How much is a billion?

Well, it looks like three Republicans caved to give Obama his Economic Stimulus Package. Whatever were they thinking? So they managed to carve a few billion dollars of pork from it. One hundred billion off that monster package is only 10%...I won't even buy hamburger that has 10% fat...give me extra lean anytime!

Do you realize that a billion seconds ago it was 1959, and you were two years old, just learning the fine art of self-reliance? I remember your awkward attempts to stand alone, without holding onto my outstretched fingers. Or your arrogant assurances, "I can dress myself, Mommy!" Sure, you fell a few times, even still carry a scar on your cheek from a run-in with a hardwood floor. And in some of your toddler pictures, you wouldn't win any best-dressed baby awards! But I was so proud of you for your efforts to stand on your own two feet, and now, nearly 50 years later, I'm still proud of the way you've always landed upright, no matter what problems life threw in your path.

Too bad our congress and president didn't learn that people are stronger and better when they have to fend for themselves occasionally, instead of waiting for government bailouts. We've become such wimps, I wonder if we could have survived Pearl Harbor and World War II as our greatest generation did? If we were attacked today, would we have the guts to get our act together and fight, or would we whimper off into the history books as a "former world power?"

To put all those billions into perspective, a billion minutes ago Jesus walked the earth. It was only a billion hours ago that our ancestors lived in the Stone Age. And a billion days ago, God hadn't yet created man. Yet when the Democrats spend our money, it takes only 8 hours and 20 minutes for them to dispense with a billion dollars!

Do  you think it's just a coincidence that tax paying day, April 15, is in the month that starts with April Fool's Day??

Self-Reliance or Washington-Reliance?

In rolling out his Economic Recovery Advisory Board today, President Obama rightfully called for an end to the partisan bickering that has made government inept since before Bill Clinton came to town. But how quickly he forgets that until just a few weeks ago, he was a big part of the problem. His voting record in the Senate was among the most partisan of the Democrats -- even worse than Harry Reid's and Hillary Clinton's (according to the Washington Post's voting records for the 110th Congress). When moderate Democrats and Republicans came together to find a meeting place for agreement on troubling issues, Sen. Obama was never in the room.

But back to his speech today: "It is time to pass an Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to get our economy moving again. This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis that can only be fully understood through the unseen stories that lie underneath each and every one of those lost jobs. Somewhere in America, a small business has shut its doors; a family has said goodbye to their home; a young parent has lost their livelihood, and doesn’t know what’s going to take its place.

"These Americans are counting on us," Obama told Congress.

Perhaps that's the problem. Instead of counting on government to take care of our every problem, we should be relying on ourselves. Had our forefathers counted on government to take care of them, we'd still be part of England, we'd be huddled on the Eastern Seaboard and our national anthem would be "God Save the Queen."

Life isn't easy right now. But times have been tougher for our country and for many of us individually. It wasn't that many years ago that I was a single mom taking care of two kids on $17,000 a year. I lived in a trailer, chopped my own firewood, got up to stoke the fire a couple times a night because I couldn't afford for the furnace to kick on and came up with a lot of fun, free entertainment so my kids wouldn't realize what they were doing without. Recognizing I would never get ahead if I stayed put, I gave up the "security" of that job and my family support system to move with my kids across the country so I could go back to school. Relying on ourselves and God, we survived in student family housing on my 20-hour-a-week, minimum-wage student workstudy and what I could save from my school loan. In all that time, I didn't take any government aid -- no free lunches for the kids, no state health insurance, no food stamps, no welfare.

Had I counted on government, I'd still be back in Idaho living in a trailer, chopping my own firewood and scratching to make ends meet on poverty wages.

I freely admit I was blessed in that I had only to look to my mother for an example. The mother of three, she was widowed and homeless on her 30th birthday. Mom lived on faith in God -- not welfare. The sacrifices she made and the strength she exhibited helped me stand on my own two feet when I needed to.

America was built by generations of people who looked inward and upward to overcome adversity. If, in these difficult economic times, we trade our self-reliance for Washington-reliance, what role models will our children have when they need the strength to struggle through a crisis?

Taxes and Dependency

As the political top continued to spin nearly out of control today, I was struck by two things: Democrats' love/hate relationship with taxes and their conviction that government is THE answer to everything.

First, taxes. They love to impose them on everyone else, but they personally hate them so much that they avoid paying them at all costs. Did you see where yet another Obama appointee, Rep. Solis, has some tax problems? Well. not her, but her husband. She also "forgot" to disclose her connection with a union lobbyist effort all the time she has been serving in the House. Since she was the treasurer of the group and not a "lobbyist," she says she shouldn't have to disclose it -- despite House rules that say otherwise. And even though the president is requiring his staff who have had lobbying ties to recuse themselves from anything involving their past connections, Solis has made it quite clear that she shouldn't have to do that because she technically wasn't a lobbyist.

On the second point, Obama put the spin on today to pressure the Senate to pass the biggest boondoggle in our country's history. His mantra is that if they don't act now to pass the stimulus bill, crisis will turn to catastrophe. What I find interesting is that he never proposed a stimulus package himself. He just left it in the hands of Congress. That's leadership? Is he going to pull that with the budget too? Just hand Congress a blank check that our great-grandchildren will be paying for all of their lives? To get the public behind the stimulus, Obama released a 102-page promo with talking points of how each state will benefit from this package.

It all made me think about something Daniel Webster said nearly 200 years ago about people becoming too reliant on the government: "If left to their own choice of pursuits, they depended on their own skill and their own industry. But if government essentially affects their occupations by its systems of bounties and preferences, it is natural, when in distress, that they should call on government for relief." But after serving in Congress for a few years, Webster changed his mind and started pushing for government to establish tariffs and take other actions that negated free trade. I guess that even in Webster's day, there was something in the Capitol water!

Posted by Mari

Full of bull

FOCA means "freedom of choice..." Freedom of choice for who?? Does the health care professional who doesn't choose to take part in such a grizzly, barbaric procedure have the freedom to say "No?" Does the innocent baby have the choice to live or die? Does the hospital have the freedom to refuse to perform abortions? FOCA means only one thing...freedom for a woman to kill her unborn baby. From my viewpoint, a woman's choice ends when she chooses to have unprotected sex. She can choose to leave her panties on, or choose to remove them.

I caught a clip of Obama's campaign speech at the Planned Parenthood Convention, in which he promised he'd sign an executive order to do away with all the anti-abortion laws in all the states. Can the president undo all that legislation by a stroke of his pen?

I'm hoping that it was just more of his political campaign blather, and that like a lot of his other promises, he'll ignore it. He should learn that a closed mouth gathers no feet. I find it hilarious, watching him and other politicians with hoof and mouth disease trying to back track their promises on the evening news. Listening to the constant barrage of pandering spin doctors makes me dizzier than a cat in the spin cycle of a washing machine.

Talk is cheap because the supply greatly exceeds the demand. Reminds me of the mountain lion who ate an entire bull. He felt so good afterward he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him. The moral? When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.

Stupidity got us into this mess; why can't it get us out? I make it a point never to vote for an incumbent. I believe that politicians are like diapers. They should both be changed regularly and for the same reason.

Focusing on FOCA

As the media give us play-by-play coverage of Congress' Christmas -- oops, "happy holidays" --catalog full of ways to spend our money and Obama Cabinet nominees who think they are above the tax laws they created for the rest of us, little attention is being given to FOCA, the so-called Freedom of Choice Act that the president has promised to pass.

When FOCA was introduced in the Senate in 2004, it was a pretty simple bill that guaranteed abortion rights to women. The bill -- sponsored by Sens. Boxer, Corzine, Murray, Lautenberg, Clinton, Cantwell, Jeffords, Lieberman, Feinstein, Sarbanes, Mikulski and six others -- was introduced "to prohibit, consistent with Roe v. Wade, the interference by the government with a woman's right to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy, and for other purposes." (What in the world does that last part mean -- "other purposes"?)

Here's the meat of the bill as it was introduced four years ago:

(a) STATEMENT OF POLICY- It is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to bear a child, to terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability, or to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.
(b) PROHIBITION OF INTERFERENCE- A government may not--
(1) deny or interfere with a woman's right to choose--
(A) to bear a child;
(B) to terminate a pregnancy prior to viability; or
(C) to terminate a pregnancy after viability where termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman; or
(2) discriminate against the exercise of the rights set forth in paragraph (1) in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information.
(c) CIVIL ACTION- An individual aggrieved by a violation of this section may obtain appropriate relief (including relief against a government) in a civil action.

The bill leaves it up to a woman's physician to determine whether the unborn child has reached viability -- that is, s/he is mature enough to survive outside the mother's womb. It also commits the government to spend our money on abortions, abortion clinics, materials promoting abortion, etc.

Perhaps more interesting is what the bill leaves unsaid. For instance, are 13-year-olds considered "women"? Can the government force private hospitals, counseling services, doctors and pharmacists to commit acts against their conscience?

Although this bill died in the Senate Judiciary Committee last time around, Obama made campaign promises to Planned Parenthood that one of the first things he would do is get FOCA passed. Judging by what he has done already, this is a promise he intends to keep. Although the country was drowning in debt, struggling through a deep-seated recession and facing increased violence in Afghanistan when Obama took the oath of office, the first things he did upon entering the Oval Office included lifting the ban on embryonic stem cell production -- even though science has demonstrated that cord and adult stem cells may be more adaptive -- and committed our tax dollars to promote abortion in other countries. With priorities like that, I'm sure we can count on him to quietly bring renewed energy to passing FOCA while the rest of us worry about the economy. -- Posted by Mari

How Much Is A Trillion?

Sorry about the sushi thing, Mari. I don't know enough about sushi to realize it's not vegetarian! But I do know about politicians and their attempts to get their hands in our pockets!

A billion here, a billion there; sooner or later you're talking real money. And now with the Democrats in charge of the House, Senate, and White House, we've morfed the federal budget into the trillions. I think Nancy Pelosi discovered the power of zero—add a couple of zeroes here and a couple of zeroes there, and viola! Congress has  more of our money to spend..

The concept of numbers has increased exponentially since I was a kid. Back then, two bits was a quarter; a buck could buy three gallons of gas; and if I ever got my hands on a fiver, I was rich indeed. All I knew about millions was that the sun was 93 million miles from the earth, just far enough away to keep us warm without burning us up.

Congress has taken full advantage of  the fact that the computer has conditioned us into thinking in terms of billions and trillions—even my old G5 Mac can store over 10 million bytes of information and is cable of processing 80 billion units of info at two billion cycles per second. Compare that to my first Apple II, which came equipped with 64K of memory. Wasn't it Bill Gates who said that was all anybody would ever need?

The new bailout package, or Christmas wish list, is just another example of why it's getting harder and harder to support the government in the style to which it has become accustomed. They should change your zip code out there in D.C. to 00000, since nothing there adds up anyway.

Think about it—a billion is a thousand millions; a trillion is a million millions. With the national debt already in the trillions of dollars and our total population around 250 million, how much does each of us owe? You do the math; my brain stopped several gigabytes back.

I'm not into sushi, Mom. I'm a vegetarian. Sushi has way too much seafood for me!

You know, the weather is warming up in D.C. It's a balmy 64 degrees today, which means Congress and the Obama administration are busy growing more hands to stick into everyone else's pockets.

Have you seen the "stimulus" bill yet? This is in addition to the bail-out money Obama asked for. Supposedly Congress' best efforts to stimulate the economy, the bill, which has been introduced in both the Senate and the House, is nothing more than a glorified bundle of earmarks. While conservatives will draw the line at bail-out money, they love earmarks as much as their liberal brothers and sisters. Remember Bush's veto they overrode? It was all about earmarks. If they want to stay elected, they've got to deliver the goodies back home. So basically, earmarks are about keeping elected people elected. And they complain about Wall Street bonuses!

Seriously though, I looked at just a chunk of the 100+ page stimulus bill last week and was surprised to find a lot of it dealt with healthcare "reform." My first question was what is healthcare reform doing in a bill like this. Then when I read the "reforms," I realized this had nothing to do with reform. It was all about identifying more ways to spend our money.

Granted, some of these projects are worthwhile -- if we had the money to spend on them. But, I remember, Mom, that you and Dad taught us to live within our means. You never let us borrow ahead on our allowance because you knew that next week we'd want something more and would be even deeper in the hole. You also taught us that if something were worthwhile, we needed to figure out our priorities and do some saving. How many years did it take Billy and me to save up our pennies, dimes and nickels to buy our first bikes?

I guess it's different, though, if you're not spending your own money. I'm sure most of our senators and congressmen and women are careful about how they spend their own money. In fact, a number of them dabble in creative financing just to reduce their personal tax burden or to get favorable credit terms the rest of us can't get. But when it comes to government spending, they don't have to be that careful. It's not their money, and they won't be around when the debt collectors come calling for the trillions of dollars we owe in national debt.

---Mari Serebrov