48 Hours to Socialism

The last 48 hours has been very telling of what we're in for during the next four years. Yesterday, the new President, Obama, decided and signed to have all trials stopped at Guantanamo Bay. The timing of this was interesting in that the trail of a man accused of the attack on the USS Cole was to start on Monday, February 9. That has now been stopped. To add insult to injury, the President then had the families of the victims of the USS Cole in to listen to them.

It's been 8 years since the attack on the USS Cole. That attack cost 17 of our sailors their lives. This was the final terrorist attack of the Clinton administration years and it happend in October of 2000. The terrorists were identified in December of 2000 and finally the trial was to start after an eight year long wait. Not now. Wouldn't it have been nice if the President had called the families to come and talk before announcing his decision? Some might even call it proper. A couple of the family members decided not to show up for the meeting saying that the decision had been made and he didn't care to hear why his son would not get justice. This was a severe slap in the face to the military and particularly the families of those that lost their lives to terrorism.
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It's also been reported that the Obama administration is brainstorming on how to identify the war on terror without using the words "War on Terror" which they have not uttered even once since the election.
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Today, the United States Senate has reached a "compromise" on the so-called stimulus package. This is actually a spending bill. Normally, a compromise is the difference between group and the other group. The House passed an $819 Billion spending bill. The Senate, compromised by passing an $827 Billion Dollar spending bill. It seems to me that a compromise would bring the bill in somewhere between 0 and $819 Billion. But this is the United States Congress. They don't do things like normal people.

This package will end up somewhere around $1 Trillion in spending. Add the interest and we're looking at nearly $1.3 Trillion dollars. Obama may be upset that he inherited a $1.2 Trillion deficit, but I'm not sure how he can be upset, because when he puts his signature to it in another week or two, he'll have doubled the deficit in less than a month. Then we get the appropriations bill coming soon, another $1 Trillion added to that.

The Republicans lost their majority in 2006 because they spent money rather than doing what they ran on, to be fiscally responsible. President Bush didn't veto the Republican spending bills over that six year period, so he took some of the heat for that as well. Obama, in less than a month is making President George W. Bush look like a penny pincher. The Democrats (and two Republicans, maybe three) are making the Republicans from 2001-2006 look like frugal people. However you look at it, we're just days from becoming a socialist country. Didn't Joe the Plumber warn us of this?

It is appropriate though that the liberals should do this on President Ronald Reagan's Birthday. Reagan lowered the top tax rate from 70% to 28% and brought us out of the deepest recession since the depression and created the longest peacetime growth in our history. 26 years later on Reagan's birthday, the liberals make a deal to take us back to the huge government transfer of money from free people to government and will extend this recession further possibly causing it to be the longest and deepest recession since the depression. Don't blame Republicans. You were warned during the campaign this was coming if you voted for Obama.
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Lastly, this item. Today it was announced that the handling of the Census in 2010 has been removed from the Commerce Department, where Judd Gregg was just nominated as Secretary, and handled instead by the White House. Could it be because Judd Gregg was just nominated and he's a Republican? It sounds as though Judd Gregg is just going to be a "token" in the Obama cabinet. I'm still trying to figure out why Gregg took the job and after this news, I now wonder why he doesn't remove his name from consideration. Perhaps Gregg is more than just a token. It could be that Obama needed at least one person that pays his taxes and for that, he had to get a Republican.

Brett