It’s déjà vu all over again.

In the early fall of 1992, George H.W. Bush was running for reelection, the economy was in recession and the Democrats had the incumbent president on the ropes. Bush was, they said, out of touch and perhaps incapable of understanding the challenges facing middle-class Americans grappling with real-world problems.

He was an elitist who played golf and ran around the world while the men and women who had put him in office were struggling just to survive. By way of contrast, his ultimately successful Democratic opponent assured people that, unlike Bush, he could “feel their pain.”

The president and his advisers argued that the recession was over. It had, according to most economists, ended that spring, and the nation was on its way to recovery. More evidence, the Democrats cried, that Bush didn’t get it.

This year, a Democratic president and his globetrotting spouse appear as divorced from the reality of today as then-President Bush seemed nearly two decades ago. Like Bush, Barack Obama comes across as a nice enough fellow who talks about things that just don’t matter to most Americans and insists on fixing things they aren’t sure are broken rather than tackling jobs they know need to be done.

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White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs spent much of his day yesterday tripping over his shorts about a NY Times hit piece on John Boehner.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took such a liking to this weekend’s NY Times story on House Minority Leader John Boehner and his lobbyist friends that Gibbs has posted about it on Twitter four times, beginning with one saying, “Headline says it all…A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists.”

Maybe Mr. Gibbs should think twice before he makes that argument. He should at least look at how his party fares in a discussion of lobbyist influence.

If you look at the top Members of Congress who receive the most money from lobbyists this campaign season, 15 out of the 20 are Democrats. None of the 20 were named John Boehner.

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With the government takeover of healthcare becoming law and our ever-increasing national debt weighing down on our children’s future, Washington’s agenda looks nothing like the American peoples agenda. It’s no wonder people all across America are continually asking the same question: why isn’t Washington listening to us?

I’ve had enough. Have you? Well, here’s a new outlet - www.AmericaSpeakingOut.com – to voice your ideas to change America. This is an outlet where these ideas will not fall on deaf ears. Together, we can create something new, something bold, and something to act as a check and balance to Washington’s out-of-touch agenda. And we can work to craft this agenda now, instead of waiting to let more bad policy go unchecked. The stakes are just too high to wait any longer. American families continue to struggle from job losses month after month, all while Congress continues to increase Washington spending, pile onto the debt, mettle with American free enterprise, and ignore national unemployment that hovers near ten percent.

Thankfully, millions of Americans are engaged and continue to offer ideas, even though the majority in Congress shuns the idea of listening to the people. As a Member of the minority in the House of Representatives, I’ve seen this firsthand. I held two healthcare town halls last summer, and about five thousand people showed up to overwhelmingly support saying no to the government takeover of healthcare. But, Washington did not listen to our voices, and the voices of countless other Americans. Instead, the backroom deals prevailed over the majority of America. Well, we can change that. That is why were trying something different.

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Just when you thought it was safe to start expressing your right to free speech, Democrats in Congress are gearing up for a vote on a new piece of legislation to blatantly undermine the First Amendment. Known as the DISCLOSE Act (HR 5175), this bill – written by the head of the Democrats’ congressional campaign committee – is their response to the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In short, the Supreme Court found that the government could not restrict the free speech rights of individuals or other entities wishing to participate in the political dialogue.

It is hard to see how establishing a level playing field for free speech – as our Founding Fathers did by making it a right under the Constitution and which the Supreme Court upheld – is a threat to our democracy. Nevertheless, the White House and their allies on Capitol Hill see honest criticism as a threat to forcing their big government, liberal agenda through Congress. So, there is no time like the present – namely five months before an election – to start putting the muzzle on those individuals and organizations not sticking to the Democrats’ talking points.

Under the DISCLOSE Act, certain incorporated entities would be restricted in how they can exercise their free speech rights. There is an exemption for some in the media sphere like newspapers, TV news, and the like. However, there is one driving force in today’s public debate that is NOT exempt. Bloggers will not have the same exemption provided to other media sources. Never mind that the Supreme Court’s opinion in the Citizens United case stated, “Differential treatment of media corporations and other corporations cannot be squared with the First Amendment.”

For many bloggers to exercise their free speech rights, they would have to jump through the same onerous new hoops as many businesses, nonprofit groups, and even such threats to democracy as your local chamber of commerce. If this sounds like an absurd overreach by one party in power, I invite you to take a look at their government takeover of health care, taxpayer-funded bailouts, and general hostility to private sector economic growth.

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In the wake of the Court of Appeals judgment last week that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lacks sufficient authority to regulate broadband services, senior congressional Democrats are reaffirming their support for alternative methods of executing what some critics charge would be a de facto government takeover of the internet.

Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and co-author of the House’s Internet Freedom Preservation Act, said the FCC should “take any actions necessary to ensure that consumers and competition are protected on the internet,” and offered to “continue to work with my colleagues in Congress to provide the Commission any additional authority it may need to ensure the openness of the Internet for consumers, innovators and investors.”

Markey, like FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, is a backer of net neutrality, a policy that would inadvertently be instituted were the FCC to reclassify broadband services under existing rules relating to telephone services, and directly instituted were his bill passed and signed into law.

Fellow Massachusetts Democrat Sen. John Kerry, meanwhile, insisted that while it is within the authority of the FCC to reclassify broadband he is not advocating such aggressive action.

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Winston Churchill – the statesman who defined champagne as “bottled sunshine” – often suffered bouts of deep depression.  He called that frequent companion his “black dog.”   After their drubbing in 2008 and Obama’s legislative tsunami – pausing, not ending in the enactment of the healthcare reform bill – some Republicans appear ready to settle in for a long political winter with Churchill’s black dog curled up at their feet.

Former presidential speechwriter David Frum, apparently eager to hug the black dog, wrote that the passage of Obamacare is the Republicans’ Waterloo, and that while they may retake the House or Senate this November, that wouldn’t matter because “This healthcare bill is forever.”

Frum merely gives voice to the thinking of the Old Republican Establishment.  They are comfortable in the minority, smiling – as former House Minority Leader Bob Michel used to – at the inability to direct national policy, adept at getting re-elected without the burden of leadership.

Frum’s reference to Waterloo is almost apt.  But the enactment of Obamacare isn’t the Republicans’ Waterloo.  If Frum knew his military history, he’d see it not as Waterloo, but as Marengo: a defeat that turned what could have been a devastating defeat into a crushing victory for Napoleon in June 1800.

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Last week, I had the honor of speaking to a robust group of conservatives in New Hampshire — and I saw a level of energy within our movement that I haven’t seen in a long time. People are fired up. And not just in the Granite State. Everywhere I travel these days, Americans are standing up and declaring themselves ready to fight for the principles and values that made this the greatest country in history – principles and values that are under attack by the Democrats in Congress and the current administration.

Today, the federal government owns or controls the nation’s largest insurance company, two of the three American auto manufacturing companies, the two entities that hold a majority of our mortgages, the entire student loan industry, wide swaths of the banking industry and now a major portion of the American health care delivery system.

Think about it. With his individual mandate, President Barack Obama and the federal government are now forcing Americans to buy a good or service simply for no other reason than they are alive. Their reform will lead to higher taxes and higher premiums – and not reduce the exploding health care costs that are the underlying problem of America’s health care system.

Let me put it bluntly: America is headed in the wrong direction.

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Now President Obama tells us he’s going to take the economy seriously.  God help us.

As the war on the economic recession grew bleak and the unemployed body count grew, Obama and the Democratic Congress were bogged down in the quagmires of health care reform and cap-and-trade – wars of choice but not of necessity.

Obama and Congressional leaders dithered on the economy to satisfy their liberal base and deliver on campaign promises of a government takeover of health care, a cap-and-trade system and a scheme to eliminate the secret ballot in union elections.

Fortunately for America, Obama and his Congressional allies have been unsuccessful so far.

In a recent interview with ABC News, the president said he lost touch with the American people because he was so focused on crafting policy.  And the result was the special election in Massachusetts that ended in disaster for Democrats.

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One cannot drink oneself into sobriety. Yet that is precisely what Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration have attempted with our economy for the past year with predictable and painful results.

Unemployment continues to stand at an official 10% for the third month in a row, the worst joblessness in 27 years.  The real unemployment rate is far worse.  Included in the December economic figures was a shocker – the percentage of adult men who are working has fallen to the lowest level in recorded U.S. history at just 80%.  That means that one in five men in this country between 18 and 54 are neither working nor claiming unemployment.  They have fallen completely out of the workforce.

That helps explain why December’s unemployment rate remained at November’s 10% rate in spite of an additional 85,000 Americans losing their jobs.  At the same time the new jobless claims were added, many of the previously unemployed were simply removed from the workforce numbers altogether.

Economists estimate our true jobless rate as high as 17%, and that could grow in coming months as more Americans exhaust their unemployment benefits and lose homes to foreclosure.

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