The American Spectator

Deborah| 3.4.09 @ 6:43AM

Hey there, Lisa -- Good column. Great questions. I see some good potential posters at the next American Tea Party. Mark Tapscott had some good suggestions for expanding the Tea Party rebellion. Find them here: http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/71683/

Gill O’Teen| 3.4.09 @ 10:09AM

I’m not convinced, Lisa. Methinks that the logic of Aristotle, Plato, even Mr. Spock, would be frustrated by the sheer fantasies of the lobumahtized lemmings who in spite of the mounting evidence still believe him God’s anointed messiah. That’s why I end all my comments with “Invest in precious metals such as gold, silver, platinum, copper and brass encased lead. Take a two by four to your next Tea Party.” Furthermore, I’d like to remind all, that the brass encased lead is more valuable when carried in a concealed steel container.

Al Adab| 3.4.09 @ 10:20AM

Limbaugh has become our modern Tom Paine. A good dose of common sense. Twice the Conservatives gave the GOP a chance 1980 and 1996 and twice the movement was betrayed by the GOP. Either we take the party back in toto or we simply shrug. Choose today.

jack preston| 3.4.09 @ 10:44AM

The party must be purged of moderates and phonies like Snow,Collins,Spector,and McCain. They give comfort to the party that wants to destroy us.
It time to remember the great line from The Untouchables by Malone(Connery)
Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I'm saying is, what are you prepared to do?
Ness: Anything within the law.
Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they're not gonna give up the fight, until one of you is dead.
Ness: I want to get Capone! I don't know how to do it.
Malone: You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way! And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal?
Ness: I have sworn to capture this man with all legal powers at my disposal and I will do so.
Malone: Well, the Lord hates a coward.

If we dont begin to deal with Dems the way Malone dealt with Capone we are finished. Did everyone notice Obama hiring the guy who started the troopergate investigation of Palin? Not a peep from Reps. Not a word on the Countrywide 6. Not a word on the scoundrels and tax cheats our President is packing his cab with. Not a word on the way he destroyed Vegas jobs two weeks ago. Where is the opposition

Howard| 3.4.09 @ 11:53AM

Good points. Of course we do not need to convert all Obamaniks. There were many reasonable people who were disgusted with the GOP for both good and bad reasons. These folks liked the idea of change, and having a black man elected added to the desire to vote for him. However, now that Obama has revealed his true nature, we can move these mild Democrats/Independants. In 2012 he loses 4%, we add 4 % it's a new game.

Robert| 3.4.09 @ 12:10PM

Howard, After Obama makes 50% of the remaining 46% of the voters who didn't vote for him into helpless drones sucking at his teat, where do you think we'll get the 8% of voters to swing the electorate back?

And, of course, that presupposes this cabal won't pull a Chavez and change the Constitution, eliminating term limits under martial law imposed under the pretext we cannot afford elections in the midst of a crisis (self-engineered but since when does that matter?).

We have seen only the tip of the iceberg. The remaining 90% of this administration's plan of action is yet to be revealed. Watch out!

L. Ross| 3.4.09 @ 1:06PM

I personally am pleased to have the GOP out of power right now. There is no way to put enough lipstick on this pig of an economy. Whoever is in right now is going to lose huge in the next election cycle. The fact that Obama is a socialist, enacting an anti-growth agenda just improves our chances of success in 2012. And 2010. We need to spend the next 2.5 years nurturing candidates who are conservatives, and be ready to hit the ground running when we win, and win big.

Louis Jenkins| 3.4.09 @ 2:43PM

More urinating and moaning over the state of the GOP. We need less moderates, we need more moderates, Obama and his policies will kill America so just sit back on the haunches and wait for the tidal wave of opinion to change. The bottom line: when the GOP forgets its roots it becomes just another political party. People understand ideas, something they didn’t see with the GOP, or its presidential candidate, in the last campaign. And they do have a great appreciation of ‘actions.’ When the conservative party no longer acts or represents its members then their fidelity will change.

For the last 8 years Republican Senators and Representatives have been acting like their counterparts across the aisle, spending our national wealth and going along with any and every Democrat bill that was introduced. One exception: the Conservative population in fly over country phoned, e-mailed, and faxed, to prevent the immigration reform bill from becoming law. It caught fire and became a conflagration. The Capitol Hill GOP gang was forced into a correct action. The party now in power is practicing intimidation and brute political force upon the critics, those with opposite political ideas, and the middle/upper class. Class warfare with all its ugliness. A burnt earth war. They insult, deride, cajole, or promise the moon to achieve their socialistic goals while ignoring their own transgressions and faults. Communicating opinions to them will not achieve results. Dire times require bold actions from every Constitution loving citizen. Submission to these tactics has no place when the wolves are amongst the sheep. It is time for lawful action.

Paulie| 3.4.09 @ 5:36PM

Just a note to complement all of you who have left a comment here! Great stuff! Conservative views have the weight of truth behind them, they are powerful and whoever speaks them has real power. Obama won because of personality, not because of substance.

leftypower| 3.4.09 @ 7:55PM

Hey, Lisa - all you conservatives whip out the names of the Founding Fathers like you own them. But you don't. Every last Founding Father was so liberal, with respect to their political climate, that they would have been executed had they failed. The pulled off a Revolution and overthrew their conservative, colonial overlords. Which is slightly more moderate that the uber-liberal Jesus Christ himself.

When you cling to the likes of Washington, with your faulty logic, it is the equivalent of linking arms with Bernie Sanders or Dennis Kucinich.

Washington politically fought against the conservatives of his day. They were called Loyalists.

Please be honest.

Martin Owens| 3.4.09 @ 9:26PM

The " Washington Crossing the Delaware " ought to be the inspiration for the times to come. But after all the damage done to the Reagan legacy by Bush-Clinton-Bush and now Obama, I just hope our icon isn't " Raft of the Medusa"....

wes| 3.5.09 @ 12:29AM

Hey leftypower,
faulty logic, you own it. While every last Founding Fathere did in fact fight against the loyalists, in belief, values, and political views, every last one of them would not, could not be likened to the modern day radical leftist/liberal/socialists.
They were liberal in the sense of pursuing religious, economic and political LIBERTY. Read the stuff they wrote. Honestly, taking on the stupidity of you leftists gives me a headache, but that will be my cross to bear.
Substance matters in the real world.
You really need to put down the bong.

ch| 3.5.09 @ 2:15AM

A liberal told me that Lincoln was a liberal, too, because 'liberal ideology was responsible for ending slavery'. Liberal-speak gives me a headache. God is a liberal, too, right morons?

Hilary Smith| 3.6.09 @ 1:08PM

With Steel, the GOP believed they could dupe Americans into seeing the Republican Party as
one of inclusion. But clearly Steel is just a figurehead. It is devastating that the
good-old-boy, whites-only, country-club mentality persists in the GOP and it's even more
devastating that the Party has managed to convince so many low-income, Festiva-driving,
flag-waving, AM Radio-brainwashed citizens that poor people actually have something to gain
by voting for greed-driven Social Darwinists. Rush Limbaugh represents the Republican Party
perfectly. Too bad conservatives don't know how to channel their righteous anger into something positive.

Truth| 3.7.09 @ 11:08AM

Undocumented immigrants paying more taxes than you think!!

Eight million Undocumented immigrants pay Social Security, Medicare and income taxes. Denying public services to people who pay their taxes is an affront to America’s bedrock belief in fairness. But many “pull-up-the-drawbridge” politicians want to do just that when it comes to illegal immigrants.

The fact that Undocumented immigrants pay taxes at all will come as news to many Americans. A stunning two thirds of Undocumented immigrants pay Medicare, Social Security and personal income taxes.

Yet, nativists like Congressman Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., have popularized the notion that illegal aliens are a colossal drain on the nation’s hospitals, schools and welfare programs — consuming services that they don’t pay for.

In reality, the 1996 welfare reform bill disqualified Undocumented immigrants from nearly all means tested government programs including food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and Medicare-funded hospitalization.

The only services that illegals can still get are emergency medical care and K-12 education. Nevertheless, Tancredo and his ilk pushed a bill through the House criminalizing all aid to illegal aliens — even private acts of charity by priests, nurses and social workers.

Potentially, any soup kitchen that offers so much as a free lunch to an illegal could face up to five years in prison and seizure of assets. The Senate bill that recently collapsed would have tempered these draconian measures against private aid.

But no one — Democrat or Republican — seems to oppose the idea of withholding public services. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law that requires everyone who gets Medicaid — the government-funded health care program for the poor — to offer proof of U.S. citizenship so we can avoid “theft of these benefits by illegal aliens,” as Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., puts it. But, immigrants aren’t flocking to the United States to mooch off the government.

According to a study by the Urban Institute, the 1996 welfare reform effort dramatically reduced the use of welfare by undocumented immigrant households, exactly as intended. And another vital thing happened in 1996: the Internal Revenue Service began issuing identification numbers to enable illegal immigrants who don’t have Social Security numbers to file taxes.

One might have imagined that those fearing deportation or confronting the prospect of paying for their safety net through their own meager wages would take a pass on the IRS’ scheme. Not so. Close to 8 million of the 12 million or so illegal aliens in the country today file personal income taxes using these numbers, contributing billions to federal coffers.

No doubt they hope that this will one day help them acquire legal status — a plaintive expression of their desire to play by the rules and come out of the shadows. What’s more, aliens who are not self-employed have Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically withheld from their paychecks.

Since undocumented workers have only fake numbers, they’ll never be able to collect the benefits these taxes are meant to pay for. Last year, the revenues from these fake numbers — that the Social Security administration stashes in the “earnings suspense file” — added up to 10 percent of the Social Security surplus.

The file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year. Beyond federal taxes, all illegals automatically pay state sales taxes that contribute toward the upkeep of public facilities such as roads that they use, and property taxes through their rent that contribute toward the schooling of their children.

The non-partisan National Research Council found that when the taxes paid by the children of low-skilled immigrant families — most of whom are illegal — are factored in, they contribute on average $80,000 more to federal coffers than they consume. Yes, many illegal migrants impose a strain on border communities on whose doorstep they first arrive, broke and unemployed.

To solve this problem equitably, these communities ought to receive the surplus taxes that federal government collects from immigrants. But the real reason border communities are strained is the lack of a guest worker program.

Such a program would match willing workers with willing employers in advance so that they wouldn’t be stuck for long periods where they disembark while searching for jobs. The cost of undocumented aliens is an issue that immigrant bashers have created to whip up indignation against people they don’t want here in the first place.

With the Senate having just returned from yet another vacation and promising to revisit the stalled immigration bill, politicians ought to set the record straight: Illegals are not milking the government. If anything, it is the other way around.

Truth| 3.7.09 @ 11:09AM

Daniel Griswold: Immigration law should reflect our dynamic labor market

Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.

Among its many virtues, America is a nation where laws are generally reasonable, respected and impartially enforced. A glaring exception is immigration.

Today an estimated 12 million people live in the U.S. without authorization, 1.6 million in Texas alone, and that number grows every year. Many Americans understandably want the rule of law restored to a system where law-breaking has become the norm.

The fundamental choice before us is whether we redouble our efforts to enforce existing immigration law, whatever the cost, or whether we change the law to match the reality of a dynamic society and labor market.

Low-skilled immigrants cross the Mexican border illegally or overstay their visas for a simple reason: There are jobs waiting here for them to fill, especially in Texas and other, faster growing states. Each year our economy creates hundreds of thousands of net new jobs – in such sectors as retail, cleaning, food preparation, construction and tourism – that require only short-term, on-the-job training.

At the same time, the supply of Americans who have traditionally filled many of those jobs – those without a high school diploma – continues to shrink. Their numbers have declined by 4.6 million in the past decade, as the typical American worker becomes older and better educated.

Yet our system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of peaceful, hardworking immigrants to legally enter the United States even temporarily to fill this growing gap. The predictable result is illegal immigration

In response, we can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.

Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.

Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals. As the people of Texas know well, the large majority of illegal immigrants are not bad people. They are people who value family, faith and hard work trying to live within a bad system.

When large numbers of otherwise decent people routinely violate a law, the law itself is probably the problem. To argue that illegal immigration is bad merely because it is illegal avoids the threshold question of whether we should prohibit this kind of immigration in the first place.

We've faced this choice on immigration before. In the early 1950s, federal agents were making a million arrests a year along the Mexican border. In response, Congress ramped up enforcement, but it also dramatically increased the number of visas available through the Bracero guest worker program. As a result, apprehensions at the border dropped 95 percent. By changing the law, we transformed an illegal inflow of workers into a legal flow.

For those workers already in the United States illegally, we can avoid "amnesty" and still offer a pathway out of the underground economy. Newly legalized workers can be assessed fines and back taxes and serve probation befitting the misdemeanor they've committed. They can be required to take their place at the back of the line should they eventually apply for permanent residency.

The fatal flaw of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act was not that it offered legal status to workers already here but that it made no provision for future workers to enter legally.

Immigration is not the only area of American life where a misguided law has collided with reality. In the 1920s and '30s, Prohibition turned millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into lawbreakers and spawned an underworld of moon-shining, boot-legging and related criminal activity. (Sound familiar?) We eventually made the right choice to tax and regulate alcohol rather than prohibit it.

In the 19th century, America's frontier was settled largely by illegal squatters. In his influential book on property rights, The Mystery of Capital, economist Hernando de Soto describes how these so-called extralegals began to farm, mine and otherwise improve land to which they did not have strict legal title. After failed attempts by the authorities to destroy their cabins and evict them, federal and state officials finally recognized reality, changed the laws, declared amnesty and issued legal documents conferring title to the land the settlers had improved.

As Mr. de Soto wisely concluded: "The law must be compatible with how people actually arrange their lives." That must be a guiding principle when Congress returns to the important task of fixing our immigration laws.

Daniel Griswold is director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. His writings on immigration can be found at www.freetrade.org; e-mail him at dgriswold@cato.org.

Truth| 3.7.09 @ 11:12AM

The TRUTH is that if YOU don't do your own thinking and allow the Radio, TV and News to do it for you , YOU ARE Going to be disappointed and never SUCCEED.
DO YOUR OWN THINKING. MOST IMPORTANTLY CHECK FACTS AND SEE THAT THEY ARE FORM A RELIABLE UNBIASED SOURCE. THEN DECIDE, OTHERWISE YOU ARE A FOLLY!!!!
GOD BLESS YOU, YOURS AND ALL :)

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