In Ace’s “Headlines” sidebar, I just noticed this post at FreedomWorks: 15 Year Old Wisconsin Conservative Meets Bullying From Teachers.

Worth a skim. To be clear: By “bullying”, he does not mean physical assault, but rather a series of moral-emotional assaults from teachers who single him out for questioning (sometimes invasive) and ridicule. From Mr. Backer’s conclusion:

If teachers want bullying to end with homosexuals, other races or religious beliefs, they should want it to end with every type of bullying possible, including political views.

I haven’t done any research that would let me vouch for Mr. Backer’s story, but if it’s true, it’s chilling. Or, to say something more positive: that kid has guts!

Faster, please.

House Republicans unveiled an ambitious cost-cutting plan Tuesday that would balance the budget in 10 years without raising taxes, while repealing ObamaCare and overhauling entitlements — a document Democrats are sure to reject but could be used as a negotiating tool in talks with President Obama.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, is sticking by controversial proposals, including one to give future Medicare retirees the option of using government payments for private health care plans.

Taxes are the vehicle that the Federal Government uses to strip power and freedom from its citizens. That immense power is sapping the private sector right now.

Here is the full text of the Ryan Budget Plan.  Read it for yourself.  No filters.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

Perhaps like me, you’re enjoying this great new TV show I just found on C-SPAN2 called Mr. Paul Goes to Washington where my favorite Senator is currently filibustering President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan. As I write this, he’s currently about to ring in his sixth hour. The goal of Senator Paul’s soliloquy is, as he has stated several times since I’ve been watching, simply to elicit one thing: A straight-forward answer to the question, (to paraphrase) ‘Does the president believe he has the legal authority to execute through drone strike non-combatant citizens on American soil?’

Brings up a very interesting point: For eight solid years, we heard screeching and gnashing of teeth from the Left about how George W. Bush wants to kill us all and eat our babies and of course shred the Constitution through wars based on lies and the horrible PATRIOT Act. But in the end, who is it who’s actually standing up for these ideals? Well, so far I’ve seen Senator Paul in exchanges with Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Pat Toomey. Odd, don’t you think, that it’d be these ‘Tea Party right-winger knuckle-draggers’ who are actually doing the work that the Bush-haters allegedly wanted done while the leaders of their nominative party are lining up with their president in his expansion of Bush’s ‘unitary executive’ policies?

Clearly it’d be expecting waaay too much for the addlepated adherents to the Bush-is-Satan school of political thought to recognize the irony of the situation, let alone find that realization a great opportunity for self-reflection. Sad, that.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

NB: I had originally written the paraphrase of Sen Paul’s question as “power” to execute. Clearly that’s within the president’s power, but I’ve clarified (I hope) by changing my original post to read “legal authority”, which I think is likely more to his point.

Charles Krauthammer suggests that the GOP House play it small:

Can you govern from one house of Congress…shrink government, restrain spending, bring a modicum of fiscal sanity to the country when the president and a blocking Senate have no intention of doing so?

…The more prudent course would be to find some offer that cannot be refused, a short-term trade-off utterly unassailable and straightforward. For example, offer to extend the debt ceiling through, say, May 1, in exchange for the Senate delivering a budget by that date — after four years of lawlessly refusing to produce one.

Not much. But it would (a) highlight the Democrats’ fiscal recklessness, (b) force Senate Democrats to make public their fiscal choices and (c) keep the debt ceiling alive as an ongoing pressure point for future incremental demands.

Read the whole thing. Agree/disagree?

It is not often that I strongly disagree with Bruce.  No, we should not give the Democrats what they want on the economy.  It’s going to be bad enough that they pretty much got what they wanted during Obama’s first two years in office.

And we’re only beginning to see the consequences of that legislation, with Obamacare causing businesses to restructure their workforces and Dodd-Frank threatening the survival of community banks.  And then there’s the additional burden of the numerous regulations the Obama administration has been pushing.

People will soon see the damage wrought by Democratic policies.  We don’t want to make it even more difficult for our friends out of work and struggling to survive.

What House Speaker Boehner needs to do is not give Obama what he wants, but instead lay down a marker to show where Republicans stand.  And not yield.  And we know tax increases only give Washington politicians excuses not to cut spending.

The Ohio Republican said on Wednesday that “the GOP won’t accept tax increases, though it will accept changes that eventually would increase revenue through a more efficient tax code.”  He must know that if he yields, some conservatives will clamor for new leadership.

When Boehner wins on this, he will give conservatives something to cheer about, to show that conservatives can stand up to the reelected president and remain a potent force even after the disappointing results of last week’s election.  The Democrat will know that the Republican Speaker is no push-over, keeping him on his toes.

Right now, Republicans should not give Democrats what they want in order to weaken the economy.  They should stand firm on principle in order to show their supporters than they mean to stand up to Obama’s job-killing policies. (more…)