Overspending created this mess
Why is Tulsa’s municipal government in such a financial crisis?
On the spending side, almost four years of the tax-and-spend policies of ex-mayor Kathy Taylor are pushing the discretionary portions of the budget to the edge of a precipice.
She bought the new City Hall on the basis of a secret $100,000 study that showed that if Tulsa didn’t sell surplus buildings and rent unused space, the city would lose millions.
She jumped into a lawsuit and gave the Bank of Oklahoma (including billionaire George Kaiser) $7.1 million as a settlement for a unpaid loan from the bankrupt Great Plains Airlines. Taylor sat on the BOK board before taking office.
Those are just some examples of how Taylor helped wreck the city budget, with the tacit approval of the previous city council and essentially the ignorant voters who put her into office in 2006.
On the revenue side, Tulsa is losing sales taxes for a variety of reasons.
First, suburbs like Broken Arrow, Owasso and Bixby are developing their own retail business. Those suburbanites are shopping in their own cities instead of Tulsa for the first time in history and they are attracting Tulsans for the first time ever.
Another problem is that Americans are buying more and more on the Internet to circumvent local sales taxes.
A third reason is President Obama’s economics, and to some extent, the overspending by the Republicans under former President George Bush.
Obama’s policies are deepening the national and international recession.
As a result, Tulsa will have to learn to do more with less.
And one thing is for sure, Mayor Dewey Bartlett will do a better job of controlling costs that the previous administration, who helped create this mess.
Pardon for the Navy Seals
On September 3, 2009, Navy seals captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq, Ahmed Hashim Abed. Abed is believed to be the man behind the barbaric attack in Fallujah in 2004 in which four Blackwater security guards were ambushed, their bodies mutilated, and then hung from a bridge.
Abed complained to someone that his captors had smacked him in the face, giving him a bloody lip. As a result, three U.S. Navy seals are facing court martial.
Matthew McCabe, Jonathan Keefe and Julio Huertas are facing a January court martial for prisoner abuse or making false statements to conceal it.
Admiral Gary Roughhead, chief of naval operations, has the power to stop these charges or pardon these men.
He should do so as soon as possible.
War is about killing people and breaking things. We are fighting against Muslim terrorists who don’t play by any rules – all they understand is brute force. They kidnap civilians, they rape captives and they behead their enemies on videotape.
Abed should be grateful that they didn’t put a bullet in his head the minute he was captured and identified. Abed is a violent enemy of the United States.
Seals are brave, skillful and honorable. They face difficult situations against a ruthless enemy. This calls for swift and decisive action, not the coddling of deadly prisoners.
If Muslims wish to attack Americans and our interests, they must understand they will pay a price.
Our own soldiers should not be penalized for protecting our shores.
Admiral Roughhead should clear these men of all charges immediately.
Obama’s sex-change appointee
In another step to the Left, President Obama appointed a man-turned-into-a-woman as a senior advisor in the Commerce Department.
Mitch Simpson was born a man, and according to his DNA, he still is a man. But now he is full of estrogen and after surgery, he is posing as a woman named Amanda Simpson.
After he/she got the appointment, Simpson gleefully announced a hope that “hundreds” of transgendered (sex change) Americans would become part of the government.
Simpson is probably not the first to work for the government but now has the highest profile.
This is just a part of Obama’s support of the radical homosexual movement. That movement wants to force straight America to accept any sexual deviation and treat it like a civil right. They want special laws (hate crimes) to protect homosexuals and they want Americans and America’s churches to accept homosexual marriage as “holy matrimony.”
They target our children, with literature about “two mommies” in grade school classes.
“Is there going to be a transgender quota now in the Obama administration?” asked Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth. “How far does this politics of gay and transgender activism go? Clearly this is an administration that is pandering to the gay lobby.”
“Simpson’s nomination was forwarded through to President Obama by a gay activist group, making it appear that this appointment of a male-to-female ‘transgender’ activist to a high level Commerce Department position to be payback to his far-left base for their political support,” a spokeswoman for Focus on the Family said in statement.
In America, a person has the freedom to screw up their life with hormone replacement and sexual surgery. It’s sad that we now have a president who wants to exalt that kind of people and give them special status.