Content by Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
Posted at 11:09am on Jun. 24, 2008 “The People’s Server”: A Web Site for Sovereign Americans
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
America’s greatest strength is her free people.
If America is to remain the greatest nation on Earth, it is imperative her sovereign citizens’ Congressional servants maximize public access to and insights and interests within policy decisions.
Toward this goal, the internet is a critical technological tool, as over 72% of Americans are on-line. In turn, the people’s Congress Representatives are endeavoring to implement online communications with their sovereign constituents. These attempts are diverse, including modern technologies like YouTube and Facebook to e-mail, and simple web pages. Yet whatever the type, all these emergent technologies serve the traditional need for elected officials to hear and serve their constituents.
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Posted at 3:24pm on Apr. 17, 2008 Mr. Bush’s Beijing Games
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
Assertions supporting President Bush’s attendance at the Beijing Games must be logically rebutted, for they mask a more dangerous myth. To wit:
“The opponents of the President’s attendance are politicizing the Olympics.”
One can’t take politics out of an event by sending politicians to it. To depoliticize the Olympics, our athletes must go there to win; and our President must stay here to work.
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Posted at 3:13pm on Feb. 8, 2008 The 2008 CPAC Conference: These Kids Are Alright
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
While appearing as a panelist at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I was heartened to see so many young conservatives in attendance.
I was not swept with nostalgic sentiment for my youth as a nascent Reaganite, though those days were filled with excitement and exploits – a few of which can be recounted in polite company. What struck me was the prescience of modern conservatism’s intellectual founder, Russell Kirk. Today, as this generation of young conservatives embarks upon their service to America, I hope they will be inspired and guided by Kirk’s caution to my Generation X conservatives, many of whom did not heed his wisdom:
“…all ideologies work mischief. I am fortified by a letter from an influential and seasoned conservative publicist, who applauds my excoriation of young ideologues fancying themselves to be conservatives, and of young conservatives fondly hoping to convert themselves into ideologues. This latter correspondent agrees with me that ideology is founded merely upon ‘ideas’ – that is, upon abstractions, fancies, for the most part unrelated to personal and social reality; while conservative views are founded upon custom, convention, the long experience of the human species. He finds himself confronted, from time to time, by young people, calling themselves conservative, who have no notion of prudence, temperance, compromise, the traditions of civility, or cultural patrimony.”
Again, he is talking about my Generation X conservatives.
Read on . . .
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Posted at 11:18am on Oct. 18, 2007 Communist China and CFIUS: “Dropping the Shark”
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
To resuscitate the TV sitcom Happy Days, the show’s main character, Arthur Fonzarelli, was aquatically clad in a swim suit, white tee-shirt, and leather jacket and filmed performing a harrowing water ski jump over a shark. Though “The Fonz” pulled it off, the network pulled the plug on Happy Days. Subsequently, any inane attempt to prevent a show’s cancellation by scripting an absurd scene which only serves to end an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief has been colloquially deemed “jumping the shark.”
But what does one call a situation where a U.S. governmental entity willfully suspends its disbelief communist China is a strategic threat and, ergo, appeases it with the sale of sensitive technologies currently employed in defending our computer systems from cyber warfare and espionage? I suggest we call it “dropping the shark.”
My friends, this is not a hypothetical homage to Seinfeld scriptwriters.
Read on . . .
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Posted at 4:10pm on Oct. 1, 2007 Fiscal Predators: The Seduction of Governmental Dependency
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
The Left claims the Bush Administration manufactured a bogus war on terrorism to scare Americans into ceding their civil liberties to a police state. In reality, however, the Left is seducing Americans into surrendering their sovereignty, liberty, and prosperity to the welfare state.
Breaking their promise to provide fiscal responsibility to federal spending, every week the House floor echoes with the Democrats’ siren paeans to whatever slice of “social justice” du jour will ostensibly excuse hiking taxes and spending. By now taxpayers should be versed in the Left’s tricks of their trade: refusing to reduce government spending; refusing to prioritize government spending; and sweetly alleging only to be taxing a targeted group they’ve unfairly demonized to purportedly “help” a targeted group of vulnerable individuals - the poor, the sick, the kids (excepting the unborn). But in truth, the Left has only helped themselves in the near and long term to more of your prosperity, liberty and sovereignty.
Bent to feast upon the taxpayers’ money needed to sate their craving for social and electoral engineering, in the 110th Congress these Fiscal Predators have already:
• Passed five-year authorizations of $887,473,870,000, of which $25,476,250,000 is mandatory spending.
• Passed over $80,000,000,000 in NEW TAXES.
• Budgeted for the largest tax increase in American history – between $217,000,000,000 and $392,500,000,000.
• Raised the federal statutory debt limit by over $850,000,000,000 from $8.965 trillion to $9.81 trillion.
• Refused to devote a dime of deficit or debt reduction in their legislation.
• Refused to enact real earmark reforms.
• Refused to propose any entitlement reforms to defuse the ticking fiscal time-bombs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
• Ignored the fact economic growth – not tax hikes and Keynesian spending sprees – increased federal revenues by approximately $6,000,000,000 and will decrease the federal deficit by 36.2% at the end of FYO7.
Yet despite these alarming acts of fiscal irresponsibility, it appears the Left’s seductive spending is enticing the American electorate.
Read on...
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Posted at 8:23am on Sep. 18, 2007 Iraq: A Quartet of Critical Inquiries
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
As a person’s word is their bond, a nation’s word is its bond. Once broken, “its word is no good.”
In 2002, with the world – and especially our enemy – watching, America gave its solemn vow to the oppressed Iraqi people we would emancipate them from a tyrant to experience their God-given right to liberty. Over four years later, in Iraq our soldiers and civilians continue striving and sacrificing to honor America’s pledge; but, on the home front, the Left is bent upon breaking America’s promise to liberate the Iraqis, in particular, and forsaking America’s dedication to liberty, in general.
Before acquiescing to this execrable outcome, Americans must demand the Left answer this quartet of critical inquiries regarding Iraq:
Read on . . .
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Posted at 10:37am on Aug. 30, 2007 Battle of "The Bums"
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
[promoted by haystack...nice job Congressman...]
During their mutual month-long August recesses, wherein public confidence in each has plummeted to record lows, the American Congress (“Our Bums”) is denouncing the Iraqi Parliament (“Their Bums”) as “do nothings.” Further, despite American military progress on the ground in Iraq, Washington claims Baghdad’s failure to meet political benchmarks will doom General Petraeus’ plan for victory.
The premise of this claim is absolutely backwards.
Read on...
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Posted at 10:36am on Jun. 15, 2007 Compassionate Communism
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
Due to the devotion of Lev Dobriansky and Dr. Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation, on Tuesday, June 12, 2007, the Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. The memorial is modeled on the statute of Lady Liberty which inspired the Chinese students and their fellow citizens in Tiananmen Square, and symbolized their hope to realize their God-given and inalienable right to freedom. And, as is indelibly etched in the most ignoble annals of history, it was beneath this statue of Lady Liberty the communist Chinese government’s totalitarian stranglehold tightened and these human beings’ cries to breathe free were choked from their throats.
Truly, then, the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial was a fitting forum for the President of the United States – the leader of the Free World – to help commemorate the event. Inexplicably, especially since the communist killers who executed the slaughter in Tiananmen Square remain firmly enthroned upon the shoulders of those students and citizens’ corpses – the President did not call for America and the entire Free World to finish the job and liberate those who still suffer and die under communism.
Instead, the President took a victory lap replete with historical and ideological pitfalls portending a perilous present and future for all free people.
Read on . . .
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Posted at 10:48am on Apr. 18, 2007 Trading with the Adversary (Part IV):Communist Cuba: Happy Ches Are Here Again
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
Now we move on to the next totalitarian regime the trade hawkers are threatening to bring to its knees by making it rich: communist Cuba.
Throughout the murderous reign of failed pitcher Fidel Castro, communist Cuba has arbitrarily oppressed, jailed, tortured and butchered its citizens. It has also brought the world to the brink of nuclear war; fueled communist guerillas and provided its troops to spread its ideological virus across continents; shot down two U.S. planes in international airspace; placed the highest ranking (to date) spy, Anna Montes, in the United States government; and conducted the warmest of relations with the vilest of America’s “adversaries,” including such misunderstood champions of peaceful co-existence as Iran, Venezuela, and China. For these and other efforts, this socialist savant of savagery has seen this imprisoned island placed on State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism; and he is simultaneously indulged the grim humor of witnessing his sworn enemies in American corporations, churches and Congress pleading his case to have economic sanctions lifted from communist Cuba.
Read on . . .
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Posted at 7:53am on Apr. 9, 2007 Trading with the Adversary (Part III): Vietnam Be-Trade Again
By Rep. Thaddeus McCotter
This week, let us move on to examine another communist regime rife with economic opportunities for Westerners inured to human misery: the workers’ paradise of communist Vietnam.
Rising from its death bed with a fitful and fitting final gasp, the Congressional Republican majority passed H.R. 6111, a free trade agreement with communist Vietnam; and, on December 20, 2006, Republican President George W. Bush signed the bill into law. It is unknown whether or not Jane Fonda hailed this Republican legislation, though she likely took a guilty pleasure in its enactment. It was, after all, one more American betrayal of the Vietnamese people.
Read on . . .