-voting for the Democrats, Obama never would have been elected president, and Romney would have won a bigger landslide against him in 2012 than Reagan did against Carter in 1980.illegalalienvoters-300x300This isn’t a guess; it’s a provable fact. Obama beat Romney by less than 5 million votes in a presidential election in which about 125 million votes were cast. More than 30 million of Obama’s votes came from people who arrived under Teddy Kennedy’s immigration law; fewer than 10 million of Romney’s did.

 

The 1965 act brought in the poorest of the poor from around the globe. Non-English-speaking peasants from wildly backward cultures could be counted on to be dependent on government assistance for generations to come.

Kennedy and other Democrats swore up and down that the new immigration law would not change the country’s demographics, but post-1965-act immigrants are nothing like the people who already lived here.Destroyed for lack of knowledgeAs Pew Research cheerfully reports, previous immigrants were “almost entirely” European. But since Kennedy’s immigration act, a majority of immigrants have been from Latin America. One-quarter are from Asia. Only 12 percent of post-1965-act immigrants have been from Europe — and they’re probably Muslims.

Apparently, the “American experiment” is actually some kind of sociological trial in which we see if people who have no history of Western government can run a constitutional republic.As of 1970, there were only 9 million Hispanics in the entire country, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, there are well more than 60 million.

We’ve already taken in one-quarter of the entire population of Mexico, most of whom seem to live in Los Angeles. For the last decade, nearly half of all felons sent to California’s prisons have been Hispanic, according to the Department of Corrections.

  • In 1970, there were only a few thousand Haitians in America. Today, there are nearly a million. Miami beaches and New York parks are suddenly littered with goat heads from Haitian voodoo rituals.
  • In 1970, there were virtually no Somalis in the United States. In the past 25 years alone, we’ve brought in more than 80,000 Somali refugees — and more than half of those since 9/11. Recent headlines out of Minnesota: “Minnesota ISIS terror suspect pleads guilty to conspiracy,” “February trial date set for Minnesota ISIS terror suspects,” “The Twin Cities have an ISIS problem.”

(Possible new GOP slogan: “We’ll cut your taxes, as long as these voodoo priests and refugees approve it.”)

  • In 1960, there were about 200,000 Muslims in the U.S., according to a study in the International Journal of Environmental Science and Development. Today, the U.S. Census estimates that there are more than 6 million Muslims here. Muslims are expected to surpass Jews as the second-largest religion in America in about two decades.

No country has ever simply turned itself into another country like this.

With the media cheering the end of America and businessmen determined to keep importing cheap labor, Democrats don’t even bother hiding what they’re doing.

Democratic political strategists Ruy Teixeira and John Judis have been gloating for 20 years about how post-1965 immigration would soon produce a country where Republicans could not win an election, anywhere. Then Democrats could do whatever they want. They called the new emerging majority “George McGovern’s Revenge.”Tyranney Alert

In today’s America, George McGovern would be a moderate Democrat; Jimmy Carter would be a two-term president; and we’d be holding primary debates at the Walter Mondale Presidential Museum and Library.

Any GOP candidate for president who wants to increase immigration — i.e., all of them except Trump — ought to be required to first pass this simple test: Be successfully elected governor of California on a platform of tax cuts and social conservatism.

The Democrats got the voters — and the country got

  • 9/11,
  • Fort Hood,
  • the Boston Marathon bombing,
  • clitorectomies,
  • an explosion of gang rapes,
  • child rapes,
  • sex tourism,
  • slavery,
  • voodoo,
  • Russell Brand,
  • billions of taxpayer dollars stolen in Medicare and Medicaid scams,
  • an epidemic of heroin deaths,
  • bankrupt school districts and hospitals,
  • overcrowded prisons,
  • and endless tax hikes to pay for all the immigrant services, as small town after small town goes all-Mexican, or all-Somali or all-Hmong.

The people coming in aren’t the ones exulting about “the browning of America.” It’s smug liberals who want America to be humbled and destroyed. The cultural left is overjoyed at the remaking of our society into one that is poorer, browner and less free.

These changes are entirely the result of government policies that were never debated, much less put to a vote. Americans have not been consulted on the question of whether to turn our country into some other country.

Never mind what we’re doing. You’ll thank us later.Partyof Deceit Spin and Lies

I know it’s gauche to consider what Americans want, but how about the immigrants? Presumably some didn’t come only for the welfare, crime and terrorism opportunities. They decided to move to the United States — not Mexico or Somalia or China — because they wanted to live in America. If our current immigration policies aren’t stopped, they’re going to wonder why they bothered.

Resist Amnesty Tree of Liberty 03 We have been torn apart In God We Trust freedom combo 2

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