TSA, DREAMing, Wikileaks, Oil, And The Economy

There's a LOT going on in the political playing field this week. Here's a brief overview to catch you up.

TSA
Just to follow-up on the TSA madness, it's interesting to note the backlash from the traveling public during the heavy travel weekend a few days ago. Or, rather, the almost complete lack of backlash. Hm. What gives? Was all the furor for nothing? Was it just a small fraction of people who were making all the noise? Was the Opt-out Day a complete bust for opponents of the strip search scanners and sexual assaults? Um, well, not really. Most likely it was simply the fact that the TSA itself opted out of Opt-out Day, simply turning off many of the scanners that were operating the previous week. Of course, doing this on the busiest few travel days of the year begs the rather obvious question of whether or not these invasive and unconstitutional policies are necessary at all. So does the fact that particularly shaped bombs aren't picked up by the scanners. Informed and serious questions about the radiation danger inherent in these scanners continue to come out, as well. Some alternative ideas are shirts and undies that have metallically printed messages -- like the 4th Amendment -- that show up vividly on the scanners, more background checks before people even reach the airport, and, of course, my personal favorite: profiling.

Despite all of this, the de-pantsing, the boob-gawking, the sexual assaults, the strip search scans, and...um...other things continue. I don't think we've heard the last of this issue.


DREAMing of amnesty
One of the measures this lame duck Congress is (wrongly) contemplating is that of passing the latest DREAM Act. Basically, the Dems know they don't have enough voters to survive normal election cycles, let alone the next one or two after their hideous government overreach of Obama's first two years, so they're desperate to get votes any way they can. Thus, amnesty for illegal aliens, all consequences be damned. What consequences, you may ask? How about rampant crime supported by federal judges who release illegal alien criminals? The list of consequences is very long, but this is a brain-dead obvious place to start.

This latest effort is the fourth separate amnesty bill in the past few days. No one really knows what's going on, or what they're voting for, but the Democrat leadership is going to push for this vote, anyway, and fill in the details of the policy later.

One thing that would actually help reduce illegal immigration a tremendous amount would be to simply require ID in order to vote. We have to show ID when we write checks, when we go to a hotel, when we buy beer...why not when we exercise a precious Constitutional right? Another thing that would help is a strict enforcement policy. Oddly enough, despite all the controversy and antagonism from the federal government, Arizona is seeing some incredible results from their recent new immigration enforcement law. Similarly, so-called 'sanctuary cities' are being overrun with illegal immigrants and experiencing huge problems because of them. Another favorite of American citizens is to build a fence; that would help, too.

It sounds like a vote may be happening on the DREAM Act today, so a few phone calls to your Senators and Rep would be instrumental in helping stop this thing.


Wikileaks
Wikileaks is a website that has recently come up with some huge caches of classified documents and released them onto the Internet. This latest batch contained thousands of State Department documents that revealed a whole lot of incompetence, petty insults, and derogatory statements of foreign leaders, prompting cyber attacks and international arrest warrants for Julian Assange, the operator of Wikileaks. Interesting how the White House has finally figured out the illegality of these actions now that it's making Obama look bad. Since the leaked documents came from the State Department, there are calls for Hillary Clinton's resignation. It won't happen, of course, but it doesn't look good on her, either. The entire Obama administration has handled this situation badly, and if they don't shape it up fast, some think it could turn into Obama's Katrina...or at least the reincarnation of Jimmy Impotence Carter.


Oil
During this time of economic difficulty, one of the things that literally everyone has to pay for is energy, whether gasoline, electricity, or something else. If the Obama administration was really concerned with helping Americans on this front, would they really be renewing their ban on oil drilling? Or setting aside 187,000 square miles of oil-producing land for a declining increasing population of polar bears? Well, why not? I mean, they lied about the seriousness of the BP oil spill (which, just a few months later, doesn't appear to have made a single permanent change in the local Gulf ecology) for purely political reasons, so it just stands to reason that they'll do anything to achieve their agenda. Be warned, be vigilant, and be skeptical of anything they do on energy - the EPA still has the authority to dictate policy without Congress' input. For now. Ironically, they're fast-tracking permits for useless, expensive, and ineffective wind farms. Depressingly typical.


Economy
I'll have a bigger economic update in the coming days, but here are a few things worth noting right now. Remember the bank bailouts that American citizens didn't want but that Congress did anyway? Turns out we were right - a review of that whole mess shows that much of that money went to international financial institutions and didn't make a damn bit of difference here at home. Of course, getting it wrong then isn't stopping our vaunted smart leaders from continuing to prop up the international community with our tax dollars while we struggle here at home. Stupid things like this only contribute to a potential double-dip recession.

Possibly the biggest economic issue on Congress' plate for the remainder of the lame duck session is that of the tax cuts that Bush put in place in 2001/2003. Obama and the Democrats initially pledged to let them expire -- which would have amounted to the single biggest tax hike in American history -- but with the economy not recovering like they promised over the past year, the political reality was that to allow such a tax hike would have been politically suicidal, especially for a party that just lost an election in historic fashion. So, now they're talking about just hiking taxes on 'the rich' but not everyone else. Of course, that's such a relatively small amount of money that it really wouldn't do any good. It's the middle class where the big money is, so that's where they have to focus. The latest development is that the Dems are trying to bargain with national security to get the GOP to play ball on tax cuts. You and I both know that's an exceedingly bad idea for many reasons, but these are Washington politicians, so common sense doesn't mean much to them.

Fortunately, it appears that the GOP is drawing a line in the sand, pledging to prevent anything else from happening in the lame duck session until the Dems have a vote on extending the tax cuts and generating a budget. Yes, creating a budget is the most basic requirement for Congress to perform, and it is required in the Constitution, but they somehow managed to fail, anyway. If the GOP holds firm on this, that should be a great sign for them making some serious changes when January rolls around and they're actually in charge.

I'm skeptical they'll hold firm - after all, they roll over more than a poodle at a dog show, but hey, here's hoping for the best.