A top priority of Democrats nationwide is to try to expand early voting even beyond the more than 40-plus million votes that were cast on days other than Election Day in 2012 or by mail. The present system balkanizes and deprives our nation of the unifying value of one Nation on Election Day.

The Democrats know that their massive use of early voting was a major factor that enabled them to pile up the winning votes to reelect Barack Obama. Obama enthusiastically supports early voting; he urged 10,000 fans at his campaign speech in Urbandale, Iowa to vote right now “starting Sept. 27 … you don’t have to wait until Nov. 6 to vote.”

On the first day of the new Congress, the House Democrats showed what they think is really important by pushing (fortunately, unsuccessfully) for a new federal law that would require 10 hours a day of early voting for 15 days before any federal election. The bill also would have invented a new voting “right” that no one has to stand in line more than one hour.

Republicans think the goal of voting reform should be honest elections, not convenience, plus maintenance of safeguards against voter fraud and coercion of voters. Republicans want to make sure that only U.S. citizens can vote, that Voter-ID is used in every state, and that ballots from our armed forces abroad are really counted.

Early voting bypasses many safeguards for voting integrity such as having Poll Watchers from both political parties to monitor everything going on to deter polling-place monkey business. It’s expensive and nearly impossible to secure Poll Watchers for the many days of early voting that were allowed in Ohio (35 days) and other swing states.

Early voting is a liberal gimmick that disenfranchises Election Day voters by determining the outcome before Election Day and, contrary to liberal propaganda, early voting decreases overall voter turnout. Early voting increased substantially in Ohio in 2012, but overall turnout decreased significantly.

Early voting violates federal law, which for more than a century has required national elections to occur on the same day. Early voting adds heavy costs to the taxpayers and to the candidates because it significantly lengthens the campaign.

Early voting is unfair because it prevents voters from changing their minds up until Election Day. Early voting encourages uninformed voting because many voted before the presidential debates were held.

Early voting makes campaigns more expensive; it lengthens the time period for advertising. It harms third-party candidates who lack a political organization to get out early voters.

Early voting is a misnomer. More precise names would be premature voting, uninformed voting, or political machine voting.

What if jurors were allowed to decide they are tired of a lengthy trial and want to vote to convict a defendant midway through the trial and go home? Isn’t it just as important for voters to hear all the facts about candidates before voting?

Absentee voting provides another big opportunity for election fraud because it deprives many voters of our precious secret ballot. Here is one way that absentee voting works.

An Arkansas state legislator, Rep. Hudson Hallum, bribed voters with money and food to cast their absentee ballots for him, obtained and distributed ballots to those voters, and then collected them in unsealed envelopes. If the ballots were marked for Hallum’s opponent, Hallum pitched them. Hallum pled guilty to election fraud.

Mail-in ballots are subject to the same problem. Most of them are probably not secret ballots but are cast without traditional safeguards of secrecy and freedom from coercion, and you don’t know who is looking at them before they are dropped in the ballot box

Obama’s margin of victory was only a few hundred thousand votes in the four swing states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia and New Hampshire. That was far less than the number of mailed-in ballots cast.

Another easy way this racket works is to take absentee ballots to nursing homes and assisted-living institutions. The campaign worker “helps” the physically or mentally disabled senior citizens choose for whom they want to vote, marks the ballot, and then turns it in.

The Democrats’ party line is that voter fraud is a myth, but that illusion was dispelled by another stunning case of fraud by a prominent incumbent. The son and field director of U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, who has been in office for 22 years representing Virginia’s Washington suburbs, was filmed by videographer James O’Keefe advising an undercover reporter how to bypass Virginia’s Voter-ID law. The method was exquisitely ingenious: it called for creating fake utility bills on the internet to substitute for Voter-ID.

It should have been a loud wakeup call in December when North Korea successfully launched a three-stage rocket delivering a payload in orbit around the globe. This event established North Korea’s credentials as having intercontinental ballistic missile technology. On December 23, North Korean officials announced that an analysis of the debris from the rocket shows it has the ability to reach the U.S. mainland.

North Korea’s test was a surprise to Americans, to the Obama Administration and to Congress because its last couple of tests had been failures. More alarming was the fact that the launch was a surprise to our intelligence community, which didn’t know the North Koreans had perfected this technology, and didn’t anticipate a launch.

There should have been an immediate demand that the Obama Administration fulfill its constitutional duty to ‘provide for the common defense.’ What could be a more important duty, and a more pressing need for spending our tax dollars, than to save Americans from being incinerated by nuclear bombs?

Ballistic missiles combined with nuclear or chemical weapons are the way an evil enemy country without an airforce or military can project power outside of its borders and threaten the United States. Rockets and missiles are the weapons of choice for terrorists and rogue groups to project power and threaten us.

An unprecedented number of countries have now acquired or are trying to acquire ballistic missiles armed with warheads of mass destruction. North Korea has more than two nuclear weapons and over a thousand ballistic missiles, and Iran has over a thousand ballistic missiles and is working as fast as it can to get nuclear weapons.

Homeland defense should not mean merely tidying up after a hurricane or tornado, housing a few thousand people in makeshift tents, and setting up food kitchens. North Korea’s successful missile launch dramatizes the fact that homeland defense demands that our government do something we cannot do for ourselves: have a functioning system that will shoot down enemy missiles before they kill Americans.

An operational U.S. anti-missile defense system is not only vital to save lives, but it’s the best deterrent to war and attack. We now know that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War at Reykjavik without firing a shot (as Margaret Thatcher famously said) when Reagan refused to abandon or trade away his plans for anti-missile defense.

The Nixon-Ford-Kissinger strategy for holding the giant Soviet missile threat at bay was MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), i.e., our threat to retaliate and wipe Russia off the map. But MAD would be no deterrent to the terrorists because they are all too eager to commit suicide.

When President Reagan announced his plan to build an anti-missile defense, the Left went on the attack, calling it Star Wars and denying that it was possible to knock out an incoming missile in space, a feat often described as hitting bullet with bullet. Nobody any longer argues that an anti-missile defense doesn’t work, and the United States has had over 50 successes in its missile defense testing.

Israel proved the effectiveness and efficiency of anti-missile defense with its Iron Dome system, which by November 2012 had intercepted more than 400 rockets aimed at Israel’s population. Israel’s system is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from distances up to 70 kilometers, and it accomplished its assigned task.

The United States has some missile defense interceptors in place but almost none to protect the eastern seaboard of our country. The United States needs to be equally protected and defended, from Alaska and Hawaii to our East Coast.

The United States spends about $700 billion annually on national defense, of which only one percent is spent on missile defense development and acquisition. We should strive for two percent of our defense budget in order to give anti-missile defense the priority and resources we so urgently need and to start a realistic modernization program.

The American people must be educated about the fact that a single nuclear weapon exploded a hundred miles above the United States could create electromagnetic pulse effects, thereby bringing our entire economy to a standstill. We could lose for many months all our electric power, our communications, transportation, banking and other critical infrastructure systems.

That would be like a return to the 18th century. But we no longer have the agrarian society that supported Americans in those olden days because we now import the majority of our food.

Because of the growing missile threat from hostile states and terrorists, the first duty of our government is to make deployment of a multi-layered missile defense system to protect the entire United States our urgent national priority.

Political Parties Need Rebranding & New Leadership

Dozens of explanations have been offered by people who think they are savvy about politics to explain why Mitt Romney lost and Barack Obama was reelected despite his many unlawful actions and the high unemployment figures. My view is that the two major political parties need rebranding and new leadership.

Obama’s massive negative TV advertising rather successfully branded Romney and the Republican Party as rich guys who can’t empathize with ordinary hard-working Americans. In fact, Obama grew up enjoying a pampered lifestyle attending elite schools and colleges he didn’t pay for, and now is rich, too, with his wealth and lifestyle coming from the taxpayers.

Nevertheless, when the pollsters asked the question, “Who is more in touch with people like you?” Romney lost to Obama by ten points. Why is it that Romney didn’t seem to relate to middle-class Americans? We can’t blame only Romney’s country-club persona for the psychological barrier between him and the bloc of middle-class Americans whose votes he lost. We must also blame the Republican CEOs’ devotion to policies that allowed, even encouraged, several million well-paying manufacturing jobs to go overseas, leaving behind empty buildings in crucial swing states.

Romney didn’t have a message for those Americans, nor did Republican Senate candidates, nor did the Republican Party. So the people who were an essential part of Ronald Reagan’s spectacular victories returned to the Democratic Party, assuming that Republicans care more about their devotion to so-called “free trade” with cheating Communist countries than to protecting good American jobs and a strong American manufacturing base.

You would think that Romney and the Republican Party would have learned a lesson from the insensitive way John McCain brushed off the suffering of those whose good jobs were moving overseas. McCain went to Detroit and callously said in debate: Those jobs are gone forever; just go to a community college and get retrained.

The basic Romney-Republican economic message was cutting taxes and regulations to enable people to prosper as entrepreneurs, innovators, and employers. That’s fine, but it doesn’t relate to the millions of men who lost $50,000 jobs and then had to take minimum-wage or part-time jobs that don’t pay enough to support a family.

Romney and Republicans also lost the votes of the Millennial generation, some of whom were turned off by our meddling nation-building in faraway lands. Other votes of Americans that should have gone to Republicans were lost because the RINO (Republicans in Name Only) Establishment, rather than grassroots Republicans, selected the wrong candidate and dictated wrong policies. Insulting the Libertarians, such as by not allowing the Ron Paul delegates to have their Convention votes recorded, was a crucial mistake, and the small Libertarian vote in some states probably was the margin of defeat of several Republican Senate candidates.

While Republicans were proclaiming that 2012 was the most important election of our lifetime, 5 million fewer Americans than in 2008 voted either for the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate. Maybe they decided there isn’t any difference between the two major parties, and on the crucial economic issue of loss of good middle-class jobs, there apparently isn’t.

The Republican Party doesn’t need only a change in marketing. It also needs a change in policies in order to respect the jobs of middle-class Americans and the choices of grassroots Republicans.

It’s time to change Republican economic policy so the Party can be rebranded as the party of family, good jobs, and superior weaponry that keeps America safe without war. Safe without war and Reagan-style peace through strength can help to win back thousands of non-voters.

The leaks coming out of the RINO Establishment (which made so many 2012 mistakes) now impudently try to instruct Republicans whom they want as representatives: (1) let the RINOs select Republican primary nominees instead of letting grassroots voters decide who they want to represent them, and (2) blame the defeat on those who talk about social issues. Let’s remember that it was grassroots Republicans, not the Establishment, that chose winners Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The Republican Establishment is also trying to make us believe that Republicans can win by offering amnesty to illegal aliens. That’s a deadend road that translates into more Democratic, not Republican, votes.

The Democratic Party should be rebranded as the Party of atheism, amnesty, abortion, and debt. For confirmation of those goals, just read the Democratic Party Platform adopted this year in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Voters should watch again that portion of the Democratic National Convention when a voice vote was taken three times on including a reference to God in the Democratic Party Platform, and three times at least half the Delegates loudly shouted No. Barack Obama confirmed the Democratic Party’s rejection of God in his 2012 Thanksgiving Day address. For the fourth straight year, he omitted thanking God, merely reminding us to thank “each other.”

There’s plenty of hope for the Republican Party because 30 of the 50 governors are Republican, 24 states are completely under Republican control, and Republicans still have the majority of the House of Representatives. It’s time for grassroots Republicans, with the help of our Tea Party allies, to take control of their Party and set it on a winning path.

Beware: Amnesty Won’t Elect Republicans

The Republican strategists who confidently predicted that their candidate, Mitt Romney, would win the 2012 election are already pontificating about what Republicans must do to win in 2016. After their disastrous defeat, strategy and policy mistakes, and expensive super PAC advertising that failed to win votes, why should anybody take their advice again?

The elitists now tell us that amnesty for illegal aliens, a.k.a. “immigration reform,” is the key to future Republican nirvana. That’s wrong-headed advice.

Barack Obama sealed his victory in the battleground states: Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New Hampshire, but those states have very few Hispanics, and illegal immigration was not a significant issue. Obama won narrowly in Florida, another battleground state, but the Hispanic vote there is Cuban and Puerto Rican and they don’t care about immigration laws.

Most polls show that Romney’s pro-enforcement policies were more popular than Obama’s pro-amnesty views. Let’s look at some numbers.

In regard to the entry of illegal aliens, a CBS poll in August found that 63% of voters believed that Arizona’s immigration enforcement laws are either “about right” or “didn’t go far enough.” This was confirmed by a Breitbart News election-night poll reporting that 61% of voters favored Arizona-style immigration laws, including 63% of independents, 53% of blacks, and even 40% of Democrats.

The notion that the main reason Hispanics vote Democratic is their support of amnesty for illegal aliens and their resentment against Republicans who oppose it is a big political lie. The reason Hispanics vote Democratic is that two-thirds of Mexican immigrant families, although they are hard workers, are in or near poverty and 57% use at least one welfare program, which is twice the rate of native-born non-Hispanic households.

That’s not a constituency for whom promises of amnesty for more poor immigrants would persuade them to vote for the Party that is branded as supporting tax cuts for the rich, limited government, and spending reductions. Nor does it mean that Hispanics are a voting bloc eager to vote for a white Cuban, Marco Rubio, instead of the Party that is offering them cash, health care, and other benefits.

The elitists are trying to wrap their fallacious argument in Ronald Reagan, but that won’t wash. Reagan was persuaded to sign a major amnesty bill for the then-illegal aliens, but it’s well known that the resultant amnesty was rife with fraud and did not produce Republican votes.

In Reagan’s 1980 victory, he received 35% of the Latino vote, and in his landslide of 1984 he received 37%. After Reagan’s generous 1986 amnesty, George H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory produced only 30% of the Latino vote.

Another myth about Hispanic voters is the notion that social issues will get them to vote Republican because they are Christian and pro-family. The Hispanic illegitimacy birth rate is 53%, about twice that of whites, and a Pew Research Center poll now reports that the majority of Hispanics support gay marriage.

An American National Elections Study asked a question about free market vs. government solutions. Only 17.9% of Hispanics responded “the less government the better,” and 83.3% said a strong government involvement is required to handle economic problems.

The pro-amnesty crowd waged an expensive campaign this year to defeat the famous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, but he nevertheless won his reelection. He said he wants to talk “man to man” with Obama and explain that granting amnesty to illegal aliens is unfair to legal immigrants.

Policymakers should read the studies by Cuban exile scholar Jose Azel that probe into Hispanic attitudes and history. He concludes that the sociopolitical heritage from Spain and the post-colonial experience of Latin America have led Latinos to view government very differently from the principles of limited government enunciated and adopted by our Founding Fathers.

There isn’t any real evidence of Mexican assimilation to parallel the Irish and Italian assimilation in the 20th century. Irish and Italian assimilation absolutely depended on stopping the entry of more new foreigners, as the United States did in the 1920s.

The voting bloc that Mitt Romney ignored, but which Republicans must recapture if they ever want to win again, is the blue-collar men without a college degree who had well-paid manufacturing jobs until the free traders shipped those jobs overseas. They used to be called Reagan Democrats and they were an essential part of the big victories won by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Republicans need a new strategy to recapture those good middle-class jobs. We don’t need them merely for Republican votes; we need them also to restore our manufacturing capacity for economic, national security, and family-support reasons.

ObamaCare Battle Isn’t Over Yet

Those who thought ObamaCare was set in concrete by Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision last June have discovered that states have the option of whether or not they will create a health insurance exchange, which is the key to participating in the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Obama’s belief that the public would warm up to his signature legislation once it became the law of the land has proven false. The current Kaiser Family Foundation poll reports that only 38% of the public approves of ObamaCare.

Sixteen states, including Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio and Missouri, have given notice to the federal government that they are refusing to set up a health exchange, which means it falls to the federal government to set up exchanges for those states. Only 17 states have committed to set up a health exchange as ObamaCare expected, while the other states are still wrestling with their decision. Republicans and Tea Parties are encouraging them not to set up an exchange.

Among the good reasons for states to say No is that an exchange would cost each state between $10 million and $100 million a year, and that would require unwelcome tax increases. Ohio estimates that setting up its exchange will cost $63 million plus $43 million to run annually.

A state-created exchange provides a mechanism for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to impose one-size-fits-all rules on insurance products sold in the state. It also makes it easier for the federal government to regulate individuals and businesses in that state, collecting fines and taxes from some in order to give subsidies to others. Nevertheless, you can be sure that the blame will fall on state officials when ObamaCare increases insurance premiums and denies care to the elderly.

State-created exchanges will bring us higher taxes, fewer jobs, and fewer doctors and health care providers. To add insult to injury, ObamaCare’s mandates will drastically infringe on our religious freedom.

If enough states refuse to create a federally controlled exchange, that will give the federal government the go-ahead to take on the task of building the exchanges. The feds would then have to figure out who is eligible and for what, a calculation that requires ascertaining family income, the number of family members, and who may be eligible for different levels of benefits.

One positive effect of states’ refusal to set up exchanges is that this might be a good way to reduce federal spending and debt. If all states declined, it is estimated that the federal deficit could be reduced by about $700 billion over ten years.

Can the federal government, big as it is, cope with this task? It can’t be easy, and it could take at least two or three years to build the technology since they are starting with Medicaid’s 1980s technology.

Another way states can throw a roadblock in ObamaCare and also reduce their own spending is by making a second decision not to sign on to ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid. The Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision assured the states of their right to say No to participation in this Medicaid expansion.

Medicaid costs are already bankrupting state governments and increasing costs of private insurance. At the same time, Medicaid payments for services rendered are so low that patients have trouble finding physicians and other health providers who will accept them.

It’s been estimated that ObamaCare’s Medicaid provision could cost the states as much as $53 billion over the first ten years, and neither the states nor the federal government has the money to expand Medicaid. Medicaid is already layered with waste and fraud, plus the failure to convince us that it is a cost-effective way to deliver health care.

ObamaCare is a massive and costly double-barreled entitlement expansion. Overnight, ObamaCare will add 30 million people to the government’s entitlement rolls, an overwhelming task even for the Obama Administration.

Tell your state legislators to reject their state’s health-insurance exchange and also to reject an expansion of Medicaid. We simply cannot afford either liberal boondoggle.

The esteemed commentator Thomas Sowell said it best: “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication AND a government bureaucracy to administer it.” It doesn’t make sense.

Good Advice from Ronald Reagan

Be of good cheer. We can save America from Obama’s rush to Socialism. Here is still-valid advice from Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1975 Conservative Political Action Conference:

We have been through a disastrous election. It is easy for us to be discouraged, as pundits hail that election as a repudiation of our philosophy and even as a mandate of some kind or other. But the significance of the election was not registered by those who voted, but by those who stayed home. . . .

It is possible we have been persuasive to a greater degree than we had ever realized. Few, if any Democratic Party candidates in the last election ran as liberals. . . . Bureaucracy was assailed and fiscal responsibility hailed. . . . Make no mistake, the leadership of the Democratic Party is still out of step with the majority of Americans. . .

I don’t know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, “We must broaden the base of our Party” — when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents. . . .

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

Let us show that we stand for fiscal integrity and sound money and above all for an end to deficit spending, with ultimate retirement of the national debt. Let us also include a permanent limit on the percentage of people’s earnings government can take without their consent. . . . Let us explore ways to ward off Socialism. . . .

A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers. . . .

It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way.

Hope for the Future

If Republicans want to win future elections, they will have to field candidates who confidently defend U.S. jobs, the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism, parents’ rights in education, traditional marriage, and the sanctity of human life.

The conservative movement was built by local study groups in the 1960s. Those study groups built a grassroots constituency that defined conservatism and taught it to those who sought to be elected our representatives. The grassroots were then ready to choose and elect Ronald Reagan.

Conservatives today should not waste time speculating about who they will support for President in 2016. Instead we should build a powerful grassroots movement that trains leaders on every level of government to articulate authentic, pro-American conservative principles. Then we will be in position to name our nominee.

Republican conservatives have recovered again and again after various elitists led us down the road to defeat with candidates who were aptly described as “me too” or “moderates” in aping the liberals, especially in policies supporting big government, globalism, and internationalism.

The State of Kansas has given us a stunning example of how conservatives can retake our Party. Kansas is a very red state, but RINO Republicans have long controlled the legislature and blocked conservative legislation. In the 2012 Kansas Republican Primary, conservatives won an overwhelming victory, taking over the State Senate by defeating eight long-serving, powerful RINOs.

As a result of the 2010 and 2012 elections, 24 states are now controlled by Republicans. That gives us a great opportunity to pass laws that will stop vote fraud in future elections. Conservatives, let’s get to work!

Those who thought ObamaCare was set in concrete by Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision last June are in for a shock. December 14 is the new deadline (extended from November 16) for states to let the feds know, yea or nay, whether or not they will be setting up a health insurance exchange, which is the key to participating in the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Obama’s belief that the public would warm up to his signature legislation once it became the law of the land has proven false. The current Kaiser Family Foundation poll reports that only 38 percent of the public approves of ObamaCare.

Sixteen states, including Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio and Missouri, have told the feds that they are declining to play ball. They have given notice to the federal government that they are refusing to set up a health exchange, which means it falls to the federal government to set up exchanges for those states.

Only 17 states have committed to set up a health exchange as ObamaCare expected, while the other states are still wrestling with their decision. Republicans and Tea Parties are encouraging them not to set up an exchange.

Among the good reasons for states to say No is that an exchange would cost each state between $10 million and $100 million a year, and that would require unwelcome tax increases. Ohio estimates that setting up its exchange will cost $63 million plus $43 million to run annually.

A state created exchange provides a mechanism for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to impose one size fits all rules on insurance products sold in the state. It also makes it easier for the federal government to regulate individuals and businesses in that state, collecting fines and taxes from some in order to give subsidies to others.

Nevertheless, you can be sure that the blame will fall on state officials when ObamaCare increases insurance premiums and denies care to the elderly.

State created exchanges will bring us higher taxes, fewer jobs, and fewer doctors and health care providers. To add insult to injury, ObamaCare’s mandates will drastically infringe on our religious freedom.

If enough states refuse to create a federally controlled exchange, that will give the federal government the go ahead to take on the task of building the exchanges. The feds would then have to figure out who is eligible and for what, a calculation that requires ascertaining family income, the number of family members, and who may be eligible for different levels of benefits.

One positive effect of states’ refusal to set up exchanges is that this might be a good way to reduce federal spending and debt. If all states declined, it is estimated that the federal deficit could be reduced by about $700 billion over ten years.

Can the federal government, big as it is, cope with this task? It can’t be easy, and it could take at least two or three years to build the technology since they are starting with Medicaid’s 1980s technology.

Another way states can throw a roadblock in ObamaCare and also reduce their own spending is by making a second decision not to sign on to ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid. The Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision assured the states of their right to say No to participation in this Medicaid expansion.

Medicaid costs are already bankrupting state governments and increasing costs of private insurance. At the same time, Medicaid payments for services rendered are so low that patients have trouble finding physicians and other health providers who will accept them.

It’s been estimated that ObamaCare’s Medicaid provision could cost the states as much as $53 billion over the first ten years, and neither the states nor the federal government has the money to expand Medicaid. Medicaid is already layered with waste and fraud, plus the failure to convince us that it is a cost effective way to deliver health care.

ObamaCare is a massive and costly double-barreled entitlement expansion. Overnight, ObamaCare will add 30 million people to the government’s entitlement rolls, an overwhelming task even for the Obama Administration.

Tell your state legislators to reject their state’s health insurance exchange and also to reject an expansion of Medicaid. We simply cannot afford either liberal boondoggle.

The esteemed commentator Thomas Sowell said it best: “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication AND a government bureaucracy to administer it.” It doesn’t make sense.

Beware of the Lame Duck Session

The current Congress hasn’t finished its mischief. It still has the opportunity to do bad things in the upcoming Lame Duck session, a period when members of Congress who are already defeated will have the opportunity to vote without concern for voter approval.

The globalists have been plotting to use the volatility of this Lame Duck session to achieve some of their internationalist goals that they couldn’t get passed during the last four years. In particular, they would like to lock us into treaties that slice out various parts of our national sovereignty, a concept that they have been trying to promote as obsolete.

The globalists could make a surprise treaty push for ratification of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (UNATT). This treaty is coming under the radar since gun-control advocates know it could never pass the U.S. Senate after debate in broad daylight.

The gun-control advocates assume that private ownership of guns is inherently dangerous. They hope they can achieve their goal of prohibiting private ownership by the covert strategy of a treaty with vague language, and so far have been successful in avoiding media attention. Supposedly UNATT is merely designed to regulate government-to-government arms transfers and direct sales by manufacturers to governments. Its danger to our Second Amendment is its innocuous treaty language that can impact on the use and ownership of guns by individuals.

Another plan to ratify an anti-sovereignty treaty and subject us to unwelcome global regulations is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This mischievous document was signed for the U.S. by UN Ambassador Susan Rice (now famous for giving big TV time to Obama’s lies about the Benghazi disaster). We don’t need a treaty that sets up UN busybodies to assure benefits and protections for persons with disabilities. We already treat individuals, able or disabled, rich or poor, better than any other nation.

The feminists are using this treaty as an opportunity to promote their abortion agenda. Article 25 requires signatory states to “provide persons with disabilities . . . free or affordable health care . . . including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programmes.”

The globalists desperately want us to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which was a bad idea when Ronald Reagan rejected it in 1981, and which has soured rather than ripened in its years of languishing in the Senate. This treaty cedes sovereign control over practically all the riches at the bottom of the world’s oceans to an International Seabed Authority.

The treaty’s one-nation-one-vote setup assures control by Third World countries, while Uncle Sap is expected to finance the technology and investment to bring the sea’s minerals to the surface. This treaty sets up a system of dispute resolution by the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) based in Hamburg, Germany, whose judgments about “maritime disputes” can be enforced against Americans.

U.S. access to the high seas, as well as freedom of the seas for all countries, is best protected by a superior U.S. Navy, not by regulations made by UN paper-pushers financed by a global tax. Instead of paying tribute to a UN tribunal, we should build more U.S. ships so America can fulfill its mission to keep the seas open for commerce and national defense.

Still lurking in the drawers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is the U.N. Treaty on the Rights of the Child, a broadside attack on parents’ rights to raise their own children. This impudent Treaty purports to give children their own right (against their parents) to express their views freely in all matters, to receive information of all kinds through “media of the child’s choice,” to attend a church of the child’s choice (not his parents’), to be protected from interference with his correspondence, to have access to information from national and international sources in the media, to use his own language, and to have the right to “rest and leisure.”

Try Bipartisanship About China

After ratification, treaties become part of the “supreme law” of the United States on a par with federal statutes, which gives supremacist judges the power to invent their own interpretations. The whole concept of putting the United States in the noose of global organizations, in which the U.S. has only the same one vote as Cuba, is offensive to Americans, and all these UN treaties should be scrapped forthwith.

We heard a lot of loose talk during the presidential campaign about getting tough with Communist China. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney criticized China’s violations of free-trade rules that the United States obeys. This is the perfect issue to showcase the bipartisanship to which both men said they are committed.

The whole idea of free trade with China is a colossal racket. We play by the rules, and China cheats us coming and going. China steals our patents and manufacturing secrets, and violates the rules of the World Trade Organization to which they agreed when we helped them to join in 2001.

The statistics are awesome: the U.S. has closed 57,000 factories, lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, and piled up a trade deficit with China of $3 trillion. Our famed manufacturing base that was a major reason why we won World War II is gone.

Chinese Communist officials must be laughing all the way to the bank at U.S. self-deception about free trade. What the Chinese mean by free trade is that the United States is bound by rules, but China gets our manufacturing technology free, sells us shoddy and sometimes poisonous merchandise, and uses its profits to build a military to overtake ours.

A new book and DVD by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry titled Death by China is making the rounds of home and public showings. Called “a lucid wake up call,” Death by China makes a powerful case against allowing China to continue its war against America while our leaders pretend it’s just good business. Workers join the unemployment lines, our country’s manufacturing base disappears, CEOs rake in their bonuses for cutting costs through outsourcing, and a big Communist country builds up its powerful military. Communist China’s strategy is to spy and steal in order to become the number one superpower in the 21st century.

The Chinese engage in massive intellectual property theft in order to get every kind of technology: aerospace, biotech, information, and energy. The Chinese force U.S. corporations to give China their technology and manufacturing secrets as the price of being able to locate a plant in China. The Chinese subsidize their exports in order to sell their products cheaply in the United States, and the Chinese impose high tariffs on imports in order to protect their home market.

U.S. Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk, speaking on Fox News, demanded that we be nice to Communist China lest we start a “trade war.” But as Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation said, “The trade war has already been going on for five or ten years. . . . and we’re losing.” For years, U.S. free traders have been promising that we will soon be exporting our products to China. But what we are really exporting to China is U.S. jobs.

Spying and Stealing by China. Stealing industrial secrets is a major part of China’s trade relationship with America. China has a large pool of potential spies among Chinese immigrants to the United States and the unprecedented number of Chinese graduate students attending U.S. universities.

Here is an example of how China’s spying and cheating works. DuPont had built a $17 billion-a-year industry selling a product called “Titanium white,” which makes dozens of commonplace items white, from toothpaste to plastics to paint. China tried to buy the process from DuPont, but DuPont wouldn’t sell its 70-year-old business.

So the Communist Chinese just stole it, using a Chinese immigrant, Tze Chao, who worked for DuPont as an engineer. After his arrest, he explained that the Chinese, “in asking me to provide DuPont trade secrets to them, overtly appealed to my Chinese ethnicity and asked me to work for the good of the PRC.” That’s how many immigrants retain their loyalty to their native country.

A Chinese immigrant scientist named Kexue Huang, who held positions at both Dow AgroSciences and Cargill, stole their trade secrets and sent them to China to promote China’s strategic science goals. He was caught and pled guilty. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said, “These crimes present a danger to the U.S. economy and jeopardize our nation’s leadership in innovation.”

The free traders in the United States have been telling us for years that trade would lure China away from Communism, to embrace private enterprise, and become a good fellow in the global community. That isn’t happening; although China has allowed a few powerful bosses to get very rich, the Communist Party has retained all the reins of power. China just issued a requirement that new lawyers must swear an oath of loyalty to the Communist Party. They must swear these words: “to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the Socialist system.”

Selling Us Counterfeit Chips. Our U.S. weapons system is endangered by Chinese cheating. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that one million suspected “bogus parts” have been found in U.S. military aircraft, including the Air Force’s largest cargo plane, special operations helicopters, and a Navy surveillance plane.

This report describes a “flood of counterfeit parts” from China, which threaten our national security and the safety of our troops. Obama’s Defense Department issued a weak statement that it is “working very hard to try to sort this issue out,” and that it would strengthen efforts to prevent Chinese counterfeit parts from ending up in the U.S. military’s supply chain. I don’t find that statement very encouraging.

Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative, said that even the smallest counterfeit parts can cause a lot of trouble. A computer that can operate a Tomahawk missile could have a design that involves hundreds of people at many locations. The chips are so complex that no single engineer or even team of engineers can understand how all their parts actually work.

The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that a faulty chip in a sensor on a Navy helicopter in the Pacific Fleet prevented the pilot from firing its missiles. The manufacturer was completely unaware of the problem since it didn’t make the chips, but bought them from China.

Some counterfeit chips are designed to contain a “kill switch” that can shut down the military equipment. Some chips appear to be working perfectly, but really are sending information to someone else. It’s dangerous to buy our military equipment from Communist China; it should be manufactured in the U.S.A.

Chips are not the only Chinese counterfeits. Thousands of U.S. motorists found their cars were installed with dangerous Chinese counterfeit airbags. Now these counterfeit airbags have to be replaced at the owner’s own expense. A government test found that some Chinese airbags don’t inflate, and some shoot flames and shards of metal shrapnel instead of inflating.

China Piggybacks on U.S. technology. China limits U.S. access to its markets while stealing our designs, patents, know-how, technology, and the intellectual property that drives innovation. China has built up its economy by piggybacking onto Western technology. China manipulates its currency to the disadvantage of American exporters, excludes American products from government purchases, subsidizes Chinese companies to give them a commercial advantage, and invents regulations and standards designed to keep out foreign competition.

Here is an excerpt from a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (9-23-12) from a businessman, Randy Rossi, a retired president of a global manufacturing company that did business with China. “I can tell you that China cheats like crazy and its cheating gives it a massive unfair advantage against U.S. manufacturing companies that follow the rules . . . China manipulates its currency, steals massive amounts of U.S. technology, disregards civilized rules designed to protect consumers and employees from personal injury and totally disregards global environmental standards. This cheating gives China a 40%-50% advantage over U.S. companies that follow the rules . . . I don’t get defending the Chinese as they massively cheat against U.S. companies. Pretending that they don’t is naivete beyond comprehension.”

Remember the scandal of the Chinese drywall sold in many southern states, especially Florida, to be installed in private houses during the housing boom. China sold hundreds of millions of square feet of Chinese drywall, and the homeowners didn’t realize how they were cheated until months later after they moved into their new house, and the drywall emitted an insufferable sulfurous smell that made people sick, caused headaches, respiratory ailments, and skin and eye irritations. The drywall also caused televisions and microwaves to fail, and covered silver and copper items with black soot.

The new homeowners had to move out, going to the expense of finding lodging in another house or hotel. Hundreds of lawsuits were filed in state and federal courts, but chances of getting justice from Communist Chinese manufacturers is almost impossible. After four years of litigation, they have never received a cent.

Ready for Chinese Vaccines? As more and more U.S. public schools are making vaccinations a requirement, Communist China is preparing to take over the vaccine market. China’s Food and Drug administration brags that China has more than 30 vaccine-producing companies with an annual production capacity of nearly one billion doses.

Are U.S. parents willing to inject their kids with Chinese vaccines? Chinese cough syrup killed 93 people in Central America in 2007. At least 81 U.S. deaths in 2008 were caused by Chinese-made Heparin, a blood thinner widely used in surgery.

An expert on Chinese health at the Council of Foreign Relations, Yanzhong Huang, pointed out the difference between Chinese and U.S. medicine safety. Unlike China, U.S. vaccines are kept safe by supporting institutions such as “the market economy, democracy, media monitoring, civil society, and a business ethics code,” plus inspections and regulations, severe punishments for violators, and, of course, lawsuits by trial lawyers.

This year’s scandal involved a big outbreak of meningitis and dozens of deaths. We don’t yet know where the contamination came from, but about 80 percent of the active ingredients in U.S. prescriptions are imported from China or India.

U.S. globalists for decades have closed their eyes to the fact that China is a Communist dictatorship. All during the ’70s and ’80s, and even the ’90s, the globalists predicted that as China pursued a market economy, China would evolve into capitalism, economic freedom, and then political freedom. Dream on; it didn’t happen. The Communist Party still runs the country. So-called reforms don’t include changing the Communist Party government. The Internet didn’t produce freedom but instead became a device to monitor and control the people.

A new Pentagon report states that China is pursuing Marxist global ambitions, and that China’s tremendous military investments are destabilizing. China is developing a nationwide missile defense system. Our Pentagon’s annual report to Congress warns that China’s growing military power will make China the “defining feature of the strategic landscape of the early 21st century.”

When will Americans wake up to how Communist China is cheating us in our so-called “free trade” with them?

Treaty Mischief on Disabilities

The United Nations in collusion with Obama’s globalists have cooked up another scheme to slice off a piece of U.S. sovereignty and put us under global government. The plan is to stampede the Senate into ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This particular piece of globalist mischief had been unnoticed since President Obama ordered UN Ambassador Susan Rice to sign this treaty on July 30, 2009. Now he is trying to ram it through to ratification.

The notion that the UN can provide more benefits or protections for persons with disabilities than the U.S. is bizarre. The United States always treats individuals, able or disabled, rich or poor, innocent or guilty, better than any other nation. We certainly don’t need a committee of foreigners who call themselves “experts” to dictate our laws or customs.

We already have protections and benefits for persons with disabilities enshrined in U.S. laws, regulations, and enforcement mechanisms. Prominent among these laws are the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Other laws that benefit persons with disabilities are the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986, the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, and the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968. These federal laws are enforced by numerous federal agencies, particularly the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The UN General Assembly adopted the CRPD on December 13, 2006 and it became part of what globalists euphemistically call international law on May 3, 2008, after 20 nations ratified it. The treaty now has 117 nations that have ratified it.

Under the CRPD, we would be required to make regular reports to a “committee of experts” to prove we are obeying the treaty. The “experts” would have the authority to review our reports and make “such suggestions and general recommendations on the report as it may consider appropriate.” These demands are often outside the treaty’s scope of subject matter. They override national sovereignty in pursuit of social engineering, feminist ideology, or merely busybody interference in a country’s internal affairs.

CRPD’s Article 7 gives the government the power to override every decision of the parent of a disabled child by using the caveat “the best interest of the child.” This phrase has already been abused by family courts to substitute judges’ decisions for parents’ decisions, and transferring the use of that phrase to the government or to a UN committee is the wrong way to go.

The feminists saw to it that this treaty on disabilities includes language in Article 25 that requires signatory states to “provide persons with disabilities . . . free or affordable health care . . . including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programmes.” Wow!

When the UN approved the CRPD, the United States made a statement that the phrase “reproductive health” does not include abortion. But that’s just whistling in the wind because international law does not recognize the validity of one nation’s reservations to a treaty ratified by many other nations. Furthermore, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on record as stating that the definition of “reproductive health” includes abortion. In testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on April 22, 2009, she said: “Family planning is an important part of women’s health, and reproductive health includes access to abortion.”

After ratification, treaties become part of the “supreme law” of the United States on a par with federal statutes. It’s easy to predict that some pro-abortion supremacist judges will rule that the CRPD, if part of the supreme law of our land, includes abortion. Several Supreme Court justices, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have urged us to use foreign law in interpreting U.S. domestic law.

Americans may differ about the legality and the scope of abortion rights, but it’s unlikely that any of us want those decisions to be made by a UN “committee of experts.”

Another problem with this treaty on disabilities is its failure to give workable definitions. When the treaty states that “disability is an evolving concept,” that means open sesame for litigation against the U.S.

This treaty is a broadside attack on parents’ rights to raise their children, and it’s a particular threat to homeschooling families because of the known bureaucratic bias against homeschooling and against spanking. It is clear that both the United States and persons with disabilities are much better off relying on U.S. law than on any UN treaty.

UN Treaty Ratification Vote Tuesday, Dec. 4th — Keep Calls Coming!

Dozens of explanations have been offered by people who think they are savvy about politics to explain why Mitt Romney lost and Barack Obama was reelected despite his many unlawful actions and the high unemployment figures. I toss into the mix my view that the two major political parties need rebranding.

Obama’s massive negative TV advertising rather successfully branded Romney and the Republican Party as rich guys who can’t empathize with ordinary hard-working Americans. In fact, Obama grew up enjoying a pampered lifestyle attending elite schools and colleges and now is rich, too, with his wealth and lifestyle coming from the taxpayers.

Nevertheless, when the pollsters asked the question, “Who is more in touch with people like you?” Romney lost to Obama by ten points. Why is it that Romney didn’t seem to relate to middle-class Americans?

We can’t blame only Romney’s country-club persona for the psychological barrier between him and the bloc of middle-class Americans whose votes he lost. We must also blame the Republican Party’s devotion to policies that allowed, even encouraged, several million well-paying manufacturing jobs to go overseas, leaving behind empty buildings in crucial swing states.

Romney didn’t have a message for those Americans, nor did Republican Senate candidates, nor did the Republican Party. So the people who were an essential part of Ronald Reagan’s spectacular victories returned to the Democratic Party, assuming that Republicans care more about their devotion to so-called “free trade” with cheating Communist countries than to protecting good American jobs and a strong American manufacturing base.

You would think that Romney and the Republican Party would have learned a lesson from the insensitive way John McCain brushed off the suffering of those whose good jobs were moving overseas. McCain went to Detroit and callously said in debate: Those jobs are gone forever; just go to a community college.

The basic Romney-Republican economic message was cutting taxes and regulations to enable people to prosper as entrepreneurs, innovators, and employers. That’s fine, but it doesn’t relate to the millions of men who lost $50,000 jobs and then had to take minimum-wage or part-time jobs that don’t pay enough to support a family.

Romney and Republicans also lost the votes of the Millennial generation, some of whom were turned off by our meddling nation-building in faraway lands. Other votes of Americans that should have gone to Republicans were lost because the RINO Establishment, rather than grassroots Republicans, selected the wrong candidate.

While Republicans were proclaiming that 2012 was the most important election of our lifetime, 11 million fewer Americans than in 2008 voted for either the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate. Maybe they decided there isn’t any difference between the two major parties, and on the crucial economic issue of loss of good middle-class jobs, there apparently isn’t.

The Republican Party doesn’t need only a change in marketing. It also needs a change in policies in order to respect the jobs of middle-class Americans and the choices of grassroots Republicans.

It’s time to change Republican economic policy so the Party can be rebranded as the party of family, good jobs, and superior weaponry that keeps America safe without war. Safe without war and Reagan-style peace through strength can help to win back the Millennial generation.

The leaks coming out of the RINO Establishment (which made so many 2012 mistakes) impudently try to instruct Republicans what to do now: (1) let the RINOs select Republican primary nominees instead of letting grassroots voters decide whom they want as representatives, and (2) blame the defeat on those who talk about social issues. Let’s remember that it was grassroots Republicans, not the Establishment, that chose winners Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The Republican Establishment is also trying to make us believe that Republicans can win by offering amnesty to illegal aliens. That’s a deadend road that translates into more Democratic, not Republican, votes.

The Democratic Party should be rebranded as the Party of atheism, amnesty, abortion, and debt. For confirmation of those goals, just read the Democratic Party Platform adopted this year in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Voters should watch again that portion of the Democratic National Convention when a voice vote was taken three times on including a reference to God in the Democratic Party Platform, and three times at least half the Delegates loudly voted No.

There’s plenty of hope for the Republican Party because 30 of the 50 governors are Republican, and Republicans still have the majority of the House of Representatives. It’s time for grassroots Republicans, with the help of our Tea Party allies, to take control of their Party and set it on a winning path.

We heard a lot of loose talk during the presidential campaign about getting tough with Communist China. Since both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney criticized China’s violations of free-trade rules that the United States obeys, this would be the perfect issue to showcase the bipartisanship to which both men said they are committed.

Free trade with China is a racket because we play by the rules, while China steals our patents and manufacturing secrets, and violates the rules of the World Trade Organization to which they agreed when we helped them join in 2001. The statistics are mind-boggling: the U.S. has closed 57,000 factories, lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, and piled up a trade deficit with China of $3 trillion.

A new book by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry titled “Death by China” makes a powerful case against allowing China to continue its war against America while our leaders pretend it’s just good capitalism. Our workers join the unemployment lines, our country’s manufacturing base disappears, CEOs rake in their bonuses for cutting costs through outsourcing, and a big Communist country builds up a tremendous military in order to become the number-one superpower in the 21st century.

The Chinese engage in massive intellectual property theft in order to give them an unjustified leap forward in technology: aerospace, biotech, cyber, information, and energy. The Chinese force U.S. corporations to give China their technology and manufacturing secrets as the price of locating a plant in China.

Our U.S. weapons system is endangered by Chinese cheating. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that one million suspected “bogus parts” have been found in U.S. military aircraft, including the Air Force’s largest cargo plane, special operations helicopters, and a Navy surveillance plane. This report describes a “flood of counterfeit parts” from China, which threaten our national security and the safety of our troops.

Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative, said that even the smallest counterfeit parts can cause a lot of trouble. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that a faulty Chinese-made chip in a sensor on a Navy helicopter in the Pacific Fleet prevented the pilot from firing its missiles.

Some counterfeit chips are designed to contain a “kill switch” that can shut down the military equipment. Some chips appear to be working perfectly, but really are sending information to someone else.

Chips are not the only Chinese counterfeits. Thousands of U.S. motorists found their cars were installed with dangerous Chinese counterfeit airbags and now have to be replaced at the owner’s expense. A government test found that some Chinese airbags don’t inflate, and some shoot flames and shards of metal shrapnel instead of inflating.

China manipulates its currency to the disadvantage of American exporters, excludes American products from government purchases, subsidizes Chinese companies to give them a commercial advantage, piggybacks on U.S. technology, and invents regulations and standards designed to keep out foreign competition.

As more and more U.S. public schools are making vaccinations a requirement, Communist China is preparing to take over the vaccine market. China’s food and drug administration brags that China has more than 30 vaccine-producing companies having an annual production capacity of nearly one billion doses.

Are U.S. parents willing to inject their kids with Chinese vaccines? At least 81 U.S. deaths in 2008 were caused by Chinese-made Heparin, a blood thinner widely used in surgery.

This year’s scandal involved a big outbreak of meningitis and reportedly about 32 deaths. We don’t yet know where the contamination came from, but about 80 percent of the active ingredients in U.S. prescriptions are imported from China or India.

An expert on Chinese health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Yanzhong Huang, pointed out the difference between Chinese and U.S. medicine safety. Unlike China, U.S. vaccines are kept safe by supporting institutions such as “the market economy, democracy, media monitoring, civil society, and a business ethics code,” plus inspections and regulations, severe punishments for violators, and lawsuits by trial lawyers.

All during the ’70s and ’80s, and even the ’90s, the globalists predicted that as China pursued a market economy, China would evolve into economic freedom, then political freedom, and become a good fellow in the world community. Dream on; it didn’t happen.

China is a dictatorship run by the Communist Party determined to use every protectionist gimmick to become the world’s number-one military and economic superpower. When will Americans wake up to how U.S. adherence to “free trade” allows China to cheat us coming and going?

Americans may be tired of an exhausting national campaign, but let’s not forget that the stakes have never been higher. As Yogi Berra said, When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

If Barack Obama is reelected, he will merely click the repeat button to give us another dose of his first term, sending us down the road to European socialism, dependency on government, and imposing incredible debt on our children and grandchildren. Taking the fork in the road will give Mitt Romney and a new Republican Senate the opportunity to take us into a new era of rejecting dependency on government.

That’s our choice of what kind of America we want for ourselves and our children because it’s becoming clearer all the time that Obama’s road means a growing percentage of Americans dependent on government for living expenses, housing, medical care, and even food. The Congressional Research Service has just issued a new report that total annual spending on means-tested welfare programs has hit an incredible $1 trillion a year, not including entitlement programs to which people contribute, such as Social Security and Medicare.

There are 83 federal welfare programs that make up this single largest budget item, more than we spend on national defense. In 2011, federal and state welfare spending averaged $61,194 per poor household per year.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who ordered the budget figures to be released, said, “No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends, but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty.” A major reason to take the right fork in the road is the fact that Obama gutted the welfare reform provision to get people out of poverty when he summarily and unlawfully abolished the successful Work requirement which was required by the law passed by the Republican Congress in 1996 and signed by Bill Clinton.

The biggest increase in welfare spending is for food stamps, which are now feeding 46,681,833, including 1,634,000 non-citizens. Sessions says that the Obama administration has allowed this program to increase mightily through misleading promotion and a disregard for self-reliance.

Foreign policy is another major reason to take the fork in the road. The scandal of the Obama Administration’s refusal to defend our U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, despite desperate appeals to send help, proves that it was a hollow victory to kill Osama bin Laden because his acolytes are alive and still killing Americans.

The pathetic job market is a major reason to take the fork in the road. Obama’s much- touted “plan for jobs and middle-class security” is to send two million kids to community colleges. They will be looking for private enterprise jobs that don’t exist, and the only new jobs this will cause is hiring more government teachers.

In the last presidential debate, Barack Obama taunted Mitt Romney with this accusation: “Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.”

Some Obama staffer too young to remember any of those years must have given those words to Obama. They make no sense.

The 1980s were actually years of our most successful foreign policy. Those were the Ronald Reagan years when he labeled the USSR the Evil Empire and then won the Cold War (in the famous words of Margaret Thatcher) “without firing a shot” based on our military superiority and his determination to build an anti-missile defense.

The 1950s were the high-water mark for the American nuclear family. Social and economic policies favored it, and no one had to apologize for it. Since then, illegitimate births have increased to 41 percent a year, causing all the taxpayer costs and social problems that result from that unhappy figure.

The 1920s (known as the Roaring Twenties) were years of sustained economic prosperity, industrial and technological progress, and cultural dynamism. Obama, on the other hand, is taking us back to the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression, when the progressives started to falsely tell us that government can solve all our economic problems.

The only question voters need ask themselves in deciding whether to take the fork in the road is: are you and our country better off now than four years ago? For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the answer is a resounding “no.”

Further Reading:

• Election Central 2012

Political pundits have been warning about an October Surprise that could affect the outcome of the presidential election. But this year’s October Surprise may have been the 9/11 murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens plus three other Americans, and President Obama’s deceitful, cowardly response.

The fallout is the collapse of the false narrative that the assassination of Bin Laden brought finality to Muslim threats, the proof of the failure of President Obama’s Middle East policy, and the coverup. A coverup is a bad act or false statement followed by an effort to conceal or mislead public knowledge.

Obama got away with his war on Libya without congressional approval because no Americans were killed. Now four Americans have been killed.

The 9/11 attack in Benghazi, Libya was a preplanned, calculated, organized, military-style assault on U.S. territory and personnel. But the Obama Administration persisted for two weeks in spinning the fairy tale that it was just the spontaneous outburst of a mob angry about an anti-Muslim video.

On Sept. 16, the Obama Administration sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice onto five Sunday TV programs to redundantly present the party line that the torching of the consulate and murder of the U.S. Ambassador were merely an angry mob reaction to an anti-Islam video made in the U.S. Rice called the event “spontaneous, not a premeditated response” that seemed “to have been hijacked” by “extremists who came with heavier weapons.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted on Sept. 14 that the attack was all about an anti-Muslim video, saying, “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” He spent eight days denying the obvious before he admitted that the label of terrorism was “self-evident.”

When Obama spoke to the United Nations on Sept. 25, he announced “the vision we will support.” Expressing “outrage” at the anti-Islam video (which he mentioned six times), but not at the terrorists or violent enemies of the United States, Obama proclaimed that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

In an emotional pitch to the UN, Obama announced that it’s the world’s duty to condemn the video. Obama and Administration spokesmen almost sounded like they were empathizing with the rioters, and that it must be our fault for allowing a video to be shown that hurt the rioter’s feelings.

Mitt Romney challenged Obama on the Libyan attack in the second presidential debate on Oct. 16. Obama responded by claiming he had called it a “terror” event the day after it happened, after which moderator Candy Crowley showed her bias by immediately backing up his statement.

Fact checkers emphatically pointed out Obama had made a vague reference to unspecified “acts of terror” in his Sept. 12 Rose Garden remarks, but he absolutely did not apply the “T” word to the fatal Benghazi attack. It took Obama two weeks to admit that we had suffered another deliberate enemy attack, meanwhile whining that suggestions that he would “mislead is offensive.”

Obama spent more time discussing the evils of the video than castigating any particular violent attack from the Muslim world. He said Ambassador Stevens was “killed” in Benghazi without mentioning who murdered him, much less labeling them as terrorists.

Obama is deeply committed to the myth of a liberating “Arab Spring” and “the forces of change” to bring about democracy in the Middle East. He seems oblivious to the reality of how his policy of dislodging dictators friendly to the United States, such as in Egypt and Libya, has resulted in rule by Islamist forces who attack and kill Americans.

The evidence is overwhelming that Ambassador Stevens and his tiny security staff had made repeated requests to the Obama Administration for enhanced security and more security staff. Fox News reported 230 prior security incidents in Libya.

Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb, who was in charge of diplomatic security, testified on Oct. 10 that she had placed “the correct number of assets in Benghazi at the time of 9/11 for what had been agreed upon.” That doesn’t square with the denials of repeated requests for enhanced security measures and staff.

Obama revealed his messianic self-importance in this interview given on New Hampshire Public Radio on Nov. 21, 2007: “The day I’m inaugurated, not only the country looks at itself differently, but the world looks at America differently…. If I’m reaching out to the Muslim world, they understand that I’ve lived in a Muslim country, and I may be a Christian, but I also understand their point of view.”

We hope congressional investigations will keep digging. We still want to know, what did Obama and other Administration officials know and when did they know it.

Further Reading:

• White House told of militant claim two hours after Libya attack: emails
• Election Central 2012