When Bush Spoke to Students, Democrats Investigated, Held Hearings

From The Examiner
By Byron York

The controversy over President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush's speech -- they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president's school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president's political benefit. "The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," the Post reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," said Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. "And the president should be doing more about education than saying, 'Lights, camera, action.'"

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush's appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech. "The hearing this morning is to really examine the expenditure of $26,750 of the Department of Education funds to produce and televise an appearance by President Bush at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, DC," Ford began. "As the chairman of the committee charged with the authorization and implementation of education programs, I am very much interested in the justification, rationale for giving the White House scarce education funds to produce a media event."

Unfortunately for Ford, the General Accounting Office concluded that the Bush administration had not acted improperly. "The speech itself and the use of the department's funds to support it, including the cost of the production contract, appear to be legal," the GAO wrote in a letter to Chairman Ford. "The speech also does not appear to have violated the restrictions on the use of appropriations for publicity and propaganda."

That didn't stop Democratic allies from taking their own shots at Bush. The National Education Association denounced the speech, saying it "cannot endorse a president who spends $26,000 of taxpayers' money on a staged media event at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C. -- while cutting school lunch funds for our neediest youngsters."

Lost in all the denouncing and investigating was the fact that Bush's speech itself, like Obama's today, was entirely unremarkable. "Block out the kids who think it's not cool to be smart," the president told students. "If someone goofs off today, are they cool? Are they still cool years from now, when they're stuck in a dead end job. Don't let peer pressure stand between you and your dreams.

UN Wants New Global Currency to Replace Dollar

The dollar should be replaced with a global currency, the United Nations has said, proposing the biggest overhaul of the world's monetary system since the Second World War.

A number of countries, including China and Russia, have suggested replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

From The Telegraph
By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor

In a radical report, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has said the system of currencies and capital rules which binds the world economy is not working properly, and was largely responsible for the financial and economic crises.

It added that the present system, under which the dollar acts as the world's reserve currency , should be subject to a wholesale reconsideration.

Although a number of countries, including China and Russia, have suggested replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency, the UNCTAD report is the first time a major multinational institution has posited such a suggestion.

In essence, the report calls for a new Bretton Woods-style system of managed international exchange rates, meaning central banks would be forced to intervene and either support or push down their currencies depending on how the rest of the world economy is behaving.

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More Bishops Criticize Government-Run Health Care; ‘Our Federal Bureaucracy Is A Vast Wasteland’

From Catholic World News

Drawing upon Catholic teaching on subsidiarity, an increasing number of US bishops are criticizing the concept of government-run health care. Bishop Samuel Aquila of Fargo has criticized the view that “the national government is the sole instrument of the common good.” Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford adds:

As Catholic people, however, we are not allowed to wash our hands of it and to let things shake out as the federal government would have it. Our more than bicentennial experience with our federal government leads many to the conclusion that our government really does only one thing well: waging war. In every other area of life, when someone says, “I am from the government and I am here to help you,” our survival instinct tells us to run and hide. In the early ’90s when the health care scare was last put upon us, the opposition crowed: “If you like the postal service, you will love national health,” and that still seems to be the feeling of many …

The fourth principle is subsidiarity which commands us to seek the most effective approach to solving the problem. Our federal bureaucracy is a vast wasteland strewn with the carcasses of absurd federal programs which proved infinitely worse than the problems they were established to correct. It perhaps is too extreme to say that competent government is an oxymoron, but sometimes it seems that way. The moral principal of subsidiarity implies decreasing the role of government and employers in health care when lower order groups can better serve individuals and families. We need to think of health care as more of a market than a system …

It was observed by the ancients that usually the problem with totalitarian governments is not that they do not love their people; the problem seems to be that they love them too much — they just do not trust them. To establish control, these governments have always tried to control food. Remember why Jacob’s sons went down to Egypt in the Book of Exodus. But since homo sapiens is an omnivore, this proves increasingly difficult.

Modern socialist governments like to control not food but the means to protect and extend life. Some have called the current efforts of our federal government “senioricide” or “infanticide.” That perhaps is too severe, but we as Catholics should take care that health care does not morph into life control.

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Catholic bishops question details of health care overhaul (AP)
• Concerns to take to heart in health care and proposed reforms (Rockford Observer)
• Kansas City bishops question centralized health-care system (CWN, Sep 2)
• Iowa bishop warns against healthcare rationing, ‘federal monopolization’ (CWN, Aug 28)

China Alarmed by US Money Printing

The US Federal Reserve's policy of printing money to buy Treasury debt threatens to set off a serious decline of the dollar and compel China to redesign its foreign reserve policy, according to a top member of the Communist hierarchy.

From The Telegraph
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China's green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed's recourse to "credit easing".

"We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again," he said at the Ambrosetti Workshop, a policy gathering on Lake Como.

"If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies," he said.

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Obama Accused of Making 'Depression' Mistakes

Barack Obama is committing the same mistakes made by policymakers during the Great Depression, according to a new study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan.

From The Telegraph
By Edmund Conway

His policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century, the paper says.

There are "troubling similarities" between the US President's actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

In particular, the authors, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute, claim that the White House's plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the US economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.

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2,000 Students at US University Report Swine Flu Symptoms

From Yahoo News

Some 2,000 students at Washington State University have reported symptoms of swine flu, university officials said, in one of the largest reported outbreaks of the virus on a US college campus.

The west-coast school last week instituted a blog to help provide information to students about the sudden and dramatic spread of the A(H1N1) virus on campus just days into the new school term.

"We estimate that we have been in contact with about 2,000 students with influenza-like illness in the first 10 days of our fall semester," the latest online posting said.

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Why the Obama Administration Will Implode in Weeks

From Fox Forum
By Kevin McCullough

I was the first pundit to predict that Barack Obama would become president. Here's what I think we can expect from this administration in the next six to eight weeks.

Never has an administration had more political firepower at their disposal yet been set to so totally fail in the next six to eight weeks. It is nearly a foregone conclusion. It is nearly unavoidable. And it defies all logic given the sizable majority the administration has in both houses of Congress.

Since I was the first pundit to predict Obama's presidency (back in December 2006) it behooves me to tell you the course I believe the next few weeks will take. Just think, it was only a few months ago that the left looked unstoppable in bringing about their plan to radicalize, nationalize, and federalize America.

1. Health Care's Long and Painful Death

Barring the existing possibility that the Democrats cram a reform bill down the throats of actively protesting Americans through an ultra-partisan process that would shut out conservatives and Republicans from even being allowed to contribute to the discussion, health care reform is dead.

It actually died a good while back when the president decided to pivot and create a new issue that no one had been discussing--health insurance reform. The American people will want to know why we should spend $4 billion to cover everyone in America "efficiently," when we already do so with inefficiencies like people using the emergency room as their general practitioner for $2.5 billion.

Deep thinkers on the issue also want to know why the president hasn't entertained one item of tort reform-- protecting his friends, the trial lawyers-- yet is willing to claim that doctors are eager to lop off feet, tonsils, and other body parts just to make a buck.

2. Cap-and-Trade Will Be the Largest Tax Increase in American History

With the 2010 election cycle just around the corner, it won't be too long before the campaign ads are drafted. With cap-and-trade still sitting in legislative limbo (and the president's own adviser--Warren Buffet-- now opposing it openly in the media), with anti-tax Democrats, Republicans, and Independents coming to Washington on September 12, and with "Blue Dog" Democrats getting hammered by constituents during the August recess, the chance of an ultra-partisan "ram through" victory on the legislation would not be wise.

Cap-and-trade, if passed, will contribute to unemployment, Wall Street stop and starts, and ultimately reduced treasury revenues. It would serve as the single largest tax increase on the average American in all of American history.

Even President Obama admitted as much, predicting that electric bill prices, in his words, would, "skyrocket." Those that have looked at the specifics tell us that the average utility bill in America will go from $167 to $307 per month, per family.

3. Unemployment Will Remain

By now several Washington organizations, from left and right, and one of note consisting of both--the Congressional Budget Office, predict that unemployment will not shrink from the predicted "Obama high" of eight percent. Instead, nearly without fail, economists are predicting that unemployment will be at or over 10% for up to the next 24 months.-- That is a nearly 250% increase in the unemployment rate under Bush for nearly the duration of his two-term presidency. We did not see the unemployment climb this high during President Bush's entire two-term presidency.

If more people were working, higher taxes and possible new health care entitlements could be considered, but with at least ten percent of the population out of work, it is political suicide for Democrats to even think of it.

4. Obama's Integrity Has Been Tarnished in August

Not a great deal has been made of the whoppers that the president has been spewing while Congress has been away during the summer recess but it turns out that more people than I realized have also noticed the president wildly "exaggerating" in his talks on health care. For instance, the president confused the $500 physicians actually get to amputate a foot as opposed to the $50,000 that he claimed they got. He also showed an utter disregard for the reputation of those doctors he talks about, the "facts" he uses to make his argument, and is highly overly optimistic about the results of his policies. Long story short, at the beginning of the summer Americans mostly trusted him, his passion index was at +10, he heads into the fall at -14.

5. A $3 Trillion Dollar Budget

There was lots of new spending for this and it sure added up. And that brings me to number 6.

6. A Coming Middle Class Tax Hike

The Obama administration will hem and haw about hiking taxes. -- There will be an official, and arrogant, explanation given by Robert Gibbs from the podium in the White House briefing room about why they must to do this to be "good stewards" and to be a "responsible administration" that "pays as it goes."

But the truth is, in order to pay for everything the Obama administration has promised (and budgeted for), a tax hike is looming for small businesses and the working families that President Obama promised would never come.

And as an aside, the president was going to break that promise all along. Because the minute the Bush tax relief measures run out in 2010, middle class taxes would be going up in the Obama administration. That means that, fundamentally, that Obama's "not a single dime" pledge on the campaign trail was just hot air from start to finish.

Of course, the president, the Democrats, the left, and Congressional leadership could surprise me. They could show up in September and endorse the Coburn health care bill in the Senate and steal all the credit for it. They could show up next week and fight with all their might to not allow the tax rates to skyrocket in 2010. They could decide to scrap cap-and-trade and re-think the use of public money for a true job-based economic stimulus.

But I'm not holding my breath, and I'd advise you against it as well.

They've awakened the American worker, the American small-business owner, and the American voter.

All three of which are now wondering aloud, "What on earth have we done?"

Kevin McCullough is the nationally syndicated host of "'Baldwin/McCullough Radio" now heard on 197 stations and columnist based in New York. He blogs at www.muscleheadrevolution.com. His second book "The Kind Of MAN Every Man SHOULD Be" is in stores now.