Having formulated a plan to solve my previous dilemmas, I’m ready to point you to my new site. I’ve given it, I hope, an objective broad enough to keep your interest(s) yet specific enough that I won’t lose focus.

I call it Tennessee Conservative, a blog about Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Holiness.

See you there?

Readers who have followed me since the Fishkite days know I’ve been writing at this address for about two and a half years. Well, it’s about time for me to move again.

Since most of my posts are political, I’m switching to a politically-themed site. Despite the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - inspired tagline at top, this blog never really had much focus. I’ll link to the new site when it’s ready.

I’m also trying to figure out what to do with the old content at this domain (the “morgue”). I’m pretty sure I don’t want to haul it all to the new place, as I did last time. Why? 1. It’s a frustrating process; 2. I don’t have time to re-size all the images and fix all the broken links, even if I wanted to; and 3. starting fresh might be good. At the same time, though, it’s nice to have a record, so I’ll probably leave this site’s archives untouched.

Last, I’m trying to decide whether I will continue to write more personal-oriented stuff here, save that for Facebook, or post it at the new location — things like Eden & Freckles updates, etc.

What do you think? Feel free to add your $0.02 in the comments.

U.S. Government foreign aid was increased dramatically under the “stingy” George W. Bush administration, reversing a steady downhill trend over the previous four decades. Source: USAID Greenbook on U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants.

The average U.S. household makes $67,609 a year and is $668,621 in debt — $546,668 being its share of federal government debt and another $121,953 owed privately to creditors (mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other debt).

It would take the average household 9.88 years to work its way out of debt, provided it hands over every penny earned in that span.

Discussion question: how are Washington’s policies correcting, or contributing to, this sorry situation?

CNN is running with the shocking headline, “Cheney: No link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11.”

The quote: “I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true.”

Gosh, if only Cheney would have said something sooner…

September 16, 2001

Russert: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?

Cheney: No.

September 14, 2003

Russert. [I]s there a connection?

Cheney: We don’t know. You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn’t have any evidence of that. Subsequent to that, we’ve learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organization.

We know, for example, in connection with the original World Trade Center bombing in ’93 that one of the bombers was Iraqi, returned to Iraq after the attack of ’93. And we’ve learned subsequent to that, since we went into Baghdad and got into the intelligence files, that this individual probably also received financing from the Iraqi government as well as safe haven.

Now, is there a connection between the Iraqi government and the original World Trade Center bombing in ’93? We know, as I say, that one of the perpetrators of that act did, in fact, receive support from the Iraqi government after the fact. With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.

Sept . 10, 2006

RUSSERT: Well, I asked you, I said, “is there a connection between Saddam and 9/11 on September ‘03” and you said “we don’t know.”

CHENEY: (Unintelligible). That’s right.

RUSSERT: So you raised that possibility.

CHENEY: It was raised by the CIA who passed on the report from the Czech Intelligence Service.

RUSSERT: All right. Now the president has been asked, “What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?” and he said “nothing.” Do you agree with that?

CHENEY: I do. So it’s not…

RUSSERT: So it’s case, case closed.

CHENEY: We’ve never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11.

The Bush administration said this again and again and again, but the Leftist media still continues to hear only what it wants to hear.

Newsbusters has more quotes.

Friday was a great night for the I-Cubs to visit AutoZone Park:

I would hope that a star-bellied sneech with the richness of its experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a sneech that doesn’t have a star on its belly.

To follow up on my last post, I thought you might like to see a mash-up of the chart I posted and the Dow Jones Industrial Average during the same period:

Again, I’m not an accountant, financial adviser or mathematician, but three things strike me:

1. The Social Security surplus seems to fluctuate just as much as, if not more than, the stock market. That would seem to negate the argument that allowing private investment accounts is a more risky proposition.

2. If the Social Security surplus falls, those actual dollars are gone and are never coming back. If the stock market takes a dip, diversified investors lose nothing unless they decide to sell low, in which case they’re still getting some kind of return on the investment, more than nothing.

3. The SSA is projected to enter negative territory within the decade, if not next year. When do you think the Dow is going to hit negative 6,000?

In early 2005, President Bush set out on a nationwide tour to promote what he hoped to achieve during his second term — reforming and stabilizing the Social Security program.

The Democrats flatly refused to address the issue, opting instead to accuse the Bush Administration of fear mongering. They unified their party, and the media, behind an ignorant mantra, “there is no crisis.”

If Democrats could convince Americans that there was no particularly dire problem ahead, then any attempt by Republicans to shore up the system could be painted as unnecessary, reckless, and harmful to senior citizens.

The problem was, Social Security’s insolvency was already painfully clear to anyone without an ideological blindfold. The Clinton administration had been issuing similar warnings since at least 1998.

Nevertheless, the Left’s brood of young, online activists marched in lock-step, rallying to the defense of the Democrats with a website called ThereIsNoCrisis.com, having registered the domain name in late 2004. Locally, it was promoted by the Lefty bloggers, including that listless hive of scum and villainy, The Flypaper Theory.

Visit the site today, and you’ll find only a generic placeholder page with links to random websites offering alternative medical cures, get rich quick schemes and a variety of other shady services. Not much difference, really.

The argument was that we shouldn’t do anything about Social Security because it would be drawing a surplus for at least another 12 years, and would be financially sound on paper for another 20 years after that, thanks to the Trust Fund — which was, in actuality, a filing cabinet filled with IOUs that the government had written to itself. Whatever tweaking Social Security actually needed wouldn’t be necessary for several more decades. And besides, Al Gore had championed a “lockbox” in one of the 2000 debates, so obviously President Bush had no credibility on the subject.

Instead, as Kevin Hassett reports in this week’s National Review, “the economy has been so bad that in February of 2009 Social Security was in the red.”

The chart indicates that the Congressional Budget Office now believes that Social Security will have essentially no surplus next year.

The problem is, the assumptions that give us that scenario are far more optimistic than the assumptions required to justify, say, a $787 billion stimulus package. Indeed, the chart is almost comical in its miraculous ability to skirt negative territory. In reality, Social Security will almost surely have a deficit this year. Such a deficit requires urgent reform…

But fixing Social Security now would get in the way of imposing card check, hiking taxes on corporations, and “reforming” health care this year. So Democrats are ignoring the problem.

As government looks for excuses to undercut free markets, it seems to be able to find a crisis everywhere it looks. Except for where the crisis is.

Such reform could have been implemented four years ago, at least starting us on a path to recovery. Instead, once again, the Left-wing Democrats chose political warfare over sound policy.

Eventually, however, they will get around to drafting a Social Security bail-out. And when they finally do, we can expect increased taxes, fewer benefits, or both, given that the Democrats’ default solution to every fiscal crisis is pumping more money into a failed system.

Leftist media types were eager to discredit the Tea Party protesters who assembled on Tax Day earlier this year to voice their objections to rampant government expansion, exponential deficit spending and the burdensome tax increases to follow.

Commercial Appeal Metro Columnist Wendi C. Thomas posted an update on Twitter, reporting that she was “driving past the Tea Party in Memphis,” but still felt qualified to offer a judgment based solely on the gathering’s signage and skin color. Apparently the Rush Limbaugh phrase “drive-by media” is literally true.

Upon confrontation, Thomas refused to elaborate and attempted to silence criticism by blocking access to her status updates. It was a curious move, since her Twitter account is prominently advertised on the newspaper’s website and can still be viewed publicly, even without logging into the site.

In another display of willful ignorance, the Memphis Flyer’s Jackson Baker wrote that the gathering was “a nationwide Fox News-generated ‘protest’ against — just what?”

Without bothering to lift a journalistic finger or attempt to actually discover anything resembling a set of facts concerning the event’s genesis or purpose, Baker was content to consult only his own crusty, ideologically-biased assumptions. That’s how he determined that the Memphis Tea Party “was as much a gathering of cranks and ideologues responding to a news conglomerate’s marching orders as it was a bona fide conclave over the issue of taxation.”

In an adjoining report, Flyer colleague Chris Davis amended this allegation and downgraded Fox’s role, saying it had only an “apparent, if not actual, partnership” with the event’s organizers.

Davis attended the rally long enough to document some homespun signs and photograph a young man wearing an offensive t-shirt. If these rather embarrassing props seemed to lack the polish of a rally professionally staged by the nation’s top cable news network, this was lost on our intrepid alt-weekly reporter.

But Davis reportedly took an early leave from the Memphis Tea Party on orders from an “aggressive middle-aged woman” who allegedly commanded him to put away his recording equipment. She must not have detected the other 999 people doing likewise, since everyone else was allowed to stay at the free and open event, held in a public park.

Is that really all it takes to rid ourselves of biased journalists? She apparently accomplished more with one well-deserved scolding than thousands have been able to achieve with frustrated letters to the editor, canceled subscriptions and general contempt for the entire floundering news industry.

While the media was busy peddling these deliberately misinformed notions to its dwindling readership, state and federal legislators were preparing their own assault — new tax bills unwittingly tailor-made for the tea party activists to expose and defeat.

Now we wait to see if they, like the Boston radicals before them, are determined to turn a grievance into a real political movement.

For more on that topic, see my editorial in the upcoming June issue of the Main Street Journal (subscribe online).