To understand why Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating, all you need to do is look at this analysis done by The Gainesville Tea Party.

Even liberals should be able to figure this one out. Especially the last line that shows how serious Washington is about restoring fiscal sanity and our economic health.

Keep in mind also that this analysis does not include the sixty plus trillion dollars in unfunded and mandated obligations of Medicare and Social Security.

Why S&P Downgraded the US:

U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000

Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000

New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000

National debt: $14,271,000,000,000

Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

Annual family income: $21,700

Money the family spent: $38,200

New debt on the credit card: $16,500

Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710

Total budget cuts: $385

Set that aside for now so you can concentrate on how Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egypt is sending 19 American NGO (non governmental organization) workers to trial for ‘crimes’ like promoting democracy and human rights and for receiving funds to support them and their mission.

The Muslim Brotherhood used the NGO’s to help overthrow former President Hosni Mubarak. The ‘democracy’ that got rid of Mubarak is no longer needed. Now, they are holding 43 of them prisoner and moving to the oppressive Sharia law.

One of the Americans held captive is Sam LaHood, the son of Secretary of  Transportation Ray LaHood. Sam LaHood is the head of the Egypt office of the Washington-based International Republican Institute.

I don’t attribute any of that as, like Joe Biden had warned, that President Obama will be tested on the international stage. This is a result of a combination of his inexperience, naivety, and his pre-occupation with transforming the United States into some form of government-controlled society where the federal government makes all decisions for you.

Three years ago, then Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said . . .

Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.

And they have not stopped.

Makes one wonder if Biden made that statement because he knew what would follow when the top of the ticket is clueless on any subject besides ‘social justice.’

Link: Egypt sends American workers to trial

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission with the mission of overseeing the observance of the MLK holiday was created in the bill signed by Reagan.

In May 1989, Coretta Scott King was made a member of the commission for life by Republican President George H. W. Bush.

Democrats today are trying to usurp Dr. King’s legacy, when it was the Democrats who Dr. King was fighting. See the below article for details.

* * * * * * * *

Democrats Smeared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960′s

By Frances Rice

Character assassination. That’s the tactic used by Democrats in the 1960′s to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Republican who was fighting the Democrats and trying to stop them from denying civil rights to blacks.

The relentless disparagement of Dr. King by Democrats led to his being physically assaulted and ultimately to his tragic death. In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King’s leaving Memphis, Tennessee after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a “trouble-maker” who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Prior to his death, Democrats bombed Dr. King’s home several times. The scurrilous efforts by the Democrats to harm Dr. King included spreading rumors that he was a Communist and accusing him of being a womanizer and a plagiarist.

An egregious act against Dr. King occurred on October 10, 1963. With the approval of Democrat President John F. Kennedy, Democrat Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy – President Kennedy’s brother – authorized the wiretapping of Dr. King’s telephone by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Wiretaps were placed by the FBI on the telephones in Dr. King’s home and office. The FBI also bugged Dr. King’s hotel rooms when he traveled around the country.

The trigger for this unsavory wiretapping was apparently Dr. Kings’ criticism of the Kennedy Administration, according to the author David Garrow in his book, “Bearing the Cross”. The justification given by the Kennedy Administration publicly was that two of Dr. King’s associates, including David Levinson, had ended their association with the Communist Party in order to work undercover and influence Dr. King. However, after years of continuous and extensive wiretapping, the FBI found no direct links of Dr. King to the Communist Party.

The unrelenting efforts by Democrats to tarnish Dr. King’s reputation continued for years after his death. To his credit, Republican President Ronald Reagan ignored the Democrats’ smear campaign and made Dr. King’s Birthday a holiday.

Today, while professing to revere Dr. King, Democrats are still trying to tarnish his image by making remarks that diminish his civil rights achievements and continuing to claim that Dr. King embraced Communism – a system that is secularist and socialist.

In reality, Dr. King was a Christian who held deeply religious beliefs and was guided by his faith and his Republican Party principles in his struggle to gain equality for blacks. He did not embrace the type of socialist, secularist agenda that is promoted by the Democrat Party today, which includes fostering dependency on welfare that breaks up families, supporting same-sex marriage and banning God from the public square.

An understanding of who the real Dr. King was can be gained from a glimpse of Dr. King as a young man who participated in an oratorical contest when he was 14 years old. The title of his speech was “The Negro and the Constitution” which had the following sentences: “We cannot have an enlightened democracy with one great group living in ignorance…We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flout the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule….”

If Dr. King were still alive, he would be slandered by Democrats in the same way that they smeared him in the 1960′s and demean all black Republicans today.

Bio: Frances Rice is a lawyer, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and Chairman of the National Black Republican Association. She can be contacted at: www.NBRA.info/

The stimulus bill turned out to be a slush fund to award green energy grants to big campaign contributors and to buttress under-funded labor union pension and benefit plans in the states. And the green technology jobs went to China. Feeling stimulated yet?

It also marks the third anniversary of the death of the ‘media watchdog.’

Instead, this is what we get from The White House . . .

Iran’s latest warning “reflects the fact that Iran is in a position of weakness,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, adding that Tehran’s threats suggest “a measure of the impact that the sanctions have been having on Iran.”

It was the media, coupled with Obama’s own audacity, that made President Obama. Set him up to be the messiah. The One who would turn radical Islamists into friends and neighbors, change the climate and lower the sea level. So where are they now?

If there were a diagnostic list for the symptoms of a regime gone rogue, Iran would tick off every box. Taking hostages? Check. Sponsoring terrorism? Check. Covertly pursuing nuclear weapons? Check. Under international sanctions? Check. Repressing its own people? Check. Threatening to close the world’s oil highway, the Strait of Hormuz, in international waters? Check.

And where is our President on this? He is not found in the Oval Office, addressing the American people on Iran’s threats. He’s on the back nine. Obama’s absence on this topic shows Iran Obama’s weakness. It’s a real knee-slapper for Iran. And for Obama, it’s like ‘voting present.’

How’s that ‘improving our image” around the world and in Islamic countries working out?

And the good news is . . . ‘Hollywood’ reports that movie revenues hit a 16-year low.

The result: projected domestic revenues for the year of $10.15 billion, down 4 percent from 2010′s, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. Taking higher ticket prices into account, movie attendance is off even more, with an estimated 1.275 billion tickets sold, a 4.8 percent decline and the smallest movie audience since 1995, when admissions totaled 1.26 billion.

So why is that good news? It’s ‘Hollywood,’ that’s why.

Adam Carolla explains the OWS crowd’s self-entitlement mentality.

‘Too big to fail’ is one thing. Try this, ‘Too big to save.’

The teachable moment here is, unless we turn this ship around, you’re looking at our future by looking at the economic situation in Europe today. Good too for the Brits continued refusal to adopt the ‘solution’ the European Union has in mind. It’s best not to board a ship while it is sinking. Besides, they have their own problems.

House Republicans totally botched the issue by accepting Obama’s premise that extending the tax cut would create jobs by wanting to take it out to 12 months instead of just two. That Obama did not want a 12 month extension proves that point.

Speaker Boehner blew it by not framing the issue for what it really is. The gross amount of $160 is nothing more than street money given out by the community organizer and paid for by (that 99%) senior citizens and the disabled.

Under President Jimmy Carter, The ‘Department of Energy’ was instituted on August 4, 1977. Its purpose was to lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Imports: In 1977, 8,565,000 barrels of oil (net) per day, or 37.3%.  For 2009, 9,667,000 barrels per day, or 51%

Domestic production has declined. The U.S. produced 3 billion barrels of oil in 1977. By 2009, that was reduced to 1.95 billion, according to the EIA.

Oil consumption in the U.S. is up, not down. In 1977, the U.S.consumed 18.4 million barrels of oil per day. In 2009, we consumed 18.77 million barrels per day, making the U.S. the world’s largest petroleum consumer.

Gasoline usage has grown significantly. In 1977, the U.S. utilized 7.1 million barrels/day of gasoline. In 2009, Americans used 8,997,000 barrels/day, or 378 million gallons/day.

Gasoline prices have continued to rise. In 1979, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. was $0.58 per gallon, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Adjusted for inflation, that is the equivalent of $1.85 in 2010 dollars. In 2009, the average price of gasoline in the United States was $2.88 per gallon. During 2008, oil prices reached a record high of $145 a barrel, with gasoline prices of more than $4 per gallon throughout much of the nation.

A huge federal bureaucracy was created. The Department of Energy brought together under one Cabinet secretary more than 50 agencies that dealt with energy, including the Atomic Energy Commission. Upon its creation in 1977, according to official estimates, the new DOE employed a total of 20,000 people. Today, the Department of Energy has 16,000 permanent employees and 100,000 contract employees around the nation.

The agency’s budget, meanwhile, has ballooned from $8.4 billion in Fiscal Year 1980 to $26.5 billion in FY2010.

Good intentions do not necessarily translate to good results, especially where the federal government is concerned. Matter of fact, the Dept. of Energy and the Dept. of Education (both DOE’s) should be the first to go in cutting government waste.

H/T Political Vel Craft

All the studies of the pipeline are done. Our Canadian neighbors are not happy that Obama chose to delay his decision on the pipeline until after the 2012 election. Senate bill S.1932 is Republican’s attempt to force the president’s hand before the election, calling for a decision from the Sec. of State within 60 days.

The bill would:

1. Establish congressional affirmation that Keystone XL is good for job creation, economic growth, and national security;
2. Require the President, through the Secretary of State, to issue a permit within 60 days to allow the Keystone XL project to move ahead, unless he finds that it’s not in the national interest;
3. Require the permit for Keystone XL to contain strong and specific environmental protections and protect states’ rights;
4. Require the federal permit to recognize an alternative route approved by Nebraska, protecting their ability to shift the route of the pipeline to avoid the Sand Hills area, while not holding up construction elsewhere;
5. Concludes more than three years of federal review by deeming the Final Environmental Impact Statement to be adequate.

Where President Obama is concerned, his re-election takes precedent over the national interest. Because if he were to approve the pipeline, he would alienate his environmental base and risk losing their campaign contributions. If he rejects it before the election, he puts BIG LABOR (labor unions are in favor of the pipeline) on the ropes and risks losing their support.  To him, putting off the decision until after the election is his way of voting present and doesn’t risk a dime of campaign contributions or support from either the environmental or labor union special interests.

If he rejects it, how could he explain to the American people why the nation doesn’t need 700,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude and 140,000 high-paying jobs? After all the green-energy bankruptcy scandals (BrightSource, Solyndra, etc.), he can’t say with a straight face how green energy is the answer to today’s energy problems. His own Energy Information Administration . . .

projects that most petroleum-based and non-petroleum based liquid fuels — including those derived from fuels such as coal, biomass, and natural gas — will continue to be used for transportation over the next two decades.

At a time when our economy is struggling and real unemployment is north of 11 percent, a truly shovel ready project like this means over a hundred thousand jobs nationwide. 14,000 in Oklahoma alone according to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), ranking Republican on the Senate Environment Committee.

In my state of Oklahoma alone, we’d be creating 14,000 jobs with the Keystone pipeline. Existing pipeline infrastructure can’t accommodate the current volume of crude oil, which makes us more dependent on imports and vulnerable to increasing prices. The Keystone pipeline will improve both the inbound and outbound flow of crude oil at Cushing, OK.

Speaking to the President’s speeches of lessening U.S. dependence on Middle East oil and creating jobs, Inhofe continues . . .

There’s not one piece of legislation in the House or Senate right now that would do more to achieve both of these goals than this Keystone bill that we are introducing today.

If you think we don’t have an energy problem, consider this. Bill Clinton opposed ANWR exploration because, he said, it would take 10 years to get anything out of it. That was nearly 20 years ago and ANWR is still closed. As recent as five years ago, people in the Northeast United States were suffering from a lack of heating oil. (84 percent of heating in the NE comes from oil.) Back then, Joe Kennedy’s oil company accepted discounted heating oil from the hemisphere’s idiot, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, to ostensibly ‘help’ poor people in the United States. A political move to give then President Bush a slap in the face.

All the green energy talk and environmental lobbies have managed to do to solve the NE problem is . . . nothing. Five years later and we have headlines like this one, ‘Northeast states cut heating aid to poor.’

If there ever was a case to increase oil production, I think people going without heat or food would make a compelling case. Even though these are the people Obama champions on the campaign trail, he officially ignores them in The White House.

National security meets foreign policy

While we’re on the subject of oil independence, let’s take a look back to the Carter administration and the long lines at the pump, the gas rationing, and OPEC’s embargo that caused it all.

Jimmy Carter was forced into getting a spine and came up with the Carter Doctrine. It was supposed to ensure protection of Middle East oil. Carter declared that the United States would consider any attempt by an outside force to gain control of the gulf region an assault on U.S. vital interests, and would be considered an act of war that would be repelled by military force if necessary. Carter also invented the Cabinet position of the Department of Energy which, thanks to environmentalists and big government statists, was and is a dismal failure.

Today, the Iranian situation is still volatile. They are making threats via military exercises to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil traffic. With the Keystone Pipeline project on the table, and people in the Northeast  being left in the cold, and Iran threatening to cut off oil to most of the world, how does him voting present on the Keystone Pipeline work for you?

So far, except for ‘social justice,’ there is no Obama Doctrine.