As a heavily taxed business owner and resident of Alachua County I attended the budget meeting held yesterday. Never have I witnessed such a callous disregard for the safety and tax burden of our citizens. In a time of severe financial crisis you have the audacity to continue your profligate spending instead of funding the one essential service government is supposed to provide-police protection. I refer specifically to the one million dollars designated for the assistance of non-profit organizations through CAPPS. These are dollars being given to agencies that already enjoy a tax-free status which not only creates a “double-dipping” scenario but is inexcusable in such a financial crunch. The list includes such successful organizations as United Way, Planned Parenthood, Catholic Charities and others. And we are expected to give them money while our police and correctional officers go without a raise for the fifth year in a row? And I particularly resent the opinion of County Manager Randall Reid and the commissioners that our sheriff’s deputies are on the same level as administrative and clerical personnel and, as such, must sacrifice equally. That is unacceptable; our law enforcement officers are at much higher risk, perform extremely hazardous duties and, as such, deserve higher pay and more benefits than those performing clerical duties. Lastly, I am mortified that you have not only forced Sheriff Darnell to beg and threaten for the righteous benefit of her officers, you chastize and belittle her for her efforts. It is obvious that you have no respect for the citizens, the police officers that protect you and your position as commissioner.

 Laurie Newsom

“Only when liberals are in charge can terms like faith, hope, charity and sacred honor be classified as hate speech.  Our ever increasing lexicon now includes “Becklash”; defined as an entirely irrational reaction to a TV and radio commentator’s well attended non-political Restoring Honor rally in Washington.”

Click for full article…

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/27172

WASHINGTON — “Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.More than 50 million Americans are on Medicaid, the federal-state program aimed principally at the poor, a survey of state data by USA TODAY shows. That’s up at least 17% since the recession began in December 2007.”

Click here for full text…

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-08-30-1Asafetynet30_ST_N.htm

For those of us who cannot be in Washington, D.C. for the 8-28-10 Restoring Honor Rally, CSPAN will be televising the event starting at 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Check your local listings.
 
It has also been announced that the event will be streamed live via Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/restoringhonor

“C4L: We have the financial reform bill that recently passed through Congress. They’re instituting a new Consumer Protection Bureau within the Federal Reserve, imposing more stringent regulation requirements on large financial firms, and creating a council to identify systemic risk. Will this sort of reform be effective in preventing future financial crises, and what do you think will be the effect on US businesses?

JR: Well, it’s part of the trend where the US for whatever reason, both consciously and unconsciously, is driving the business out of the US. There’s a transition now from the US to Asia in the financial world and the economic world. The largest creditor nations in the world are now in Asia: China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, you know who the largest debtor nations in the world are.”

Click for full article…

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=37488

It is apparent from yesterday’s primaries  that Tea Party values are making a difference at the polls. Not only are there  victories of candidates that believe in our values – limited government, free markets, FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY – but  the voters demanding  those values from our elected officials are  getting to the polls and sending the message that we will no longer tolerate this country’s descent into radical socialism. We must CONTINUE the fight for our country’s founding principles by getting involved with our candidates: volunteer your time, pull out your pocketbook. They need our support! Visit our vetting page and decide on the candidates you want to support. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Keep reminding them that if they agree that this country needs to turn around they need to VOTE on November 2. WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

“The denial of the possibility that there is an endpoint [to the welfare state] is crucial to the liberal enterprise,” says Dr. William Voegeli, author of the new book, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State and a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World.

In this Reason.tv interview, Voegeli traces recent federal government expansions to President Franklin Roosevelt’s introduction of a “second Bill of Rights” that included the right to housing, education, and medical care.”

Click on the link…

http://biggovernment.com/reasontv/2010/08/24/never-enough-william-voegeli-on-americas-limitless-welfare-state/#more-160025

2010 Sets Record For Cost Of Government

“The average American worker had to toil through the first 231 days of 2010 — more than 63 percent of the year — to pay off the costs of their state, local and federal governments.  This leaves just under four and half months for Americans to provide for themselves and their families before the growing tab of the cost of government comes due again, says Mattie Corrao, government affairs manager for Americans for Tax Reform. 

Every year, the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation and its Center for Fiscal Accountability calculate the day on which average Americans have paid off their share of the costs of federal, state and local spending and regulations.  This year the day fell on August 19, a full eight days later than last year’s date.  It is the latest Cost of Government Day ever recorded, says Corrao.”

Click for full article…

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=19728&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DPD

How far from reality has Dowd wandered? Protests Ground Zero Mosque

John Quincy Adams versus Maureen Dowd

  By Alan Caruba  Sunday, August 22, 2010

As this is being written, two rallies are being held in the pouring rain in New York, just outside the proposed site of the Ground Zero mosque. One represents people opposed to it and one with people who see no problem whatever in an Islamic house of worship a few steps from where Muslims, in the name of Islam, destroyed the Twin Towers and killed some 3,000 people.

That pretty much tells you how a particular mindset can either resist evil or fall victim to it. Some might say that “evil” is too strong a word with which to describe Islam, but let me take you back to 1830 and quote John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States.

Referring to Muhammad, he wrote: “Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent god; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle.

Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion.

He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust; to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.

Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon the earth, and good will towards men.”

Liberals can never see evil no matter how it manifests itself or how many times it does so. They are drawn to it and the men who personify it.

Here is Maureen Dowd writing in The New York Times on Sunday:

“The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems—making them easy prey for fearmongers.”
According to Dowd, Americans are foolish, even stupid, to remain angry about 9/11.

As far as Dowd is concerned, “Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America—-a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.”

How far from reality has Dowd wandered? The nation is irrational? Obama is high-minded? Being angry regarding the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor is wrong? And surely the fearmongers she has in mind include Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.

In psychology, the term “projection” is used to describe imputing one’s own emotions to others. “The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment.”

The echo chamber to which she refers has been and is the liberal news media that sold us on Barack Obama, equating him with Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Engaging in what media pundit, Bernie Goldberg, called a “slobbering love affair.” Dowd is looking in the mirror.

This isn’t punditry or even rational analysis of the current political scene. This is ill-concealed contempt for the vast majority of Americans who either were already conservative or who have been moving into the ranks of conservatives as they witnessed the abomination of Obamacare, the massive bailouts of unions and banks while ordinary Americans saw their jobs disappear and homes foreclosed.

They are the Americans who voted Republicans into the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, and replaced Teddy Kennedy, the ultimate liberal, with a Republican Senator. They are the Americans who compose the Tea Party movement.

Within the liberal enclave of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, there is bewilderment that Americans would object to a mosque near Ground Zero.

The nation is not having a nervous breakdown. It is Maureen Dowd and all the fellow travelers who cannot believe that Americans will not roll over for Obama’s socialist agenda, who are angry at a profligate Congress that has amassed more debt in a year and a half than the days when the U.S. spent its treasure to win World War Two.

In 1830 John Quincy Adams understood exactly the threat Islam posed to the modern world. In 2010, Maureen Dowd and the readers of The New York Times remain utterly clueless.

© Alan Caruba, 2010  This article appeared in Canada Free Press on Sunday, August 22, 2010

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/philly-requiring-bloggers-to-pay-300-for-a-business-license-101264664.html

Roy G. Callahan, USN, Ret.
1529 NW 143rd Street
Gainesville, Florida 32606
Tel:  (352) 332-9144
Fax:  (352) 332-9144
Call6603@Bellsouth.net
 
Friday, August 20, 2010
 
Representative  Cliff Stearns
2370 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Representative  Stearns,

In late July, with the stroke of a pen, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member “National Ocean Council.” California Representative Sam Farr, the author of the Oceans 21 that went nowhere gloated , “We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today’s executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act.” Once again, Congress was bypassed.
 
This panel has the power to implement “coastal and marine spatial plans” to ensure that all executive agencies, departments, and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap existing regional and local authorities governing marine and coastal planning.
 
Co-chairing this National Ocean Council is Czar John Holdren. He is notorious for cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth. He also hyped weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich and the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Nancy Sutley. The disgraced green job self evolved communist Van Jones reported directly to Ms. Sutley.
 
Members of the panel include:
 
*   Socialist and energy/climate change Czar Carol Browner. Ms. Browner bullied auto company execs into never putting anything in writing. She is now threatening to push massive cap-and-trade tax hikes during the upcoming congressional lame duck session.

*   Dr. Jane Lubchenco is head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She is also a former high-ranking official at the left wing Environmental Defense Fund which has long championed drastic reductions of both commercial and recreational fishing activity and placing it under centralized control.

*   Attorney General Eric Holder, who will no doubt use his stonewalling expertise to shield the ocean council’s inner workings from public scrutiny.
*   Interior Secretary Ken Salazar who is currently destroying jobs through his illegal offshore drilling moratorium and blocking onshore development. He is wreaking havoc on this country’s energy sector. His comments on the new ocean grab are more threat than promise: “With two billion acres we help oversee on the Outer Continental Shelf, Interior is a proud partner in this initiative, and we look forward to helping coordinate the science, policies and management of how we use, conserve and protect these public treasures.”
 
My purpose in writing this letter is to serve as a reminder to you that Congress is one leg of the three-legged stool our constitutional form of government depends on. It exists as a barrier to prevent the usurpation of power by the Executive and Judicial branches. Recent history shows Congress has abrogated its responsibilities by allowing bureaucrats in Departments such as the EPA et al to do whatever they want with no accountability or congressional oversight. This has to stop.
 
You are my congressional representative in the House of Representatives. Your recent campaign literature reveals you “rediscovered the Constitution.” Therefore, I demand you exercise your right as my representative to use the power of the purse to author legislation withholding funds for this travesty. The Judiciary has no army or police force to enforce its rulings and if Congress refuses the funds, neither does the executive branch of government.
 
It is time for you to earn your salary and benefits and do what you were elected to do – Protect and Defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and “domestic.”
 
Yours in the Bill of Rights,
Roy G. Callahan

Copy to Senators LeMieux, Nelson, Republican Senators and Florida house and Senate members, and primary candidates’, et al.

“‘Atlas Shrugged” — Ayn Rand’s fourth and last novel, published in 1957 — may be second to the Bible as the most influential book read in America, according to a Library of Congress survey. It is required reading in management training at BB&T, the 12th-largest bank in the U.S. and one that resisted taking TARP bailout funds.”

Click for full atrticle…

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=544033

Our county commissioners are at it again-underfunding police protection so that they can continue using taxpayer dollars to pay for non-essential services. It is up to us, Alachua County citizens, to protest and show the commissioners that their priorities are NOT acceptable. The main function of government is to provide for citizen safety; by not funding police and fire protection adequately the commissioners are derelict in their sworn duty to provide this protection.  We will suffer greatly if this is not changed. And why do the officers that put their lives in danger to protect us have to beg for their jobs or for a decent wage that  truly reflects what they do EVERY DAY. There are plenty of taxpayer dollars to fund essential services adequately with NO increase in taxes!

Yesterday Sheriff Sadie Darnell’s presentation to the commission was pertinent and powerful. And we must also thank the four Tea Party members that spoke before the commission reminding them of their duty to protect. But I must ask: WHY only four? If the citizens do not speak up government will destroy our safety and our rights. Surely more members can become involved.  If you truly cannot attend meetings then please send emails to the commissioners letting them know that their priorites MUST change. We deserve to be protected and we must never forget that we are paying their bills. 

To contact all the commissioners at one time use email bocc@alachuacounty.us

Below is a link to the Gainesville Sun article detailing yesterday’s commission meeting. 

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20100818/ARTICLES/8181006/1002/news01?Title=Sheriff-rejects-more-cuts