American Communist/Islamofascist-sympathizers are wringing their hands over 2011 Muslim Hate Crime stats

From the radical leftists at the Southern Poverty Law Center (where BNI and other anti-Islam bloggers top their hate-groups list), we learn that that the FBI numbers for anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. are about the same for 2011 as they were in 2010 when there was an “unprecedented 50% spike.” What they choose not to highlight is the fact that anti-Jewish hate crimes are still about 5 times higher than anti-Muslim hate crimes.

Religious bias
FBI Hate crimes motivated by religious bias accounted for 1,318 offenses reported by law enforcement. A breakdown of the bias motivation of religious-biased offenses showed:

62.2 percent were anti-Jewish.
13.3 percent were anti-Islamic.
5.2 percent were anti-Catholic.
4.8 percent were anti-multiple religions, group.
3.7 percent were anti-Protestant.
0.3 percent were anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc.
10.5 percent were anti-other religion. (Based on Table 1.)

Read more here.

US Drops 10 Spots In Economic Freedom Rankings

‘Cut it or Shut it!’: Tea Party Says No to Budget Compromise at DC Rally Today

Jenny Beth Martin looked out on the rain-dampened crowd along Constitution Avenue and pointed over her shoulder at the Capitol.

“They heard us, but they’re not listening!” Martin, a tea party leader, told members of the movement that helped put Republicans in charge of the House last November.

The crowd booed.

Four months after the historic election, the populist force that helped drive Republicans to power is finding that its clout on Capitol Hill isn’t automatic.

What brings you out today, one tea party member was asked. “Saving our country, obviously.”

Sensitive talks over how many billions of dollars to cut from this year‘s federal budget have strayed far below the Republicans’ campaign promise to slash $100 billion. Rather than standing firm and allowing parts of the government to shut down until enough lawmakers came around, House Speaker John Boehner was doing exactly what the tea partiers thought they had elected Republicans to avoid: negotiating with President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats over spending cuts.

“Cut it or shut it!” chanted the crowd outside the Capitol on Thursday.

“I’m not talking about $5 billion or $6 billion or $10 billion. I’m talking about $100 billion,” said one tea party activist (seen in the picture above), speaking of the budget cuts. According to the AP, $10 billion has been cut so far.

Among those not balking were some of the 87 freshmen Republicans, who more than anyone in the House owe their seats to the tea party juggernaut.

Read more here.

Obama calling for more infrastructure spending

WASHINGTON (AP) – Vowing to find new ways to stimulate the sputtering economy, President Barack Obama will call for long-term investments in the nation’s roads, railways and runways that would cost at least $50 billion.

The infrastructure investments are one part of a package of targeted proposals the White House is expected to announce in hopes of jump-starting the economy ahead of the November election. Obama will outline the infrastructure proposal Monday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee.

While the proposal calls for investments over six years, the White House said spending would be front-loaded with an initial $50 billion to help create jobs in the near future.

The goals of the infrastructure plan include: rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads; constructing and maintaining 4,000 miles of railways, enough to go coast-to-coast; and rehabilitating or reconstructing 150 miles of airport runways, while also installing a new air navigation system designed to reduce travel times and delays.

Obama will also call for the creation of a permanent infrastructure bank that would focus on funding national and regional infrastructure projects.

Administration officials wouldn’t say what the total cost of the infrastructure investments would be, but did say the initial $50 billion represents a significant percentage. Officials said the White House would consider closing a number of special tax breaks for oil and gas companies to pay for the proposal.

Read more here.

HOW’S OBAMA’S “RECOVERY SUMMER” WORKING OUT FOR YOU?

So there we have Joe Biden telling Americans yesterday that “we’re heading in the right direction.” Well … from his standpoint, and certainly from the standpoint of his boss, The Community Organizer …perhaps he’s right. Right, that is, if your version of “the right direction” is toward the economic tyranny that will be visited upon us by Obama’s vision of a centrally planned economy.

Just take a look at some of the headlines over the past few days:

* Home sales in the United States were down in July. This in spite of dirt-cheap mortgages and greatly reduced prices. The figures are the worse we’ve seen in this country in over a decade. The experts are telling us that we’re in for another drop in home values. Welcome to Recovery Summer!

* The Financial Times says that disappointing US economic figures are driving a surge in demand for low-yielding assets. I’m not sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. Here’s a quote: “Things appear to have come to a head…with markets braced at the edge of a precipice ahead of key US economic data likely to further unnerve investors already concerned by the extent of impending slowdown.” Welcome to Recovery Summer!

* This from The Wall Street Journal: Day after day, investors have been hit with more evidence that the economy is stalling. The Dow is down over 4% this month, after an ebullient July that was fueled by impressive earnings results from U.S. companies. The Dow posted another triple-digit loss today and at one point fell below the 10,000 level. Michael Casey has details about the factors driving today’s market action. But earnings season is now over and investors are far more focused on potential troubles ahead. What’s that Biden said? Oh yeah … Welcome to Recovery Summer.

* Economist David Rosenberg, apparently someone who has earned a certain degree of respect in economic circles, writes a daily brief for investors. Yesterday he said that the U.S. economy is heading into a 1930s-style depression. He reminded his clients that the Great Depression also had some high points such as positive stock market gains .. but then, as now, those signs of recovery were unsustainable and only provided a false sense of stability.

* Charles Nenner, founder and president of Charles Nenner research says that the Dow is on its way down to 5000 in the next 30 months. He’s saying that things “really look bad for the next 10 years.”

* While millions of Americans are looking for jobs so that they can start taking care of their families again, Our Hero is looking for over 5% in new income tax that our own government says will affect 50% of the small business income that we need to put to work to grow new jobs. Smart, isn’t it?

* You saw the jobless claims that came out last week. Try 500,000 new jobless claims. Welcome to Recovery Summer.

* The number of subscribers to cable and satellite television fell for the first time in history during the second quarter of this year. People just aren’t going to pay the price any more .. not in this economy they’re not.

* The Obama Administration is no longer using the “jobs created or saved” nonsense to tout the effectiveness of the stimulus plan. There’s a new phrase now …. “lives touched.”

* The Obama Administration has now as much as admitted that ObamaCare will increase the cost of medical care in this country and, at the same time, add to our deficit. Exactly the opposite of what was promised when they were trying to get the bill passed earlier this year.

Is this all working out the way you planned it in 2008? Absolutely NOTHING that Obama and his Democrat dog washers are trying is working. In spite of the infantile ravings of Biden, there is no recovery. Millions of Americans are still out of work while Democrats borrow money for such wonderful stimulus projects as teaching Siberians how to deal with their government. Siberians, in case you were educated in our hideous government schools, are Russians .. and the government we’re trying to teach them to interact with is located in … Moscow. There you go. A quick $200,000 shot to hell by Pelosi’s big spenders … and Obama calls this “economic stimulus.”

This is what we get when the idiot voters in this country fall for a smooth talking community organizer with absolutely NO executive experience at all … and who has often professed his disdain for the private sector … and we put this menace in charge of bring our economy back.

Would you take your sick puppy to a vet that hates dogs? Why, then, would we take a sick private sector economy to a ruler who hates the private sector?

This is all so much worse than I ever could have imagined when Obama got his crown of thorns in January of 2009. I’ve seen incompetence before … but this character gets the gold medal.

I’m telling ya. If the Democrats remain in power after the November election this year, it’s time to buy some luggage. If they remain in power after 2012 … and this disaster of a president gets a second term … it’s time to pack.

THE REPUBLICAN TAX INCREASE?

Now you have to love this bit of nonsense. Once again we’re seeing how valuable our system of government education is to the Democrats. After all, you could never pull this off with an educated electorate.

You know, don’t you, that taxes are going up at the end of the year. At the beginning of the Bush presidency the Republicans simply didn’t have enough votes to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. The Democrats insisted on an expiration date of December 31st, 2010. Now … since those tax cuts will expire and taxes are going up .. The Democrats have decided it might be a good political ploy to start referring to this as a “Republican Tax Increase.

Nope … not kidding: House majority leader Steny Hoyer says that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts is a “Republican tax increase” for “working Americans” and the Democrats have “no intention” of allowing it to go into effect. Hoyer says, “We have no intention of allowing the Republican tax increase — that their policies would lead to — to go into effect for working Americans. Period …. We’re going to act and make sure that the Republican phase out and increase in taxes does not end as they provided for in the laws they passed.”

This is just amazing. Now we have a lot of economists telling the Democrats that if they don’t extend the Bush tax cuts our economic recovery will be damaged. Democrats don’t want to cut the taxes on the top producers. They know that their base constituency loves taxing the rich … but they also don’t want to be seen as increasing taxes during a recovery. After all … what if the experts are right? What if increasing taxes on the very people who we’re depending on for job growth stalls our recovery? Well, that’s easy! We’ll just call them “Republican tax increases” and let them take the heat!

Again .. not to belabor the point … but you can’t get away with this if the voters are truly educated and informed.

Government Drunk on Stupid

In these tough and turbulent economic times, we need to look for small things we can be thankful for.

For example, I am thankful President Obama is not a lifeguard, as I believe he would toss concrete blocks to drowning swimmers instead of life preservers.

Why do I believe that? His economic policies are drowning our economy, leaving many Americans unemployed or underemployed, and he knows it.

President Obama can squawk all he wants and blame everyone from President Bush to Tea Partiers to Fox News, but our anemic economy is the result of his willingness to mindlessly over gorge Fedzilla—the burgeoning federal bureaucray—on more grotesque spending and borrowing and signing more blubber-infested bills that no one knows what’s in them, how they will be implemented or the impact they will have on the economy.

The evidence is glaring: The business community does not trust President Obama. They don’t trust his Socialist economy-killing policies, his Wall Street reform sham that no one knows what is in it or how it will be implemented or his take-over of the healthcare system. They are uneasy about his cap-and-tax energy proposal, green-energy scam and his support to kill the Bush tax cuts.

Read more here.

DEMONIZING THE RICH

Looks like it’s time for the Democrat Party to dance with who brung them to so many parties in the past. Midterm elections are on the horizon and the Dems are looking at possibly (I’ve been watching American voters too long to use the word “probably”) losing the House. Obama and his troupe tried the “Summer of Recovery” tour but that went over about as well as a pregnant Nun. It’s hard to convince people we’re in the middle of an economic recovery when businesses keep shutting their doors and unemployment remains high. Something else that didn’t work was Pelosi’s little “we have to pass health care reform so that we can see what’s in it” ploy. Well they passed it … and it seems that every single week we learn something new and wonderful about what an absolutely hideous piece of legislation ObamaCare is. Remember, if you will, the information we gave you last week on the hundreds of 1099s virtually small businesses will have to file starting in 2012.

Well … if you’re a mindless Democrat (a little redundancy there from the Department of Redundancy Department) .. or, to make it simpler … if you’re an uneducated idiot, there’s always one last ploy you can use when election day draws near. You can demonize the rich. The wealth envy has always been there, it’s there now, and it will always be there … so take advantage of it!

So we’re getting some really interesting arguments out of Washington right now. All of them are in efforts to explain why the middle class is worthy of tax cuts and the evil rich people are not. Now our tax cheat Treasury Secretary says that increasing taxes on the rich is “the responsible thing to do.” He says, “It’s responsible to let the tax cuts expire that just go to 2 percent to 3 percent of Americans, the highest earning Americans.” Doing so would show the world that the U.S. is “willing as a country now to start to make some progress” reducing long-term budget deficits. Can you believe this line of BS? Now we have a responsibility to increase taxes on the filthy rich. To whom to we have this responsibility and why? We have to look out for the general welfare of the American public because everyone is concerned about our deficit. So by increases taxes on the rich, that will help alleviate our deficit woes, right? Wrong. This is categorically untrue, as I have already pointed out numerous times. The fact is that the more and more Democrats feed this line about the taxes for the wealthy being linked to the deficit, the more the American public will start to believe them. This is a classic case of using wealth envy to get policy passed … even if you know it is untrue, the American people are too stupid to know otherwise.

What you’re seeing here is the how critically important government schools are to Democrats. I doubt that one out of a thousand parents in this country have ever seen fit to study the origins of government-controlled education in this county. If they had they would have run across some of the writings of the people directly involved with the creation of today’s system of government schools. Reading some of those letters, articles and studies would have revealed that it was never the intention of these people, or of the schools that they created, to fully educate America’s children.

Why am I suddenly ranting about government schools? Simple — because with any education at all the people of this country would understand, or would have the means to discover some basic truths about taxing the snot out of the filthy, disgusting, insipid filthy rich.

You always get more of the behavior you reward and less of the behavior you punish. Taxes are punishment. When you punish those who work harder with higher taxes you dampen their desire to put in the extra effort. The higher taxes get less willing productive people will be to go the extra mile, make that risky investment in a new business or otherwise work to increase their earnings. Conversely .. the lower taxes are the more willing you will find productive high-achievers to be to take those extra steps that lead to more income. These basic human traits – to work harder when rewarded and to work less when punished – have proven themselves time and time again as taxes rise and fall.

Now here’s the part that the Democrats really don’t want the American dumb masses to understand: When you increase taxes on the high-achievers they slow down their economic activity resulting in lower tax revenues. When you decrease taxes on high-achievers they work even harder because the reward is greater, resulting in higher tax revenues. There is no arguing this point. The historical record proves the point. Democrats would lose a powerful weapon … their “tax the rich” pandering to wealth envy … if the American people understood this. Hence our government schools.

The very people Obama and his anti-capitalist cadre are targeting with their higher taxes are the people our economy depends on to create new jobs. Between 70 and 80% of all existing jobs and all new jobs being created are jobs created and provided by America’s small businesses … and the owners of these small businesses are the VERY ONES Obama and the Democrats are targeting with tax increases. Thanks to our woefully inadequate government schools most Americans have no understanding of this fact. Ask them and they’ll tell you that most Americans work for major corporations and financial institutions. If Americans really DID understand that the very people Obama and the Democrats want to bring down to size with more taxes are the people we’re depending on for new jobs … Democrats would be hiding under their beds.

Less money for dead people: Obama signs waste law

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Thursday signed legislation intended to slash by $50 billion the taxpayer money improperly paid to dead people, fugitives and those in jail who shouldn’t be getting benefits.

But that goal, if achieved, would not even halve the $110 billion made in such payments last year.

The new law will strengthen the efforts by federal agencies to halt the flow of improper money in a series of ways. Among those steps: requiring more audits of programs and adding penalties for agencies that don’t comply with the law. The legislation also broadens how any recovered money can be used.

Obama chose to sign the bill in front of cameras in the White House’s State Dining Room in hopes of bringing attention to the new law. He announced a goal of reducing improper payments by $50 billion by 2012; the White House says that last year’s total of nearly $110 billion in these payments was the highest ever.

The president said the ultimate to goal is to end all improper payments.

Read more here.

Pork, More Pork and Yes, Even More Pork

Yup … the porkers are stirring. Look! There they are approaching the taxpayer trough yet again. After all … an election is on the horizon. This election, though, is a bit different for Democrats. They definitely don’t want to go to their home districts and run on a national agenda. Their survival may well depend on separating themselves from Obama’s big-government movement. So … tout the pork! Democrats are going into their home districts and saying “Look at this sidewalk? Look at this pedestrian bridge! Look at this new community center! I did these things for you! Don’t you want to send me back to Washington?”

The problem here is that these politicians and their constitutions just can’t see a pedestrian bridge or a weasel crossing under a road in some national park as being so expensive that it really had anything at all to do with our increasing debt. Maybe the politicians know better .. but the voters may not.

Are you one of those Americans who suffer from thousands of dollars of credit card debt? Think about this now … you have an $8,000 balance on your credit card and really nothing to show for it. You can’t point to any one large purchase that created this burdensome debt load. If you check your statements you’ll see that you created that debt bit-by-bit. There’s a $40 fill-up at the gas station here, $35 in groceries there. Then you charge some movie theatre tickets and the next day it’s $4.60 at Starbucks. None of these expenditures are going to bury you … but time goes by, the charges add up, and suddenly you’re sitting there trying to figure out how you got in this situation.

Same thing for government and our national debt. That pedestrian sky bridge in El Paso, or that new composting restroom in a Madison, Wisconsin park aren’t exactly going to break the bank. But you get 435 members of the House, toss in 100 Senators … every one of them trying to impress the local voters with these pork items … and suddenly things are out of control.

I have something that could lead to a fix. I’ve been proposing this for years. I actually managed to have something like this introduced as legislation in the Georgia General Assembly about 10 years ago .. and it went nowhere. I just call it the “Taxpayer’s Addendum.”

How does it work? Well, let’s apply it to congressional pork. I would propose that every single time a lawmaker proposes an earmark as part of an appropriations bill in Washington the request must be in writing and the Taxpayer’s Addendum should be added to the request. Here’s how it might read:

“I, ___ (politician’s name) ________ do hereby swear and affirm that it is my considered position and belief that it is more important for the government to spend the necessary sums for the completion of the project outlined herein than it would be for the person who actually worked for and earned these funds to be permitted to retain those funds for the payment of their person expenses; including expenses related to basic necessities of life such as food, transportation, shelter, clothing and healthcare.”

How many of these politicians do you think would be willing to actually walk up to a wage earner and physically take the money out of that person’s pocket to pay for some of this pork? Yeah … the number would be somewhere near zero I suspect.