Back in August, I nearly bought a t-shirt emblazoned with the Gadsden Flag to wear at the 9/12 rally. I decided not to spend my money and thought “How many rallies could I possibly attend to justify buying this shirt?”

In hindsight, it would have been a good investment in protest attire.

FreedomWorks has issued a call for another protest on March 16 to kill the Obama healthcare bill. The President has declared that the bill must be through the House and Senate by March 18, so he can conveniently schedule a photo-op before he flies off to the Pacific.

Wouldn’t you hate for the overwhelming opposition of the American people to conflict with Obama’s tight schedule? How rude of us.

Despite promises from Obama and a strongly-supported measure in the House, the new version of the health care bill funds abortions. Americans United for Life Action have a new ad urging Congress and Obama to prohibit any federal funding from going to abortions.

Susan B. Anthony List also has more information about abortion and the Health Care Summit last week. This is a major problem. Americans should not be required to fund abortions with tax dollars.

Over and over again, we’ve been told that Obama’s health care policy is the only idea out there. Between his administration and the media, the American people keep hearing that Republicans are out of ideas and the “party of no.” Obama has repeatedly said that he’d read Republican alternatives and insinuates that they’ve not taken him up on the offer.

That’s not exactly true.

The House Republicans have an interesting video debunking Obama’s claims.

Have you ever watched an episode of Lost when someone comes in the room and says, “I’ve never watched an episode. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

After explaining that it is absolutely impossible to explain the plot line because nothing makes sense, it is generally best to give said person the first season on DVD and say, “See ya in a few days. You’ll be hooked.”

Now someone has come up with an eight minute recap of Lost seasons 1-5.

In case you don’t understand the addictive nature of this show, Lost prompted the one and only time that the Obama Administration has used common sense. Robert Gibbs announced that the State of the Union would not be on February 2, the date of the season 6 premiere. I know that I wasn’t the only person on Twitter freaking out when I heard that it was a possibility.

This does make me wonder what’s worse: living under an Obama Administration or living on a mysterious deadly island where nothing makes sense. Honestly, I really don’t know.

H/T Go Fug Yourself

This week, we heard another story of stimulus fraud sending millions of dollars to nonexistent zip codes. Prior to that, Americans learned that funding was going to fake congressional districts. Then Senators McCain and Coburn’s released a report that highlighted 100 wasteful projects in the stimulus. I can’t be the only one outraged that digging for dinosaurs in Argentina and sending college students from Alaska to the Copenhagen conference were approved programs.

Seeing the waste on the national level made me question what’s going on locally. Finding out exactly where are taxpayer dollars have gone is critical to ensure that nothing like this bill ever passes again. It’s not enough for the national media or top bloggers to pick out a few egregious examples of stimulus waste. Politicians need to hear from their constituents.

That’s where we come in. Bloggers and activists in every town and county throughout the country need to keep an eye on stimulus funding.  It’s up average taxpayers like you and me to make sure that no fraud is going on in our communities.

How do we start?

The Recovery Act promised transparency to the American people, yet how many Americans have taken time to sift through all of the grants, loans and awards? Do you know what’s going on in your backyard?

Recovery.gov is the official site that documents and tracks all stimulus funds. From the homepage, you can search by Zip code, or you can download detailed information about awarded grants in your community or state. These searches provide the most basic information about what’s going on in your area.

If you really want to dig into data, visit the Recovery.gov Download Center and look at spreadsheets that indentify organizations and contacts for all of the awarded grants.

A number of watchdog sites have emerged that track stimulus projects and are easier to use than Recovery.gov. At StimulusWatch.org, you can search by project, agency, state, city, zip code and keyword. I was able to pull up all of the projects in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn. Thankfully, all of the projects seem to be legitimate and fall within the parameters of the Recovery Act.

StimulusWatch.org is built as a wiki, so users can vote a project up or down and track the most wasteful project, such as “Explaining the African Vote” project at the University of California, San Diego. They received $233,823 to conduct exit polls in sub-Sarahan Africa.

ProPublica also created a Recovery Tracker. Unlike the other two sites, ProPublica also releases information on businesses that obtained loans through the stimulus. For example, the new Melting Pot in Chattanooga borrowed $684,000.

All of this information can get confusing. While some projects stand out, such as a $950,000 grant to colleges in Arizona to study ants, what is the difference between a grant, contract and loan? How do we know if it should be funded by the stimulus?

How the Recovery Act Works

According to Recovery.gov, the stimulus aims to

• Create new jobs as well as save existing ones
• Spur economic activity and invest in long-term economic growth
• Foster unprecedented levels of accountability and transparency in government spending

How does this work?

After the stimulus was passed, Congress allocated a set amount of funds to different federal agencies. These agencies then established requests for proposals or grant opportunities. These can be accessed through Grants.gov or Recovery.gov. Another pot of money was allocated for states, which turned it over to state agencies to either directly use or create sub-grants.

Often, this is where the waste starts.

Since the federal government allocated funds to various government agencies, the agencies are actually the ones making the grants and distributing funds. This means that the kids who got a free trip to the Climate Change were accountable to the National Science Foundation not the Obama Administration. Many of the questionable grants were awarded through government agencies like the National Science Foundation or the Institutes of Health. These are huge bureaucratic entities, and once they got control of the money there was no accountability.

Since many of the contracts and loans are also awarded by smaller agencies, it’s difficult to track where the money is going. Available contracts are listed on Recovery.gov and the site posts winning contractors. Loans are not as transparent, and ProPublica is the only site that I’ve seen include loans with community information.

What Can You Do?

Tracking stimulus funding in your community is the perfect activity for bloggers, local tea parties or concerned activities. Once you’ve researched the information, there are a number of ways that you can use it to raise awareness or hold your local, state and national elected officials accountable:

• Create a local Google Map of all the projects
• Write a blog post
• Write letters to the editor of your newspaper
• Write or call your local Congressman or Senator
• Create fliers about any questionable projects to hand out at local GOP meetings or Tea Party events
• Contact local media outlets about projects that need attention

The next Recovery.gov filing deadline is January 30, so get ready for another round of stories about government waste.

Did Obama somehow intern for Neville Chamberlain?

Contrast Cheney and Obama’s reactions to the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day. Obama conveniently scheduled remarks three days after the event between golf and snorkeling in Hawaii despite complaints of how tiring it is to be President.  Had Bush done that, there would have been hell to pay.

Cheney is completely accurate with his analysis that Obama is busying living in Rainbow and Unicorn land:

“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

One year into his presidency, it’s obvious that this is not a man capable of making a tough decision. This is a man who wants to be a celebrity in the White House, not the Commander-In-Chief and protector of this nation. Ignoring problems does not make them go away. I agree with Ed Morrissey on Obama’s true aim:

In his statement, Cheney goes beyond Obama’s performance this week to make an entirely different point than just incompetence.  In fact, Cheney believes that Obama’s response fits a pattern that has a rational purpose, which is to move America away from a war mentality entirely and bring the effort against al-Qaeda into the law-enforcement realm instead.

Cheney is right about this pattern. By changing the perspective from radical-suicide-bombers-determined-to-destroy-us to misguided misanthropes, he can adjust the playing field to his terms. Surely it’s our fault the terrorists are angry. After all, Obama’s found a way to blame America for every other problem in the world.

Rather, Obama’s endgame is to turn America into a larger version of a socialized European nation. He can accomplish this by downplaying just how evil the bad guys are. “Golly, if they get Miranda Rights and are tried in civil court, just how different can they be from you and me?”

When Americans feel safer on defense and foreign policy issue, Obama can focus more on his domestic policies, which are traditionally a Democratic strength. As long as terrorism remains a viable threat in this country, Americans will demand a strong military and intelligence community. That’s funding that Obama doesn’t’ get to spend on health care, education or the Big Government Program of the Week. It also makes him appear weaker since even hardened liberals are questioning his response.

Quite simply, Obama thinks he can PR us out of a global war on terror. If he ignores it, the press ignores it and — at least  theoretically — the American people ignore it. Sorry, Mr. Obama. In this case, I don’t think even Nick Naylor could make the terrorists look warm and fuzzy.

Poster from the Blind Side

Last week, I saw the Blind Side, the new movie about Michael Oher, and loved it. As a sports tearjerker about SEC football*, it’s one of my favorite movies this year.  My favorite line was when Sean Tuohy comments, “Who’d have thought we would adopt a black son before we’d meet a Democrat.”

Last  night, 20/20 did a special on Michael Oher and the Tuohy family, who adopted him. The special is inspiring and makes you want to cry. As I watched it, I couldn’t help but think that if Christians lived our faith the way we should, these stories would be the norm and not the unusual. Hollywood wouldn’t make inspiring movies like this because they would be common, everyday experiences.

Oher’s story is a testament that education and parental involvement are the keys to success compared to government programs. While Oher succeeded, it’s sad to know that the first African-American president eliminated this opportunity for hundreds of low-income students when the DC Opportunity Scholars program was axed. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t mince words when discussing Obama’s involvement, or rather uninvolvement (his version of voting “present” in helping kids with worst backgrounds than him):

Let’s call them Sidwell Liberals, after the famous Washington, D.C., school where President and Mrs. Obama send their daughters. Despite this personal experience, Mr. Obama signed into law a provision passed by Congress that shuts down Washington D.C.’s voucher program, depriving 1,700 disadvantaged kids of the chance to escape failing public schools through the use of scholarships that let them attend private schools. Two of them attend Sidwell Friends School with the Obama girls.

Our public school system has failed nationally. If it was working, there wouldn’t be Michael Oher stories. There would be no demand for private school scholarships in DC. Government programs have failed. If these programs were successful, American school children wouldn’t be falling futher and futher behind. DC spends more money per student than any other state, yet dumping money into programs doesn’t work. Having volunteered with organizations working with DC youth, I’ve seen how horrible these schools are. I used to live near one of the better public schools in DC. That school would have been the “bad school” in nearly any other school district in America.

What does work? Individuals taking responsibility to help kids. Public-private partnerships like the DC Opportunity Scholars. Parents working with their kids and not dumping them into the lap of Uncle Sam for childcare. The system is broken. It won’t be fixed by expanding it but dramatically changing it.

Because Christians aren’t helping our communities, the government has stepped in. Bureaucracies will never be able to fix social issues, but individuals can. If we stopped growing government and started living out our faith, success stories would become the norm.

*Since I bleed orange, I loved the cameos with Coach Fulmer. I was upset by the way that my alma mater treated him, and it was nice to see him on screen. If I ever get a chance to meet the Tuhoys, I may have words with the way Lee Anne treats the Vols. As a Christian and a conservative, I respect her, but she’s sadly misguided with her football loyalties. Of course I am biased here. My entire family went to LSU, and I was raised to despise Ole Miss. One of the last things my grandfather said before he died was that the Devil lived in Oxford, Mississippi.

Sarah Palin gets a lot of coverage here at CosmoCon, but another controversial politician that I admire is Dick Cheney.

My liberal readers are probably choking right now, but I was pleased to see Human Events name him Conservative of the Year. He hasn’t gotten the recognition that he deserves. He was calling out Obama earlier this year while most Republicans were trying to be polite during the honeymoon phase.

Cheney has a quality that I admire–he doesn’t give a damn what other people think. To a certain degree, Palin also has this quality. Both of them aren’t afraid to share their opinions and often say unpopular things that need to be said.  Both of them also give common sense, grown-up alternatives to the empty, amateur rhetoric of the Obama administration. As John Bolton notes at Human Events:

How is it, therefore, that someone who has no political ambitions can cause so much angst at the White House and in the mainstream news media? The irrefutable answer is that what Cheney is saying, primarily on foreign policy, defense and anti-terrorism, makes sense to more and more American citizens growing increasingly worried by the Obama Administration’s insouciance when U.S. national interests are threatened, both at home and abroad. Since the only real, long-term way to deal with persuasive positions on substantive policy matters is to refute them with sounder policy arguments, it is not hard to understand why the Obama White House is near panic. Where are they going to go to find a better policy inside his administration?

Maybe I’m alone in wanting to hear the blunt truth rather than platitudes about how expanding our government can make us feel all warm and snuggily inside. Seeing the current administration’s  the approval ratings slide, perhaps not. I’d rather know that our military has every tool available to defend this country rather than support policies that make Europeans and Middle East countries like us more. National defense is not a popularity contest.  Sadly, I don’t believe our President and his administration understand that fact.

Bolton nails it with the appeal of Cheney:

Perhaps most importantly of all, Cheney knows that the personal attacks on him, as offensive as they are, in reality constitute stark evidence that Obama and his supporters are simply unable to match him in the substantive policy debate. An old lawyers’ cliché says: “If the law is against you, pound on the facts; if the facts are against you, pound on the law; if the law and the facts are against you, pound on the table.” Obama and his supporters are doing the political equivalent of continuous table-pounding, because that’s basically all they have to offer. Cheney’s unwillingness to be deterred by the media assaults on his character, his judgment and his performance in office are therefore his most impressive force multiplier with the general public. Outside-the-Beltway Americans see him for exactly what he is: a very experienced, very dedicated patriot, giving his fellow citizens his best analysis on how to keep them and their country safe.

Cheney may not have been popular with some Americans, but they knew what they were going to get. You don’t see that in many politicians in either party. I disagreed with many of the actions that the Bush and Cheney, but I never doubted the character of either of them. Now, I live in fear of what the power hungry triumvirate of Obama, Pelosi and Reid will do to our country next. When you have no character and rely on mob-like tactics and slick marketing, how can you be trusted?

Human Events also has a fascinating interview with the Vice President.

Apparently Glenn Reynolds posted this yesterday, but I ran across this witty Youtube video this morning. Obama’s got us covered, at least when it comes to czars.

The great thing about this video? It was created by the 18-year-old Gateway Patriot. But those kids with their internets and online videos still aren’t doing anything compared to the awesomeness of the 70s.

Allow me to vent for a second.

I realize that speculating about the next election is Washington’s favorite pastime, which is quickly followed by gossiping and complaining about Metro, but I’m sick of it.

The 2012 election is approximately 1,070 days away. Anything, literally anything can happen. There’s also a mid-term election coming up next year that could be a game changer. Sure, it’s likely that the GOP will pick up seats but it’s unknown if that will hurt or help our chances in 2012. There’s also a war going on in Afghanistan, a terrible economy, record government spending and a massive health care bill that could alter our society completely.

No one, and I repeat, no one knows what will happen in three years.

Think back to 2005. Did anyone think that John McCain and Barack Obama would become their parties’ nominees in 2008? If you did, please contact me. I’d like you to help me purchase stock and possibly pick out numbers to the next Powerball.

Unless you have the ability to predict the future, I’m absolutely sick of hearing guessing games about who will run in 2012. Let’s focus on next November first. There’s a lot of work ahead of us.