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1. Today House Republicans Are Set To Approve Barack Obama’s Latest Stimulus Plan
2. GOP Does the Right Thing With Payroll Tax
3. Boehner’s Bailout: The Highway to Hell
4. Dylan Byers of Politico Defends Media Matters While Ignoring Herman Cain
5. Only Solution to ObamaCare’s Tyrannical Attack on Religious Freedom is Full Repeal
6. The Uber Conservative
7. American Majority Racing and NASCAR
1. Today House Republicans Are Set To Approve Barack Obama’s Latest Stimulus Plan
It is sad that we have gotten here, but House Republicans, including conservative stalwarts like Jim Jordan of Ohio, are set to pass Barack Obama’s latest stimulus plan. Except they are calling it John Boehner’s “Highway Bill.” Consider, however that Barack Obama’s budget, unveiled yesterday, calls for much of the same infrastructure spending the House Republicans want.
There is a reason the Heritage Action for America, Club for Growth, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and other conservative organizations are opposed to this spending spree. It is not conservative. It should not be Republican. It is Barack Obama style spending. Call your Congressman today at 202-224-3121 and tell him to oppose H.R. 7, the American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act.
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2. GOP Does the Right Thing With Payroll Tax
We all agree that a temporary payroll tax cut without permanently restructuring Social Security, along with its funding source, is a ludicrous idea. Sadly, Democrats would rather play politics by introducing this inane stimulus measure, in an attempt to get Republicans to vote against a tax cut.
For far too long, the extension of the payroll tax cut was coupled with more entitlement spending, in the form of 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and extension of Medicare ‘doc fix.’ We have long advocated that Republicans should decouple the tax cut from the spending in order to preclude a situation where conservatives, who oppose more entitlement spending, would be forced to vote against a tax cut. Today, House Republicans announced that they will decouple the two issues and pass a clean payroll tax cut extension until the end of the year. They are leaving out the entitlement spending extensions and daring Senate Democrats to oppose their clean tax cut – one that they have “championed” for the past few months.
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3. Boehner’s Bailout: The Highway to Hell
Here are the inviolable facts. This 5-year (2012-2016) surface transportation reauthorization bill, H.R. 7, will commit $262.8 billion in spending through 2016, even though the revenue from the user-pay taxes (gas tax and other highway related taxes and fees) will only reach $193.2 billion over the same period. Even working with CBO’s numbers, which don’t account for FY 2012, there will still be a $55.2 billion deficit over 4 years ($210.3 billion in contract authority vs. $155.1 billion in revenue).
Boehner can propagate his protestations from now until tomorrow, but the fact is that, under this bill, contract authority for transportation will outpace its funding source by roughly $55 billion from FY2013 through FY 2016. That is their solemn commitment to the Democrats; that spending will definitely be authorized at those levels. Any “offsets” discussed henceforth are notional, phantom, temporary, and/or stridently opposed by Democrats.
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4. Dylan Byers of Politico Defends Media Matters While Ignoring Herman Cain
We should not be surprised Dylan Byers is defending Media Matters over at the Politico. I’m sure he does not want the spotlight shifting to him and the Politico for continually running Media Matters generated hit jobs.
Byers himself cited Media Maters bashing Dana Loesch.
He repurposed a Media Matters hit job on George Will recently too.
He makes sure we all see both Greg Sargent and Media Matters targeting the New York Times.
But here’s the one I’m most fascinated by and highlights the exact pattern described by Tucker Carlson. On January 31, 2012, at 6:20 p.m.,Dylan Byers linked to a Buzz Feed story about me that had been posted at 4:10 p.m. The Buzz Feed story itself was nothing more than a straight regurgitation of a Media Matters hit job posted at 1:52 p.m. In fact, the Buzz Feed story was the first link to Media Matters and the Politico was the second according to my Google News Alert that day. You will be unsurprised to learn the Huffington Post was third.
It is humorous to read Byers demanding examples from Carlson when he should be able to just pull up his own blog at Politico to find them. But the most laughable line of Dylan Byers’ denial/non-denial is this line:
“In publishing those quotes without providing evidence, the Daily Caller has put accusations on the public record regardless of whether or not they carry any weight.”
This is the Politico. Surely they have heard of Herman Cain.
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5. Only Solution to ObamaCare’s Tyrannical Attack on Religious Freedom is Full Repeal
Well, we can’t say they didn’t warn us. Nancy Pelosi famously decreed that Congress must first pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it.
The problem with passing a 2,700 page government takeover of health care is that it gave unprecedented authority to Washington bureaucrats to infringe upon our most personal health care decisions. So when Congress passed the bill they didn’t really know what we’d end up with, but conservatives had a bunch of good guesses. It turns out we were right. And now we know for sure what’s in it: assaults on religious liberty, government bureaucrats with the power to strip away our most basic freedoms, increases in health insurance premiums, trillions in new costs, and a drag on our economy that is killing jobs.
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6. The Uber Conservative
In his CPAC speech, Mitt Romney used “conservative” more than any other word except “President.” Just how many times?
My radio producer Shane Backler cut up his speech and put them all together.
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7. American Majority Racing and NASCAR
On Thursday, American Majority launched an unprecedented program to engage NASCAR fans this year and promote fiscally conservative values on Fox News. American Majority Racing is a year-long project in conjunction with MacDonald Motorsports, challenging millions of race fans to “Pledge to Vote to Keep America Free.” Car #81, driven by rising NASCAR star Jason Bowles, is going to be on the track for the entire Nationwide series in 2012. The effort will also be off the track, activating and educating fans through a state-of-the-art booth on vendor’s row and special outreach at the campgrounds surrounding the races. If fans aren’t registered to vote, we’ll be doing that as well. There will be race car simulators, contests, a show car and American Majority Racing “swag” at the booth – all of which will be messaged encourage increased participation by fans. NASCAR fans are the American majority and as such, should have a louder, stronger voice in the direction this nation takes.
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