“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

iVoteAmerica has left no doubt about our belief that the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is one tick removed from midnight on the insanity clock. This diatribe should dispel all doubt that within her head there resides a world undecipherable to sane people.

We’re not entirely certain whether the Speaker’s intention was to give a policy speach or a sermon. Nonetheless, listen here to the most powerful woman in America as she gushes forth a litinany of spiritual babble in a manner that makes the BP oil spill look like a dribble.

At least we all understand what we are up against with respect to the BP oil spill. In this case, only God and a few highly trained psychiatrists can shed light on just how mental Nancy Pelosi really is.

Our prayer is “Holy God, save us from both our sins and the insanity of our leaders…amen.”

However, as any student knows, one’s love for history can lead to confrontations with figures whose stature and words haunt the violators of the simple precepts that created America.

For some time I have wondered what Benjamin Franklin’s advice would be if he could appear before Congress today? Or, for that matter, the advice of Jefferson or any of the founding fathers.

Franklin’s book, The Way to Wealth, might serve as a blueprint for all Americans, but especially our esteemed but misguided leaders in Washington. I have secretly wished the book to be required monthly reading for all politicians.

Ben’s book is filled with a litany of anecdotal principles for the creation and maintenance of wealth. The precepts read like wise proverbs and sound akin to the advice given us by our fathers. When Benjamin’s words are read or recited they ring with tempered, penetrating and undeniable truth.

I’m saddened, however, that Washington is filled with ears that cannot hear and minds that cannot grasp the magnitude of our departure from the most basic principles of economics such as these set forth by Benjamin Franklin:

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship…Tis easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it…Pride that dines on vanity sups on contempt…Rather go to bed supperless than rise in debt…Keep the shop, and thy shop will keep thee…Not to oversee workmen is to leave them your purse open.

There is much more within Franklin’s lines of wisdom such as “A penny saved is a penny earned” and one of my favorites is,

Prudent economy; that careful management of anything valuable which expends nothing unnecessarily, and applies what is used to a profitable purpose; thrift; — opposed to extravagance.

History is an excellent tutor and its message can be the chastisement a nation like ours needs to return it to its former state of discipline.

iVoteAmerica encourages you to secure this old book for yourself with additional copies for your representatives.

Syndicated from Facts Not Fantasy

I have this theory that every so often governments go insane. Usually they have someone who is already demented heading up the government, but it takes a majority of the elected body to enact crazy laws and it takes the government apparatchiks to engineer the systemic failures, the wars, and the crazed rush off the cliff.

The election of 2008 is a splendid example of this. The majority of voters elected a man with the thinnest possible resume for the job of President. Indeed, the man has refused to release his birth records to reassure voters he met the minimum, Constitutional standards for the job. The man, however, was a skilled orator, able to give voice to the TelePrompter speeches written for him by master manipulators.

Promising “change”, promising a government free of “lobbyists”, promising “transparency”, and generally promising a new dawn of enlightened government, Barack Obama and his majority in Congress arrived on January 20, 2009 and promptly began to bankrupt the nation, deprive Americans of access to its vast energy resources, and seek to impose an insane law predicated on the belief that carbon dioxide, vital to all life on Earth, was a “pollutant” that had to be reduced and, of course, heavily taxed.

Capping all this madness was a naïve effort to establish improved relations with the spawning ground for terrorism around the world, the Middle East. He is determined to change the fanaticism that have spawned Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the Taliban, and decades of Islamofascist terrorism from Bali to London, Manhattan and Madrid, to Mumbai.

And it has taken barely four months to get to this point.

In the President’s own words during a C-Span interview, “We’re out of money.”

A recent Cato Institute Tax & Budget Bulletin by Chris Edwards, its director of tax policy studies, spells it out.

“Federal spending is growing by leaps and bounds,” wrote Edwards. “The budget hit $3.9 trillion this year, double the level of spending just eight years ago.”

“The government is also increasing the scope of its activities, intervening in many areas that used to be left to state and local governments, businesses, charities, and individuals.”

To clarify what is occurring, it is necessary to know that the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids the government from bailing out individuals or private industry. Such bailouts violate the Equal Protection doctrine that forbids the government from selecting who shall receive the bailout and who shall not.

Moreover, it violates the General Welfare clause because such bailouts benefit a small group and not the general public. Finally, it violates that Due Process Clause because it interferes with contracts that have already been entered into and, lastly, they turn the public treasury into a public trough.

This new administration, however, has given the union virtual ownership of Chrysler and is likely to do the same with General Motors if the courts do not intervene. The losers are those who lent money to them under contractual terms that put them first in line to be compensated, but who have been left out in the cold along with their fiduciary responsibilities to their investors.

“In recent years,” wrote Edwards, “the range of federal control over society has widened as politicians of both parties have supported nationalizing many formerly state, local, and private activities.” This has led States in particular to spend well beyond the taxes they collected because they counted on the federal redistribution of funds to make up the difference. In the process, they gave up control over their education, healthcare, and transportation systems to name a few.

Edwards cited the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, a 2,205-page official compilation of all federal aid or subsidy programs, including grants, loans, insurance, scholarships, and other types of benefits.

“There has been a large increase in the number of agricultural programs due to bloated farm bills passed in 2002 and 2008. There have also been large increases in the number of homeland security and justice programs, which subsidize local activities such as firefighting and policing. While those are important activities,” said Edwards, “it would be more efficient if they were funded locally because Congress often steers such funds to projects of dubious quality and little national security relevance.”

The Founding Fathers fashioned a central, federal government with specific limitations on what it could or could not do. Most of these have been violated since the last century’s increasing governmental intrusion and acquisition of centralized power.

“It is very sad that a nation founded on individualism and limited government,” wrote Edwards, “has more people than ever suckling at the federal subsidy teat.”

“President Barack Obama has proposed a wide range of new subsidies in energy, health care, and other areas. If enacted, they would take America further away from the individual reliance, voluntary charity, and entrepreneurialism that made it so prosperous in the first place.”

We should not be living in an America where the unions own the corporations, where the banks are not free to determine their own prudent loan principles, where local schools are governed from Washington, D.C., where the kind and size of automobile you drive is decided upon by politicians and bureaucrats, and where we are denied the energy we need based on false accusations about “dirty” fuels that are, in fact, the life’s blood of the economy.

Much of what the government is doing and proposing to do is patently insane. It is most surely unconstitutional.

Visit the official site of the July 4th “Tea Parties” that will be held to protest what is being done to our nation at http://www.teapartyday.com.

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com and a weekly commentary at http://www.anxietycenter.com, the website of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, May 2009; Image © 2009, Donald Teel

Despite the fact that some polls indicate the American public is opposed to a bailout or loan program for the American automakers, the three wise men from Chrysler, General Motors and Ford have made their second trek to Washington seeking to worship Washington’s latest messianic mess, corporate bailout.

These three wise men came from afar…DETROIT. Wishing to appear more humble they chose to travel by more modest means than by Learjet.

Their mission remains unchanged as they continue to follow an economic star in hopes of finding a means of extricating themselves from their business sins and their bad contracts with the United Auto Workers union.

Appearing more akin to Curly, Larry and Moe (Three Stooges) than to wise men, Mulally (Ford), Wagoner (GM) and Nardelli (Chrysler) continue to look silly, sound foolish and present themselves as ill-prepared to square-off with lawmakers over what has now climbed to $34 billion in so-called “loans.”

Pronouncing the Players Man and Wife

There is nothing as powerful as $34 billion to get the UAW and the America auto industry to climb into bed together. One might almost think it was a marriage of convenience, coupled with some gold-digging, as the UAW leadership took marriage vows to assist the giant auto companies with the crisis.

The loving couple decided the money meant they could finally compromise their positions, with the UAW officials lobbying round-the-clock in DC for help, realizing the house of cards they helped build may fall and bury them all.

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas…in Detroit

The three Wise Men arrived atop their best hybrids in an attempt to rewrite the marketing script that had them flying in at a cost in excess of $40,000 each, creating a public relations nightmare that sent shock waves across America and turned “the folks” against the notion of “buy American.”

Since this is the season of giving we should loan money to winners not loser. iVoteAmerica has been told that there are three Ford dealerships for every 1 Toyota dealership and Toyota’s dealers move eight times the vehicles per dealer! How is that possible for Toyota and impossible for GM, Chrysler and Ford? One taxpayer said to iVoteAmerica, “I’d like to loan my tax money to Toyota.”

Think about the way our government is constantly bailing out losers in the form of failing investment firms, insurance companies, toxic mortgages, banks, Wall Street and the American automobile industry. Why don’t we loan the $34 billion to successful small business owners instead?

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…in Detroit. Happy Holidays from iVoteAmerica!