
How much is $825 billion:
Being a citizen is a full-time job. If we wish to reclaim our rights, we first must begin by reclaiming our responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities are inextricably linked and cannot be separated.
“We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. We have never made good on our promises . . . I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started . . . And an enormous debt to boot!”Save a lot of time, wasted money and grief for the nation ... Next!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) yesterday told Politico: “Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election.” The House bill perfectly demonstrates how the left is using the economic stimulus bill as cover to accomplish its long-held desire to permanently increase the size of the federal government, with little or no benefit to the American taxpayer.Here is the rest of their writeup.
Today’s top six disastrous highlights are:
1. Medicaid Bailout: The House bill includes an $87 billion bailout for state Medicaid spending. Supposedly, this federal spigot will expire in two years. But there is simply no reason to believe states will be prepared to meet their Medicaid obligations any more in 2011 than they are today. Medicaid is funded by a formula that matches state spending levels with federal dollars. If we keep bailing states out, they will have every incentive to continue irresponsible spending. For example, Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) significantly expanded health care spending in Illinois while Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) prudently made “hard choices” to maintain adequate reserves. When the bailout comes, Indiana taxpayers are going to have to pay for the Illinois governor’s mistakes.
2. Medicaid Expansion: The House bill expands Medicaid eligibility to cover unemployed workers whose income does not exceed 200% of the Federal Poverty Line. This provision is supposed to expire in two years, but does anyone really expect political will at the state or federal levels to kick new populations off the Medicaid rolls once states put them on? No. States will push for indefinte expansion of the program and neither the White House nor this congressional leadership is ideologically predisposed to say no. Mark our words, this is a permanent expansion.
3. Family Planning Loophole: Section 5004 of the Medicaid expansion includes language that smuggles the left’s social agenda into law under the guise of stimulus. This section undercuts parental authority, increases control over taxpayer dollars by family planning clinics, and expands exactly who is eligible to receive the benefits. Contrary to current law, the income of parents or even a spouse would not be counted in determining eligibility. So a child in a family at any income level could be eligible for free family planning services. And thanks to a “presumptive eligibility period” in the legislation, no parent ever needs to be notified that his or her child applied for Medicaid. Finally, applicants would not have to prove citizenship before “presumptive eligibility” is determined.
4. Education Bailout: The House bill creates a $79 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund to help states pay for public services, 61% of which must be spent on education. Not only does this money encourage states not to make tough budgeting decisions, it also comes with new federal restrictions designed to please leftist constituencies. For example, the bill forbids bailout funds to increase school choice by specifying that “no recipient of funds under this title shall use funds to provide financial assistance to students to attend private elementary or secondary schools.”
5. Education Shopping Spree: Besides that $79 billion, the House bill includes more spending for a slew of other programs, bringing the total price tag for education “stimulus” to $142 billion. Winners of this round include $1 billion for Technology Education, $1.5 billion for Pell Grants, $6 billion for higher education institutions, $2.1 billion for Head Start, $2.5 billion for the National Science Foundation, and $2 billion in Child Care Development Block Grants. Are any of these increases intended to be temporary? Can you imagine Democrats in Congress standing up to cut Head Start and Pell Grant funding in two years? Of course not. This $142 billion increase in education spending would nearly double total outlays in 2007 for the Department of Education.
6. New Jobs? President Obama has said the stimulus could create as many as 3 million jobs, but Speaker Pelosi said yesterday that 4 million jobs will be created or saved. Yet, when pressed by Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI) earlier this week, Tax Committee staffer Thomas Barthold could only shrug and admit to having no estimates that any jobs or economic growth would be created. The video is priceless.
Some legislators are beginning to catch on to the left’s game. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) says he opposes the Medicaid bailout “because some governors would use the money to mask poor decisions in other portions of their budgets.” Rep. Heath Shuler (D-TN) says he is “concerned about returning fiscal responsibility to Washington” and adds that the stimulus bill “can’t be the pet projects of the House and Senate.”
The shutdown of general availability for the Windows 7 Beta will occur in 3 phases over the course of the next few weeks:More here.
* Starting January 27th, the Windows 7 page will be updated with a warning that time is running out on downloading the Windows 7 Beta and that we will be limiting downloads shortly. People will be encouraged to register and start the download of the Windows 7 Beta sooner rather than later.
* February 10th, new downloads of the Windows 7 Beta will no longer be available. People who have already started their Windows 7 Beta download and have not yet finished will still be able to finish their download and are encouraged to do so.
* February 12th, people will no longer be able to complete their download of the Windows 7 Beta. Anyone who hasn’t finished downloading the Windows 7 Beta will be unable to do so.
Product keys for the Windows 7 Beta will continue to be available. So if you have the Windows 7 Beta but didn’t get a product key you will be able to do so even after February 12th.
MSDN and TechNet Subscribers will continue to have access to the Windows 7 Beta bits throughout the Windows 7 Beta phase. The above dates do not apply to MSDN and TechNet Subscribers.
The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.At least he's keeping something to keep America safe.
Segment 2 - Rush talks about the next 4 years under Obama
In case you missed the previous Part 1 segments from January 21, 2009, here they are:
Segment 1 - Rush has direct words for the new administration
Segment 2

The perfect scam, pay more in taxes to the government, so government scientists can pretend to control the weather. How dumb are you? We are about to find out.So how did I get here, simple really, Al Gore forced me to look into this whole area. As an engineer for quite some time, science is not foreign. Computer models were used frequently in my work. We had a technique of using the concocted model to predict known behavior. The equivalent for the AGW hoax would be to set the computer models for say the year 0 and run them forward for 2,000 years and compare their results with the known temperature record. There is a reason they won't do this, and it does not bode well for the models. After some research into what was going on, I found myself firmly in the camp that AGW doesn't exist.
Oil prices fell below $34 a barrel Tuesday on the continued gloomy outlook for global energy demand and as traders sold the expiring benchmark contract due to a lack of space at a key U.S. storage facility.The oil producers are caught in their own trap. They ran up so much debt when oil was spiking, that now it takes massive production(overproduction?) to satisfy the payments. Sorry guys, you didn't buy into the T Boone Pickens joke we will never see oil below $100 a barrel again, did you? Shame.
By midday in Europe, light, sweet crude for February delivery was down $3.14 to $33.37 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.




Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama's pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.The kooks and hoaxers are just doing a little house cleaning, But -- Maybe not so much so, proud is an interesting word, at least not in public. Other notorious members are the Communist Party Of China, Putin's Russia and Fidel Castro's Cuba. An all Communist festival. So why remove her name from the esteemed organization lists? Will the media report?
By Thursday, Mrs. Browner's name and biography had been removed from Socialist International's Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group's congress in Greece was still available.
Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world's social democratic political parties such as Britain's Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.
The group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization's action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
...
Her name has been removed from the Gore organization's Web site list of directors, and the Audubon Society issued a press release about her departure from that organization.
In a mirrored office tower overlooking Caracas, a top Venezuelan official says his government is ready to accept Barack Obama’s offer to talk with U.S. adversaries -- if the president-elect scraps George W. Bush’s division of the world into friends and foes.Doesn't the "inconsistent record on Democracy" just say it all? Hugo Chavez is doing all he can to convert Venezuela into the latest version of Cuba's Communist paradise. Watch the video, inadequately called "The Hugo Chavez Show" as if life is a show to be watched. Come to think of it, the dimwitted actor we hired makes that seem more real today than before.
Such categories are “simplistic,” says Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela’s former envoy to Washington. “Why do nations have to be friends? What we have to do is sit down and discuss issues.”
Venezuela may provide a useful first test for Obama’s pledge to engage rather than isolate antagonists. While President Hugo Chavez is one of Washington’s noisiest critics, frayed relations would likely be easier to mend than those with nations such as Iran and Cuba, whose leaders are even more hostile toward the U.S.
Still, “Obama needs to be cautious” given Chavez’s inconsistent record on democracy, says Elsa Cardozo, an international-relations scholar at the Metropolitan University of Caracas. The 54-year-old former lieutenant colonel has allowed open elections and an opposition press while consolidating power over the government and selectively persecuting political rivals.

Earth on the Brink of an Ice AgeIce ages come and go, they started cycling during the last 5 million years. Before that it was much warmer than today. The ice age is defined as 'glaciation periods, that last about 100,000 years. The interglacial periods last about 10,000 years. The present warm period is an interglacial,called the Holocene Period, has lasted so far about 12,000 years. So it is easy to see, the next ice age is coming. Prof Bob Carter, a paleoclimatology professor, who has a lecture series on geologic climate where he explains it all to the laymen - Video here.
The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years.
Most of the long-term climate data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles. The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earth’s orbit, which changes over a period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as the earth’s ‘wobble’, which gradually rotates the direction of the earth’s axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.
Elements of the astronomical theory of Ice Age causation were first presented by the French mathematician Joseph Adhemar in 1842, it was developed further by the English prodigy Joseph Croll in 1875, and the theory was established in its present form by the Czech mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s. In 1976 the prestigious journal “Science” published a landmark paper by John Imbrie, James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled “Variations in the Earth's orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” which described the correlation which the trio of scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the Milankovich theory is always described in textbooks of climatology and in encyclopaedia articles about the Ice Ages.
In their 1976 paper Imbrie, Hays, and Shackleton wrote that their own climate forecasts, which were based on sea-sediment cores and the Milankovich cycles, "… must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends - and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted... the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."
During the 1970s the famous American astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists began promoting the theory that ‘greenhouse gasses’ such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, produced by human industries could lead to catastrophic global warming. Since the 1970s the theory of ‘anthropogenic global warming’ (AGW) has gradually become accepted as fact by most of the academic establishment, and their acceptance of AGW has inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to prevent the worsening of AGW.
The central piece of evidence that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” The ‘hockey stick’ graph shows an acute upward spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold temperatures.
The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years -- evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.

The root cause of the crisis is the housing foreclosure crisis, and what caused that, loans to unqualified individuals, loans made by the Government Sponsored Enterprises(GSE) Fannie MAe and Freddie Mac. Yes, the federal government forced home mortgage loans to be made to people who had no means to pay them back, that's what a sub-prime mortgage is. People who had no stake in America, people who were here illegally. As interest rates climbed, gas prices rose, food prices rose, the party ended.
And what forced the demands for unqualified loans, Pres Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Who was the enforcer of the CRA, that would be people like Barack Obama, your helpful Community Organizer from the voter fraud group ACORN.
Thomas Sowell is always a good read.
Among the Congressional “leaders” invited to the White House to devise a bailout “solution” are the very people who have for years created the risks that have now come home to roost.
Five years ago, Barney Frank vouched for the “soundness” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said “I do not see” any “possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury.”
Moreover, he said that the federal government has “probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing.”
Earlier this year, Senator Christopher Dodd praised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for “riding to the rescue” when other financial institutions were cutting back on mortgage loans. He too said that they “need to do more” to help subprime borrowers get better loans.
In other words, Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default.
And that folks, is the root of the current financial crisis. So what is to be done. We have a data point:
Here is a short video of one of the hearings in 2004 where the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regulator was explaing that Fannie and Freddie were going out of control with bad paper. Demcorats in their own words.
THE CHIEF REASON for skepticism at the official position on "global warming" is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic "global warming"; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.
THE sun's ability to shield the solar system from harmful cosmic rays could falter in the early 2020s, just in time to threaten the health of NASA astronauts as they return to the moon.The modern solar maximum, that's a term you probably hadn't heard in the last years, have you, has ended, that appears certain. Personally, I think the change seen in October 2005 portended the onset of a state change in the sun. But you are free to have your own opinions, that is what science is supposed to be. At least until we have provable fact to the contrary. Consensus in science is just so much meaningless gibberish.
As well as the 11-year cycle of sunspots and solar flares, the sun's activity experiences longer-term shifts lasting several decades. The sun is currently in a long-term high, having been relatively active for nearly a century, but it is not known when this will end.

The WattsUpWithThat comment section already sports complaints that the graph above is generated by beginning in the very hot year of 1998 — hence the trend is bogus. That would be wrong to do, wouldn't it — carefully selecting when to start tracking temperature trends?
Or better yet, the could always strike up the propaganda band.
"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth" --- Franklin D. RooseveltA really good quote for today's Democrat socialist to remember.
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. --- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message to Congress, 1944
Acting either out of boldness or desperation, Hansen goes on to reveal the environmentalist left's deeper ambition: a collectivist redistribution of wealth. He recommends that the carbon tax be returned to the public in "equal shares on a per capita basis."NASA's Hansen in his open letter to Obama titled “Tell Barack Obama the Truth – the Whole Truth”, on page five of the PDF Hansen published at Columbia University's website on December 29. He has a more obfuscated way to describe wealth redistribution -- But, this sure has a lot to do with science as well as fixing the planet. Well, at least it is a NASA scientist, who is purported to be in charge of the 'science' of man made global warming, as if there really is any science there, but to come right out and say this, it's amazing. And in public as well.
Take it out of one pocket and put it in another, the magic of government -- And how exactly does this change the climate?A rising carbon price is essential to “decarbonize” the economy, i.e., to move the nation toward the era beyond fossil fuels. The most effective way to achieve this is a carbon tax (on oil, gas, and coal) at the well-head or port of entry. The tax will then appropriately affect all products and activities that use fossil fuels. The public’s near-term, mid-term, and long-term lifestyle choices will be affected by knowledge that the carbon tax rate will be rising.
The public will support the tax if it is returned to them, equal shares on a per capita basis (half shares for children up to a maximum of two child-shares per family), deposited monthly in bank accounts.
Newsbusters has the details here, which expounds on the genius of a socialist redistribution idiot. Bet you knew all along this is really what was behind the hoax, didn't you.No large bureaucracy is needed. A person reducing his carbon footprint more than average makes money. A person with large cars and a big house will pay a tax much higher than the dividend. Not one cent goes to Washington. No lobbyists will be supported. Unlike cap-and-trade, no millionaires would be made at the expense of the public.
The tax will spur innovation as entrepreneurs compete to develop and market low-carbon and no-carbon energies and products. The dividend puts money in the pockets of consumers, stimulating the economy, and providing the public a means to purchase the products.
A carbon tax is honest, clear and effective. It will increase energy prices, but low and middle income people, especially, will find ways to reduce carbon emissions so as to come out ahead. The rate of infrastructure replacement, thus economic activity, can be modulated by how fast the carbon tax rate increases. Effects will permeate society. Food requiring lots of carbon emissions to produce and transport will become more expensive and vice versa, encouraging support of nearby farms as opposed to imports from half way around the world.