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Monthly Archives: July 2011

I’m referring to E.J. Dionne’s latest hit piece in which he states:

The tea party’s followers have endangered the nation’s credit rating and the GOP by pushing both House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor away from their own best instincts.

Now, we all know,  at least those of us who are conservative, that E.J. Dionne is not exactly impartial in this matter. Neither is he an expert on anything he states. He’s a journalist and has always been a journalist, though I use the term loosely for what the E.J. Dionnes of this world represent in real journalism.

One of the arguments used in the last few weeks over the budget/deficit battle is the fact that Bush raised the debt ceiling 8 times during his presidency. While this is true and I won’t dispute it. But liberals are looking at the wrong numbers so,  let’s look at some numbers.

In an eight year time frame, Bush raised the debt ceiling a total of $4.915 trillion dollars. In 2 1/2 years under Obama the debt ceiling has been raised three times for a total of $3.019 trillion dollars, a mere 1 trillion less than Bush committed, in less than half the time,  not to mention that the next increase, which is inevitable no matter which plan is finally used, will add another 2.4 trillion dollars, exceeding the total increases committed under Bush for 8 years, in less than 3 years.

Some other numbers that might be of interest to those of you who actually care about this country come from the deficit. It’s not the debt ceiling that’s the problem. It’s our ability to pay for those things funded only by operating in a deficit and there’s a cut-off point whether it’s a single family or a government.

In pictures from the Heritage Foundation:

Today’s government reminds me of an old Lending Tree Commercial:

Except the government doesn’t want any help as it’s hopelessly addicted to spending, even if it means total ruin. The TEA party worked to send some fiscal hawks to Washington. For that work, they’re demonized, not only by the erstwhile journalist who prompted this post but by Washington D.C., itself.

The deficit under Bush was $450 billion, give or take a billion. The left wants to blame the ’09 deficit on Bush, too, due to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, but it’s not so, at least only so in part. There was a Democratic Congress who facilitated it, so who, ultimately, is to blame? Don’t answer that because this isn’t about blame. It really no longer matters who is to blame.

The deficit for 2010 was revised to $1.5 trillion exceeding both the estimates of the CBO and the White House in the above graph. 2011 numbers are not in yet but the deficit keeps growing. In and of itself, even that isn’t a terrible thing as long as there is ability to eventually recover.  And that is the crux of the matter. With a high deficit, unemployment languishing in the double digits for 15 straight weeks, and anemic economic growth, our ability to pay down debt is so severely curtailed there is no end in sight. We often, singly or collectively, operate under deficits for periods of time when life throws us screwballs, but  we don’t continue to spend indiscriminately while our finances go out of control. We eventually brings ourselves back to equilibrium because to do otherwise brings us to total ruin, generally speaking, that is. There are some who have to hit bottom and below before they understand that simple fact of life.

Under the plan that passed the House, H.R._2560, the debt ceiling will increase $2.4 trillion. It’s 12 short pages and an easy read so there’s no excuse for Mr. Dionne not having done so. What’s being objected to is the requirement for a balanced budget and some cuts to discretionary spending. Some people have realized we’ve reached a limit to what we can handle financially as a nation. Others are in denial and want their “fix.”

And like any other kind of addict, they resort to promises of better behavior.

“Let’s get this [deficit and debt] problem off the table … [and] with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future,” he told reporters gathered for a White House press conference Monday morning.

When that doesn’t work, they resort to threats.


Who is  stealing from grandma?

Washington, D.C. needs an intervention. The TEA Party gave it one. It’s not the debt ceiling, in and of itself.


Oh, and a Constitutional Amendment that has to be ratified by the states. I forgot about that. It’s being ridiculed, too, but we’ll address that one another time.

Another day, another red herring… *Sigh*


Because all know that funds are, and will always be, available to pay interest on bondholder debts

President Obama’s default drop dead date  pronouncements  could precipitate a financial crisis that is unjustified based upon the actual funds available to pay interest on the debt.

The holders of U.S. Treasury bonds care about one thing: Being paid interest owed to them on time. They know that the U.S. Treasury receives approximately $200B in tax receipts each month and they know that debt service interest payments due each month are approximately $29B each month, or less than 15% of total cash on hand.

Further, these creditors know that there exists no “default” date, after which America would automatically and inevitably default on debts owed to them. So why would the Moody’s credit rating agency threaten to lower the supreme AAA credit rating that the United States of America has maintained throughout its history? Why would world financial markets go wobbly as Timothy Geithner’s faux August 2 default date approaches?

Could it be that Moody’s and the holders of T-Bills have lost confidence in the maturity and good judgment of President Barack Obama?

Surely they know that Obama and Geithner are proficient at basic arithmetic, Obama’s still-hidden Ivy League academic record and Geithner’s personal income tax transgressions notwithstanding. Yet, they hear the Chief Executive and his Administration playing a game of chicken with Republicans in Congress over, not just their debt service payments, but even refusals to guarantee payments Social security payments to the nation’s elderly, disabled and orphan survivors.

We know that there are, and always will be, for the foreseeable future, more than enough funds to pay monthly costs for:

  • Interest on the national debt ($29B);
  • Social Security retirement, disability and survivors benefits ($49B);
  • Medicare and Medicaid ($50B);
  • Military personnel ($3B); and
  • Veterans Administration obligations ($3B), with tens of billions ($37) to spare for federal law enforcement, border patrol and what remaining government functions the Obama Administration deems essential, even if the debt ceiling is not raised.

Yet, this is the same administration that threatened not to pay the armed forces in the case of a government shutdown last Spring unless funds were restored to Planned Parenthood abortion mills.

Yes, everyone on Capitol Hill, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and in foreign banks knows that there are no dates on, before or after August 2, 2011 when America will not have the money to pay its bills. But they also are beginning to suspect that the man responsible for actually writing the checks is willing to precipitate financial disaster on his own country merely for his own political purposes.

There are consequences to putting community organizers in charge of the nukes and our money. We the People are reaping the whirlwind of an ObamaDemRecession aftermath, already devastating for the unemployed, underemployed and small businesses whose customers have no money with which to buy their goods and services.

It can get worse and it appears that if Obama doesn’t get his way, he is willing to make it so. In fact, whether we had this debt ceiling issue or not, the fact of the huge debt we already owe could cause markets to dump American dollars any day. The laws of Nature have not been suspended.

But when you add to Nature’s laws an unnaturally irresponsible actor in the role of the most powerful man on Earth, prepare for the deluge.

I just hope that Congressional Republican leaders will begin to educate their constituents, especially including seniors, from whom the threat to their welfare and security comes: Barack Hussein Obama

Mike “gamecock” DeVine

Legal Editor – The Minority Report

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist for



Bible Belt baseball and the American journey

Last week, these United States celebrated the 235th anniversary of its birth in 1776. Next week, barring an aberrant losing streak, the Atlanta Braves will celebrate its 10,000th major league baseball* victory, the first of which took place in 1876 with the creation of today’s National League, five years after their 1871 founding** in Boston  and only a year before President Rutherford B. Hayes would bring an end to post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Even then, the way was being paved for the Braves’ move to a New South and the rise of an America that would one day save the world from tyranny three times and make America’s Past Time, Japan’s.

What hath God wrought

But what has any of that to do with this year’s 400th anniversary of the first printing of the King James Bible, you might ask. Would there have been Puritans and Pilgrims to flee the Old World for the New World absent the explosion of a priesthood of believers no longer content to bow to the Church of England? Would there have been a Declaration of unalienable rights endowed by their Creator?

Would there have been a Christian Abolitionist, Union soldier and future faux Father of Baseball named Abner Doubleday to fire the first shot back from Fort Sumter? Would there have been Rev. Martin Luther Kings readying the City too Busy to Hate for the cry for Hammerin’ Hank Aaron to Play Ball!

Several weeks ago we first learned that the oldest franchise in Major League Baseball had made up 526 games in 20 years of the Bobby Cox Era to stand at 9,982 wins and 9,982 losses to reach a .500 winning percentage for the first time since 1923.

The impending reality of a Braves’ 10,000th victory caused us to shed our long-standing prejudice against arbitrary milestones based upon consecutive zeros. Big Head Bonds notwithstanding, Aaron changed the history of baseball with the number 715, with nary a zero to be found in the number. But 10,000 has more zeroes than we are used to… especially during  an ObamaDem recession, but I digress.

The Pilgrims landed on a Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620 and after the Indispensable Nation ended involuntary servitude, **Harry Wright disbanded the first professional baseball team he formed in Cincinnati in the 1860s and landed the Red Stockings that would become the Braves in Boston, Massachusetts in 1871 to form baseball’s first professional league, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players.

*The National Association disbanded in 1876 and the Boston team joined Albert Goodwill Spalding’s National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, and Major League Baseball was born.

After iterations as the Beaneaters, Nationals, Doves and Rustlers in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, they emerged as the Miracle Braves of 1914 with their first World Series championship.

Spahn, Sain, praying for rain and bean eating made brave men men thirsty, so they took the bus to Milwaukee for some brewskis and ended up staying and making that city even more famous by defeating the New York Yankees for their second championship of the known baseball world.

Welcome South Brother, move over pigskins

After half of King James Version-reading Dixie voted for John F. Kennedy, The Powers that Be noticed that Ike’s interstate highways intersected where Atlanta Crackers sold out Ponce de Leon Park. Atlanta was not, after all, Gone with the Wind! And after all, College is out in the Summer and its too hot for football anyway.

Reconstruction finally ended when Ted Turner’s team became America’s Team on TBS and went on to put Atlanta on the map for more than just Sherman’s March and changing planes.

Braves beat Indians in 1995  for franchise World series victory #3, but, more importantly, The Deep South’s first major pro sports championship. Tinker, Evans and Chance of the Chicago Cubs, also founded in 1876, wouldn’t have had a chance against Maddux, Smoltz and Glavine.

As of the date of the posting of this column, the franchise Harry Wright left Cincinnati to found has 9,998 wins and the King James Bible is the best-selling book of all-time.

Praise God in the Land of the Free and the Home of the…Braves!

P.S. from Braves-Gamecock: Beat the Phillies!

Mike DeVine

Legal Editor – The Minority Report

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist for



Republicans need to get over their historical aversion to playing the “moral card” against the Democratic Party.

Remember the budget debate last Spring when the Commander-in-Chief held our Armed Forces hostage to federal funding for abortion-provider Planned Parenthood? President Barack Obama and his Democrat Senate majority declared that unless the Republican House majority continued to fund that organization, he would force a government shutdown during which he would deem soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to be “non-essential government employees” he would press into involuntary servitude without pay.

The All-American morality of Obama’s unemployed food stamp nation

Summertime now finds President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats as arbiters of all that is moral and “American” in the present budget battle over the raising of the debt ceiling:

In his opening remarks, speaking on the current Congressional budget negotiations, President Obama framed the battle as a matter of making “the tough choices,” and posed a question:

“Do we retain tax breaks for the owners of corporate jets and oil companies making hundreds of billions of dollars at the cost of cutting food safety, college scholarships, medical research or medical care for our most vulnerable?”

The President later added, in response to a question from a reporter, that “food safety may be compromised” if the GOP fails to come to an agreement on tax breaks…


As far as we know, parenthood-planning abortions do not take place on corporate jets, but I digress.

The sun rises in the east, the sun sets in the west, Democrats accuse Republicans of not caring for the vulnerable and Republicans politely disagree with their “honorable” Democrat friends. Were the President’s press secretary and Vice President honorable last week:

CHIP REID, CBS NEWS: “This weekend, when the Vice President was laying out all the things that you have to do and how much — when he said you have to ask those who are struggling in this economy to bear the burden and let the most fortunate among us off the hook, he said that borders on being immoral. Does the President agree with that?”

JAY CARNEY, WH PRESS SEC: “Why, I think he does. Yes.”

Its worse than just that Obama, Carney, Clyburn (GOP is un-American”) and Schumer dishonorably lie.  Its worse than that every Democrat was a hypocritical supporter of the corporate jet tax subsidy now held up as proof of immorality. Its even worse than that they and their media friends always define “caring” as being for whatever particular spending increase Democrats are for at the moment. Its even worse than if the Democrats are actually the ones that are immoral and un-American in their hearts.

Let them eat moral “caring” or corporate jet hatred tastes great?

What is worse are the actual results of Democrat economic policies in their effects on kid’s safety, the elderly and the poor.

From the best we can gather President Obama’s and his minion’s attacks on Republicans as putting kid’s safety at risk is  based either on the GOP’s proposal to cut approximately 10% from the Department of Agriculture’s budget or his own veiled threat to use the discretion he would have in the event of a failure to raise the debt ceiling to prioritize spending.

As in the event of a government shutdown when only Obama would have the power to pay David Axelrod before General Petreaus and the troops, the President would be the only party responsible if debt service is not paid to bondholders. Bondholders know this. Bondholders know that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would always have enough cash on hand from corporate jet owners to pay all of our interest payments.

But that same discretion also gives the Chief Executive the power to choose not to pay DOA food inspectors and thus shut down Big Agriculture. President Obama seems to be like the man on the ledge threatening suicide that would be blamed on those that don’t meet his demands. A “Stop me before I kill again” strategy?

Democrats think We the People are that stupid in their echo chamber that has already forgotten the GOP wave election landslide of 2010 but remember how a “present” voting community organizer was trusted with the nukes over John McCain.

Chattel slavery was immoral. So are job-killing policies that inflate food and energy prices. Say so!

The Grand Old Party was created for the purpose of making the moral case against slavery and its mostly Democratic Party apologists in a nation that declared its independence 235 years ago yesterday, based upon the proposition that all men are created equal.

Republicans now need to return to their underdog-championing roots to make the moral case against life, liberty and happiness pursuit deprivations born of the failed policies of their same old nemesis.

Are kids safer today than they were three years ago? Are kids safer now than when President Bill Clinton’s government spent far less on food inspections? Are the elderly cared for more by a party that wants no change to the existing unsustainable Medicare program?

No, no and no, and the GOP should say so.

Democrats that live to raise taxes on “the rich” always argue that they only want to raise rates back to the level during the Clinton (they always forget the role of the GOP congress) Boom 90s.

Yet, shouldn’t that logic also apply to Clinton era level spending? The fact is that the only logic the Democrats use is based on how many voters they can keep fooling that they care about anything other than their own hold on power and what they mean by morality.

Is it moral to pursue skyrocketing energy prices? Is it “American” to pretend all of America’s ills can be cured by taxing the “rich” owners of corporate jets? Who knew that my $250,000/year Dry Cleaner could fly me and grandma to Gamecock football games sans TSA underwear inspections? Does the Chinese Buffet guy also have a Cessna in his backyard?

Do kids, the elderly, the poor and the unemployed deem class warfare rhetoric more moral and preferable to actual safety, actual health care and a job?


Do ObamaDems deem recovery immoral?

Would that it were only the kids and grandmothers of corporate jet owners that suffer under ObamaDems. One in five American males have no job to go to on this day after America’s 235th birthday. Are they celebrating how much Obama cares for them today? What of those one in seven Americans on food stamps? Do they prefer dependence on Obama for crumbs over the Reagan Recovery boom times? Did they feel less cared for when unemployment averaged 5% under President George W. Bush and more cared for under Obama’s 9% unemployment stimulus?

Can we eat Obama’s “care”? No and we can’t make $15/hour drilling for oil with his “care” either.

Much more of ObamaDem all-American moral caring and the only people with jobs in this country that can afford Le Seuer peas over the generic store brand will be able to fit on just a few corporate jets owned by tax-payer funded GE, SEIU and the United Auto Workers.

Does America want another five years of this Democrat Party-style caring so that we can feel as cared for as did those unemployed millions that listened to reassuring fireside chats for eight years before Pearl Harbor? But at least our too-busy-to-meet-with-Boehner and McConnell dear leader killed Osama bin Laden. Thank God sharks in the Indian Ocean had a happy meal.

Much more of Obama’s caring and we won’t have to worry about the safety of food kid’s parents can’t afford.

This former Democrat left that party due to the results of Reaganite policies that defined the American Way out of poverty. We had had enough Democrat moral superiority to choke on our own rhetoric while inspecting human hearts to win victim-dependent votes.

Americans want their all-American lives, liberty and pursuits of happiness back. Save the care rankings for the real Messiah on Judgement Day. Get rid of the fake Messiah next Election Day.

Mike DeVine

Legal Editor – The Minority Report

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist for



July 2011
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