JDPFu.com 2025

Being elected President of the USA is serious, not a popularity contest like in High School. This seal reminds me of the honor required for this government office, in particular.

1. Taxation – [[Fair Tax]]
2. War on Terrorism – how do you negotiate with people that want you dead? You don’t.
3. [[Term Limits|TermLimits]]
4. Energy Policy – [[Thoughts On Energy]] Ethanol is a waste; Coal, Solar, Wind with government incentives; why isn’t drilling happening in ANWR, Alaska? Popular Mechanics Article
5. [[Campaign Contributions]] – if you can’t vote in an election, then you shouldn’t be allowed to give money
6. Health Care – More competition; posted costs for all work; less government interference; shopping across state lines and small biz/individuals placed into the same insurance "Group" so they don’t get screwed by insurance rates.
7. Immigration – Fair is fair; no reward for breaking laws
   [[Thoughts on Immigration]]
   *[[Shortage of HiTech Workers in USA?]]
   **[[Saxby Update on Immigration August 2007]]
8. [[Education]] – School Choice
9. Abortion – ProLife/ProChoice
10. Tort Reform – loser pays to prevent lawsuit abuse

I came across this reading something on Hillary Clinton … here
"Personalize it"

Saul Alinsky’s rules of power tactics, excerpted from his 1971 book "Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals"

1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Just a few Political Sites that I’ve come across:

• http://www.prwatch.org/
• http://www.sourcewatch.org/
• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Congresspedia
• http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
• http://politifact.com/ – has the //True-o-meter//
• http://boortz.com/
• http://www.speakout.com/activism/issues/
• http://www.weeklystandard.com/
• http://politics1.com/

Ok, the other Senator responded to my Thoughts On Immigration that I forwarded to his office. The response follows:

Dear Mr. P:

Thank you for contacting me regarding immigration reform. It is good to hear from you.

Illegal immigration is a problem in this country that must be solved. I became involved with the immigration reform bill because it was clear to me that this issue touches the lives of Georgians on a daily basis. Moreover, I believe the people of Georgia elected me to represent them and to work constructively to meet the difficult challenges facing our nation.

From the early development of this legislation, I fought for the inclusion of a border security first provision. I felt strongly that this issue should go to the floor of the Senate for a free and open debate with all Senators having the opportunity to offer amendments and have them voted on. That has not happened. For that reason and because certain amendments have been adopted that make the bill unacceptable, I cannot support the bill in its current form.

Due to the tremendous response from Georgians, I am now convinced that many people do not believe our government will enforce the border security provisions in the legislation. Therefore, Senator Isakson and I communicated to President Bush that Congress must pass, and he should sign, a supplemental appropriations bill to fully fund the necessary expenditures to secure our borders.

I will continue to approach this issue by tackling border security first and separately from any other immigration measure and I will oppose comprehensive reform unless and until that is done. That is why I voted against cloture twice on the immigration bill.

This is the most important domestic issue facing our nation today. The Senate should not limit the traditional amendment process or the custom of unlimited debate. We should take as much time as necessary to openly and thoroughly debate the bill.

Immigration reform is a process and we are nowhere near the finish line. The President and Congress must work together to secure the border first. Once this is done , we can work to resolve the collateral issues. I believe we can get there, but we are not there yet .

High Tech Workers Unavailable in USA? …. Here’s a legal team describing the techniques to ensure they comply fully with the law, yet don’t select a US worker who is qualified. This lets them get a cheaper, H-1b visa worker.

Summary from youtube:
Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers. See what Bush and Congress really mean by a "shortage of skilled U.S. workers." Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week.

Many of my friends started here on H-1b visas … my beef, isn’t with the workers from foreign countries, rather, it is with the employers and our elected representatives who tweak the system to allow these abuses.

Lou Dobbs did a story on this too.

News media bias? Really? No way? Follow the money ….
Journalists dole out cash to politicians

Here’s the summary:
MSNBC.com identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

Ok, one of my Senators responded to my Thoughts On Immigration that I forwarded to his office. The response follows:

Dear Mr. P :

Thank you for contacting me regarding the Senate debate on comprehensive immigration reform. I appreciate hearing from you and appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Many have asked why I became involved in a process to work towards a comprehensive reform bill in the Senate. I did it for two reasons. First, in my travels throughout the State of Georgia in the past three years, I had heard loudly and clearly from Georgians that they wanted us to end illegal immigration in America right now, plain and simple. We cannot leave it for future generations to solve. And second, quite frankly, the 2006 elections changed the landscape in Washington and put Democrats in charge of the legislative process. Had I not sat at the table and fought for conservative principles, Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi would have had the votes to pass last year’s horrendous Senate bill and send it on to the President. I could not let that happen. Therefore, I stood strong with other conservative colleagues in the Senate and worked towards a process by which we could to start the immigration debate in the Congress.

I started this process seeking to accomplish three main goals in this debate – to truly secure our borders, to prohibit a new pathway to citizenship and to stop the current climate of amnesty whereby millions of illegal immigrants are breaking our laws and facing no punishment for doing so. As a result of a severely flawed immigration law passed in 1986, some 12 million to 20 million immigrants have been allowed to enter this country illegally and remain indefinitely. They work tax-free, get free health care in our emergency rooms and educate their children for free in our schools. Our nation’s policy today is amnesty, and it must end.

The immigration bill we debated for the past two weeks differed dramatically from the one signed into law in 1986 and it is also very different from last year’s Senate bill. The 1986 law granted amnesty but failed to secure the border, and our country has been paying the price ever since. Last year, the Republican-led Senate repeated the same mistake of 1986 by passing a bill to grant legal status to illegal immigrants without securing our nation’s borders and without imposing any punishment for those here illegally. I voted against that bill last year because it was amnesty and because it failed to secure the border.

This year, I led an effort to ensure that any proposal contain the essential foundation for successfully reforming our immigration system – a requirement to truly secure our borders first before any reform of our temporary worker system takes place. This became known as the "Isakson trigger," and it mandated that Congress must fund, put in place and make operational true border security before any temporary work program could begin. As it currently stands, the bill states that border security must include at least 20,000 border agents, 31,000 detention beds, four unmanned aerial vehicles, 105 radar towers, and 300 miles of vehicles barriers. In addition, a minimum of 370 miles of the fencing mandated in last year’s Secure Fence Act must be constructed. I firmly believe that these security measures would finally provide comprehensive border security and would ensure that we have operational control of our southern border.

The final, key piece of my trigger was a biometrically secure identification card that will allow employers for the first time to instantly verify whether an immigrant is legal. Employers today must guess whether documentation provided by immigrants is fraudulent or not. A biometrically secure ID would replace this guessing game with certainty and would hold employers accountable with much stricter fines for hiring illegal workers.

Although opponents of the bill have suggested that there was nothing worthwhile in this bill, I would suggest that it contained several critical and necessary changes to fix our broken immigration system. It would have secured our borders first. It would have ended our current system of amnesty. It contained no new pathway to citizenship and would have forced illegal immigrants to go home before they could be eligible for a green card or for citizenship. It would have ended chain migration. It would have given employers a fraud-proof system to verify whether workers are legal. It would have forced immigrants to learn English. These are the kind of conservative Georgia principles that I brought to the table and fought for and was able to include. Even though these principles were included, I recognized it was still an imperfect product and that is why I worked through the amendment process to make it even stronger.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Bingaman to limit the temporary worker visa quota for the proposed Y-1 visa to a "hard cap" of 200,000 per year. The bill as originally drafted provided for 400,000 Y-1 visas for the first year, and that number could have risen to 600,000 in following years. This amendment passed and that number was instead capped at 200,000.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Graham to impose mandatory jail sentences for those who crossed the border illegally after being deported – at least 60 days in jail for the first offense and no less than two years for the second offense. Everyone needs to know that America is changing its immigration laws, and that if you break our laws, you will lose your freedom. This amendment passed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. McCain to require illegal immigrants to pay back taxes on their earnings for the time they had been in the United States . This amendment passed.

I cosponsored and voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Coleman to close a loophole in existing immigration law to allow local law enforcement to acquire information about the immigration status of a person they have probable cause to believe is not lawfully in the U.S. There are several "sanctuary cities" around the United States that have prohibited their law enforcement to inquire about a person’s immigration status. In certain cities, a person can be charged and even tried without the local authorities ever inquiring about whether the person is in the United States legally. The amendment would make it clear that state and local governments may not prohibit their law enforcement from checking a person’s immigration status when they have probable cause to believe that the person is in the United States illegally. Unfortunately, this amendment failed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Hutchison to prohibit anyone who worked here illegally from obtaining social security benefits based on earnings obtained while here illegally. This amendment passed.

I cosponsored and voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Inhofe to require that English be declared the national language of the United States . It also provided that the English language is the default language for government communication, and that no person has a right to have the government communicate in any language other than English, unless "specifically stated in applicable law." If an exception is made, then only the English language version of any government form can have legal weight.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Demint to require that temporary workers maintain a minimum level of private health insurance to keep them off public assistance such as Medicare and Medicaid. Unfortunately, this amendment failed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Sessions to prohibit anyone who is not a green card holder in the United States from being able to take advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit. This amendment passed.

I voted for an amendment offered by Sen. Cornyn to permanently bar about 635,000 "alien absconders," or immigrants who have received deportation notices, from obtaining visas. Unfortunately, this amendment failed.

I also voted to defeat all cloture motions designed to cut off debate on the immigration bill. The Democratic leadership in the Senate refused to allow up or down votes on additional Republican amendments that would further strengthen this bill. Among these critical initiatives that I supported but was not allowed an up or down vote on was an amendment mandating spending for border security as well as an amendment to require illegal immigrants to return home in order to participate in the Z visa program. The Democratic leader’s refusal to allow votes on these additional amendments was unacceptable.

As I have said throughout the debate, I would reserve judgment on the final bill until deliberations were complete on the bill. At the time the Democratic leadership moved to end debate on the bill, it was my view that this bill was not good enough yet for the people of Georgia .

I recognize the lack of trust that a majority of Georgians have in the federal government’s ability to follow through on its promise to secure the border. For that reason, I recently sent a letter to the President calling on him to use his emergency funding powers to fully fund the border security measures in this legislation as well as all outstanding border security measures that have previously been passed but not yet funded .

I have been working hard to address the number one domestic issue in the United States . I will continue my efforts because I believe it is absolutely critical to our state and to this nation that we secure the borders and restore credibility to our immigration system.

Thank you again for contacting me. Please visit my webpage for more information on the issues important to you and to sign up for my e-newsletter.

Sincerely,
Johnny Isakson
United States Senator

Interested in privacy rights?

• http://epic.org/
• http://www.eff.org/
• http://privacy.org/

If you already read my Rants on Campaign Contributions, then you have an idea of my belief in fair competition and a lasifair government. That wraps up my feelings about most things, including education.
If public education were excellent, why are all the public schools not creating college prepared students? What is it that private schools have over public schools? Can public schools copy the success of private schools? Is there a good way to help competition? The keys are:

• Gradual change is needed; nothing quick
• The government shouldn’t show any preference except towards the outcome.
• Income of the parents shouldn’t prevent students from going to another school, provided a commitment from the parents for the education exists. That commitment includes the parents providing transportation.
• Parents should be able to choose what is studied. Recommendations provided, but the parents get the final say. That doesn’t alter which standardized tests are given to the students, however.
• Competition is needed – the money follows the student. If a student leaves, then so does their money. Competition is good.
• Parents should be able to select the school – within seating limits – that their children attend. How would you feel if the government told you which grocery store you were allowed to shop at? Why do they get to tell you were you must send your child?
• Failure (low scores) should force a school out of business, not have more money thrown at it.
• Learning is the primary purpose for a school, not playing sports. Being on a sports team is a privilege once acceptable grades have been achieved. Teamwork can be learned by group exercises in all subjects, including PE.

The Power to Tax is the Power to destroy.
– John Marshall

Government is the people’s business and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid. – Ronald Reagan

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax – Albert Einstein

Ok, now that you are thinking that taxes are bad, what solutions are there to funding our government, minimizing the ability to cheat, being fair (which isn’t the same as progressive), having non-citizens and illegals share in the tax load with a slight penalty and preventing elected officials from being able to change it with a simple vote. If you make more money, you shouldn’t be taxed at a higher rate. Success needs to have rewards, not penalties.
Some simple caveats:

• A consumption tax is required. If you won’t admit to being in my country illegally, why would I expect you to pay your taxes? I don’t, so we need to take your money at a point of sale.
• Consumption taxes hit economic classes differently. Wealthier people spend more money. Less affluent people spend less money. Wealthly visitors spend lots of money.
• Ok, now you’re saying that the cost of food and medicine shouldn’t be taxed. ‘’No loopholes.’’ The tax must be flat. If there are any ways around it, then everyone will find a way that they qualify.
• But I’m not completely indifferent towards economically challenged folks. Each household should be reimbursed some amount to cover the taxes for basic living for average costs around the country. There is no local adjustment for different costs of living. People choose where to live. They can choose to move to less expensive locals too.
• Ok, we’re with either the Flat Tax or the Fair Tax Wikipedia.
• Short description of the Fair Tax

Google Video on the FairTax 18 minutes to understanding.

More to come …