It’s a question that I feel should be asked since the Patriot act was implemented in 2001. Well it seems that the government has assured us that the information will be safe. President Obama sent a letter to Congress stating that the census data can’t be disclosed under the Patriot Act. Considering that the present Administration have told us other things in the past and have done something totally different. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Welch even wrote: “If Congress intended to override these protections it would say so clearly and explicitly.”

All I have to say to that is… Yeah, like I trust Congress.

There are ten questions on this years Census, included in the questions are name, race, age, birth date, do you own or rent, & who may live elsewhere during the year. The Census was set up to count how many people lived in this country and where. The purpose being to determine the number of seats your state has in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Why does anyone have to tell them if they’re renting or if they have a mortgage or not? My opinion is that we should definitely participate in the Census to make sure that everyone is counted, but as for the other information, we should refuse to answer them. I mean what does my name have to do with the Census?

“Tonight’s speech was a reminder that, for decades, the policies of Republicans and Democrats alike have failed. Libertarians are asking people to take matters into their own hands. Instead of just complaining, we’re encouraging ordinary Americans to step up and run for Congress on the Libertarian Party ballot line.

I can say exactly the same thing about President Obama’s speech tonight that I said about George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2008: ‘Tonight’s State of the Union address went much as expected. Instead of calling for a more limited role of the federal government in American society, the President laid out plans that would only increase the government’s intervention into the realm of economics, health care, education and foreign policy.

I am weary of the President’s unspoken premise that only government–indeed, only the federal government–can accomplish good in our society.

President Obama seems to be totally blind to the concept that government can cause problems rather than solve them. His speech was filled with ‘More’: more handouts, more spending, more programs, more bailouts, more regulations. We Libertarians want less government, not more.

Not to be outmatched by the Democrats, the Republican Party conveyed its lack of seriousness in addressing this nation’s government spending problems by having Bob McDonnell, Virginia Governor for eleven (11) days, deliver its rebuttal to the President. If they were really serious about addressing the dire fiscal circumstances of this nation, they would have had Paul Ryan, a six-term congressman from Wisconsin, who has proposed the most serious plan of anyone in the two older parties to keep us from going off a fiscal cliff.

Last week, Alan Auerbach, Professor of Economics and Law at UC Berkeley and US government fiscal policy expert, said that the Democratic and Republican parties are in a ‘death embrace’ with their government spending. The only political party that is rationally and forthrightly addressing the need to cut government spending and end our culture of ever expanding entitlements is the Libertarian Party.

As Americans lose hope in Obama, we Libertarians are warning voters against running back to the Republicans who got us into such big messes in the first place. Republicans started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans made the false intellectual case for bailing out banks and car companies. Republicans argued that deficits don’t matter. Republicans gave us the giant Medicare expansion bill.

The President’s suggestion of a ’spending freeze’ was especially ludicrous and insulting to the intelligence of Americans. The amounts involved are minuscule, and Congress won’t accept them anyway. Will Obama sign the spending bills that ignore his ‘freeze’? You bet he will. Instead, the President should demand across-the-board cuts in all areas, including entitlements.

The President talked a lot about jobs. Unfortunately, the policies he supports are responsible for most of the unemployment we see today. High taxes, minimum wage laws, hiring regulations, firing regulations, mandatory unemployment benefits, and other government interference make it much more difficult for businesses to hire and keep employees. As expected, the President’s prescription is to increase the dosage of this government poison.

While our nation is declining dangerously right now, a turnaround could be straightforward and simple with steps like these: 1. Bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan; 2. Stop rewarding failed companies with bailouts; 3. Cut taxes and spending and let the free market work.

Finally, on the matter of political rhetoric, I call upon the two older parties to stop spoon feeding politics to the American people as if we are a bunch of overgrown children. These are difficult times that call for more than rhetorical flourish or positioning a group of diverse people around a politician. Older party politicians need to be specific about their proposed policies, as Libertarians are.

And, I know I’m probably just wasting electrons, but can’t we go back to the days in which the President sent a copy of his speech to Congress and left it at that. The speech last night took 1/7000th of an entire year. I think the vast majority of the American people would agree that we have better ways to spend our time.”

William Redpath has served as the Chairman of the Libertarian Party since 2006. For more information, or to arrange an interview, call LP Executive Director Wes Benedict at 202-333-0008 ext. 222.

The LP is America’s third-largest political party, founded in 1971. The Libertarian Party stands for free markets and civil liberties.

The current laws in regards to campaign contributions are very screwed up. Look how much money was funneled into President Obama’s campaign. Unknown contributors and questionable entities made it possible for Obama and his henchmen to carry out one of the greatest campaigns in American history. If Obama is so much for equality for all Americans, then he should lead by example in the next election in 2012.

How that could be done is to eliminate all contributions for all campaigns. The media (newspapers, TV and radio) should be regulated to have equal coverage of each candidate. All candidates should be required to be involve and participate in any and all debates. No more commercials for candidates, instead have each news and talk show have these candidates come on at different points of the election cycle to “pitch” their policies. No one candidate gets more air time or a better time slot than another. As for raising money for running the campaign trail, there is no more campaign trail. If all the candidates are interviewed and participate in debates, there wouldn’t be a need to be on a campaign trail. If all news outlets are required to have these candidates on in equal time, how can the American voter NOT know what they stand for. As for the debates. Have at least two every month through the primary and then step it up to once a week through the general election.

All the repetitive speeches and slandering of the opponent has taken up too much of the campaigning along the trail that it’s not even worth for a voter to go to one of these “campaign rallies”.

No matter at what level of government the candidate is running, it should be done in this type of manner.

“The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors’ own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul. It also calls into question whether an overhaul is even doable; 72% of the doctors polled disagree with the administration’s claim that the government can cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.”

“More than seven in 10 doctors answered “no” when asked if they believed “the government can cover 47 million more people and that it will cost less money and the quality of care will be better.”

“This response is consistent with critics who complain that the administration and congressional Democrats have yet to explain how, even with the current number of physicians and nurses, they can cover more people and lower the cost at the same time.

The only way, the critics contend, is by rationing care — giving it to some and denying it to others. That cuts against another claim by plan supporters — that care would be better”.

Read the rest of the article at the link above.

Let’s take a look at the state of Maine. A state that had 128,000 citizens that were uninsured in 2003. At the time, Governor John Baldacci (D) signed into law a state-wide health care plan to combat the situation. By the time 2009 arrived, it would cover all of Maine’s citizens. The system would help keep control of hospitals and physicians to hold down insurance premiums. It was sold as a way to provide everyone insurance as well as save business and patients money. To top it off, it was stated that there would be no increase in taxes.

Well after five years of the program, not only has the program not save any money, but it has also cost the taxpayers of Maine $155 million and is still rising. Here’s how the program was supposed to work. There were to be two government programs that would cover the uninsured. The legislature greatly expanded MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program. Today Maine families with incomes of up to $44,000 a year are eligible; 22% of the population is now in Medicaid, roughly twice the national average.

Then the state created a “public option” (where have you heard that lately?) known as DirigoChoice. The plan would compete with private plans such as Blue Cross. To get lower income Mainers to enroll, it offered taxpayer-subsidized premiums. (again, this sounds familiar) The plan’s original funding source was $50 million of federal stimulus money the state got in 2003. Over the years, the plan was to be “funded by the savings in the health-care system.”

During the peak of the program in 2006, only about 15,000 people had enrolled in the DirigoChoice program. That number has now dropped to below 10,000, according to Maine’s own reporting. About two-thirds of those who enrolled already had insurance, which they dropped in favor of the subsidized public option. So instead of the 128,000 that were uninsured, the actual number is only 3,400.

Most of what is in Maine’s health care program is actually in the Obama-care bill. So why bother with trying to have a national health care program when they can’t even get it to work on a small scale? If Obama and his friends are so into this bill, then may I suggest that we do a test on the actual program on the state level. Sort of like a “try it before you buy it” program. Try it in California for five years and let’s see how successful it is at that point. If it can survive without a constant need of federal stimulus money, then I say we go ahead with it on a national level.

I know it will never work. One because that it has already been tried in Maine as well as Massachusetts and Tennessee and each time it failed. Currently in Maine, a healthy single male at the age of thirty, pays a monthly premium of $762 while a citizen in the same condition in New Hampshire only pays $222.

This bill (HR3200) needs to be stopped and the discussion of health care reform needs to be re-focused to look at tort reform. A major part of health care costs come from malpractice insurance that the doctors need to have to protect themselves from from major law-suits. The lawyers have pushed the price of health care up from the class-action suits to individual cases. As for class-action suits, no one benefits from this type of practice other than the lawyers. Lawyers will pocket millions of dollars while the people who are affected by the situation only get a few dollars each as compensation.

Will Universal Health Care really work here in America? The answer is no. If you don’t believe it, then you need to go look for the information like I did.

For those who thought that President Obama was going to be a different type of politician, I guess you’re kicking yourself in the ass now. Republicans and Democrats alike will increase spending in the federal government and to do so, they have to raise taxes to pay for it. Taxes are a necessary thing in a society that is as advanced as the United States. The problem comes into play when too much spending is going on. We don’t need to spend millions of dollars to build a dog park for just one city. How is that going to create growth? Yes it will create a couple of dozen for a few months, but what happens after the park is done? How about the $4.545,000 for wood utilization research? Since 1985 taxpayers have already spent $90 million on this research and they still don’t know how to use wood.

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, head of the President’s National Economic Council, was asked if the administration would keep to their word of not raising taxes on 95% of the American people, their answer was that they weren’t too sure. Tiny Tim Geithner said “We have to bring these deficits down very dramatically, that’s going to require some very hard choices. “We will not get this economy back on track, recovery will not be strong and sustained, unless we convince the American people that we are going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established,” he said.

What recovery is he referring to??? The recovery is just a bunch of spending of American taxpayer’s money to satisfy the industries that backed the Obama while he was running for office. The problem is that there shouldn’t be a deficit of 1.7 trillion dollars as we currently have thanks to Obama and friends.

There is a big difference between debt and deficit. President George W. Bush put us in debt, but Obama is giving us a major deficit. The Obama Administration has spent more money than all other presidents combined and he did it in less than six months.

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”

As writers who inveighed against last year’s GOP candidate and called George W. Bush’s presidency a “disaster,” we’re equal-opportunity critics. As taxpayers with children and hence some small, almost certainly unrecoverable stake in this country’s future (not to mention that of General Motors, Chrysler and AIG), we write with skin in the game and the fear that our current leader will indeed start busting out the 1970s cardigans.

The key to understanding Obama’s predicament is to realize that while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor’s big-government policies and perpetual crisis-mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.

You can read the whole article by clicking the link at the top of the page.

Some of the comments are worth reading also. Of course there’s the 7th graders acorn crew with their “you lost nah nah” comments but you can skip over those.

Shocking to some to see the media doing their job for a change instead of being Obama’s bootlickers.

Beautiful piece. Bush was bad. Carter was horrible. And now we have Carter on steroids AND meth. It will take a decade to undo this mess Obama is making.

Obama is a socialist/marxist that wants to REMAKE this country; he has said so more than once. Those that surround him are of like mind. Of course, remember that the “rulers” will be miraculously insulated and immune from the chaos and misery that their policies will create. Carter was a least a decent, honest man with good intensions, but was a terrible president. I find nothing in Obama but a cold, arrogant, elitist, that has been raised and mentored to loath and despise this country.

What’s next? Cardigans? What may be next is what Presidents like Jimmah Cawter and Obama attract like offal to flies– an international crisis brought on by enemies who know how weak and ineffectual they are. It’s frustrating that in these times of real danger and challenge, we have a President who talks big, does little except spend money, and at the end of day winds up as soundbites on cable news. President Obama is the Peter Principal cubed. I hope all you rubes who voted for him are bleary-eyed and happy.

Six months into his presidency, with more surely to come, it is an appropriate moment to ask: What is the point and purpose of Barack Obama’s speeches?……He seems to be on TV every day, talking.

Mr. Obama is not the nation’s Speaker in Chief. He’s not a senator, and he’s no longer a candidate. He’s the president. A president’s major speeches are different than those of anyone else. That high office imposes demands beyond the power of a podium. Inspiration matters, but the office also requires acts of leadership. A U.S. president’s words must be connected to something beyond sentiment and eloquence. Too much of the time, Barack Obama’s big speeches don’t seem to be connected to anything other than his own interesting thoughts on some subject.

You can read Daniel’s article at the link above. Also, read some of the comments if you get a chance. Here’s a few I thought were right on the spot:

“It is megalomania, pure and simple that drives this talking head of a president. His ideas are old and vacuous, and as the author points out, rest on a tissue of foundation.”

“Just like a top 40 song that everyone hums along to when it first comes out after excessive airplay people begin to just change the channel and soon enough it is out of radio rotation. The American public is already beginning to change the channel; what will happen when he announces a major speech and only Keith Olberman shows up?”

“I certainly can’t see why anyone thinks his speeches are worthy of any praise. Seeing the media fawn over his oratory reminds me of pre-school parents ooo’ing and ah’ing over their precious little ones fingerpainting……He may be spouting roses and laurel but what I hear in my head resembles the sound all adults make in “Charlie Brown” features. What he lacks in sincerity he makes up for in deceit.”

In a potentially alarming trend for the White House, independent voters are deserting President Barack Obama nationally and especially in key swing states, recent polls suggest. Obama’s job approval rating hit a low of 56 percent in the Gallup Poll on Wednesday. And pollsters are debating whether Obama’s expansive and expensive policy proposals or the ground-level realities of a still-faltering economy are driving the falling numbers.

But a source of the shift appears to be independent voters, who seem to be responding to Republican complaints of excessive spending and government control.

“This is a huge sea change that is playing itself out in American politics,” said Democratic pollster Doug Schoen. “Independents who had become effectively operational Democrats in 2006 and 2008 are now up for grabs and are trending Republican. “They’re saying, ‘Costing too much, no results, see the downside, not sure of the upside,’” he said.

As we posted earlier, Libertarians said the same thing back in May.

In a wide-ranging interview set to air Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, one of President Barack Obama’s most prominent Republican supporters says he is ‘concerned’ about the new president’s ambitious agenda and the high price tags accompanying many of Obama’s initiatives.

“I’m concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them.”

“I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president — and I’ve talked to some of his people about this — is that you can’t have so many things on the table that you can’t absorb it all. And we can’t pay for it all.”

I lost all respect for Colin the day he endorsed someone because they shared the same skin color, instead of sharing the same political philosophy. If he had been thinking with his head and not his color, he would have seen this coming.

It also seems that Colin doesn’t know what he believes anymore.

1996 Republican Convention: “The federal government has become too large and too intrusive in our lives,” Mr. Powell said then. “We can no longer afford solutions to our problems that result in more entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, more bureaucracy to run them, and fewer results to show for it.”

May 2009 Washington conference: The (Republican) party must realize that the country has changed, he said. “Americans do want to pay taxes for services,” he said. “Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less.”

June 2009 interview with CNN: “The people want their problems solved,” Powell also says in the interview. “And very often, it’s government that has to do that. So let’s have good government, effective government, whether you call it limited or not.”