From the Center for Immigration Studies:

The Treasury Department reports that illegal immigrants filing tax returns using the Individual Tax Identification Number are receiving more than $1.5 billion each year from the federal government through the Child Tax Credit and the Additional Child Tax Credit…

Thus the insanity of our government. We’re bankrupt, but we’re still sending out checks to illegal immigrants – and we’re sending out these checks to people in conformity with our tax law, which ignores the fact that the people in question wouldn’t be here but for law-breaking. Meanwhile, if you or I, dear legal citizen, mess up on our taxes the heavy hand of government will drop on us like a ton of bricks.

Ultimately, we need a full review of all our laws – a re-codification, as it were. Its not as odd as it sounds – nations which exist for a period of time tend to need such a re-working of laws to ensure consistency, fairness and relation to current reality. One new committee in Congress I’d like to see is a body to look over our laws and regulations and figure out what needs to be changed and what needs to be eliminated…though they can start with eliminating the requirement to send money to people who, legally, aren’t even here.

From NRO’s Battle 10:

Allen West is under no illusion as to the fragile nature of the GOP’s coming House majority.

“The thing that you don’t want to see happen is that the Republican Party gets thrown on the ash heap as well, in 2012. Not a lot of patience out there right now,” West told Battle ‘10. “As I tell people, if the pendulum swings back to the other side — same old players, same old actors — that’s going to cause people to say, ‘here we go again.’”…

West goes on to note that the vote on November 2nd provides a chance for the GOP – a chance, that is, for us to really show we’re on the side of the people. If we blow it, then we might be done for as a party – and that is for good (Democrats will cling to their party for a while out of their slavish devotion to their leaders, of course).

While the Democrats seem set to re-install the exact, same leadership which lead them off a cliff, the new GOP must put some new faces up there. Allen West is the logical choice to be one of the new spokesmen of the GOP – not just because he’s telegenic and a phenomenal speaker, but because he understands just what has happened…understands, fundamentally, the dynamic which elevated him to office.

If we do the right thing, we’ll obtain a generation of power and be able to reform our nation – to rescue our nation from liberalism. I hope to goodness they are listening in DC – West clearly is; we’ll see how the rest do.

Here is the actual report (PDF). I have to say, its not as horrible as I thought it would be; I was figuring it would be nothing more than a plea for higher taxes and only modest cuts. As it turns out, its a plea for some higher taxes and semi-big cuts in spending – and it has its share of completely impossible things, such as an end to mortgage interest deduction. You’ll never get that past the American taxpayer.

The proposals don’t put in place a balanced budget until 2037 – 27 years from now. I don’t think we’ll be able to get away with that. Long before then, I think the world will demand much more fiscal sanity from us…plus, when you put things that far out, its easy for Congresscritters to cease being mindful of the problem and start putting more spending back in. Just a little here and a little there, to begin with. Balancing the budget can’t be something to happen when my grand-daughter is 32…it must be an axe to fall on the head of Big Government before she gets to middle school. The budget should be balanced by 2015.

Our budget crisis is acute (the report does clearly state that, and that is a good service, in and of itself), but the report still tries to soften the blow. By so doing, however, they’ve set their own plan up for failure. A century of fiscal idiocy has now to be paid for – there is, as the report notes, no painless way out of it. More to the point, there is no way out of it which won’t be very, very painful. The authors of the report, however, still live in enough of the Big Government dream world that they imagine we can get out of this without agony. Might as well bite the bullet and have done – if we balance the budget by 2015, we’ll have one or two really bad years, but then ever better years thereafter. The proposals here are basically a means of spreading out the pain so that things never get horribly bad, but also never get terribly good.

All in all, it is the plan of the Ruling Class to save itself from its fiscal irresponsibility. We should use it as a basis for discussion rather than a blue print for action. As this was set up by Obama and the Democrats, we can hang on to the good bits and dare them to defy their own creation – meanwhile and all the while trying to inject even stronger and deeper reforms to fundamentally end the era of Big Government.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston over at Pajamas Media dissects the plan.

From Hot Air:

Don’t blame them. It was your elected representatives, in bipartisan fashion, who passed an anti-smoking statute last year requiring the FDA to impose more “graphic” health warnings on cigarette packaging. Evidently putting “you’ll get cancer” on the side of the carton is no longer deemed a sufficient deterrent to lighting one up, so now we’re actually going to thrust photos of putrefying flesh into smokers’ faces in hopes of steering them away. Coming soon, presumably: Mandating special flavor additives to ciggies so that you actually throw up while smoking…

Allahpundit’s exit question is exquisite:

Does this mean we’re ready for a law requiring pictures of dismembered fetuses on the walls of Planned Parenthood? It’s all about informed choices, after all.

But, of course, it isn’t about that, at all – its about providing funding for liberal advocacy groups who hate Big Tobacco. If they didn’t have this outlet, they’d have to get a real job. Naturally, this won’t stop government from raking it in off of tobacco taxes.

I’m a smoker. I like smoking. I know, all of us smokers are supposed to be wracked by guilt and we’re all supposed to say we hate it and wish we could quit. I don’t hate it and don’t wish that, at all. I still might quit, though things like this make me disinclined to do so.

Just to clear some things up – I agree with smoking bans in most places. Not in bars, because that is stupid – and if someone really wants a smoke-free bar, then let them open one up. But to mandate that every bar, everywhere, ban smoking when smokers really, really like to have a cigarette with their beer is asinine – un-American, too. Living in Vegas, I have the privilege of living in one of the last bastions of American smoking – but even here, it is coming to an end. More and more smoke-free areas of the casino…and I wouldn’t dream of lighting up without being sure that those around me also smoke (fortunately, its even money in Vegas that anyone you meet is a smoker). Smoking is a thing that some people really dislike – don’t like the smell, don’t like the concept. I’m entirely cool with keeping it as a private eccentricity. But I also just can’t stand fascism – and trying to scare me off of smoking by putting a corpse on my pack is fascist.

I’m fully aware of the health risks involved – but unlike wimpy liberals, I also know that I gotta die of something, some time. Its that old Redd Foxx joke…imagine all those people who never smoked and never drank, pissed off as they lie in bed, dying of nothing. Smoking might advance my date of death…on the other hand, it might not. Dad lived until 82 and almost the last thing he did on this earth was have a cigarette. Camel – unfiltered.

I’m just sick to death of these people – they’ve wrecked our whole world, but they want us to quit smoking. You’d figure that people who destroyed sexual morality and bankrupted a nation would be shy about pestering people on their smoking. But, nothing doing – they won’t stop until all fun, everywhere, is banned as everyone lives in a hovel on organic food rations while Al Gore flies around to lecture us.

No, thanks. I see lighting up these days as a means of striking a blow for liberty, and I’ll keep doing it just as long as I want to.

A Day to remember our un-payable debt:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields. – Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

We voted last week and we owe that to the veterans – take time, today, to remember all of them. Pray for those are, right now, in harm’s way. Never forget that your duty to them is to make a nation worthy of their sacrifices.

From Politico:

…At least 15 Democrats have said publicly that they have lost faith in her ability to lead — a number backed up by as many as two dozen more who are indicating the same thing privately, while others haven’t yet taken sides.

Liberal Reps. Peter DeFazio (Ore.) and Marcy Kaptur (Ohio) sent a letter to colleagues asking them to support a plan to forestall leadership elections until December — a clear effort to give the anti-Pelosi forces time to coalesce. Democratic leaders plan to go forward with the leadership contests Nov. 17, according to sources familiar with a Wednesday afternoon conference call…

Given that slavish devotion to the leadership is the modern hallmark of the Democrat party, I doubt these few rebels will get their way. Fear of offending the Powerful will, I think, get most Democrats to fall in line.

Still, there are clearly fissures in the Democrat party. We should do what we can to encourage them – nothing like a split Democrat party to stand against in 2012. Though, of course, having one united behind Obama, Reid and Pelosi won’t be bad, either.

Verum Serum takes a quote out of the odious Ted Rall’s new book, The Anti-American Manifesto:

…Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force—the sole force—poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood’s prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale—rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we’re suffering under today—is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction…

I’m worried about the guy; the bile is obviously just spilling over in his heart. He won’t have to worry about the teabagger fascists taking over as he’ll have a heart attack long before we get ’round to that.

While Rall has always been extreme (stupid, too), he does speak the mind of the left – just more clearly and forthrightly than most of them are willing to go. They do think we’re a bunch of racist, redneck, fascist, hate-filled, bigoted creeps bent on destroying everything not like us. Which is just a bizarre view to hold – if I were like that, my primary enemy, as there are so many more of them than there are liberals, would be Protestants. What do I care about some freaky liberals in San Francisco when right down the street I might have people who deny the Real Presence?

But, I get along with my Protestant brothers and sisters. I even go as far as being enthusiastic for black candidates for office, and have a very high regard for some gay people. Our liberal friends refuse to understand this, because if they ever did, they’d no longer be able to hate us. And if they stopped hating us, they’d have to listen to our ideas, and then either agree with them or come up with rational opposition.

But, as we can see from Rall, “rational” doesn’t fit well with liberalism. Its an entirely attitudinal thing. Its about how you view yourself – and, more importantly, how you view yourself as a wonderful person, no matter if you’ve never done a decent act in your life. Some liberals have, to be sure, but to be a liberal means to feel morally superior even when you’re a complete creep. Rely on it, Al Gore is proud of himself – never loses a wink of sleep over the fact that he has a carbon footprint as large as a coal-fired power plant…he’s a liberal, and therefore wonderful, and there’s an end on it.

There’s not much we can do for the Ralls of this world, other than pray for them. But we must keep in mind this blinding, irrational hatred they feel. It may come out in violence, but it is more likely to just come out in a truculent effort to block us, no matter how clear and necessary are the policies we advocate. It will be unthinking opposition, and thus at times harder to fight (battling crazy people is always hard). But reason will always win over irrationality.

From the Telegraph:

A Christian woman has been sentenced to hang in Pakistan after being convicted of defaming the Prophet Mohammed.

Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old mother-of-five, denies blasphemy and told investigators that she was being persecuted for her faith in a country where Christians face routine harassment and discrimination…

Just a terrible crime – and yet another reason, if it is necessary, why Sharia law has no place in the United States.

Pray for this poor woman and her family – and for the barbarians who have sentenced her to death for nothing.

From Your Tango:

The number of American women without children has risen to an all-time high of 1 in 5, a jump since the 1970s when 1 in 10 women ended their childbearing years without having a baby, according to the Pew Research Center.

About 1.9 million women aged 40-44—or 18 percent—were childless in 2008, an 80 percent increase since 1976, when just 580,000—10 percent of those in that age bracket—had never given birth, the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey shows.

Childlessness has increased across racial and ethnic groups and most education levels…

Taxes, education, health care, war, gay marriage, global warming…all completely trivial and pointless debates next to the concept of not having children. Quite simply, if we don’t have children, we don’t have a civilization – don’t have anything, at all.

I realize that in this matter I’m a bit of Mr. Hypocrite – married late, have no children of my own. But given a choice between staying silent and watching my civilization die and the risk of being charged with hypocrisy, I’ll take the risk. We really need to get a handle on this issue, or there won’t be any issues to get a handle on.

We have diligently enacted polices and pursued social ideas which have been directly inimical to family formation and child-rearing. We’ve crushed the farming, manufacturing and mining jobs which form the basis of stable, long-term employment; we’ve turned people’s heads with propaganda for a life of luxury; we’ve allowed pornography and varied smut to pervade our society; we’ve degraded any sense of sexual honor among the young; we’ve provided welfare which cuts out the need for fathers; we’ve ceased to ostracize men who don’t live up to their responsibilities and women who will have children by a series of men they never marry…its like we’ve been on a mission to commit slow, national suicide.

And, in a sense, that is what we have been doing. Work of the Enemy, this is. It is the old, anti-Christian heresies of the past, rising again in the modern age and telling us that the material is evil, life is worthless, responsibility a mindless drudgery. In ages past, we fought these ideas off – in modern times, we’ve lowered all defenses, and all the destruction has flooded in to the world.

We’re dying off. Make no mistake about it – if we don’t start having children, again, then the story of our nation is told. A new Christian civilization will eventually arise over the ruins of the first, but there is no requirement that the United States and our unique way of life endure. If we want it, then we’d better change – better change back to a society of honor, decency and strict morality.

21 years ago, today, that wall came down: