Big Dogs Weblog

Democrats Flip-Flop On Raising The Debt Limit

Oct 23, 2009 Political

When Republicans were in charge they spent like, well Democrats. They ran up huge deficits and asked for an increase in the debt limit (raising the debt ceiling) and that move was opposed by Democrats. Barack Obama was opposed to it when he said it burdened our children with our debt. He was absolutely correct when he said it.

“Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren,” Obama said in a 2006 floor speech that preceded a Senate vote to extend the debt limit. “America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.”

Obama later joined his Democratic colleagues in voting en bloc against raising the debt increase. The Hill

That was then and this is now. Like Obama’s stance on the war in Afghanistan, the “war of necessity” that must be won, which changed and on which he is now floundering, the issue of the debt ceiling is just as fluid.

Yes Republicans spent like there was no tomorrow and yet the Obama Administration has managed to outspend them. Obama’s deficit for this year will be 1.4 TRILLION dollars, nearly twice the deficit of Bush’s last year in office. Now there is an argument to be made that there is an overlap in administrations (though Congress was controlled by Democrats) but the bulk of the spending has come from Obama and his Democrats and the future spending is just as bad.

The Democrats are trying to use parlor tricks to hide the request to raise the debt limit. They are trying to add it to a Defense Authorization Bill. They are trying to hide their vote to raise the debt ceiling by claiming that they had to vote for the bill because it is a necessary one. Given that, why is the debt ceiling increase in it to begin with? Congress does this all the time. They add items that are unpopular to bills that must be passed so they can have cover when people get upset. “Why, I had to vote for it in order to save the three toed pygmy sloth from extinction. It was a choice of not voting to save the little fella or swallowing hard and voting for it while adding the other nasty things.”

Knowing they will face unyielding GOP attacks for voting to increase the eye-popping debt, Democrats are considering attaching a debt increase provision to a must-pass bill, possibly the Defense Department spending bill, according to Democratic and Republican sources. Politco

Their motives are presented as pure but the reality is that they know what they want. If it is so undesirable to vote for extraneous items in bills then they would not ADD them to the bills. They want to vote for the items but they want it to appear as if they had no choice.

These kind of tricks are used all the time. They have attempted to remove the increase in the health care bill with regard to payments to doctors who take Medicare by making it a separate item that adds directly to the deficit. This way they can claim the health care bill was deficit neutral (it is not and it never will be).

Senator Barack Obama correctly stated that raising the debt limit saddles our children with debt. He then voted against the increase (one can debate if that was party alliance or conviction but he voted against it). Now it is time for him to show he truly believed what he said when he was a Senator by vetoing any bill that increases the debt limit.

If he does not, it will show once again that all of his statements and positions have an expiration date.

Big Dog Salute to Gator Sports

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Tags: Congress, debt ceiling, Democrats, dishonesty, Obama, parlor tricks

Like Clinton, Schumer Has a Math Problem

May 22, 2008 Political

Congress has had the oil executives at the Capitol where they have been getting grilled because of the price of gasoline. The same politicians who have historically called for higher gasoline taxes to make the cost higher so we would drive less and save polar bears is beating up companies who make 8 to 10 cents on each gallon of gas. They do the work and state and federal government get more money out of the deal. Interestingly, Democrats who wanted more taxes on gas (thus raising the price) are now upset because constituents are raising hell. The members of Congress took their turns so let us see how it went.

A Congresswoman from Florida (I didn’t catch her name) was asking really stupid questions and asking the executives to prove they have not been manipulating prices. Two things, how do you prove a negative and are they not innocent until proven guilty which leads me to the next point. One Senator (maybe Ben Cardin) wants an investigation into price gouging or manipulation (or both). Since this has been looked at about 18 times and nothing has been found, perhaps there is something else at play here. That something is a global market for oil.

Members of Congress are too dense to understand that oil companies do not set the price of oil. Some of the rise is due to speculation bidding which is driving the price up. There is also a problem with a hugely increased demand from China and India which is driving the cost up (supply and demand). The other thing to remember is that Congress and the enviro-nuts refuse to let us drill our OWN oil. We have a bunch of it around. Some is off the Florida coast and some off the California coast and there is a lot of it in ANWR. We are not allowed to drill for it because Congress will not allow it. The wacko from Florida said that she did not want them there because tourists would have to look at them. Those tourists will all be from other countries because most other people will not be able to afford to go to Florida. Chuck Schumer gave us a bit of stupidity in all of this. The American Thinker reports that Chuckie said:

“If Saudi Arabia were to increase its production by 1 million barrels per day that translates to a reduction of 20 percent to 25 percent in the world price of crude oil, and crude oil prices could fall by more than $25 dollar per barrel from its current level of $126 per barrel. In turn, that would lower the price of gasoline between 13 percent and 17 percent, or by more than 62 cents off the expected summer regular-grade price – offering much needed relief to struggling families. “

When Congress argued against drilling at ANWR it was commonly agreed that we would get about a million barrels a day from there. The Democrats persuaded Bill Clinton to veto the ANWR bill and that is one reason we have higher prices. You see, if the Saudis producing a million more a day would reduce the price of gas by 62 cents then a million barrels a day from ANWR would do the same thing, or would it? Here is what Schumer said about a million barrels a day from ANWR (remember that is the figure that was believed would come from there and that is about what he is speaking):

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the Administration was “strangling” any attempts to make serious investments at alternative energy over the last seven years and that drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge would “take ten years and reduce the price of oil by a penny.” KCRG TV

So Chuckie says it would take ten years and reduce oil by 1 cent. How is there a 61 cent difference between a million barrels from Saudi Arabia and a million barrels from ANWR? If Bill Clinton had not vetoed the bill in 1995 the ten year issue would be a moot point because it has been thirteen. Chuckie made these statements within two weeks of each other. Did something in the dynamics of oil change in that time to make a 61 cent difference? The other thing to note is Chucky’s arrogance. He is basically holding Saudi Arabia up as the bad guys (they are for the most part) because they are not pumping a million more barrels a day to make things better for us. How arrogant of a man who will not allow drilling in his own country. Why should the Saudi’s or anyone else be willing to jump in and pump more for us when we are not willing to get and use our own resources.

It appears as if Schumer went to the same math classes that Hillary did. Neither of them seem able to count.

Then they got into the meat of the issue, money. Congress is upset that oil companies made billions of dollars. Ka-ching! Only problem is, the numbers are in raw dollars. The profit margin for oil companies was 10.8% for Exxon and around 8% for the others. Those are tight profit margins and not out of line with what we expect companies to make. Microsoft’s profit margin was 28.33% and even though theirs is almost three times higher, there are no calls to charge them a windfall profit tax. The company that John Kerry’s wife is associated with was nearly 9% and no one is hauling her before Congress. The thing that makes it look bad and what Congress plays up, is the raw numbers which are huge. These companies are very, very big and they make a lot of money because they are dealing with a lot of money. However, their profit margins are not excessive.

The large raw dollar figure is what has drawn the attention of Congress. They smell large amounts of money and they circle like sharks in bloody water. Money is like pheromones to them and it drives them into a frenzy with desire to obtain it.

Congress is full of idiots. They cause problems through their actions and then when there are problems they haul others before their august body and point fingers in every direction except inward. They caused the problems and their policies will continue those problems because things will only get worse. Their refusal to allow us to drill our own oil is hurting us and it is hurting the economy. If we could drill that oil and use it, maybe build a few refineries to make more gas, then prices would become more stable. If we kept that oil here then prices would certainly go down because we would not have to compete as heavily with China and India for the oil coming from the Middle East.

It was good to see oil companies finally fight back by pointing some of this out to those asking the questions. If Congress keeps getting its dander up with big oil they might have a few unexpected maintenance issues and shut down a few refineries for a while. That should make things miserable enough for Congress to pay attention.

The last thing to note is that Congress decries the amount of money big oil takes in but remains silent about the amount they [the government] takes from us. They have billions and billions coming in and they keep demanding more. They can’t seem to understand that we don’t want our taxes to go up any more than we do the price we pay for gas.

Tags: dishonesty, fuzzy logic, gas prices, new math, saudi, schumer

Did Obama Draw that Many People?

May 21, 2008 Political

Recently, news stories touted how Barack Obama drew a crowd of 75,000 people to a rally and they trumpeted how this was the largest crowd in history. It must mean that the Obamessiah is the real deal and that people come from miles around just to hear him speak.

What the news outlets left out of the story is that a popular Portland Band gave a free concert before Obama spoke. Not one outlet mentioned that perhaps some of those people came for the free concert. Most news organizations failed to even mention that the band, The Decemberists, performed for the crowd (it was in an Oregon piece). The band would explain such a large crowd when he has never done this before.

Instead of letting us know that rock stars performed they just told us of the Barack Star thus giving the impression that he was responsible for the number of people who showed.

John Kerry drew 50,000 when he had Leonardo DiCaprio and rocker Jon Bon Jovi accompany him. Certainly that many people did not show up just to see Kerry (who served in Vietnam).

Sure, Obama is a big draw but I wonder how many liberals will consider this intellectual dishonesty, a claim leveled against me for not mentioning that some Conservatives wrote nasty stuff about Kennedy’s illness when I pointed out how the left acts when Conservatives fall ill.

Sources:
Oregon.com
News Busters

Tags: crowd, dishonesty, Obama, portland, rock band

Don’t Take Flight 93 to Mecca 12-5-07

Dec 5, 2007 Flight 93

TBogg deleted evidence of cover up at the Flight 93 Memorial

TBogg has edited a comment thread to remove an important piece of evidence about the Memorial Project’s cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned Flight 93 memorial. A historically important comment left by a consultant to the Memorial Project has been deleted.

In January 2006, Alec Rawls baited the TBogg leftists for insisting that it is perfectly okay to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. TBogg’s comment thread swelled to epic proportions and eventually yielded something more than the usual litany of moonbat excuses for not thinking straight. At the end of the thread, posted sometime in March or April of 2006, there appeared an extended comment, about 600 words long, posted anonymously, and written as a semi-formal evaluation of Rawls’ January 2006 report to the Memorial Project.

Mr. Rawls would later find out that this anonymous comment was the sole piece of written feedback on which the Memorial Project was basing its denial of Islamic features in the winning design. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, pp. 149-50.)

The Project only communicated snippets of the TBogg comment, so the fact that the whole thing had been posted online caught them by surprise, undermining their ability to control the story. In particular, the TBogg comment did not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. On the contrary, it acknowledged that the crescent at the center of the memorial is geometrically similar to a traditional mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), and offered a variety of excuses for why people should not be concerned about this similarity. (e.g. “[J]ust because something is ‘similar to’ something else, does not make it the ‘same’.”)

Dr. Kevin Jaques

Only in the last couple of weeks has the identity of the anonymous scholar who wrote the TBogg comment been learned. Last week’s blogburst about the Park Service’s fraudlent internal investigation discusses a Memorial Project “White Paper” that identifies the TBogg commentator as Dr. Kevin Jaques, an Islamicist (a scholar of Islam), at the University of Indiana.

One of Dr. Jaques excuses for not being concerned about the half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent is that it is so much bigger than any other mihrab:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You might recognize it as a giant crescent from an airplane like Flight 93 flying over head, but from the ground? Pshaw.

It’s too big to recognize!

TBogg deleted the Kevin Jaques comment from his comment thread

For most of 2007, the original TBogg comment thread has not been available, but TBogg now has it reposted, with one glaring omission: Dr. Jaques comment has been removed.

If you want to see what TBogg is posting now, the url for his 2006 “Lunacy abounds” post is http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/01/lunacy-abounds-nuts.html.

For posterity, here are copies of the original comment thread, as of 5/29/2006, with Dr. Jaques’ comment intact at the end, and the comment thread repost, as of 12/3/2007, with Dr. Jaques’ comment deleted.

A full discussion of what TBogg properly calls “the infamous comment thread” can be found in Chapter Eight of Alec’s Crescent of Betrayal book (download 3, pp 131-).

The question now for Mr. TBogg is why he deleted Kevin Jaques’ comment. Did he do it on his own, or did he do it at someone’s request? Did Dr. Jaques ask him to delete the comment? Did architect Paul Murdoch ask? Did someone in the Park Service ask?

Whether TBogg acted on his own or was prompted, it is obvious that he understood that he was deleting an important piece of evidence. Just the fact that he singled it out for deletion shows a conscious act of cover-up. Maybe he did not realize the full import of having the comment remain publicly available via an original source, but he certainly knew he was covering up something important. What kind of blogger deletes a piece of evidence that he knows to be central to a high profile controversy? (Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) sent the Park Service a letter last month asking that crescent design be scrapped entirely.) This is very bad behavior.

Was TBogg’s comment thread originally removed in order to hide Jaques comment?

It was odd enough when the “infamous comment thread” first disappeared from TBogg’s blog. What blogger removes anything famous from their blog? But at that time, there was no publicly available information that could have alerted TBogg to the significance of that last anonymous comment. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the comment thread seemed to be that TBogg simply had a coding glitch, or maybe he is cheap enough to have been worried about bandwidth.

Now that the comment thread has been restored without the Jaques comment, it seems likely that the reason the comment thread came down in the first place was to hide the Jaques comment. The interesting thing about this scenario is that at the time the comment thread was removed (sometime between June 2006 and June 2007) the only way TBogg could have learned the importance of that last anonymous comment would have been through the internal investigation conducted by the Park Service in the spring and summer of 2006. No one else knew that the comment came from an advisor to the Memorial Project until July 2007 when Alec Rawls released the downloadable “Director’s Cut” version of his Crescent of Betrayal book. (Given the urgent public need to know, World Ahead Publishing graciously allowed Alec to make his then final draft available for free download until the print edition—still being updated—comes out in the first quarter of 2008.)

The TBogg comment thread was removed before the Director’s Cut release. (Noted in Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, at p. 131.) Chief Ranger Jill Hawk, who was conducting the investigation, would not tell Alec who wrote the anonymous TBogg comment, but Alec warned her to be suspicious. Given the overtly dishonest nature of its excuse making, he urged her to double check its provenance. She answered back that she had been able to get email confirmation of authorship.

This email communication with Jaques might well have alerted him to the faux pas he committed by posting his comment on the TBogg thread. Did he then contact TBogg and ask for the comment to be removed?

That would seem to be the most likely scenario. Others who were privy to the internal investigation could have also contacted TBogg, but there is no evidence for any other such route of transmission.

It is disturbing to think that TBogg would have acceded to any request to remove evidence about a possible enemy plot. He is fully aware of what Rawls is claiming: that an al Qaeda sympathizing architect entered our open design competition with a plan to build a terrorist memorial mosque and won. Kevin Jaques’ TBogg comment is crucial for understanding how such a plot could succeed, revealing the utter fraudulence of the internal investigation that should have detected any such plot. As the lone consultant to the Memorial Project on the crescent design, Jaques engaged in overtly dishonest excuse-making. And TBogg is willing to help him cover it up?

If TBogg has some other explanation for his deletions, the rest of us would sure like to hear it.

The fraudulent internal investigation

For more of Kevin Jaques’ dishonest excuse-making, see last week’s blogburst on the fraudulent internal investigation. Before the Park Service was done, it managed to round up two more academic frauds in addition to Kevin Jaques. There is Dr. Daniel Griffith, who claims there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca, and a third Mosqueteer still to be discussed. (Saving the worst for last.)

But Jaques is the central fraud, being the Project’s sole source of feedback during a crucial period when its dismissive posture was set in stone. In addition to being an expert on sharia law, Jaques has also proved to be an expert at taqiyya.

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If you want to join the blogroll/blogburst for the Crescent of Betrayal blogburst, email Cao at caoilfhionn1 at gmail dot com, with your blog’s url address. The blogburst will be sent out once a week to the participants, for simultaneous publication on this issue on Wednesdays.

Crescent of betrayal/surrender Blogburst Blogroll

Tags: cover up, dishonesty, Flight 93, Mecca, memorial