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An observation: Time is short for stimulus opponents. To defeat the stimulus package, at least two senators who voted for cloture the first time around MUST be convinced to change their minds. Only a highly focused message will do. Here's the message that : Save Welfare Reform: Kill the Stiumulus.  As is pointed out by Kathrine Bradley and Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation, the stimulus package guts the 1996 welfare reform which stands as both the most successful and the most popular federal government policy reform of the past, oh, 40 years or more. And Rector should know: For all intents and purposes, he was the author of that 1996 reform.

Stiumulus opponents should ask a short series of questions to Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe and anybody who was around in 1996. 1) Did you vote for welfare reform in 1996? 2) Do you think it worked? 3) Do you think we should kill something that worked? 4) If so, why?

Hundreds of thousands of citizens might be well advised to flood senatorial offices with these questions. They are questions that could be game changers.

View all comments (33) | Leave a comment

Bob Jones| 2.12.09 @ 10:41AM

Great questions, Quin. By the way, did either of them vote for welfare reform in 1996?

On a slightly unrelated topic, whenever a Democrat consistently votes contrary to the party line, they lose party funding and (vis a vis Lieberman) sometimes get thrown out of the party altogether.

Why can't the Republican Party tell these three wayward senators that if they don't get on the reservation, there will be no funding for them? Maybe that happened and I missed it. If not, wouldn't that be a good idea, too?

Basil Plumley| 2.12.09 @ 10:49AM

If this does not energized the social conservatives, then they have lost their way.

The three issues for the Reagan social conservatives were crime, abortion, and welfare. Since government stats show that crime is down and Clinton signed welfare reform into law, social conservatives have been down to one issue, abortion.

Hopefully, they will wake up. If they do, the Left will have overreached once again.

Tim Williams| 2.12.09 @ 12:01PM

Perhaps your questions should be posed to President Obama. At the Saddleback Forum last summer, Rick Warren asked him for an example of an issue on which he'd changed his mind over time. Obama named welfare reform, which he said he'd opposed in 1996, but which he now recognized had been successful. He further explained that he now understood that work had to be "a centerpiece of any social policy," a position on which he has, apparently, reversed himself (again.)

Pingback| 2.12.09 @ 12:13PM

time » Blog Archive » The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Save Welfare Reform. Kill links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…« Bible Word Warriors AKA The Saints….: The Story of Two Harlots … We CALL it love….: this n that » The American Spectator : AmSpecBlog : Save Welfare Reform. Kill … Leonard wrote an interesting post today on Here’s a quick excerpt To defeat the stimulus package, at least two senators who voted for cloture the first time around MUST be convinced to change their minds.…

The plan they won't discuss| 2.13.09 @ 1:44PM

It's still not too late for a far more effective plan: confront politicians who support the plan (or their policy aides) to their face with questions about the provisions, get their response on video, and upload it to Youtube. Note that I'm talking about real questions, not rants. I think part of the reason people may misunderstand this plan is because they don't know the type of questions I'm talking about. I don't mean MSM puffballs or cable TV food fights. I mean questions designed to show flaws and designed to discredit the person being asked the question.

Write major bloggers and urge them to support the plan at my name's link rather than just playing around with making fantasy ads.

Judi Coover | 2.22.09 @ 12:16PM

Good comment Tim Williams. Why is it that so many Americans are willing to accept this type of contradictions. Will we ever return to a place where we judge on actions when deciding who to vote for?

Jim Doging| 10.30.09 @ 5:40PM

This is very interesting. I don't think that either of these things are good. I like it when people are happy, healthy and productive. That is why I support Narconon.

fgss| 5.10.10 @ 4:51AM

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More Blog Posts by Quin Hillyer

http://spectator.org/blog/2009/02/12/save-welfare-reform-kill-the-s
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