TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

Find Out The Definition Of “Change” First . . .

Remember the election in 2006 a little over a year ago?
1) Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high.
2) Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon.
3) The unemployment rate was 4.5%.

Since voting in a Democratically controlled Congress in 2006 we have seen:
1) Consumer confidence plummeted.
2) The cost of regular gasoline soar to over $3.50 a gallon.
3) Unemployment is up to 5% (a 10% increase).
4) American households have seen $2.3 trillion in equity value evaporate (stock and mutual fund losses).
5) Americans have seen their home equity drop by $1.2 trillion dollars.
6) 1% of American homes are in foreclosure.

America voted for “change” in 2006, and we got it! Change to a Democrat majority Congress … remember it is Congress that makes the law, not the President.

Quote of the Day: “My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.” – Barack Obama.

CHANGE IT TO WHAT? … more of the same from Democrats? … Enough of this type of change.

Income Tax Statistics . . .

Both democratic candidates for president will return to the higher tax rates.www.taxfoundation.org/publ ications/show/151.html

It is amazing how many people who fall into the categories above think Bush is messing with them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If Obama or Hillary are elected, they both say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people who fall into the categories above can’t wait for it to happen. This is like the movie The Sting with Paul Newman; you scam somebody out of some money and they don’t even know what happened.

See The Real Cost Of Illegal Immigration . . .

We have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. Included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77

2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec..html

3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec..html

4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for welfare and social services by the American taxpayers.
Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.
Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html

11. During the year of 2005 alone there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our southern border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the US from the southern border.
Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, “estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.”
Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf

13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin.
Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm

14. “The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.”
Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.

Are we THAT stupid? We need to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement.

This should surprise no one!

An internal Federal Bureau of Investigation presentation states that counterfeit Cisco routers imported from China may cause unexpected failures in American networks. The equipment could also leave secure systems open to attack through hidden backdoors. The scope of the problem is broad and results from a complicated supply chain originating in Shen Zhen.

From a narrow project failures perspective, network problems caused by this equipment should be treated as any other hardware malfunction. Of course, the entire concept of third parties using compromised hardware to infiltrate public and private systems in the United States is another matter entirely.

Faulty networking hardware can be a nightmare to troubleshoot and fix. For example, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) location at Los Angeles Airport (LAX) suffered a failed router last year; the problem delayed 20,000 passengers before technicians successfully isolated and repaired the issue.

The following slides, pulled from the larger presentation, indicate how seriously the FBI is taking this threat to national security.

Check it out.

As costly as the breakdown of the family is to children, divorce and unwed parenting cost U.S. taxpayers at least $112 billion annually according to a study released April 15th. When calculated, the national, state and local costs add up to more than $1 trillion over the last decade. This is caused, in part, by high poverty rates of single, female-headed households, which lead to higher spending on welfare, criminal justice and education programs.

Unfortunately, as the report documents, there are fewer healthy marriages in America now than there were 25 years ago. Between 1970 and 2005, the percentage of children being raised in two-parent families dropped from 85 to 68 percent.

“This study documents for the first time that divorce and unwed childbearing – besides being bad for children – are also costing taxpayers a ton of money,” said David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, which is associated with the study.

The principal causes of this drop were the high divorce rate and the increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births. While the number of divorces has declined slightly in recent years, the percentage of children born to unmarried mothers has continued to grow. The costs of this family fragmentation are not limited to the children. As one expert wrote, “Divorce and unwed childbearing create substantial public costs, paid by taxpayers.”

As this information emerges, it is not new news to the church – and really to society, if they would stop and take a serious look at the condition of the family in America today. If both society and the church, seeing the necessity of the family unit, would join forces and work together a huge difference could be made, that not only would be good for the family, but for all America as well.

We certainly can be doing more to help marriages and families succeed. We could invest money for marriage education and other programs to increase marriage stability as Texas recently did. They have just invested $15 million over two years and their calculations were that if they only had a 1% success rate it would save $30 million per year.

Even if you set aside the social, cultural, and moral dimensions of marriage, it is clear that government should have a vital interest in promoting healthy marriages. Healthy marriages produce people who are better able to take care of themselves and their families. Even modest increases in the number of “stable marriages” could save taxpayers a lot of money. While we will never eliminate divorce and unwed childbearing entirely, we can certainly be doing more to help marriages and families succeed.

The most important thing government can do to fight family fragmentation is to stop promoting marriage substitutes. A decline in marriage and an increase in family fragmentation coincides with the introduction of legally sanctioned substitutes for traditional marriage (like civil unions and, now, same-sex marriages). These substitutes are dangerous and counterproductive as they inevitably weaken and destabilize the legitimate family that is based on matrimony. Even the best “marriage-strengthening” program can not compete with the message “marriage doesn’t matter.”

The bottom line … if we want to make a dent in the social and economic costs of family fragmentation, the first order of business is to promote and strengthen traditional marriage and accept no substitutes.

Together our community and our churches need to invest in things that would strengthen marriage!