YOU WANTED BIG GOVERNMENT – YOU GOT IT

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Posted on 19th May 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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The liberal MSM isn’t even scratching the surface regarding this IRS abuse of power. Chris Matthews has a tingle in his balls now. MSNBC will be declaring it is time to move on to more important issues like the fake sequester crisis and the fake gun crisis.

This Is Your Brain on Big Government

The dangers of America’s bloated, bullying state are inescapable.

 By   Deroy Murdock
If Obama’s Rose Parade of scandals gives you a headache, here’s why: This is your brain on Big Government.The deteriorating developments on Benghazi, the IRS, the Justice Department’s Associated Press probe, health secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s Obamacare shakedown, and the “Affordable” Care Act’s unaffordability all offer a vivid, daily tutorial on the costs and pitfalls of unlimited government. The dangers of America’s bloated, bullying state are inescapable.

Big Government often hammers its foes.

As horrified Americans have learned, the IRS targeted at least 471 conservative organizations for tough treatment. As the IRS’s inspector general explained, these included self-identified “Tea Party” and “patriot” groups and those “focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to ‘make America a better place to live.’” The IRS reportedly approved zero tea-party tax-exemption applications between February 2010 and May 2012. Across 27 months of malign neglect, some applicants abandoned their ambitions.

Meanwhile, the IRS inappropriately asked these groups for donors’ lists, their public-policy opinions, and the names of board members’ relatives who might seek public office.

A chilling Politico story explains that a “special unit” at the IRS has scrutinized Jewish institutions. It asked one: “Describe your organization’s religious belief system towards the land of Israel.” A pro-Israel group called Z Street complains that the IRS inquired whether its activities “contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

Big Government usually helps its friends.

“As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with obviously liberal names were approved in as little as nine months,” USA Today reported Tuesday. These included Bus for Progress and Progress Florida.

According to the Daily Caller’s Charles C. Johnson, the Barack H. Obama Foundation — directed by Abongo Malik Obama, the president’s half-brother and best man at his wedding — filed IRS Form 990s for 2008 through 2010 in May 2011. It then scored 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status on June 26, 2011, retroactive to April 30, 2008. The reputedly Virginia-based foundation won this valuable designation without registering with state authorities. Evidently, IRS officials did not care that, as the Daily Caller stated, Abongo Obama “was accused of being a wife beater and seducing the newest of his twelve wives while she was a 17-year-old school girl.”

IRS also sent ProPublica, a liberal news organization, the confidential, unapproved nonprofit applications of nine conservative groups. ProPublica redacted financial information and then published six of these forms.

A pro-traditional-matrimony group called the National Organization for Marriage claims that the IRS gave copies of its tax documents to the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. NOM says that HRC used those leaked documents to slam NOM and a donor identified therein: Mitt Romney.

IRS wants to hire 1,954 new agents to enforce 47 different provisions of Obamacare. Combine these political leaks with the electronic medical records that doctors and insurers soon must render unto Obama’s bureaucrats. Imagine an exposé on conservative activists who use Viagra. Why not out a rising GOP star whose psychotherapist treats her exotic sex fantasies? Far-fetched? Not after this week. Indeed, 15 IRS agents are being sued in California court for allegedly swiping without a search warrant the medical records of some 10 million Americans in March 2011.

“It is unprecedented in recent history, the amount of responsibility the IRS is being given in an area that most people don’t think of as an IRS function,” Treasury inspector general J. Russell George told the House Appropriations Committee last March 5. “This is going to lead to problems, sir.”

[UPDATE: In a story that morphs more quickly than one can keep up with it, this morning brings the staggering news that Sarah Hall Ingram, the manager of the IRS office that targeted these center-right organizations, was promoted to run the IRS division that is implementing Obamacare. It is beyond outrageous that this secret policewoman — whose actions were at least execrable, if not illegal — would get within three time zones of any American's health-care data. She should be sacked before lunch and seriously considered for prosecution.]

Big Government overreaches.

On national-security grounds, the Justice Department justifies snatching two months of phone records associated with the Associated Press. This includes 20 office, home, and cell numbers. Justice appears to be investigating a leak related to al-Qaeda’s attempt to bomb a U.S.-bound airplane in 2012. However, Justice is using a paint roller where a fine brush might do. It evidently ran roughshod over its own guidelines, which require a more limited search, and only after requesting such records.

“The normal course of business is very narrow and very tailored to a particular individual’s phone records,” former attorney general John Ashcroft’s then-spokesman Mark Corallo told Fox News. “The idea that they would do two months — grab everything — in several bureaus is truly stunning and disgraceful.” Former attorney general Michael Mukasey worries that Justice might have been “looking more broadly to discourage people to talk to reporters.”

Justice’s extraordinary steps to plug national-security leaks would be more credible had the Obama administration not gushed like a fire hydrant after Seal Team Six killed Osama bin Laden. The CIA and Pentagon gave Academy Award–winning director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal access to classified materials and facilities as they prepared to shoot Zero Dark Thirty, the Oscar-nominated film about the bin Laden raid.

Administration blabbing exposed the name of a Pakistani doctor who helped U.S. intelligence gather DNA evidence that verified bin Laden’s presence in the compound where he was shot. Having been unveiled by Washington, that physician now is spending 30 years in a Pakistani prison. While addressing the March 22, 2009, Gridiron Dinner, joking Joe Biden let slip the classified location of the vice-presidential “undisclosed location.” Instead of gathering phone records, perhaps Justice officials should deploy duct tape across the mouths of indiscreet Obama staffers.

Big Government drives costs skyward.

Obama’s laughably titled Affordable Care Act will trigger individual health-insurance “premium increases of nearly 100 percent on average, with potential highs eclipsing 400 percent,” the House Energy and Commerce Committee reports. “Meanwhile, small businesses can expect average premium increases in the small group market of up to 50 percent, with potential highs over 100 percent.”

To make matters worse, HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius improperly and perhaps illegally is asking health insurers and other companies she regulates to contribute money to private nonprofits that will enroll uninsured Americans in Obamacare.

It would be mighty sad if something happened to that pretty, little HMO of yours. So, how much are ya gonna donate?

Big Government lies through its teeth.

Once public servants conclude that the public serves them, they soon hold the people in contempt. At that point, why bother to tell the people the truth?

Thus, Obama stood before the White House press corps on May 13 and declared about Benghazi: “The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” However, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted that Obama broadly denounced “terror” just after Benghazi, but refused to call that attack an act of terrorism. Then, over the next two weeks — on 60 Minutes, Univision, The View, Late Show with David Letterman, and before the United Nations — Obama cited that now clearly irrelevant anti-Muslim video as well as his uncertainty in light of ongoing investigations. But he did not pin Benghazi on an act of terrorism.

This earned Obama four out of four Pinocchios, the Washington Post’s distinction for big-time lies.

“What we see emerging here is a pattern, a culture, a culture of intimidation, of hardball politics that we saw both on the campaign trail and now through the apparatus of government,” Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) told the Senate Wednesday. “These are the tactics of the Third World.”

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

 

VERSAILLES ON THE POTOMAC

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Posted on 6th April 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Don’t you love when leaders walk the talk? With 20% of American households on food stamps Obama, Biden and the rest of the Washington aristocracy live their lives in a “let them eat cake” manner. They don’t give a crap about the peasants. They are better than you and deserve to be treated as such.  

Obama should share in Americans’ sacrifices

Friday, April 5,2013

“Shared sacrifice” is one of Obama’s favorite mantras. Translation: The White House shares your money while you sacrifice.

Amid the alleged horrors of the sequester, truly shared sacrifice is the last thing on Obama’s mind. The American people are enduring 0.4 percent growth in gross domestic product and 7.7 percent unemployment. A record 48 million of them are on food stamps. Meanwhile, those in America’s royal palace are enduring tropical beaches, country clubs and ski resorts.

As Joseph Curl recalled in Sunday’s Washington Times, the Obamas rang in 2013 in a 6,000-square-foot, $8 million estate in Oahu’s Paradise Point. That’s when Obama played his 100th presidential golf round, one of five during the first family’s 17-day Hawaiian getaway.

The first lady and her daughters skied Aspen, Colo., in February. Some like it hot. So, Obama rode Air Force One to Palm City, Fla., where he swung his clubs with Earth’s now-No. 1 golfer, Tiger Woods.

Not to be outdone, Clown Prince Biden greeted 2013 in the Virgin Islands. He slid down the slopes of Snowmass, Colo., in February. That month, Biden visited Europe. He and his entourage invested $459,338 in tax money for 136 rooms tied to Biden’s one-evening sleepover in London. Biden stopped overnight in Paris. Rather than rely on, say, the U.S. Embassy’s car fleet, Team Biden spent $321,665 for limousine rentals. This reportedly was just for Biden’s party; Biden himself appropriately used his secure official vehicle, which was flown with him.

Meanwhile, Uncle Joe could have stayed, essentially for free, at the magnificent, 60,000-square-foot American ambassador’s residence. Instead, Team Biden bunked at the Hotel Intercontinental. That one night cost U.S. taxpayers $585,000.

Late March found the Obama daughters on spring break in the Bahamas. They enjoyed the Atlantis Paradise Island resort, which boasts three breeze-caressed beaches, 11 swimming pools, and a 141-acre water park.

After their fun in the sun, Malia and Sasha frolicked in the snow. “The Sun Valley Ski Patrol confirms the girls were enjoying the wonders of the mountain,” Idaho’s KMVT-TV revealed.

Easter found Biden on South Carolina’s posh Kiawah Island for five days. Located 15 miles from Charleston, Kiawah’s lush golf facilities are world famous. These include the Ocean Course. Greens fees: $353.

Obama whipped out his putter on Easter eve. He and some pals played Andrews Air Force Base’s course. This was Obama’s first golf round since the sequester, his sixth in 2013’s first quarter and his 115th as president.

No one begrudges Obama, Biden and their families some relaxation from the pressures of their duties. And who can blame the Obama daughters for wanting to cavort with their schoolmates?

However, as Americans struggle by the millions, such self-indulgence is like devouring a double cheeseburger, fries and a milkshake right in front of someone who is fasting on Yom Kippur. This soon grows unnecessary, unseemly and uncaring. And expensive, as Secret Service agents, advance personnel, motorcades, helicopters and jumbo jets facilitate such extravagance.

Obama literally endangers the American public by padlocking airport control towers and releasing criminal illegal aliens from federal custody, so that this country’s citizens squeal beneath the sequester. Instead, Obama should set an example and save taxpayers millions by tempering his and Biden’s monarchic lifestyles.

This gluttony would be easier to tolerate if Obama did his job. Instead, in violation of federal law, Obama’s budget is now two months overdue. The Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 requires that the president’s spending plan reach Congress by the first Monday in February. What on earth have some 500 Office of Management and Budget employees done since Feb. 4? If Obama won’t busy his OMB staffers with budgeting, they should conduct White House tours. Instead, Girls Scouts visiting Washington are barred from the Executive Mansion. Message: Let them eat cookies.

Obama now reigns over Versailles on the Potomac. And America’s taxpayers are the vassals who bankroll the opulence of King Louis Barack and Michelle Antoinette.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service, a Fox News contributor and a media fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Email Deroy.Murdock@gmail.com.

OBAMA & LIBERAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA REVEALED AS FEAR MONGERING LIARS

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Posted on 4th March 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Where are Obama, Reid and Pelosi with their shreiking about the hellfire and devastation that have been unleashed on the country by the massive 1.5% spending slowdowns from the evil sequestration budget nicks (not cuts)? Are old people dying in the streets? Have airlines had to shut down? Is Iran and North Korea ready to invade our homeland? Have we had to curtail our War on Terror to such an extent that we’ve only murdered 10 Afghan children today? Will we lose the War on Drugs now that a couple paper pushers in DC have to take 7 days off this year?

The liberals and neo-cons have had their bluff called and they look like the lying assholes we all know they are. Sequestration is a fart in a gale force wind of spending. The only thing that stinks is the shit that has been flung by the MSNBC Obama loving douchebags. Chris Matthews and his band of fear mongering libs are nothing but blowhards with an agenda of controlling you and spending your money on shit they like. The Feds were spending $2 trillion of YOUR money in 2000. The Feds were spending $2.7 trillion of your money in 2007. The Feds are spending $3.8 trillion of your money today. Are you getting 90% better service from your government than you did in 2000? Is your life better or worse than it was in 2000? What did we get for an extra $1.8 trillion of government expenditures?

Grownups like Rand Paul could cut $500 billion from the federal budget without hurting your life in any way. Once this Obama clusterfuck implodes, maybe the country will turn to rational, truth telling people like Rand Paul, but I doubt it.

I sure hope I can make it through the day without the sequester nicks resulting in my demise. The horror!!!! 

Sequester should chop federal fat, not bone

Sunday, March 3,2013

 

Imagine that your boss nicked your pay by 2.4 percent. Would you dodge next month’s rent, skip your insulin purchases and unplug your refrigerator to lower your power bill? Most likely, you would cancel your Showtime subscription, repair — not replace — your old shoes and ski Utah in 2014 (maybe).

In his immeasurable brilliance, President Barack Obama would pick premium cable instead of insulin and Park City over paying the landlord.

Similarly, as March 1 triggers the sequester — an automatic spending-cut mechanism that Obama himself initiated in July 2011 — Obama won’t curb Washington’s extravagance to finance this year’s $85 billion sequester. Instead, like a fiscal Stephen King, Obama frightens Americans into embracing Big Government by siphoning Uncle Sam’s bone marrow rather than giving him liposuction.

Fiscal Year 2013’s $3.553 trillion budget will be $15 billon larger than FY 2012’s. Nonetheless, Obama hysterically claims that the sequester’s “cuts” mean:

• Fewer childhood vaccines. Next stop, a measles renaissance?

• Furloughed federal meat inspectors. This would present Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” in IMAX 3-D at your local supermarket.

• “Airport security will see cutbacks,” Obama prophesied. Lines will grow so long that a Transportation Security Administration frisking will come as a relief.

• “Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go,” Obama warned. After all, government’s last priority should be to protect property and prevent homicide.

• “The sequester makes it awfully, awfully tough” to shield America from terrorist attacks, declared Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Why should phantom budget restraint frustrate al-Qaida’s pitch-black ambitions?

It would be bad enough if these really were Washington’s only options. Obviously, they’re not. Washington can and should whack spending without making life easier for rubella, E. coli, militant Islam and other lethal, low-level life forms.

Among many others, these plans could help:

• Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., who co-authored the Decrease Spending Now Act. It would shift to debt relief a whopping $45 billion in tax dollars now stalled in dormant federal accounts.

“Hundreds of billions of dollars are borrowed and then left unspent because Congress routinely bites off more than it can chew,” Rubio stated. Added Price: “Leaving billions of taxpayer dollars to gather dust in federal coffers only encourages fiscal irresponsibility. By rescinding this unspent and unobligated money … we can contribute to the larger goal of breaking the government’s habit of borrowing and spending money we cannot afford.”

• Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., would cut $85 billion annually by not replacing departed federal employees ($6.5 billion in savings), bringing the $128,226 average yearly federal civilian compensation closer to the private sector’s $64,560 (reducing $32 billion), curtailing federal travel by 25 percent ($2.25 billion), limiting Pentagon research to military applications ($6 billion), requiring competitive bids on government contracts, paying market wages on federal projects ($19 billion) and halving foreign aid ($20 billion).

• The Public Interest Research Group and the National Taxpayers Union jointly identified $1 trillion in 10-year savings through 56 budget cuts that liberals and conservatives should love. These range from killing a $10 million biodiesel education grant to a $160 billion modernization of federal computer systems. The $77 billion Crop Insurance program should be uprooted. The feds own some 55,500 buildings that are “not utilized or underutilized.” Sell them. Even giving them away would save taxpayers $17 billion in maintenance expenses — on empty buildings!

The research group and taxpayers union urge Medicare to calibrate excessive labor and office-space outlays with the actual prices that prevail in lower-cost communities. Savings: $47.6 billion.

Rather than spend $179,750 an hour to fly Air Force One from rally to rally to demonize Republicans, Obama should sit still long enough to send Congress a budget request. The federal Budget and Accounting Act of 1921 mandates that the president’s spending plan reach Capitol Hill by the first Monday of February. Obama’s last two budgets arrived late, and this year’s is AWOL.

Before Obama barks at Republicans yet again, he should start doing his job.

Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor and a media fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

PELOSI: “FALSE ARGUMENT TO SAY WE HAVE A SPENDING PROBLEM”

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Posted on 19th February 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Of course it isn’t a problem for Nancy. She ‘s a multimillionaire who has no problem spending our money. The politicians in Washington DC on both sides of the aisle see no problem spending our money today and committing the money of unborn generations for whatever suits their agenda, whether it be illegal foreign wars or inflicting “free” government healthcare upon the masses. Nancy and Obama know that if you just change the word from spending to investment then their followers will nod approvingly and their liberal MSM mouthpieces will bow down and support them 150%. Our government is a gluttonous slob eating at the Heart Attack Grille. I wonder what will happen next.

National debt burdens U.S. today, tomorrow

Monday, February 18,2013

Fiscal conservatives unwittingly sabotage themselves by warning that the $16.5 trillion national debt will impoverish America’s children and deliver unborn grandkids directly into Chinese slavery. While these dire predictions may come true, calling America’s massive indebtedness a challenge for future generations triggers relaxation about an immediate priority: curtailing federal spending and borrowing. By defending “the children,” budget hawks let big spenders invoke Scarlett O’Hara to justify their profligacy, at least until the tykes mature. “Cut the budget later,” spendthrifts propose. “Tomorrow is another day.”

Unfortunately, annual deficits and the accumulated national debt are harming American adults right now.

Uncle Sam is a morbidly obese glutton with a bottomless appetite. Once he has waddled away from the buffet table, little remains for everyone else but breadsticks and several drops of soup.

David Malpass, a New York-based economist with Encima Global LLC and a former Reagan administration Treasury official, understands how Washington crowds out private-sector borrowers in order to finance reckless spending and service yesterday’s debt.

Back in December 2009, Malpass explained in The Wall Street Journal how the Federal Reserve’s purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities caused capital to be “rationed not on price but on availability and connections. The government gets the most, foreigners second, Wall Street and big companies third, with not much left over.” Consequently, Malpass added, “for small businesses and new workers, capital rationing is devastating, spelling business failures and painful layoffs. Thousands of startups won’t launch due to credit shortages, in part because the government and corporations took more credit than they needed. …”

Three years hence, the conditions that Malpass lamented linger like an unshakable low-grade flu. Between the end of September 2011 and the same date in 2012, total outstanding federal debt grew 12.3 percent, while corporate debt expanded by 5.9 percent. Among non-corporate businesses, it fell 1.2 percent. For households, it dropped 1.9 percent. This is anomalous, Malpass notes, since “small-business credit has usually expanded at a faster rate than corporate credit.”

This is a stunning plunge in lending to entrepreneurs and small businesses — the twin engines of job creation. “Credit markets once provided $300 billion to $550 billion net new credit per quarter to the non-financial private sector,” Malpass recently observed. “This helped fund new investment, inventories and other working capital needs. … Private-sector credit increased only a net $66 billion in the third quarter of 2012.”

Why should banks risk capital on innovative new companies with brilliant ideas when Washington dutifully repays interest and principle on those boring old savings bonds — albeit with freshly printed cash?

And what happens when Uncle Sam devours most of the smorgasbord?

Unemployment reaches 7.9 percent while the economy contracts 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012. Rather than hire people and expand operations, business managers bite their nails and fret that paying off the debt will unleash a stampede of new taxes.

Touchingly oblivious to all of this, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California last weekend told “Fox News Sunday”: “It is almost a false argument to say we have a spending problem.”

If only Washington had a spending problem; it has a spending addiction. Congress and the White House should go cold turkey and terminate antiquated and destructive programs and agencies (e.g., depart the housing sector). From environmentally mundane Western acreage to empty office buildings, federal assets should be privatized. Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries should face affluence tests. Also, the eligibility age of 65 to 67 should acknowledge that life expectancy is not 62 (as in 1935, when Social Security began) nor 70 (as in 1965, when Medicare commenced). Americans now typically stick around for 79 years.

With all due affection for the children and grandchildren, they eventually will feel the wrath of Obama’s (so far) 55.5 percent national debt hike. Meanwhile, trillion-dollar annual deficits, rampant borrowing and the $16.5 trillion national debt are punishing American individuals, families and businesses today.

Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor and a media fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

WE DON’T HAVE A SPENDING PROBLEM

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Posted on 19th January 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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The courageous, honest words of a man who will be inaugurated this weekend as the President of the United States. With wisdom like this, how could the country go wrong? The spending won’t matter until it matters. The entire world has watched the United States add $10 trillion of debt in the last 12 years through money creation, interest rate manipulation, currency debasement, inflation and accounting fraud without destroying ourselves. YET.

Now Japan, Europe, China and other countries around the world are simultaneously attempting the same solutions. It will not end well. So we will keep spending, borrowing and printing until the entire Ponzi scheme collapses in a giant implosion. Then our beloved leader will use his emergency powers to save us. Now hand over your guns.

Michael Ramirez Cartoon

Federal spending is limitless and lawless

Friday, January 18,2013

“We don’t have a spending problem.”

Those soothing words are apparently none other than President Barack Obama’s. As the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore reported, House Speaker John Boehner says that Obama insisted to him that America has a problem with healthcare, not federal expenditures.

Maybe the spendaholic-in-chief is missing something. America is being tortured by a free-spending federal government that acts irresponsibly on good days and illegally on bad ones.

In just the first quarter of fiscal year 2013, Washington dug Americans $293 billion deeper down the hole, the Congressional Budget Office announced Jan. 8. That pace likely will make this the fifth consecutive year with a federal deficit exceeding $1 trillion. This was obscene enough when President George W. Bush botched the 2008 financial meltdown. Since then, Obama gleefully has frolicked in red ink.

Also, federal welfare spending is set to increase 80 percent through fiscal year 2022 and total $11 trillion. What fuels this explosion in the dole? According to a Jan. 15 analysis by Senate Budget Committee Republicans, bureaucrats use “aggressive outreach to those who say they do not need financial assistance.” Also, “recruitment workers are even instructed on how to ‘overcome the word “no”’ when individuals resist enrollment.”

This week, the Republican-led House approved $33 billion in Hurricane Sandy assistance. This sum, atop another $17 billion, includes such non-sequiturs as $10 million for FBI paychecks, $50 million to plant trees around America, $150 million for fisheries and $2 billion for interstate highways.

Enough wobbly Republicans joined spend-happy Democrats to save these and other slabs of pork. Republicans should have used this legislation as a tutorial on limiting disaster relief to relieving disaster, not opening the vault to those with the stickiest fingers.

Meanwhile, Washington’s record-shattering profligacy may be less frightening than its burgeoning lawlessness. Legal, schmeagle. Washington does whatever it wants.

- Senate Budget Committee Republicans report that the departments of Agriculture and Homeland Security “have promotions to increase the number of immigrants on welfare despite legal prohibitions on welfare use among those seeking admittance into the United States.”

- Congressman Tom McClintock, R-Calif., complains that Congress routinely spends tax dollars on programs whose legal authorization has expired. This is like using a company credit card years after you were fired.

Last year, McClintock tried to cut about $250 million from the International Trade Administration. “The ITA’s authorization lapsed in 1996 — 16 years ago,” McClintock marveled. “It has not been reviewed or authorized by Congress since then, but we still keep shoveling money out the door.”

The 1985 Balanced Budget Act requires that authorizing legislation “be in place before the regular appropriation bills can be considered” by Congress. Nonetheless, the CBO confirmed last year that “Congress has appropriated about $261 billion for fiscal year 2012 for programs and activities whose authorizations of appropriations have expired.” These included $3 billion for Community Block Grants, $24 billion for No Child Left Behind and $31 billion for the National Institutes of Health.

These and other initiatives may have merit. If so, Congress must reauthorize them, so that they are rooted in the law, rather than inertia.

- For its part, the Democratic-run Senate is a crime scene. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 compels senators and representatives to pass a budget each year by April 15. Whatever. The Senate has not enacted a budget since April 29, 2009. (The GOP House did so in 2011 and 2012.) Too bad this law is toothless.

Rather than huddle with Republicans to rescue America from this mess, Obama is as petulant as ever. He refuses to bargain with Republicans, saying they simply should raise the debt ceiling without restraining spending. Obama said he would not “have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people,” presumably with GOP fingers on the firearm. What vulgar rhetoric, post-Newtown.

Finally, what about the national debt of $16,456,185,258,774 and counting? Like Old Man River, it just keeps rolling along.

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service, a Fox News contributor and a media fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

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