Charlie's Life

Let’s just lay it out there: The Democrats in the Senate have ignored the will of the people and are going to transform our nation without their support or consent. They ignored conservatives. They ignored independents. They ignored liberals, leftists, union bosses, and “progressives”. The only people that got what they wanted were the appropriators and power grabbers that occupy our nation’s most prestigious club.

Principles were set aside. Values were cast overboard in exchange for billions in favors. The real priorities of supposed Democratic budget hawks have been revealed. “Pro-Life” Democrats tossed care into the wind over federal funding for abortions, bought off with massive government payouts to their home states. With your money, by the way. Your money.

There will be a reckoning for this. The American people recognize they have been duped. They did not vote for this. In fact, they were told they were voting for the opposite of this. Obama campaigned on no mandates for health insurance coverage. Now, we will have mandates. He campaigned on no new taxes on the middle class. Now, we will have $400 billion+ in new taxes, much of which will fall onto the middle class. That’s not even mentioning that if you aren’t covered by health insurance for even one month, you will be fined $495 or 2% of your income, whichever is greater. It only gets worse from there with taxes on everything big and small, from medical devices to tanning salons.

There will be no getting away with this type of tyranny by committee. The American people are not happy with this turn of events, not happy at all, and they will express their anger, their sense of betrayal, at the ballot box in 2010. But that must be just the beginning. It’s time for the American people to stand up and demand massive, permanent, and complete change. Our country simply can’t afford to keep accelerating down this path of tax, spend, and borrow. When Republicans behaved this way they were rightly punished in 2006 and 2008. Now the Democrats are back in power, and nobody can drive a country off a fiscal cliff like liberals can.

It’s not just the health care bill. It’s the $787 billion failed “stimulus” and its smaller brother the year before. It’s the cap-and-tax trillion dollar knee-cap to our economy. It’s the billions shoveled into the auto industry to prop up failing labor unions who will just pour the money into more campaigns for Democrats next cycle. It’s the Card Check legislation that would cripple our nation’s struggling small businesses. It’s the $400 billion omnibus spending bill that continued this wild spending orgy as if nothing were wrong. It’s the refusal to reform already bankrupt programs like Social Security and Medicare when millions of American depend on them and we are fully aware they’re on a path to fiscal ruin. It’s the simple disdain for fiscal sanity that seems to pervade our nation’s capital. It’s the intentional myopia with regard to the looming financial crisis that our nation is steaming towards. It’s the almost purposeful accumulation of soon-to-be overwhelming debt, for which the yearly interest payments alone with eclipse cost of the entire failed “stimulus” bill.

It has to stop. If it doesn’t our nation will go bankrupt. Our people will slave away day after day just to pay the interest on the bills we’ve already rung up. Innovation will cease because no one will be able to afford R&D costs. Unemployment will skyrocket and our currency will be devalued.

Conservatives need to step forward. Stop wasting time chasing the fantasy of a third party. Re-take the Republican Party. Use it as the vessel to knock down the gates, and storm the castle. Our government is out of control, and we need to take it back. It’s forgotten that it derives its power from us, that it’s beholden to the people. Next year will be the beginning of the effort to re-take our country from the appropriators and the power-seekers, and redistribute that power back down to the people and their local governments. But, it will not end there. It can’t. The ship is too big to turn in just one push. This effort must be sustained and disciplined. It’s an effort to inject liberty and freedom back into the lives of everyday citizens, and it must continue into perpetuity or we will risk sliding back into the same position we’re in today.

It must be bold. No commitments to only slow the growth of government. We must cut spending in every non-vital area of government. Not just tiny and ineffective tax rebate checks once every so often, but large, long-term tax cuts that will encourage investment for the future and spur real, sustainable growth. Not the carved-out exceptions for this or that industry, but an across-the-board slash in corporate taxes that would allow companies to begin hiring and invest more money at home in America. Not just temporary fixes to Social Security and Medicare by raising taxes on the rich and hiking the retirement age, but actual reform of the programs that will solve the problem and allow seniors to sleep soundly at night not having to wonder if Congress is going to rob them of their retirement after they’ve paid their dues for decades.

This bold re-taking of America must begin now. Conservatives must become active within their local Republican Parties. This must be a ground-up effort, not just one driven by the old guard of the conservative movement. They certainly will be involved, and vital to the effort, but it must be the people who lead this push. Indeed, it’s already begun with the mass protests in cities around the country, but it has to evolve into something more. We will say “No!” as long as we have to, as long as the appropriators are in power. But then, we must seize power and implement our own agenda to restore liberty to the people and shut down this tit-for-tat system.

It’s time to get involved!

That’s the question the new GOP.com website is asking, and it’s the question that Sen. Olympia Snowe should be asking herself today after her indefensible vote today to condemn Americans to a future full of higher taxes, lower quality health care, and rationing. Maybe we should all email Sen. Snowe’s office and ask her to fill out the simple form on GOP.com to remind us why she is a Republican….Go ahead.

I’m never one for kicking people out of the party; I’m just not. I think it’s stupid to purposefully boot people off the team, when the only way to win the game is to have a bigger roster than your opponent. But at some point, all of the teammates need to look around and ask why they’re playing for the Republican Party. Someone compromising on a particular issue here or there is a necessary consequence of having a big tent party. Even some of the best conservatives in the party slip up here and there. Not every issue is central to the Republican Party’s or conservative movement’s purpose, and some issues may even have viable conservative arguments available on more than one side. Take the Patriot Act for instance: probably most conservatives argue in favor of it from a national security perspective, while others argue against it because they fear the erosion of individual liberties.

But some positions are so central to the purpose of the Republican party that taking a different position calls into question why you’re even a Republican at all. A vote for the “stimulus” bill is a great example. The whole point of the Republican Party is to advocate for limited government and stand in opposition to wasteful government spending. If you can’t agree on that, then you simply are not a Republican. That’s it. There is no more central purpose to our party than standing for the individual and limited government. There simply wasn’t anything about the “stimulus” bill that should’ve been appealing to any Republican (ahem, Charlie Crist).

The health care bill is another one of these core issue votes, for multiple reasons. The bill raises taxes on millions of Americans (core issue), grossly expands government involvement in the private sector (core issue), takes away the freedom of individuals to make decisions for themselves (core issue), permanently increases government spending on entitlement (core issue), and on and on.

On top of this, how naive do you have to be (Sen. Snowe), to actually fall for the budget trickery the Democrats have built into this non-bill (what’s being called a vapor bill)? Let’s make the assumption that all the numbers in the bill are honest estimates of real costs and revenues, and that the projected cost of the bill is actually $829billion over ten years. First, history has taught us that federal entitlement programs always cost more (often far more) than they were projected to cost when they were first created. When Medicare was created in 1965, it was projected to cost just(!) $12 billion. When 1990 actually rolled around, Medicare cost a whopping $100 billion. It is nothing but willful blindness to pretend that this situation is different.

Putting aside that scenario, can anyone honestly believe that the numbers included in the Baucus bill are honest? The biggest example is how the bill remains “deficit neutral” by using ten years of revenue to cover only seven years of expenditures. Get that? They’re going to tax you for three years before the bill takes effect to make it look like the first ten years don’t cost anything. After the first ten years, we will begin to see the true costs of the legislation kick in, and, according to the CBO’s report, we still will have over 25 million uninsured Americans.

For someone to pretend (Sen. Snowe) that this massive expansion in government control over health care is nothing more than the next step in the nation’s slow slide into a single-payer health care system represents a total disregard for precedent.

The only possible justification for Sen. Snowe’s vote today would be in the off chance that she is a super-calculating person who plans on magically exerting more than her fair share of influence in the merger discussions, thereby dragging the bill so far to the middle that she knows liberal senators won’t vote tolerate it, and perhaps the bill will fail before it reaches the president for a signature. The odds of this being her line of thinking: 5%.

Outside of the remote chance that, through some sort of Machiavellian maneuvering, Sen. Snowe believes she is actually dooming the bill by voting it out of committee (and then has the ability to actually follow through and doom the bill), her vote today was totally unacceptable.

Like I said at the beginning, I’m not one to kick people out of the party. But I am certainly one to hold people in our party accountable when they start acting like Democrats. Sen. Snowe voting for the health care bill today because it’s “historic” is no excuse for ditching every core principle of the party. How many other bills would have been “historic”, but were also terrible ideas? Either you believe in the principles of the party, and believe that taking certain positions is necessary for the betterment of the country, or you can be a Democrat and just vote how the polls say you should vote.

Again: Maybe we should all email Sen. Snowe’s office and ask her to fill out the simple form on GOP.com to remind us why she is a Republican.

I was in high school in 2001 and I remember what happened on September 11th eight years ago. I recall walking through the hallways after the first plane hit and thinking, “What kind of idiot pilot can’t see a 100-story building in the middle of a city?” Quite obviously, and justifiably, my brain did not immediately assume that NYC was suffering the greatest terrorist attack in history.

When we got to our next class, we turned on the television to check the news before class started. The second plane hit and the teacher went to turn of the TV. Under protest from the students she kept the TV on and we watched, our jaws slacked and eyes watering, in realization that we were no longer witnessing an interesting and tragic news story, but instead a history-making mass-murder, a terrorist act, and something that would change our country forever. The bell rang and we shuffled to our next class. All we did the rest of the day was watch TV, mourn the loss of untold thousands, and hypothesize about what was going to happen next.

I was walking through the hallway when someone told me about a rumor that the Pentagon had been bombed. Other people were saying the White House was evacuated, that President Bush couldn’t be found and no one knew where Air Force One was. Hearing that other flights were in the air was terrifying. All I could think was that some small, previously obscure country was about to become famous right before it disappeared off the map. I was partly right.

I was into current events then as I am now and so people started asking me what I thought would happen next. I had no idea, but I said I had a hunch Iraq was involved. This turned out to be mostly untrue (they weren’t directly involved in 9/11, I know, but they did help support the international structure of terrorist organizations and they were soon enough part of the War on Terror). Interestingly, most people I was talking with had the same first thoughts.

I went home and watched news coverage until early in the morning. I can’t find the picture anywhere, but I remember an image of hundred of ambulances lined up on a bridge going into New York City. That was maybe the saddest image I’ve ever seen. Thousands of people ready to help survivors from the collapsed towers, but there weren’t any to help.

Schools canceled sporting events because no one was sure what would happen next. Looking back, it was a bit ridiculous to cancel football games in West Des Moines, IA, but who knew that at the time? Maybe the next wave of attacks was going to hit small communities – places where people felt safe. Of course, a second wave never came, and still hasn’t because of the tremendous efforts of our military, the intelligence and law enforcement communities, and the Bush administration.

Those are my memories. What’s really weird for me is when Jamie comes home from teaching and talks about all the kids in her class. Mostly seven and eight year olds, they weren’t even born when 9/11 happened. I ask Jamie if they talk about it in class, and she says some teachers do, and some don’t. One teacher has a 9/11 kids book to help her explain what happened. How do you relate such stories to kids whose worlds are so small and simple?

Studying history can often be abstract. You read about a battle in the Middle Ages where tens of thousand of people died or look at pictures of men on the moon, and you are never able to grasp the emotional sense that contemporary people experienced. Going through 9/11 (and not even having been in NYC or DC at the time) was traumatic and impactful. But kids who were five years old when it happened, or not even born yet, will never experience that. I had a 9/11 documentary playing the background the other day and even I commented to Jamie that it felt like watching something about Pearl Harbor. Still, reading things like this is really frustrating.

This is why it’s so important to consciously remind ourselves of the importance of such events – to never forget and never allow history to repeat itself. It’s also why it’s so disappointing for our current leaders in Washington to consciously try to put such events behind us, out of our collective consciousness. Calling terrorist acts “man-made disasters” and declaring the War on Terror over in favor of “overseas contingency operations”, diminishes the importance of historical events, and falsely lulls people into a sense of complacency.

It’s not fear mongering to remind people of real-life dangers. In fact, for our government not to do so, and instead pretend that everything is just fine, would be, and is, irresponsible. We are still in danger of more attacks. We are still fighting the same battles overseas that we have been for the past eight years. Renaming things to sounds more tolerable just makes it harder for our government to keep our nation safer; harder to remind people of the terrible intentions of our enemies.

September 11th, 2001 – Never Forget, Never Surrender. I never will.