California Embraces Fiscal Conservatism

By Rosalyn Hummel

The May 19 special ballot intiative took place yesterday and California voters chose to prevent meaningless budget reform and took down Propositions 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, and 1E. Only Proposition 1F passed, which will prevent pay increases for officials during deficit years.

Thank you California! This is a big step towards turning our state around. Now lets elect a Republican governor in 2010!

Oh, Nancy.

Posted by Rosalyn Hummel

Letter to the Editor

Editor, Daily Nexus,

Ah yes, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, and the rainbow sticks cover this campus like freckles on a ginger. I blame the Queer Student Union for making me want to vomit every time I see a rainbow now. Jerks. Now to my point. Everyone should be aware that it is Queer Pride Week here on campus. We are being encouraged to accept the gay community for who they are. Stop the hate, you bigot.

As a "right-wing extremist," or anyone who wants his taxes cut, on this campus, I have been called a "Nazi," a "fascist," and "Dick Cheney's clone" (though I personally admired that one). So, it is okay for someone to equate me with the scum of the earth who murdered six million of my Jewish brothers and sisters, but "fag" crosses the line?

I am not advocating any "hate" towards the gay community. I personally don't give a damn about the gay community. They mean as much to me as the victims of napalm in Vietnam. But I believe that people should treat others the way they want to be treated. If any group on this campus is guilty of hate, it is the gay community, particularly after the results of prop 8 were released. If I had a dime for every time I heard "Mormons suck" I could afford Michelle Obama's shoes. I understand that it is the cool thing to be a "victim" these days, but grow the hell up.

ZAC GATES

Jesusita Fire

By Rosalyn Hummel

On behalf of the UCSB College Republicans, I want to pledge our support for the firefighters and everyone that is helping to put out the devastating Jesusita fire. We thank you for your bravery and selflessness. Our hearts go out to the people that have been affected by Jesusita and you remain in our thoughts and our prayers.

May 19 Special Ballot Initiative

By Rosalyn Hummel

I'm sure most of you have heard about the Special Ballot initiative on May 19. If you haven't, it's a massive tax increase ($16B) that California does NOT need right now!

The already approved tax increase has made California the highest-tax state in the nation for at least the next two years. Proposition 1A wants to extend that.

The already approved tax increase will cost a typical California family more than $1,100 annually.
We will be paying higher sales taxes, which hits low income residents the hardest. Does anybody really want to pay a 9.25% sales tax? I should hope not.
We will be paying a higher car tax, which hits everyone who must drive to work.
We will be paying higher income taxes which hurt everyone.
We will see a reduction in the tax credit for dependents, costing California families $200 per child.

Proposition 1A extends all these taxes well into the future in return for meaningless “budget reform.”

I implore everyone to get out and vote in May 19 and vote NO on Props 1A-1F. If you need to register for a mail-in ballot, go to this webpage:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/vote-by-mail/vbm-app-general-special-051909.pdf
and fill out the form, print it, and mail it in to your county elections clerk.
If you don't know where to mail it in, you can find the address at this link:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_d.htm

If any of you are in the Santa Barbara area May 9th or 16th, I encourage you to go volunteer with the Montecito Hope Ranch Republican Women's Club and inform people about the propositions and encourage them to vote NO. It will be at the Borders on State/Paseo Nuevo from 12pm-4pm.

Stop the phony spending cap!

The Cake is a Lie

by Steven Begakis

When considering the imminent push for national healthcare, I typically draw upon one of my favorite obscure cultural references from the famous puzzle video game, Portal. The story follows a scientist in a research facility who is tasked with conducting a series of tests by a friendly super-computer. While the scientist moves through each testing stage, the computer tempts the scientist with the promise of cake upon completion. Without warning, the computer attempts to kill the scientist, but she escapes into the maintenance areas, and it then becomes clear that the rest of the scientists in the facility have been either killed or driven insane. Within the dilapidated halls there appears on a wall the ominous scribbling of the phrase, “the cake is a lie,” written several times in succession with increasingly degenerate penmanship.

How true of our current scenario. As our nation prepares to make its ill-fated journey into the land of government healthcare, we have only to look beyond our borders to see the latest experiment in this failure of a system. Throughout Europe there is strewn a host of victims of nationalized healthcare’s many flaws. Dick Morris recently pointed out, “The current debate [about] erecting a Medicare-like governmental single payer... misses the essential point... The people and equipment that now serve 250 million Americans and largely neglect all but the emergency needs of the other 50 million will now have to serve everyone. And, as government imposes ever more Draconian price controls and income limits on doctors, the supply of practitioners and equipment will decline as the demand escalates.” Morris correctly notes that price increases will never be considered, which leaves the government the only option of rationing. The result would be as predictable as it is currently happening in other nations: unimaginable waiting lists and a denial of service to the sick and the elderly.

When the issue is brought before Congress, our lawmakers should insist that an “exit clause” be explicitly added to any healthcare reform legislation. The clause would require that a non-partisan committee take a “snapshot” of our current healthcare system over the past 5-10 years, then reevaluate the status of our nationalized system 5-10 years down the road, comparing objective data between the two time frames. It would measure such data as denial of service, availability of doctors, sufficient medical supplies, burden to the tax payer and any other considerations that would evaluate true healthcare quality. If we find that nationalization has brought us to our knees, the exit clause could cause automatic re-privatization, allowing us to return to our more successful private health insurance. If not, the committee could simply reaffirm the program.

Detractors may argue that such a clause would be unnecessary, even clunky and overly-bureaucratic, but the integrity of our healthcare system is too important not to have a backup plan. After a decade of “free” healthcare, it would be impossible to dismantle even a failing single-payer system, for those that become dependent on government care wouldn’t allow such a thing to happen. There must be a way for our experiment with nationalization to self-destruct if it proves incapable of serving the purpose it was intended to. Democrats and Republicans could agree that such a fail-safe would not be an impediment to progress, but instead designed with the best interests of the nation in mind.

As Congress continues to happily lead us down the rabbit hole of nationalization, all with the seductive promise of “free, quality, available healthcare,” we must take into account that our system may end up like all the other disastrous attempts at single payer. If the cake is a lie, we may be stuck with a medical system that puts an incalculable burden on taxpayers, while never providing the service that it promised. Our lawmakers, along with President Obama, would be doing our country a great service in acknowledging that foreseeable future and providing the necessary fail-safe to prevent it.

A Change of Heart

By Zac Gates

One year ago, our radiant university campus was poisoned with fantastically obnoxious, unusually inarticulate, and extraordinarily filthy hippies seeking to put an end to the Bush war machine that was responsible for the murders of tens of millions of innocent Iraqi goat herders. The skullduggeries of this sinister administration spread destruction as far as the eye could see. Karl Rove was a Nazi. Condi Rice was a pathological whore.

American Marines were guilty of oppression and Gen. David Petraeus made Saddam Hussein look like Mother Teresa. One student said, "End this (expletive) war or else!" Or else what, you'll finally take a shower? I saw more hair under the arm pits of girls than I saw on the balls of the dudes holding signs that said "Real Men Want Peace!"

President Bush's decision to take this nation to war in a global effort to combat terrorism created an unimaginable period of zero terrorist attacks on American soil, and the folks at home were demanding his scalp. The campus bullhorns in the Sociology, Black Studies, and Political Science departments, or "distinguished professors," were whip-sawing between accusing Karl Rove of starting the Iraq War to humiliate Arabs in their lecture halls and actually going out to the campus courtyards and calling George Bush a retard.

Then it happened.

The angelic Hussein descended from the heavens. The American people were struck with an epiphany and they said, "I have to vote for Barack!" The Red Sea was parted, metaphorically, and most important of all, Europe liked us again! Hell yeah!

Suddenly, the negative Nancy's and the crackpot journalists who incessantly compared the Iraq War to Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags, ahem Dick Durbin, vanished into thin air. Instead of opening up a newspaper and seeing liberals reduced to spluttering rage about Bush's pledge to give up golfing, I saw a media drooling over a jug-eared statist who cannot go eight seconds without saying "uhhhh." Who knew that people could become so slavishly hooked on a few greeting card bromides?

It seems the Left has forgotten about the reign of Bushitler. The unspeakable atrocities of this administration are yesterday's news. Interestingly enough, Hussein has not parted with Bush in the way many of his sycophants would seem to have hoped for.

It began with Hussein-Obama's selection of Robert Gates as Defense Secretary, a man who pushed for the troop surge that Obama deemed a "failure." So, Obama admires men who have made terrible decisions in the past. You know, that whole Bill Ayers relationship is finally starting to make sense! During the campaign season, Hussein pledged to close Club Gitmo and end the Iraq War immediately. No more Bush duplicity, this was the real deal.

Barack "Not That Hussein" Obama is sworn, Bible-free, into office.

He signs an order demanding Club Gitmo be closed within the next year. Atta boy, Barack. He orders a missile strike against militants in the sovereign nation, and U.S. ally, of Pakistan. Okay, take it easy, Barack. CNN reports that troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan have been delayed. *Spills shot of wheatgrass* Come again?!

The media has virtually ignored Obama's foreign policy, despite the fact it is nearly identical to that of President Bush's. Their Barack-and-Rolling has been a little too much "rolling" and not enough "Baracking." The key difference in foreign policy is that we are no longer calling it the "War on Terror." It is now a "shared struggle against extremism." Oy vey.

There is no campus protest against the war this year. I have searched high and low for a belly-aching sign with George Bush's face on it, but I have come back empty-handed. Why the sudden change in attitude? Was all of this bitterness just an attempt to take a cheap shot at a Christian man from Texas? Was it just the "cool" thing to do? Now I may be off my hinge here, but maybe, just maybe, we might have won the fight in Iraq, no?

Levels of violence have continued to sink ever since the surge of U.S. warriors back in early 2007. We have been able to transfer significant territories to the control of the democratically-elected Iraqi government, such as Al-Anbar Province, due to the unremitting ass-kicking of SEALs, Marines, and Army soldiers, and we even signed an agreement calling for a total U.S. withdrawal by 2011. Is it safe to say "Mission Accomplished" yet?

However, the success of this war should in no way excuse the fact that Marines are cold-blooded murderers. Oil has been stolen and many innocent freedom-fighters have been tortured for the mere sake of sadistic pleasure. (Abu Ghraib, anyone?) I don't think the Left understands the gravitas of the situation. America is guilty of terrorism!

Imperialism has replaced diplomacy. America is a "downright mean country" that bullies the inferior. We are a bunch of rapacious dogs who like to harass Ahmed simply because he likes to wear sweaty rags on his head. Millions have been slain by the sword of American foreign policy. Our judgment is near. America is doomed.

But suddenly nobody cares anymore.

Why would these clowns suddenly stop all of their bitching? Why is this illegal occupation suddenly "not so bad?"

I think the answer is that these apes had a grudge against one man, and one man alone: George Walker Bush. They were willing to put national security behind their selfish impulses to slander an honest, good-hearted man. The good news is they lost the fight. They lost. We won.

President Bush's foreign policy lives on in the Obama presidency. Bush is now sitting at home in Texas, cigar in one hand and a beer in the other, and under his cowboy hat there is a slight grin; a grin of delight at the sniveling granola-suckers who tried so hard to bring him down. Bush: 1, Hippies: 0.

Don't take the media too seriously. We now know they flip-flop as much as John McCain says "my friends." The media blitzkrieg during the Bush administration simply whetted my awareness of the media's hypocrisy. They are going to praise one man for doing something while criticizing another who does the exact same thing. It is just something we have to live with.

Unfortunately, we have to tolerate these fawning bootlickers for at least another four years, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We now can read a copy of Newsweek that isn't attacking a nasty, crass and unscrupulous primate of a president. Barack Obama is now the toast of the town.