The United States is set to pay off Afghan members who are part of the Taliban organization to switch sides, which adds to $1.3 billion under a new $680 billion defense appropriations bill.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama signed a new $680 billion defense appropriations bill, which includes a $1.3 billion “Taliban reintegration provision” under the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. Generally, CERP funding is usually intended for humanitarian relief and reconstruction projects. However, the US army will begin to pay members of the Taliban to switch sides, according to Reuters.

This strategy is to separate local Taliban from their leaders and a similar tactic was used in Iraq to neutralize the insurgency in that country called Sons of Iraq. Democratic Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently stated, “You got 90,000 Iraqis who switched sides, and are involved in protecting their hometowns against attack and violence.”

Nicholas Schmidle, an expert on the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, told CNN that the program has some chance for some success but the old Afghan saying, “You can rent an Afghan, but you can’t buy him,” will eventually win.

Thanks to my conservative buddy,  Brian S. for this story

WASHINGTON The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday a U.S. House health-care system re-write would extend health insurance to 96% of the nonelderly U.S. population by 2019, and spend $1.055 trillion to do so. Penalties imposed on individuals who did not purchase insurance, and employers who did not offer coverage to their workers, would raise $161 billion over that time-frame. That brings the net cost of the bill to $894 billion through 2019, CBO said.

House Democrats have seized on that net cost figure to claim that their bill is below President Barack Obama’s upper limit which he set for health-care legislation of $900 billion.

The $1.055 trillion estimate also does not include $245 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, which the House plans to address through separate legislation introduced Thursday.

The costs of the bill are fully offset by cuts to existing spending programs– including the Medicare?Advantage and other programs–saving $426 billion through 2019, and by tax increases raising $572 billion over that time, CBO said. In fact, the combined impact of provisions in the bill would be a net deficit reduction of $104 billion in the next decade, according to CBO.

CBO also said the House bill would not add to the deficit in the first decade beyond 2019–a key condition for support from fiscally conservative House Democrats. CBO Director Doug Elmendorf, in a Thursday letter to House Democratic Chairmen, cautioned that his estimates are preliminary and “subject to substantial uncertainty.”

For the rest of the Story Please go here:

http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=200910291728dowjonesdjonline000980&title=cbo-puts-house-health-bill-total-cost-at-1055-trillion

Face Forward Comments:

Dear Lord, this Democratic controlled congress loves to spend your money.  As I have said so many times, I hope everybody has good health care. I really don’t want anyone to suffer.  On the other hand, I have worked hard to provide for my family to get them the health care they have needed.  My problem with this whole thing is; I am not sure with increased taxes that I will be able to afford the level I think they need any longer.  That will especially be true after we get through paying for all of the people who do not want to work, have blown off getting their own health care or worse are not even citizens of this country.

I don’t want to see the “needy” (which seems to be a much larger number when the Democrats give it) to go without.  Having said that, at what point do any of us take away from our own family to give to others?  No sane parent would ever give food to another child and let their own children starve.  Seems like a strong analogy, but in essence that is what we are being asked to do. 

Our government will argue that is not the case.  In their eyes they are just leveling the playing field by taking from us, the tax payers, and redistributing to everyone, including you and me.  So, while we may be paying for others that are not paying, we are also getting to use it (even if it is sub-par), which in their eyes makes it alright.  If this system of government sounds familiar, it is one of the founding principals of socialism.

“socialists advocate the creation of a society in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly based on the amount of work expended in production, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.”

One might argue that what is being proposed is several steps beyond even socialism.  A classic definition of Communism is:

A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.

You can find full definitions of both Communism and Socialism in the Face Forward education section.

Yikes, it looks like we have all just joined the communist movement, comrade  That movement flies in the face of the principals that made this country great.  Everyone has to be  accountable for themselves for if they are not we waste resources on them rather than increasing our innovation and growth.

On another note, at least they put the bill online just like Obama promised.  I am sure that fact will only be mentioned several hundred times.  So go ahead America and read it.  I am sure you will understand the words that are being used (at least they are not yet in Russian), however I bet you have no idea as to the context or the sentence structure.  Here is one of my favorite passages on Outpatient Hospitals:

Many people fear that the Health Care system will become politicized

(a) OUTPATIENT HOSPITALS.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—The first sentence of section1833(t)(3)(C)(iv) of the Social Security Act (42U.S.C. 1395l(t)(3)(C)(iv)) is amended—(A) by inserting ‘‘(which is subject to the productivity adjustment described in subclause (II) of such section)’’ after ‘‘1886(b)(3)(B)(iii)’’; and (B) by inserting ‘‘(but not below 0)’’ after ‘‘reduced’’.  (2) EFFECTIVE DATE.—The amendments made by paragraph (1) shall apply to increase factors for services furnished in years beginning with 2010.

Did you get all of that?  Well of course not….just as George Soros and the Tides group planned it (George and his group are rumored to be the actual authors of the bill).  I read somewhere that by dividing every word on the 1900+ pages by the actual amount the bill will cost, you come out with an amount of just under $3,000,000 per word.  After reading a large portion of the bill, most of the words are not any I would ever pay for if given the choice, anyway.

What to do?  I am sorry to say, that I don’t know if anything can be done. If we have any chance at all we must get on the phone/fax/email to every Blue Dog Democrat and appeal to their financial senses.  We know how the majority of the Republicans are going to vote and we know how the liberal lawmakers are going to vote.  The only chance we have is to influence the Blue Dogs, and help them see this as an obstacle ito balancing the budget, which cannot be overcome. Go here to see if there is a Blue Dog Democrat in your state: http://www.house.gov/melancon/BlueDogs/Member%20Page.html

Other than that, I know of nothing else we can do.  I have letters on my desk from my Senator and  Congressman telling me that will not support the bill. I am willing to take a stand….will you stand with me?

WASHINGTON (AP) – An early progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government’s first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

- A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.

- A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.

- A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees.

There’s no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report. But administration officials seized on the 30,000 figure as evidence that the stimulus program was on its way toward fulfilling the president’s promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

The reporting problem could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

The White House says it is aware there are problems. In an interview, Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.

“If there’s an error that was made, let’s get it fixed,” DeSeve said.

For the rest of the story please go here:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20091029/D9BKMVMG0.html

Face Forward Comments: (Sarcasim Alert)

Oh yes, I know it was just an honest mistake.  This president, who learned all about honesty in politics by working in Chicago, and reading the works of Saul Alinsky would never knowingly mislead anyone.  He would be especially disheartened to know that Fox (his best friends ever) would be disapointed in him.

MATAMOROS, Mexico — This border city near the mouth of the Rio Grande is eerily quiet most days — because its streets are largely the lair of the Zeta gunmen, the most feared and savage gangsters in Mexico.

On other days, gunbattles ensue in broad daylight between heavily armed Zeta enforcers and those who get in their way — as happened last month when soldiers stopped a suspicious carload of men on a street that runs along a Rio Grande levee through a wealthy Matamoros neighborhood. The gunmen opened fire and tossed grenades. Bullets tore into houses and businesses and even flew across the Rio Grande, hitting buildings and a parked car at the riverfront campus of a University of Texas branch campus.

“We have this fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said anthropologist Tony Zavaleta, acting provost of the University of Texas at Brownsville, whose family has lived on both sides of the Rio Grande for centuries.

Zeta cells have attacked Mexican towns in platoon-strength numbers; fought hours-long skirmishes with Mexican troops in the streets of Matamoros and in Monterrey and other cities; massacred hundreds of competitors, often beheading and dismembering them; and assassinated police chiefs and local politicians.

Employing military-style tactics and frightening firepower, the Zetas have transformed Mexican drug trafficking from a law enforcement problem into what seems an invincible criminal insurgency.

“These are not your everyday assassins,” said Luis Astorga, an expert on Mexico’s narcotics trade and the gangsters who control it. “This is more like an urban guerrilla organization.”

Formed by army special forces deserters, the Zetas have rained terror upon much of the country this decade as they battle criminal rivals, the army and police for drug-smuggling routes to U.S. consumers.

“Zeta organization and planning has been outstanding, and the shock value of Zeta operations has been unequaled,” military strategist Max Manwaring of the U.S. Army War College wrote in a recent report on Mexico’s criminal paramilitary groups.

For the rest of the story please go here:

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/65948242.html

Face Forward Comments:

Hey Obama, thanks for nothing.