Read John's Show Preview 5:30PM Guest: Jim Frogue
7PM Guest: Kevin Alpha and Rob Alpha
7:30PM Guest: Mike Littwin
Go ahead, report us
Slated on Backbone Radio, Aug. 9 Listen every Sunday, 5-8pm on 710 KNUS, Denver... 1460 KZNT, Colorado Springs... and streaming live at 710knus.com.
Guilty plea. Can't deny it. Caught redhanded. We at Backbone Radio, BackboneAmerica.net, Centennial Institute, and the '76 Blog don't like Obama's plan for government health care one bit. We think it's dishonest, dysfunctional, disgusting, dangerous, and deadly. We don't see how a policy that is anti-life for the youngest and oldest among us can possibly be "healthy" for everyone else. We think it's socialized medicine, a bankruptcy prescription, a poison pill. We don't see how a plan that is anti-freedom, and wildly expensive besides, can seriously be foisted on the public as "free."
So on the basis of that, we've been studying that horrible House bill and passing along the ugly realities of what's in it, line by line. We've been running down details on Democrats' townhall meetings in Colorado (not always easy) and urging folks to show up with a civil tone and hard questions.
According to the President's enforcers, this makes us purveyors of "fishy stuff," surveillance targets, undesirables who must be reported to Flag@WhiteHouse.gov. Busted!
The absurdity and creepiness of it all was beautifully captured today by columnist David Harsanyi (see DenverPost.com, opinion section). But since confession is good for the soul, we are fessing up here and now. Go ahead, report us. I understand Guantanamo is nice this time of year.
Actually it's California, not Cuba, that is our family's destination this weekend. Backbone Radio in my absence will be ably hosted by former congressman Bob Beauprez -- an expert on Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats -- with Matt Dunn and Joshua Sharf helping out.
They'll have a great show for you. Please tune in. This can't really be happening in America, can it? Yup, it's happening. But people are starting to wake up. The turn is coming. Thanks for doing your part.
Yours for self-government, JOHN ANDREWS
Blue Dogs perpetuate Democrat racism
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. - Karl Marx While not in the habit of quoting the father of "scientific socialism," I know a good Marxian quotation when I see one–and boy does it ever apply to the current follies in Washington, D.C. Governing parties in America are always unstable coalitions which, in the Democrats’ case is not surprising, given the racist legacy which is at the core of their being.
There is much talk these days about the Blue Dogs in the Democratic party who have slowed the Obama Administration’s rush toward socialized health care. Although the Democrats have solid majorities in both houses of Congress, and therefore theoretically have the votes to pass any bills they wish, approximately 50 Democrat members of the House of Representative are haggling over the cost, the funding and the coverage of so-called Obama Care.
This has not stopped Democrat spokesmen from denouncing Republicans for all the "lies" they’ve been telling about the estimated trillion dollar program that Obama claims will save the taxpayers money. But if we take a longer historical perspective than the first few months of his administration, we will recall that when the Democrats ruled Congress between New Deal and Great Society days, northern and western liberals shared power with white southern racists.
The only difference is, now the racists are primarily outside the South, and come in both black and white. For years the dream of full equality for former slaves and their descendants was stalled by Democrat apartheid south of the Mason-Dixon line, even with the ascendancy of liberal Democrat politics. As long as northern Democrats did not challenge racism and southern Democrats did not oppose Big Government, the party kept its majority.
Civil rights legislation proposed by the Eisenhower Administration was watered down by a Congress dominated by two Texans, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. When Johnson became president he saw the advantages to his party from the 90 percent black vote in metropolitan areas outside the South. His embrace of Civil Rights legislation came at the corrupt price of converting the idea of equality of opportunity to, as Johnson put it, "equality as a fact and equality as a result."
As black columnist Star Parker has so often written, liberal Democrats have switched to black racism and bringing blacks onto what she astutely calls "the government plantation" of perpetual dependency and missing out on full citizenship.
Back in 2006, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer devised a clever scheme in which they ran moderate Democrats in traditionally Republican districts. Their object was to gain a House majority, enabling her to become Speaker and Hoyer to become majority leader. All the candidates had to do was to speak and act like Republicans (pro-life, fiscally conservative, etc.) so that Republicans unhappy with their party would feel comfortable voting for a Democrat.
The strategy worked. But when Barack Obama became president and sent costly and intrusive stimulus, cap and trade, and government health care bills up, the relatively less liberal newcomers began to show signs of independence. Currently, they have prevented passage of any sort of health care bill by the time of the August recess, as planned.
Of course, this independence is tenuous. The House leadership controls the committee assignments and is not above abandoning the Blue Dogs when they run in their party’s primaries next year. Thus, it is premature to declare that these worthies will do anything more than delay bad legislation, shave off a few billion dollars here and there, or kill controversial provisions.
Nevertheless, the irony is rich. Whereas in the mid twentieth century white and black liberals needed white racists to keep control of Congress, how black and white racists need Democrats that look like Republicans to maintain and expand their Big Government plantation that keeps minorities down with what former President Bush called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
Of course, President Obama does not consider himself a racist, for he means to make members of all races dependent on federal largesse and regulation so that no one gets too far ahead of anyone else.
As long as we "spread the wealth around," as he revealingly said to Joe the Plumber last fall, everyone gets to be on the plantation. There may be some overseers around to keep uppity folks under control, but no one said that commandeering the lives, liberties and properties of 300 million people was going to be easy.
Will car tax undo Dems?
(Denver Post, Aug. 2) Or will they undo it? Enroute to a defeat for governor of Virginia, the Democrat blamed his loss on “the slogan from hell: ‘No Car Tax.’” That was Don Beyer when Jim Gilmore beat him in 1997. Unseated as governor of Arkansas, the Democrat realized he had “unwisely raised the state motor vehicle tax,” writes biographer Nigel Hamilton. A visitor “found him on the floor, bawling like a baby,” and railing at Jimmy Carter. That was Bill Clinton after Frank White humiliated him in 1980. If Coloradans oust Bill Ritter in 2010, our gentlemanly governor will control his emotions better than Slick Willie. But his undoing could be identical to that of Clinton and Beyer – misjudging how mad Americans can get when government messes with their cars, trucks, campers, and trailers. Some genius, maybe the same consultant that’s charging CU almost a million dollars for logo design, coined the acronym FASTER for Ritter’s bill that boosted vehicle registration fees and late penalties, effective July 1. The bill is supposed to raise $250 million a year for roads. But the only thing that’s going faster so far is Republican hopes.
The surprise has people steamed. In a puny concession praised by Post editors, Ritter offered to roll back the late charges on non-motorized vehicles, such as boat trailers. Thanks a lot. In a defensive crouch panned by the editors, county clerks met citizen anger with canned complaint postcards and extra guards. The brouhaha is far from over.
The average additional hit of $32 per vehicle, or even the maximum penalty of $100, may sound trivial at a time when politicians talk in trillions. But like a candidate’s $400 haircut, a Pentagon platinum toilet seat, or that British parliamentarian’s moat-cleaning allowance, it’s the kind of crazy-making detail that infuriates recession-weary taxpayers.
Insult follows injury when you hear that the last two letters in FASTER – Rep. Joe Rice’s legislative masterpiece, which has GOP strategists taking aim at him – stand for “economic recovery.” Can Dems really believe picking our pockets is the right remedy in hard times?
Freda Poundstone, Republican former mayor of Greenwood Village, knows it isn’t. The grande dame of citizen petitions in Colorado, author of a 1974 constitutional amendment that bears her name and halted Denver’s annexation march, hopes to get on the 2010 ballot with a petition to halt the revenue grab. Her Initiative No. 10, currently gathering signatures, would cut taxes on vehicles, income, and phones – VIP for short.
Annual car registrations would be capped at $10, vehicle ownership and sales taxes would phase down, state income tax would drop from 4.63% to 4.5% with further cuts in fat economic times, and telecom taxes of all sorts would end. Colorado Tax Reform is the sponsoring group. I was an early signer.
Initiative No. 10 gains urgency from a little-noticed 2008 ruling of the state Supreme Court, Barber vs. Ritter, which effectively wiped out the inconvenient distinction between what’s a tax, subject to TABOR limits and voting, and what’s a fee at the legislature’s discretion. Unless we the people can win the next round of ballot battles and rebuild fiscal guardrails, Colorado could follow California over the cliff.
This election will be a doozy. Ritter wants rid of TABOR, even though Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore in their new book “Rich States, Poor States,” crunch numbers to prove it’s been “a boon to the economy of the state,” tenth strongest nationally since 1997. But disgusted motorists may want rid of Ritter and his party. Then there’s Poundstone with her petition, and that Clear the Bench campaign seeking to fire four justices.
The political rehab for automobile casualties, where Beyer and Clinton once checked in, could be adding a Colorado inmate 15 months from now.
Trade in that Obamobile
Slated on Backbone Radio, Aug. 2 Listen every Sunday, 5-8pm on 710 KNUS, Denver... 1460 KZNT, Colorado Springs... and streaming live at 710knus.com.
The ultimate clunker in America right now is the Obama administration, stuck in a permanent left turn, polluting the air with fantasy, and already running out of gas after six short months. Never mind a rebate for getting rid of the thing, a lot of people would pay to see the last of it. All we're asking to you to pay is attention, however. Join us Sunday evening for the most principled, most patriotic, most faith-based, most Colorado-proud three hours of radio anywhere on the dial. Guests will include...
** Jim Frogue from Newt Gingrich's health policy think tank... Bill Moloney from Cape Cod with tidings of Democrats losing traction... and former state Sen. Peter Groff from inside Obama's Education Department.
** Plus Mike Littwin satirizing our bartending president as a real man of genius... truly a sign of the times when mockery begins from that quarter... and the Georgia boys behind a band I've just learned about, calling themselves Backbone Music.
"What's happened to our backbone?" their signature song asks. I see signs it's starting to come back. Listen on Sunday and do your part in "the big turn," as Fred Barnes of Fox News called it in a Denver speech this week.
Yours for self-government, JOHN ANDREWS