The Road to Hell

The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, it has been said.

And no one better exemplifies that today than Liberals.

The “touchy feely” good intentions of many (many other have no good intentions at all and just want to run your life for you because you’re a moron in their eyes) a liberal has caused a lot of pain.

The latest example: The Tree Huggers.

Save a Tree. A Spotted Owl. Ignore mankind, their evil. Loggers and Forest Management is evil.Humans are just greedy pigs. Just let nature be nature.

And if you dare do anything else we’ll sue you into oblivion!

To a Liberals it’s their duty to force you to behave.

The problem is, it leads to even bigger disasters when they come along. And, of course, the environmentalists are far to holier-than-thou to accept any blame or consequences of their actions.

After all, they did it with the best of intentions.

The Wallow II fire is a prime example. The second largest fire in the history of the State of Arizona could have been minimized but Tree Hugging Environmentalists have made it worse.

And who knows it may grow to be the biggest ever. But try to reform the process to prevent this from happening again and the Lonnie Left will be send their pack of Raptor Lawyers and Media Psychos after you!

The fire is swallowing up homes,lives, jobs, and many, many animals.

PHOENIX — Environmentalists are the target of a blame game as wildfires rage through Arizona forests.

State Sen. Sylvia Allen, a Republican from Snowflake — a town in the White Mountains not too far from the huge Wallow fire — says misinformation, lawsuits and lies have been used to promote unhealthy forest environments and those philosophies have made their way into federal policies.

In a statement last Saturday, Allen said, “I once again must express my anger at the lack of forest management that, for the last 20 years, has turned our forests into a tinderbox of undergrowth, small trees, brush and downed trees. In some areas of the forest around Alpine, the undergrowth was so thick that you could not even walk across the forest floor.”

Allen said her family was forced to evacuate their home in 2002 because of the Rodeo-Chedeski fire. (The largest fire in state history, nearly a half million acres)

“The catastrophic fires of the last few years are an indication of the health and vitality of our forests,” she said.

Allen has allies, including Apache County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Brannon Eager, who says poor forest management and stewardship of the land has left the forests vulnerable to dangerous and destructive fires, such as the Wallow fire burning in the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest near Alpine, Springerville and Eagar.

“For years and years, we logged the forest,” Eager said. “We went though, we took care of it, we logged it. We harvested the timber, we thinned the timber and that’s what a ponderosa pine forest is supposed to look like.

“The forest has been growing for 25 to 30 years now with nobody taking care of it. It’s just been allowed to grow. This is my opinion — that we should go back to taking care of the forest, to utilizing what’s up there.”

Eager agrees with Allen’s criticism of environmentalists for pushing to save the Mexican spotted owl, the goshawk and other animals. He said they stopped the logging, put families out of work and created a volatile forest environment.

“We need to do everything we can to protect the animals that we have, but at the same time we also need to protect our forests.”

Eager asked, “What are the spotted owls going to nest in now? There’s nothing left.”(KTAR)

“The Wallow Fire is further evidence that our current system of managing our forests is simply not working,” Allen said. “To the contrary, the federal government’s policies for protecting spotted owls and goshawks are wreaking devastation, destroying homes, and threatening lives, communities, and our economy throughout northern Arizona, and the owls and goshawks are no better protected.”

“It’s time that we return common sense to forest management. In areas where the forest had been thinned around communities, the fire has dropped and homes have been spared. Unfortunately, this thinning has only been accomplished in a few areas.”

“The only way we’re going to restore our forests is to involve private industry, which will absorb the costs while responsibly thinning the forest, so we don’t have any more of these enormous fires,” said Allen. “It saves the taxpayers money, creates jobs, and protects us from these devastating wildfires.”

Allen also pointed to the economic devastation resulting from fires like the currently-burning Wallow and Horseshoe Fires and the Rodeo Chediski Fire of 2002. “Besides the millions of dollars it takes to fight these kinds of massive fires, there is another hidden cost to this beautiful region where I live. The fires kill tourism and recreation, and local businesses suffer for a long time after the fires go out.”

“My frustration is with bureaucrats 2000 miles away with their misguided regulations that lead to these catastrophic fires, and with the extreme environmental groups who have made millions of dollars from American taxpayers by filing lawsuits.” (Sonoran Alliance)

Because that is the preferred weapon of choice of the Liberal, a Lawsuit.

Liberals love to sue everyone at the drop of a hat or get a court to restrict what you can or cannot do according to their superior moral “intent”.

And you get Liberal Judges who rule from the bench who want to enforce their views in a very authoritarian way.

Where are they when they sh*t hits the fan because of them?

In their Ivy Towers of Superior Humanity that’s where.

After all, they have the best of intentions. And they are untouchable and unaccountable because of it!

The environmentalist groups have stopped the forest service from cutting and trimming of our forest for what ever reason they saw fit..Now that we are overwhelmed with fire, just as we were with the Rodeo-Chedeski fire those groups are no where to be found. Those groups have prevented us from clearing pre-fire and now they have set the stage for an even bigger fire to spark pro-fire. Those of us who live in the White Mountain area are well aware of the issues we have with the bark beetle. Studies have shown and proven that dead tree’s killed by the bark beetle are like fire tender waiting to ignite. (WMICentral)

It has been over a decade since the last timber mills closed in Arizona’s mountains, and in that time under the management of the United States Forest Service (USFS) over 1,700 square miles of the state’s forests have burned. “I thought we’d learned our lessons in 2002 after the devastating Rodeo-Chedeski fire that destroyed over 730 square miles of Arizona’s forests, taking homes and lives with it. But I guess its business as usual for the USFS,” Representative Brenda Barton said.

For over a decade, residents and civic leaders in Arizona’s mountain communities have been imploring the USFS to adopt a more pro-active approach to forest management; one that allows for an aggressive program to clean and clear the forest floor. It’s here in what is called the “fire load” that otherwise healthy lightning strike fires become catastrophic and devastate hundreds of thousands of acres in a relatively short period of time. Such intense and large fire events have an effect of searing the ground, which in turn makes it relatively difficult for the forest to regenerate.

Compounding this management problem is the refusal of the USFS to allow previously burned lands, such as those remaining from the 2004 Willow fire near Payson, to be cleared and cleaned. Current practice now simply allows this debris to build up and become dry and fuel for future wildfires.

The Forest Service is riddled with Tree Huggers and afraid of lawsuits. Just what the Environmentalists want.

And we get to pay the price for it. Be Happy. Hug a Burnt Tree.

In contrast, Sweden, arguably one of the most progressive environmental nations in Europe has in the past six years turned away from the US practice of au natural forests and has aggressively begun a forest management program which grooms and utilizes the timber while cleaning the forest floor. This program has created over 7,500 new jobs in Sweden’s northern regions while providing timber for the domestic construction industry. Germany has also begun a program of managed harvesting of their famous Black Forest in Bavaria.

Meanwhile, the jobs and economy of northern Arizona has languished as the USFS has pursued a “hands off” approach to forest management, culminating in recent years with entire areas of Arizona’s forests being gated off and locked to recreational use.

In the past, well managed timber harvesting combined with prudent cattle management has kept Arizona’s forests clean, which minimizes the opportunities for catastrophic wildfires, such as we have experienced since the late 1990’s.

But they had good intentions!

Then there’s the Global warming Crowd…warning this is very graphic.

Now, do you want to have a rational, reasoned discussion with these people?

After all, they probably thought it was humorous.

Good Luck!!

And then there’s this Lovely Australian loonie. Good Luck have a rational discussion with him.

Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.

Not necessarily on the forehead; I’m a reasonable man. Just something along their arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ”Really? You were one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly was that, granddad?”

On second thoughts, maybe the tattooing along the arm is a bit Nazi-creepy. So how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness? Or what about their signed agreement to stand, in the year 2040, lashed to a pole at a certain point in the shallows off Manly? If they are right and the world is cooling – ”climate change stopped in the year 1998” is one of their more boneheaded beliefs – their mouths will be above water. If not …

OK, maybe the desire to see the painful, thrashing death of one’s opponents is not ideal. But, my God, these people are frustrating. You just know that in 20 years’ time, when the costs of our inaction are clear, the climate deniers will become climate-denial-deniers. ”Who me? Oh, no, I always believed in it. Yes, it’s hard to understand why people back then were so daft. It’s so much more costly to stop it now.”

That’s why the tattoo has its appeal.

Not that the other side isn’t frustrating. There’s a type of green zealot who appears to relish climate change. Every rise in sea levels is noted excitedly. Every cyclone is applauded and claimed as a noisy, deadly witness for their side.

Suddenly, it’s as if they have the planet’s assistance in their lifelong campaign to bully everyone else into accepting their view of the perfect world. One without any human beings. Except for them. Living in a cave. Wearing an unwashed T-shirt that not only says ”Support wildlife” but actually does.

Is it possible to get the politics out of the climate-change debate? The first step might be to acknowledge the way ideology informs attitudes to climate change on both sides.

People on the left instinctively believe in communal action, the role of government and the efficacy of international agencies such as the UN. They were always going to believe in climate change; it’s the sort of problem that can best be solved using the tools they most enjoy using.

The right tended to be sceptical about climate change from the start and for exactly the same reasons. It’s the sort of problem that requires global, communal action, with governments setting rules. It is a problem that requires tools they instinctively dislike using.

These initial responses to global warming, on both sides, were understandable. But there’s a point in any debate where what you want to believe comes up against what you know to be true; where ideology yields to reality. (Not with Liberals it doesn’t)

Aside from the frothing fringe of the environmental movement, no one is secretly pleased about global warming. We’d all rather it just went away. Who needs to feel guilty about having a long shower, flying to Paris or eating T-bone steak?  (Liberals!)

Who needs to be worried about their children and grandchildren and the way we are pushing the burdens of our time on to them?

As Cate Blanchett put it this week: ”I can’t look my children in the face if I’m not trying to do something in my small way and to urge other people.”

Each generation of people has a job to do; a burden that falls to their time. Sometimes, it’s a war or depression. Sometimes, it’s the work of building the first railways and roads. Sometimes, it’s a plague that wipes out half the population or a fire that destroys a whole city.

Looked at through this lens, our generation has it easy. Already wealthy and armed with new technology, we need to front up to the challenge of building a low-carbon economy.

The tool we’ll use is a carbon tax that seeks to subtly redirect some of our choices. Cut your power bill by more than the compensation offered and you get to keep the change.

Is that really so onerous compared with a depression or war? (YES!)

Our grandparents didn’t fail us, even though the challenges they faced were so much greater. So why are we in the process of failing to live up to their example?

Have at it.

But remember, They had the best of intentions….

 

More Lies, Damn Lies…

The Department of Justice distorts figures to hide from Congress pervasive corruption in the nation’s immigration court system, which allows deportable aliens to evade hearings without consequences and more than 1 million removal orders to be ignored.

Adding insult to injury, U.S. taxpayers finance the drove of appeals filed by illegal immigrants deported for criminal convictions and fraudulent marriages. From 2000 to 2007, Americans doled out $30 million for aliens’ court costs, according to a new report <http://cis.org/Immigration-Courts>authored by a former immigration court judge (Mark H. Metcalf) in south Florida, considered a hotbed in the system.

The veteran jurist says the nation’s immigration courts, which are operated by the DOJ, are ruled by deception and disorder <http://cis.org/Immigration-Courts> and are at the heart of a system that nurtures scandal. About 250 overwhelmed judges preside over hundreds of thousands of cases annually and rarely are their deportation orders enforced.

Even after the 2001 terrorist attacks, 50% of all aliens who were free pending trial disappeared, according to figures provided in the judge’s report. Between 2005 and 2006 the number of aliens who failed to appear at their court hearing grew to 59%.

The DOJ deceptively reported the figure as “only” 39% by combining aliens who were free pending trial with those in custody who were forced by authorities to appear in court. That allowed the so-called bail-jumpers to appear as a smaller part of a bigger overall figure.

The agency also told Congress that immigration courts rule in favor of aliens only 20% of the time when in fact its 60% and that aliens appeal deportation orders in only 8% of cases when the figure is actually 98%. Many more examples are included in the judge’s report, which refers to the DOJ’s findings as a sham.

“Accuracy, credibility, relevance, and timeliness elude this agency and the flow of believable statistics to the public,” it says. The judge suggests that Congress order its investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct an in-depth probe.

Am I surprised? No.

When the U.S. government reports its debt, it does not include payment that it is required to make to seniors, veterans and retired employee. If those were included, as they should be, the US debt would be an far greater number than the already outrageous number the government does publish. Accountant Sheila Weinberg, founder of the Institute for Truth in Accounting, has done the accounting correctly and has come up with these numbers: Total US debt $61 trillion, which comes out to $534,000 per household. These numbers provide a picture of why the debt is really such a big problem. No way, no how can it be paid off, given the simple fact that most households don’t have $534,000 to turn over to the government. Default is really the only long-term option. It will be done either in straightforward fashion, where the government pays pennies on the dollar for what it owes. Or it will be done in stealth fashion by the Fed printing up dollars to pay for the government obligations, which will create huge price inflation that will screw the average worker and also those on fixed incomes such as retirees.

The Department of Education Has a SWAT TEAM?

Acting on orders from the U.S. Department of Education, a S.W.A.T. team broke into a California home Tuesday at 6 a.m. and roughed up a man — reportedly because of his estranged wife’s defaulted student loans. She wasn’t there. [UPDATE below: Officials confirmed the raid on the house but deny that the search warrant was related to student loans.]

Yet, Kenneth Wright of the city of Stockton was grabbed by the neck by handcuffed before he and his three young children were put in a police car as the officers searched his house, he told ABC News10. He said he was in his underwear the whole time.

“They busted down my door for this. It wasn’t even me,” Wright told the local news station <http://www.news10.net/news/article/141108/2/Questions-surround-feds-raid-of-Stockton-home>. “All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door.”

Local police were reportedly not involved in the incident.

So can ObamaCare be far behind? They will already have the IRS…

Speaking of The Devil…

ObamaCare Update:

Once provisions of the Affordable Care Act start to kick in during 2014, at least three of every 10 employers will probably stop offering health coverage, a survey released Monday shows.

While only 7% of employees will be forced to switch to subsidized-exchange programs, at least 30% of companies say they will “definitely or probably” stop offering employer-sponsored coverage, according to the study published in McKinsey Quarterly.

The survey of 1,300 employers says those who are keenly aware of the health-reform measure probably are more likely to consider an alternative to employer-sponsored plans, with 50% to 60% in this group expected to make a change. It also found that for some, it makes more sense to switch.

“At least 30% of employers would gain economically from dropping coverage, even if they completely compensated employees for the change through other benefit offerings or higher salaries,” the study says.

But don’t worry, it will bring down costs and be vastly better for everyone!

A recent article by Julie Rovner on NPR agrees with what many have been saying for a long time – ER visits will go up due to ObamaCare, not down as proponents of the new law contended (full version here).  From the article:

• 97% of ER doctors saw Medicaid patients on a daily basis who can’t find doctors who accept their insurance
• 97% of ER doctors saw private insurance patients on a daily basis, whose doctor referred them to the ER (perhaps because they were closed)
• 89% of physicians surveyed believe ObamaCare will increase ER visits, a view echoed by a December survey of 600 ER administrators
• According to a Centers for Disease Control report, less than 8% of ER visits are for non-emergency care
• CEP President Sandra Schneider warns “the combination of more elderly people plus fewer emergency departments (closing due to financial stresses) is creating “a critical supply-matching-demand issue that will only get worse.”

• The day ObamaCare was signed into law Medicare acquired 53 Trillion in unfunded liabilities – that’s 3 times the size of the entire US economy
• In 9 years Medicare will pay less than Medicaid, a system in which children have twice as many problems accessing care than those on private plans
• For those turning 65, the amount spent on their care will fall $36,000 over their lifetime (at todays prices).  For those now 45 that figure jumps to $105,000.
• As baby boomers enter the market the number of enrollees expands, while the number of people paying into the system decreases (more out, less in).
• With decreasing provider payments fewer doctors will accept Medicare or Medicaid, and those who need healthcare most will be the hardest hit – the elderly, disabled, and poor.
• ObamaCare is expected to add 32 million people to the insurance roles, of which they are expected to double the amount of healthcare they use, and it does not create one more doctor or nurse to meet the increased demand.

But ignore the man behind the curtain. The lies are sweet. And everything is just fine!

Promising the American people ‘you can keep your plan if you like it’, while now the chief actuary acknowledges up to 20 million will lose their plans.

Nothing to see here…Except the Lies.

Irksome

John Stossel: Politicians care about poor people. I know because they always say that. But then why do they make it so hard for the poor to escape poverty?

Outside my office in New York City, I see yellow taxis. It’s intuitive to think that government should license taxis to make sure they’re safe and to limit their number. It’s intuitive to believe that if anyone could just start picking up passengers, we’d have chaos. So to operate a taxi in NYC, you have to buy a license, a “medallion,” from an existing cab company (or at a once-in-a-blue-moon auction). Medallions are so scarce, they now cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Licensing prices poor people out of the business.

“Compare New York City, where a license to own and operate a taxi is $603,000, to Washington, D.C.,” George Mason University economist Walter Williams told me. “There are not many black-owned taxis in New York City. But in Washington, most are owned by blacks.” Why? Because in Washington, “it takes $200 to get a license to own and operate one taxi. That makes the difference.”

Regulation hurts the people the politicians claim to help.

People once just went into business. But now, in the name of “consumer protection,” bureaucrats insist on licensing rules. Today, hundreds of occupations require expensive licenses. Tough luck for a poor person getting started.

Ask Jestina Clayton. Ten years ago, she moved from Africa to Utah. She assumed she could support her children with the hair-braiding skills she learned in Sierra Leone. For four years, she braided hair in her home. She made decent money. But then the government shut her down because she doesn’t have an expensive cosmetology license that requires 2,000 hours of classroom time — 50 weeks of useless instruction. The Institute for Justice (IJ), the public-interest law firm that fights such outrages, says “not one of those 2,000 hours teaches African hair-braiding.”

IJ lawyer Paul Avelar explained that “the state passed a really broad law and left it to the cosmetology board to interpret.”

Guess who sits on the cosmetology board. Right: cosmetologists. And they don’t like competition.

One day, Jestina received an email.

“The email threatened to report me to the licensing division if I continued to braid,” she told me.

This came as a shock because she had been told that what she was doing was legal.

“When I called (the commission) in 2005 on two separate occasions, they did tell me that, but then when I called (again) … the cosmetology lady told me that the situation had changed and that I needed to go to school now and get a license.”

No customers complained, but a competitor did.

One cosmetologist claimed that if she didn’t go to school she might make someone bald.

But this is nonsense — hair-braiding is just … braiding. If the braid is too tight, you can undo it.

The cosmetology board told Jestina that if she wanted to braid hair without paying $18,000 to get permission from the board, she should lobby the legislature. Good luck with that. Jestina actually tried, but no luck. How can poor people become entrepreneurs if they must get laws changed first?! Jestina stopped working because she can’t afford the fines.

“The first offense is $1,000,” she said. “The second offense and any subsequent offense is $2,000 each day.”

“It is not unique to Utah,” Avelar added. “There are about 10 states that explicitly require people to go get this expensive, useless license to braid hair.”

Fortunately, IJ’s efforts against such laws have succeeded in seven states. Now it’s in court fighting for Jestina, which, appropriately, means “justice” in her native language.

Once upon a time, one in 20 workers needed government permission to work in their occupation. Today, it’s one in three. We lose some freedom every day.

“Occupational licensing laws fall hardest on minorities, on poor, on elderly workers who want to start a new career or change careers,” Avelar said. “(Licensing laws) just help entrenched businesses keep out competition.”

This is not what America was supposed to be.

There are a lot of things, large and small, that irk me. One of them is our tendency to evaluate a presidential candidate based on his intelligence or academic credentials. When Obama threw his hat in the ring, people thought he was articulate and smart and hailed his intellectual credentials. Just recently, when Newt Gingrich announced his candidacy, people hailed his intellectual credentials and smartness as well.

By contrast, the intellectual elite and mainstream media people see Sarah Palin as stupid, a loose cannon and not to be trusted with our nuclear arsenal. There was another presidential candidate who was also held to be stupid and not to be trusted with our nuclear arsenal who ultimately became president — Ronald Reagan. I don’t put much stock into whether a political leader is smart or not because, as George Orwell explained, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

All the evidence that I see is that academics and intellectuals have messed up the world. I challenge anyone to show me a major calamity that was engineered by a stupid, inarticulate person, but those caused by intelligent, articulate persons are too numerous to count, from the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao to Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Obama.

My vision of a good presidential candidate is a person with ordinary intelligence but great respect and love for our Constitution. Maybe Palin’s and Reagan’s respect and love for our Constitution qualified them as dumb in the eyes of the mainstream media, intellectuals and academics. (Walter E Williams)

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly.

Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama’s “fresh-faced” University of Chicago econ professor arrived in Washington in December 2008 to fill two slots: chief economist/staff director of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and member of the Council of Economic Advisers. In September 2010, he replaced CEA head and fellow academic Christina Romer, who retreated to the University of California at Berkeley last August when unemployment hit 9.5 percent. (She infamously projected that the Obama stimulus would hold the jobless rate below 8 percent.)

Goolsbee’s primary task: translating all of the administration’s big-government theories for us dummies. As Goolsbee put it to his university’s student newspaper: “We’ve certainly seen in previous crises that it’s quite important to explain things to non-experts. The American people can confront any challenge if they’re comfortable with the approach.”

And what exactly was the nature of Goolsbee’s vaunted expertise? Making money as a business rescue-and-recovery expert without ever having had to meet a payroll.

Goolsbee, the 15th wealthiest member of the Obama administration, has raked in assets valued at between $1,146,000 and $2,715,000. He also pulled in a University of Chicago salary of $465,000 and additional wages and honoraria worth $93,000, according to Washingtonian magazine. As I’ve noted before, the government research fellow and Obama campaign adviser was a champion of extending credit to the un-creditworthy. In a 2007 op-ed for The New York Times, he derided those who called subprime mortgages “irresponsible.” He preferred to describe them as “innovations in the mortgage market” to expand the pool of homebuyers.

Goolsbee’s most recent “innovation”: the “White House White Board,” a weekly video lecture teaching everyone else how to hitch what remains of America’s free-market system to the wagon of the state and how much (or rather, how little) we should make doing it. He illustrated his grand interventionist strategy to pick and choose “Startup America” winners by drawing a trough of broken light bulbs (symbolizing entrepreneurial ideas) piling up in a “Valley of Death” because they lacked government support.

A comical choice of imagery given the Democrats’ enviro-nutty ban on incandescent bulbs. But I digress.

When Goolsbee joined Team Obama, the unemployment rate was at around 6 percent. When he announced his resignation on Monday, the jobless rate stood at 9.1 percent. Romer and Jared Bernstein (former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden) had predicted unemployment would drop every single month after August 2009 due to the Obama stimulus. Bernstein bailed on the administration in April 2011 for the sanctuary of a liberal think-tank. He’ll also now ply his failed wares as a financial pundit.

These hapless command-and-control ideologues were preceded by Peter Orszag, who hung his “Mission Accomplished” banner over the White House budget office in June 2010 after fewer than two years on the job, and by former National Economic Council head and hedge fund manager Larry Summers, who was caught sleeping on the job — literally — more than once during his brief tenure. Summers packed his bags in September. He was followed by Princeton economics professor and former top Obama Treasury Department official Alan Krueger in October 2010.

White House aides have lamented that the economic team is “exhausted.” Apparently, Obama is tired of hearing from them, too. The Hill newspaper reports that he has stopped receiving daily economic briefings that were once treated with the same emergency status as national security briefings. So, the central planners continue to be paid to fail — while their boss looks the other way at the destruction, whistling into what he calls America’s temporary “head winds.”

Nice non-work if you can get it. (Michelle Malkin)

So is our Dear Leaders solution to economic headwinds?

Give money we don’t have to people who have even less– Greece!

‘Nuff Said!

Mob Rule

New York Times bestselling author and conservative political commentator Ann Coulter’s new book, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America”, tackles politics once again, this time taking on the liberal left and what she describes as their “mob behavior.”

See my take:  http://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/liberal-are-bees/

In “Demonic,” Coulter traces the words and movements of groups from the Ku Klux Klan and the SDS to anti-war protesters and Democrats today to argue her point that liberals have “consistently used mob tactics to implement their idea of the ‘general will.’”

“Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of Obama Care as racists,” Coulter writes.

Chapter 1

The Liberal Mob

2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him.

3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain.

4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.

5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him.

7 He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!”

8 For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”

9 Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”– Mark 5:2–9

The demon is a mob, and the mob is demonic. It is the nihilistic mob of the French Revolution; it is the revolutionaries who seized control of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century; it is the Maoist gangs looting villages and impaling babies in China; it is the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing Republicans and blacks in the South; it is the 1992 Los Angeles riot that left fifty dead and did $1 billion of damage after the first Rodney King verdict; it is the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; it is the masked hoodlums smashing up Seattle when bankers came to town; it is the 500,000 illegal aliens marching under a foreign flag in Los Angeles; it is throngs of Islamic fanatics attending the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s funeral, tearing his body out of its coffin; it is left-wing protesters destroying property and attacking delegates at the 2004 and 2008 Republican National Conventions.

Everything else changes, but mobs are always the same. A mob is an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.

The Democratic Party is the party of the mob, irrespective of what the mob represents. Democrats activate mobs, depend on mobs, coddle mobs, publicize and celebrate mobs — they are the mob. Indeed, the very idea of a “community organizer” is to stir up a mob for some political purpose. “As so frequently happens when a crowd goes wild,” historian Eric Durschmied says, “there is always one who shouts louder and thereby appoints himself as their leader.” Those are the people we call “elected Democrats.”

The Democrats’ playbook doesn’t involve heads on pikes — as yet — but uses a more insidious means to incite the mob. The twisting of truth, stirring of passions, demonizing of opponents, and relying on propagandistic images in lieu of ideas — these are the earmarks of a mob leader. Over and over again, one finds the Democrats manipulating the mob to gain power. It is official Democratic policy to appeal to the least informed, most weak-minded and perpetually alarmed members of the public.

Their base consists of soccer moms, actresses, felons, MSNBC viewers (both of them), non-English speakers, welfare recipients, heads-up-their-butts billionaires, and government workers — who can never be laid off. The entire party gave up on attracting the votes of white men decades ago. It’s easier to round up votes by frightening women about “assault weapons” and promising excellent free health care to non-English speakers. Yes, a free health care system that is so superior that they exempt themselves and their friends from having to be in it. Liberals frighten people about their health care in order to stampede through ObamaCare. They claim the Earth is overheating in order to seize taxpayer money for solar panels and compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

They call out union thugs to force politicians to accede to insane benefits packages. They stage campaigns of calumny to get their way on gay marriage. Faddish ideas that would never have occurred to anyone fifty years ago — or even twenty years ago — are suddenly foisted on the rest of us by the liberal mobs.

Although the left in America is widely recognized as hysterical, unreasonable, and clueless, the “root cause” of these traits has generally been neglected. More than a century ago, Gustave Le Bon perfectly captured the liberal psychological profile in his 1896 book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” Le Bon — a French physician, scientist, and social psychologist — was the first to identify the phenomenon of mass psychology. His groundbreaking book “The Crowd” paints a disturbing picture of the behavior of mobs. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used his book to learn how to incite a mob. Our liberals could have been Le Bon’s study subjects.

Even the left-wing Guardian has admitted that Le Bon’s study of crowd behavior was “possibly the most influential work of psychology ever written.” Presumably recognizing themselves in his psychological profile, liberals have recently tried to undermine Le Bon. They have complained that he merely “articulated the propertied classes’ fear of the mob.” Who likes mobs? Renters? Window manufacturers? Rope salesmen? Liberals also objected that Le Bon did not hold the police accountable for a mob’s behavior — which is like demanding that we take into account the length of the rape victim’s skirt.

It is revealing that liberals so fear Le Bon that they try to sully him as “controversial” and “reactionary.” (Those particular complaints, incidentally, were lodged by liberal activist George Monbiot, who has called for “citizen’s arrests” of former government offiials from George W. Bush’s UN ambassador John Bolton to former British prime minister Tony Blair. No wonder he doesn’t like psychological studies of mob behavior.)

It was all the usual claptrap, but the piercing truth of Le Bon’s study speaks for itself. Liberals wouldn’t go after him if, even a century later, his theories didn’t still ring true. All the characteristics of mob behavior set forth by Le Bon in 1895 are evident in modern liberalism — simplistic, extreme black-and-white thinking, fear of novelty, inability to follow logical arguments, acceptance of contradictory ideas, being transfixed by images, a religious worship of their leaders, and a blind hatred of their opponents.

Many of liberals’ peculiarities are understandable only when one realizes that they are a mob. For example, a crowd’s ability to grasp only the simplest ideas is reflected in the interminable slogans.

Liberals have boatloads of them: Bush Lied, Kids Died! Our Bodies, Our Selves! No Blood for Oil! No Justice, No Peace! Save the Whales; Love Your Mother (Earth); Ban the Bomb; Make Love, Not War; Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican; Diversity Is Our Strength! Save the Planet! Pro-Choice, Pro-Child! Support Our Troops, Bring them Home! Co-Exist! Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today? Dissent Is Patriotic! War Is Not the Answer! Go Green! Healthcare Is a Right, Not a Privilege! Imagine Peace; Celebrate Diversity! Beat the Bushes for Peace! No Nukes! Give Peace a Chance; Think Globally/Act Locally; No Tax Cuts for the Rich; Save the Planet! Venceremos! One, Two, Three, Four, We Don’t Want Your F–King War! Bush = Hitler; Hell No, We Won’t Go! Off the Pig! Eat the Rich! Die Yuppie Scum! Peace Now! We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For! Solidarity Forever! Bring America Home! You Can’t Hug a Child with Nuclear Arms; Meat Is Murder! Books Not Bombs! Fight the Power! Yes We Can!

And those are just the ones on my neighbor’s car.

What is the Tea Party’s slogan? There is none. Republicans almost never have slogans, certainly none that even they can remember — except when our presidential candidates are forced to come up with some utterly forgettable catchphrase for their campaigns.

There are only three memorable Republican slogans in the past half century — unless you count what Dick Cheney said to Pat Leahy on the Senate floor in 2004, in which case there have been four. There was, “27 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong,” after Goldwater lost in a historic landslide in 1964. There were the YAF buttons made in tribute to William F. Buckley’s mayoral campaign platform in 1965: “Don’t Let Them Immanentize the Eschaton!”

And when there were few other reasons to vote for the reelection of the first President Bush in 1992, there was,”Annoy the Media, Vote Bush!” Republicans display crosses and fish, college and sports decals, and a few parodies of liberal slogans (“Imagine an Unborn Child”), but no bossy demands on our bumper sticker.

Conservatives don’t cotton to slogans. When they finally produce one, it’s never the sort of rallying cry capable of sending people to the ramparts, such as “Yes We Can!” or “Bush Lied, Kids Died!” “27 Million Americans Can’t Be Wrong” is a wry observation, not an urgent call to battle. “Annoy the Media, Vote Bush!” — barely qualifies as a suggestion.

Conservatives write books and articles, make arguments, and seek debates, but are perplexed by slogans. (Of course, another reason Republicans may avoid bumper stickers is to prevent their cars from being vandalized, which brings us right back to another mob characteristic of liberals.)

By contrast, liberals thrive on jargon as a substitute for thought. According to Le Bon, the more dramatic and devoid of logic a chant is, the better it works to rile up a mob: “Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments. An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations. To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.”

Liberals love slogans because the “laws of logic have no action on crowds.” Mobs, Le Bon says, “are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas.”5 He could be describing the New York Times and other journals of elite opinion when he describes periodicals that “manufacture opinions for their readers and supply them with ready- made phrases which dispense them of the trouble of reasoning.”

You will see all the techniques for inspiring mobs in liberal behavior.

There are three main elements to putting an idea in a crowd: affirmation, repetition, and contagion. The effects takes time, Le Bon says, but “once produced are very lasting.” It’s the same reason annoying TV commercials are so effective. “Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. Head On! Apply directly to the forehead. Head On! Apply directly to the forehead.”

Affirmation is the creation of a slogan, free of all reasoning and all proof.” Indeed, the “conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration,” he says, “the more weight it carries.” This is “one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds.”

Affirmation only works if it is “constantly repeated, and so far as possible in the same terms.” The power of repetition “is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives or our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion, and we finish by believing it.”

Short slogans endlessly repeated create a “current of opinion” allowing “the powerful mechanism of contagion” to operate. Ideas spread through the crowd as easily as microbes, Le Bon says, which explains the mass panics common to rock concerts, financial markets, street protests, and Dennis Kucinich rallies. “A panic that has seized only a few sheep,” he observes, “will soon extend to the whole flock.”

Liberals have it down to an art: The cacophonous method of yelling until conservatives shut up just because they just want to go home, the purblind assertions — No WMDs in Iraq! Civilian Deaths! Violence at Tea Parties! Head On! Apply directly to the forehead! — and overnight the entire mass of liberals is robotically repeating the same slogans.

It isn’t only in their incessant street demonstrations that liberals talk in slogans. This is how liberals discuss serious policy matters with the public. It’s as if they’re speaking to a vast O.J. Simpson jury, mesmerized by a pair of gloves and a closing argument that rhymes (“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”).

Conservatives talk the same on TV as off TV — unless they are inarticulate politicians using sound bites to avoid saying anything stupid. But regular conservatives talk on TV as if they’re having a normal conversation with their friends or neighbors.

Liberals don’t know how to do this because they don’t have normal friends and neighbors — only fellow demonstrators. Their self-image is as little Lenins, rousing the masses at the Finland Station, which is why they always sound as if they’ve gotten control of the PA system and are broadcasting from Big Brother, Inc. — or if they’re Al Gore, addressing a kindergarten class.

Here, for example, is Stephanie Bloomingdale, of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, being interviewed on MSNBC about the union’s beef with Governor Scott Walker: “Well, America, we need all of you to help us with our fight. Because this is a fight to reclaim the values of the middle class. This is the movement of our time. And we need people all across America, working people, to stand up and say, this is the time we need to restore economic justice. And we know that the only — that the union movement is the only thing that stands between unbridled corporate greed and a true economic democracy. And we — what I would like to say is, America, stand with us, stand with us who are fighting for justice and economic justice in our society.”

The next night, Katrina Vanden Huevel was engaging in the same sort of “Internationale” hectoring: “People are waking up. And they’re in the streets. There are going to be fifty rallies around this country. Maybe a million people in the streets of this country. And what are they saying? Enough! You’re giving our people’s money away. Invest in our country, invest in jobs, invest in education. Keep cops on the street, keep teachers in the classrooms. Enough with these perks for corporations. There’s a movement called U.S. uncut, which is inspired by an article in The Nation.

“If we can recoup from the very richest who brought us this financial crisis and from corporate tax dodgers, we can balance budgets in a fair way. Justice, fairness, concepts that may be coming back to America in this moment.”

The advantage of slogans like these — “working families,” “economic justice,” “unbridled corporate greed,” and “invest in our country, invest in jobs, invest in education” — is that liberals never have to talk about the actual issues being discussed. You’d never know in the fog of jargon that the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, was only asking government employees to start paying 6 percent of their pension contributions (up from zero percent) and 12 percent of their health care insurance (up from six percent).

Similarly, the pro-abortion movement depends on never ever using the word “abortion” — only cant, such as “choice,” “family planning,” and “reproductive freedom.”

The Left’s robotic speaking style helps explain why liberals have never been able to make a dent in talk radio, despite many tries. Apparently, even the people who get bused in to their rallies can’t be paid to listen to liberals hectoring them on talk radio. Being endlessly lectured by deadly earnest liberals is boring. Ask any Cuban.

Based on their public commentary, it appears that not one liberal has the vaguest idea how the economy imploded. The only thing liberals know is — as President Obama explained — “Republicans drove the car into the ditch, made it as diffiult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive. We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.”11 (It was always a “ditch” and not a “lake” because a lake would have been offensive to Teddy Kennedy.)

A liberal would stare at you slack-jawed if you explained that the federal government, via Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, forced politically correct lending policies on the banks — policies that were attacked by Republicans but ferociously defended by Democrats — and that the banks’ suicidal loans were then bundled into mortgage- backed securities and dispersed throughout the entire financial system, which poisoned the economy, bringing down powerful institutions, such as Lehman Brothers, and destroying innumerable families’ financial portfolios.

In light of the Democrats’ direct role in creating the policies at the heart of the nation’s financial collapse, it’s not surprising that they prefer metaphors to facts. What’s strange is that the image of a car in a ditch is sufficient for the bulk of Democratic voters and commentators to adjudge themselves experts on the economic crisis and refuse to listen to explanations that aren’t images of Bush driving a car into a ditch. Image is all that matters to the mob. Obama can take in the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, as he did in 2008, but the mob will never believe he is in the pocket of Wall Street bankers.

The top- three corporate employers of donors to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Rahm Emanuel were Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan. Six other financial giants were in the top thirty donors to the White House Dream Team: UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse Group.12 In 2008 alone, Goldman Sachs employees gave more to Obama — nearly $1 million — than any other employer, with the sole exception of the entire University of California, which has 230,000 employees — ten times more than Goldman.13

And still Republicans are called the Party of Wall Street. Bush let Lehman Brothers go under — what else do Republicans have to do? Liberals latched on to the image of Bush, Cheney, and even Tom DeLay as “oilmen” to blame them for everything from Enron’s collapse to blackouts and high oil prices.

In 2006, Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed “oilmen” in public office for high oil prices — and hearing Pelosi try to craft a syllogism is like watching Michael Moore attempt ballet. She said, “We have two oilmen in the White House. The logical follow-up from that is $3-a-gallon gasoline. It is no accident. It is a cause and effect. A cause and effect.” That’s all liberals needed to know. Two “oilmen” in the White House — cause and effect. Strangely though, a barrel of oil costs the same on the world market for all those other countries that were not being run by “oilmen.”

A few years earlier, she had blamed Bush and Representative Tom DeLay for the blackout throughout the Northeast United States and parts of Canada — presumably because they are both from Texas — saying they had “put the interests of the energy companies before the interests of the American people.”14 In fact, the blackout was due to a failure of humans operating electric power; it had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.

The New York Times’s Paul Krugman has written more than a dozen columns making hazy connections between Bush and the corrupt and collapsed Enron — “Some cynics attribute the continuing absence of Enron indictments to the Bush family’s loyalty code”  — despite Bush’s having absolutely nothing to do with the company, other than being from Texas.

By contrast, Krugman was on Enron’s advisory board while he was writing encomiums to Enron in Fortune magazine.16 Once a year, when I don’t feel like writing a column, I think I’ll reprint Krugman’s column singing Enron’s praises — although, again, in fairness, he was being paid by Enron at the time.

Democrats wouldn’t make such absurd statements if absurdity didn’t seem perfectly logical to their base. This is how Democrats communicate with their constituents: They use mob tactics to rile up the irrational masses. Crowds can’t grasp logic, only images. “These image- like ideas,” Le Bon says, “are not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic lantern which the operator withdraws from the groove in with they were placed one above the other.”

Republicans love Wall Street — oh look, Wall Street just made historic campaign contributions to Obama; he must be really cool. Republicans hate the poor because they’re trying to block government policies promoting easy mortgages. . . . Oops, I wonder why the economy just tanked. It’s because Bush drove it into a ditch! Enron collapsed and Paul Krugman says it’s Bush’s fault. Krugman was paid by Enron and Bush wasn’t? Bush lied, kids died! Oil prices went up under Bush — it’s his fault — he’s an oilman! Oh but then oil prices went down under Bush. . . . Hey, look over there! A shiny object!

Despite their perennial enthusiasm for revolution and “change” in almost any form, Le Bon says, crowds are wildly conservative when it comes to scientific progress. Want to scare a liberal? Mention nuclear power plants, genetically modified fruits, new pharmaceuticals, food irradiation, or guns with plastic frames. We could probably get a crowd of liberal protesters to scatter just by coming at them with a modern vacuum cleaner.

It certainly works on dogs and cats. The Left’s abject terror of technological development is yet another mob attribute. Le Bon says that the mob’s “unconscious horror” of “all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted.”

While mobs go about changing the names of institutions and demanding radical changes to society, he says, when it comes to scientific progress, crowds have a “fetish- like respect” for tradition.18

Thus, according to Le Bon, if “democracies possessed the power they wield today at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam- power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible.” It is lucky “for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.”

Our liberals are even worse than Le Bon imagined. Democrats don’t merely want to block scientific progress, they want to roll it back. Al Gore’s global warming fantasy book Earth in the Balance called for the worldwide elimination of the internal combustion engine within twenty-five years. (Which, if nothing else, would have ruined Obama’s “car in the ditch” catch-phrase.)

In 2007, Democrats in Congress banned the incandescent lightbulb, currently scheduled for elimination in 2014. Indeed, banning Thomas Edison’s invention was among the very fi rst acts of the new House majority elected in 2006, in a bill cosponsored by 195 Democrats and only 3 Republicans (two of whom are no longer in office). When Democrats came up with the idea of banning the lightbulb, what image appeared in their heads? A litcandle? Only four Democrats voted against the bill in both the House and then Senate, with the vast majority of Republicans voting against it in both chambers.

Consider that the two industries that provoke the most fear and loathing in liberals are two of the most innovative: the oil and pharmaceutical industries. When a majority of the country objected to national health care because, among other reasons, it would mean the end of innovation in medicine once the government took over, liberals stared in blank incomprehension. (It was almost as if they’d been drugged.) They believe every drug, every diagnosis, every therapy, every cure that will ever be invented has already been invented. Their job is to spread all the existing cures, not to worry about who will discover new ones.

The only traditions liberals are eager to smash are moral and sexual ones, such as marriage and protecting the unborn. Crowds are too impulsive to be moral, according to Le Bon, which explains why liberals are mad for innovation when it comes to thousands-year-old institutions like marriage. Only when it comes to scientifi c innovation, are they hidebound traditionalists.

Indeed, the only way to get liberals interested in novel scientific research is to propose slaughtering human embryos. When adult stem cell researchers had already produced treatments for eighty different diseases, 21 while embryonic stem cell researchers were stuck in the dark ages, the failed researchers won liberal hearts by pointing out that their method destroyed human fetuses, while adult stem research did not.

As long as Democrats can win by demagoguing the mob, they are perfectly happy to turn America into a banana republic. With the country drowning in debt and Medicare and Social Security putting us on a high-speed bullet train to bankruptcy, the entire Democratic Party refuses to deal with entitlements. Instead, they will gin up the mobs to throw out any politician who cuts these increasingly theoretical “benefits.” The country will have the economy of Uganda, but Democrats will be in total control.

Rich liberals want chaos for everyone except themselves, confident that they can afford a “green” lifestyle and their children will still attend Sidwell Friends. The rest of us are forced to live in a lawless universe of no energy, gay marriage, girl soldiers, and marauding criminals because liberals can’t enjoy their wealth unless other people are living in complete pandemonium. They promote anarchy, believing the middle class should live in squalor, while liberals will be protected by their wealth against the mob.

The seminal event of the New Testament — Jesus’ crucifixion — is a dramatic illustration of the power of the mob.

When the mob was howling for Pontius Pilate to sentence Jesus to death, even Pilate’s wife couldn’t convince him to spare Jesus. After having a dream about Jesus, Pilate’s wife sent her husband a note saying Jesus was innocent — a “just man.” Pilate knew Jesus was innocent and that the mob hated Jesus out of “envy.” But not his wife, not even his own common sense, was enough for him to resist the mob.

Three times Pilate told the “multitude” that Jesus was innocent and should be spared. He pleaded with the mob, proposing to “chastise him, and release him.” But the mob was immovable, demanding Jesus’ crucifixion. Pilate was required to release one of the prisoners, so he gave the mob the choice of Jesus or Barabbas, a notorious murderer and insurrectionist — in other words, someone who incites mobs. Again, the mob “spoke with one voice,” demanding “with loud shouts” that Jesus be crucified.

Capitulating to the mob, Pilate ordered Jesus’ death.

Even one of the mob’s victims, a thief being crucifi ed alongside Jesus, joined the mob’s taunting, saying to Jesus, “If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.” The other thief rebuked him, noting that they were guilty, whereas Jesus was not. He said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.” And Jesus said “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.”Pilate gave in to the mob out of fear. The thief joined the mob to side with the majority. The mob itself was driven by envy.

Although it all worked out in the end — Jesus died, darkness fell over the Earth, the ground trembled, and the temple veil was ripped in two, and three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, giving all peoplethe promise of everlasting life — here was the stark choice, to be repeated like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence: Jesus or Barabbas?

Liberals say Barabbas: Go with the crowd. C’mon, everybody’s doing it — it’s cool. Now let’s go mock Jesus. (As is so often the case, the mob said, “Kill the Jew.”)

Conservatives — sublimely uninterested in the opinion of the mob — say Jesus.

AMEN!

The Ghost of Depressions Past

Two years into a “recovery,” the unemployment rate leaps to 9.1% and just 54,000 new jobs are created. Is this just “bumps on the road to recovery,” as the White House insists, or something more dangerous?

This has been the most miserable recovery in modern history. Not only are there not enough jobs being created, but also the economy itself looks to be stalling.

Yet the Obama administration is crowing about its accomplishments as if slowing growth and rising joblessness have nothing to do with its bad policies.

“The initiatives put in place by this administration — such as the payroll tax cut and business incentives for investment — have contributed to solid employment growth overall this year, but this report is a reminder of the challenges that remain,” said Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s top economic adviser.

“Solid employment growth”? Since the end of last year, job growth has averaged 130,500 a month — about the number of people who enter the workforce each month. That’s not “solid” enough.

By the way, the unemployment rate has been below 9% for just five months since Obama took office — and three of those months were in the first 12 weeks of his presidency, before his policies took effect. (IBD)

The Democrats are focused on NOT passing a budget. They are not concerned with China dumping out debt. They are just attacking like angry bees anyone who might disagree with them.

“Throw grandma off a cliff” “End / Kill Medicare” et al.

And what are the Republicans doing about it? Not much.

But we can obsess about Wiener’s Weiner!

And today is the anniversary D-Day.

But at least they spent $2 million to produce a new “food pyramid” so the stupid morons who don’t know that chips and beer is not a food group can ignore this too.

The upcoming election may become less about candidates and more about whether enough voters believe America faces a looming collapse that must be addressed now. Democrats minimize the threat of unfunded entitlements and our growing debt and promise to stay the course to “protect” those who depend on government support. Republicans, pointing to a looming crisis brought on by our unsustainable entitlement culture, the exploding deficit, and an anemic economic recovery, propose an austere budget and program changes that can easily be demagogued as severe and uncaring. One party campaigns on “caring enough to give you what you want” while the other campaigns on “caring enough to confront America’s unsustainable path.” As a result, the 2012 election may be the most important choice Americans have faced in decades.

With apologies to Charles Dickens’ beloved family classic, A Christmas Carol, what some voters need is a midnight visit by the ghosts of elections past, present and future to break through the denial that so many exhibit.

The Ghost of Elections Past might show voters how Roosevelt’s New Deal, designed to combat the Great Depression, actually suppressed economic growth and prolonged the depression and high unemployment. He’d point to President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Designed to wage war against poverty, Johnson launched costly entitlements that expanded the reach and cost of government—expanded welfare, low-income housing, Head Start, and Medicare. Over the next thirty years, over 5 trillion dollars was spent on the “war on poverty,” but the number of Americans in poverty remained the same. Worse yet, more Americans were now dependent on expensive government programs, and responsible taxpayers were feeling the strain on their pocketbooks.

The ghost could note that when the Social Security Act of 1935 was being debated, it was estimated that Social Security payments would total $4 billion in 1980. In fact, government paid out a staggering $108 billion—off by a massive 2,600%. When Medicare was instituted in 1965, the House Ways and Means analysts predicted it would cost $12 billion in 1990; the actual cost topped $110 billion. They estimated that Medicare Part A would cost $9 billion in 1990—the actual cost $67 billion. Washington entitlements always cost more than projected!

The Ghost of Elections Present would point to the stark contrast about what was promised in President Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign and the economic results after two years of his administration. The ghost could show the empty storefronts indicative of our anemic “recovery,” the continuing housing defaults and dropping price index, the long unemployment lines, the exploding gas prices at the pump, and end with a face-to-face encounter with the rapidly advancing U.S. Debt Clock.

But it’s the Ghost of Elections Future who could bring home the implications of the upcoming election. Four more years of President Obama means home prices continue on their downward spiral and bankruptcies grow with no relief in sight. The private sector responds to increased taxes, regulations and healthcare costs by refusing to hire more workers. Layoffs continue and real unemployment approaches 20%. The Fed continues to print dollars and buy debt, bringing creditors to the realization that they’ll never be repaid in anything other than a massively devalued dollar.

Reacting to the loss of confidence in the dollar, the IMF and WTO choose to no longer use the U.S. dollar as the standard currency of exchange. With the dollar nothing more than the obligation of a bankrupt government, a new round of double-digit inflation is unleashed. The cost of imported oil skyrockets. With over half of Americans receiving some form of direct government payments and the top 10% of wage earners unable to carry the load, state and federal governments are forced to make severe austerity cuts. With the cuts and the devalued dollar, the poor and middle class are hit with a devastating blow. Millions take to the street in protest, but the government cupboards are bare, and no one is willing to fund America’s debt.

Rather than being caught in America’s collapse, companies that can…leave. Those with wealth have long since moved to gold and strategic commodities. The ghost ends his warning pointing to a cavernous cliff a mile in the distance where young and old alike are forced off a cliff of no return for America.

Have you had enough of my ghosts? Get past the denial; we can’t borrow forever! As citizens, we must face the problems our current president refuses to address. Be prepared. Demand both parties to provide viable answers instead of campaign rhetoric. If we don’t, get ready to face three ghosts in your dreams…or, even worse, a nightmare that becomes reality! (Terry Paulson)

Ams for the poor?

Sorry, we are supposed to have Hope and Change and Win the (Socialist) Future for the Annoited One?

Ignore the Debt behind the curtain!

isn’t he just so wonderful….

The Democrats are Coo-Coo For their Coco Puffs!

Proof of the old saying was evidenced this week.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

Welcome, to the Democrat Party.

We are over $14 Trillion dollars in debt. The economy is on the verge of a double dip recession and possible depression because Obamanomics is a total failure.

The Chinese are divesting themselves of our Treasury Bills.

The housing market is a worse as it has ever been.

Inflation is crushing the average American.

The Democrats childishly and stubbornly will not propose or pass a budget (April 2009 was the last one).

So what do the Democrats want to do: SPEND EVEN MORE!

With the release of a discouraging economic report this week, Democrats have only one response: more government spending!

House Democrats this week have amplified their calls for new spending on infrastructure and other federal projects in the face of May’s discouraging job-creation figures.

Even as Republicans are insisting on “trillions” of dollars in spending cuts, Democrats maintain that a targeted injection of additional federal dollars in the near-term would go a long way toward reversing the hiring slump. Friday’s disappointing job report, they say, only bolsters their case.

“The American people, while concerned about the deficit, place much more emphasis on job creation, and they see a role for the government,” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) (Mr. Boycott my State himself!) told The Hill. “A fast injection of job stimulus on the public side would help tremendously. … It [the job report] helps our argument about investment.”   

The 2 Stimulus plus the 2 “quantitative easings” (government printing money from thin air to pump up the economy-allegedly)  have done so well so far, lets just do more of it and everything will be hunky-dory.

This would be the fifth stimulus program passed by the U.S. government since 2008.

But this one will work! According to the Democrats. If they just keep doing it someday it will work!

We just have wish really, really hard! We have to relentless chant “Yes! We Can!!” “Yes! We Can!!” “Yes! We Can!!”

<<sound of a coo-coo clock going off>>

Other Democrats delivered a similar message on Friday. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said “the answer” to the lingering jobs crisis is “investment” in the “communities and businesses who need confidence and resources to hire [people].”

Remember: Investment= SPENDING money we don’t have.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) said “investing in our communities goes hand in hand with full economic recovery.”

Heard this one before? Yep. Is it working yet? Nope.

So what we need is an even BIGGER Stimulus! That will work!

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) said that only in Washington is targeted new spending being demonized.

“Once you get outside the Beltway, almost everyone agrees that we should be rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and investing in clean American energy that reduces our dependence on oil,” Blumenauer said.

Well, he has that backwards. Typical delusional Liberal.

The remarks are a stark contrast to the Republicans’ plans to cut trillions of dollars in federal spending to bring down the nation’s soaring deficits. Those deficits, they argue, have crippled the ability of the private sector to hire new workers. Friday’s job report, the Republicans contend, is evidence that the Democrats’ deficit-spending strategy has failed.

“If you talk to job creators around the country like we have, they’ll tell you all the over-taxing, over-regulating, and over-spending that’s going on in Washington is creating uncertainty and holding them back,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said at a press conference Friday.

“One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House it’s time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy,” he said.

The spending debate was stirred up Friday by the Labor Department’s report that the economy created only 54,000 jobs in May – about a quarter of the average job growth over the last three months. Of those, roughly 83,000 were created by the private sector. State and local governments have been shedding jobs for months, and that trend continued in May, the Labor Department found.

Leaders from both parties blamed the other side for the continued jobs crisis. Democrats flung charges that House Republicans have yet to bring a jobs bill to the floor this year, while GOP leaders countered with accusations that the 2009 economic stimulus bill was a flop.

“They passed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill which failed to get people back to work,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said last week of the $787 billion stimulus bill. That proposal featured $288 billion in tax benefits; $275 billion for energy and infrastructure projects; and $224 billion for safety-net programs.

Both sides have proposed legislative packages they say will spur job creation. Democrats are pushing their “Make It In America” agenda, a package of bills designed to increase manufacturing and discourage the outsourcing of jobs. It includes proposals to boost funding for airports, highways and high-speed rail, and also develops a national infrastructure development bank.

Republicans, meanwhile, have proposed to cut taxes, eliminate trade barriers and scale back federal regulations that the business lobby considers burdensome.

If the Democrats see the government as a necessary catalyst for economic recovery, the Republicans just want to get it out of the private sector’s way.

Dennis Slater, president of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, a trade group, suggested Friday that the most effective strategy would incorporate elements of both approaches. 

“Until Congress and the administration agree to make America’s farmers and manufacturers a national priority by passing free trade agreements and investing in critical national infrastructure – both proven drivers of economic growth – unemployment will remain unacceptably high and our economy will continue to stagnate,” Slater said in a statement.

Grijalva, the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the Democrats could be doing much more to convince the public of the merits of an increase in targeted spending.

Just like all the other things (like ObamaCare) if we just talk you to death we can convince you we’re right. We just haven’t talked enough!

Oh God…not that…please make them stop!

“I don’t know if it’s a question of being able to sell it, or [that] we haven’t fully embraced the concept as our own,” he said. “It’s a winner. I don’t know for the life of me why we’re not being more assertive on this point.” (The Hill)

Want an easy explanation for why the economy and hiring have slowed again? Try this: High gas prices have erased the stimulative effects of the tax-cut deal President Obama and Republicans cut at the end of 2010. That’s the view from researchers at Morgan Stanley. Other analysts made similar revisions this week. Deutsche Bank cut its 2011 outlook from 3.4 percent to 3.1 percent. IHS Global Insight cut from 2.7 percent to 2.5 percent. They all cite the effects of high gas prices.

So there you have it. In light of stunningly ineffective stimulus so far, Democrats think that the evidence shows we need more money artificially pumped into the economy, surely financed by more deficit spending, further ratcheting up our debt. (Daily Caller)

So what if we’re broke and the Debt Ceiling has been reached– Lets just SPEND EVEN MORE!!

Not that’s just Coo-Coo For Keynesian CoCo-Puffs!

The Future So Bright I have to Spin Dry

The Obama administration is 0-for-3 in meeting economic expectations. In 2009, President Obama and his advisers believed the bountiful stimulus package would give the economy a strong jolt. It didn’t, and still hasn’t. In 2010, Obama declared Recovery Summer and predicted a surge in employment. The economy lost 283,000 jobs over the summer. This year, Obama expected a significant ratcheting up of jobs and growth. There’s been a ratcheting down. Presidenting for Dummies Gary Locke The White House always has an excuse. Obama’s economic policies are never at fault. The problem in 2009, according to Obama? The economy was in worse shape than he’d feared when he took office. In 2010, economic adviser Christina Romer said the dip in jobs was unexpected. No doubt it was, but that’s a lame explanation. And Obama stubbornly refused to express regret for having proclaimed Recovery Summer in the first place. Now, two years after the recession officially ended, the excuses for economic stagnation and puny job growth are stale and implausible. Obama didn’t offer any in an economic speech in Toledo a few hours after bad job numbers for May were released last week. Romer’s replacement, Austan Goolsbee, dismissed the 9.1 percent jobless rate as a bump “along the road to recovery.” House Democratic whip Steny Hoyer blamed the Bush administration—really, he did. Yet Obama labors on as if his policies are working, only a bit more slowly than he’d anticipated. In two and a half years in the White House, he appears to have learned nothing about what stirs the economy and produces jobs and growth. Evidence of failure, like 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter of 2011, matters little. Rather than a midterm course correction, Obama wants more of the same, lots more. (Fred Barnes)

According to the unemployment data released this morning, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.1 percent. However, this report from MarketWatch suggests the data is much worse than that:

McDonald’s ran a big hiring day on April 19 — after the Labor Department’s April survey for the payrolls report was conducted — in which 62,000 jobs were added. That’s not a net number, of course, and seasonal adjustment will reduce the Hamburglar impact on payrolls. (In simpler terms — restaurants always staff up for the summer; the Labor Department makes allowance for this effect.) Morgan Stanley estimates McDonald’s hiring will boost the overall number by 25,000 to 30,000. The Labor Department won’t detail an exact McDonald’s figure — they won’t identify any company they survey — but there will be data in the report to give a rough estimate.

If Morgan Stanley is correct, about half of last month’s job growth came from the venerable fast-food chain. That is hardly the sign of a healthy economy. (Weekly Standard).

And McDonalds was the first of over 1,300+ companies and organization (and even states) to get ObamaCare waivers. Coincidence??

But you won’t hear it from the Mainstream Ministry of Truth Press or even our Dear Leader.

President Barack Obama says the U.S. economy is still facing challenges and it is going to take more time to mend the wounds inflicted by the recession.

So you need to re-elect him in 2012 so he can finish the job. <<wink wink>>

“Every time we look at those numbers we don’t get too excited by what those numbers say, or we don’t get too disappointed by what those numbers say. What we’re looking at is the overall trend,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One. “If you look at where we’ve come from, the turnaround is pretty dramatic.”

He’s serious, folks. Really, he’s serious…

Distancing himself from new economic sputters, President Barack Obama on Saturday declared that recent “headwinds” were the result of high gasoline prices, Japan’s disastrous earthquake and jitters over a European fiscal crisis. He cited the U.S. auto industry’s resurgence as an inspiration for a broader recovery.

“We’re a people who don’t give up, who do big things, who shape our own destiny,” the president said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

<<Barf bag on Standby>>

Sen Lamar Alexander (R-TN) cited a perfect Obama example of the ‘right kind’ of job our Dear Leader wants and if he can’t get it, f*ck it!

He cited the case of Boeing, which was accused last month by the National Labor Relations Board of retaliating against union workers in Washington state who went on strike in 2008 by locating a new assembly line for its 787 aircraft in South Carolina, a state with right-to-work laws. The NLRB is seeking a court order that would force Boeing to return all 787 assembly work to Washington.

Obama promoted “investments” in education and technology, and touted his management of the auto industry, which he said saved millions of jobs.

The Bush and Obama administrations pumped $80 billion in taxpayer money into Chrysler and GM, with Obama guiding the companies into bankruptcy. The companies are now reporting profits, Chrysler has paid back all but $1.3 billion of its federal infusion, and the White House declared this week that the overall loss to taxpayers will be $14 billion, far less than initially expected.

And that’s the Good News!?

The president also called for spending cuts and hinted at tax increases. “We’ve got to live within our means, everybody’s got to do their part,” he said. ”Middle-class workers like you, though, shouldn’t be bearing all the burden.  You work too hard for someone to ask you to pay more so that somebody who’s making millions or billions of dollars can pay less.”

Obama evoked national pride: “[W]e are people who will forge a better future because that is what we do… when we come together, no-one can stop us” – then reprised his ‘Win the Future’ slogan and declared that “we can live out the American dream again… that’s what drives me every day I step into the Oval office.”

<<excuse me>>  RALPH!….

“We’re still feeling the sting of the recession… even though the economy is growing, even though it has created more than 2 million jobs in the last 15 months,” 

<<RALPH>>

Consider the evidence: We already know that (a) the president appointed a debt commission, then ignored its recommendations on ideological grounds; (b) the White House has already released its 2012 budget, which was so disastrous that it received zero votes in the Democrat-controlled Senate; (c) President Obama offered a grand new “vision” for entitlement reform in April, which conspicuously lacked any actual solutions; and (d) Democrats everywhere are deliberately avoiding committing to any plan of their own, opting instead to focus their attention on demagoguing and lying about Paul Ryan’s responsible alternative.  Against that backdrop, ta da! (Nice catch by ABC Newsman Jake Tapper, based on his exchange with White House Press Secretary Jay Carney):

    TAPPER:  In the meeting yesterday with House Republicans, a number of the House Republicans said to the president that they wanted him to introduce a budget that was score-able — that CBO could actually assess — instead of what he introduced, the broad outlines and the April speech at GW, and the president seemed to indicate he was not going to do that.  You — I think you said from the podium that he wanted something score-able that was part of a compromise, not his own separate budget proposal.  Why not?  If the Republicans in the House are saying it would help the negotiating process to have a score-able –

    CARNEY:  Well, we heard two things — we heard two things from the Republicans yesterday:  one from the speaker that we need to get these negotiations wrapped up and finished in the next few weeks, and that the president should put forward a new plan, a new proposal, that should make its way through Congress and be scored.  I don’t think those are compatible.

    Everyone knows what the president’s position is, what his plan is, the parameters of his plan.  It’s quite clear.  The Democrats are aware of it.  Republicans are aware of it.  The president’s spoken about it at length.

    And that is what the vice president brought to the table for these negotiations.  We are at a point now where we don’t need new plans.  We need to find common ground around the shared goal of significant deficit reduction and come together, hold hands, and agree that we’re going to get this done and find as much common ground as we can in what the president believes needs to be a balanced approach towards deficit reduction — because as I said earlier, it is not a goal unto itself.

Translation: Uh, we have a plan!  (They don’t).  It’s very clear! (By definition, it isn’t)  So, we don’t need any, you know, score-able blueprints.  We need bipartisan consensus!  (Just like Simpson/Bowles?)  Another gutless runaround from Democrats on entitlements — color me shocked.  Hey, no worries — it’s not as if Medicare is cataclysmically speeding toward insolvency, or anything. (Guy Benson).

So what if the National Debt is over $14 Trillion. The Democrats haven’t passed a budget is April 2009. There’s a Double Dip recession on the horizon. Your house is worthless…But Obama is still in Large and In Charge!

Re-Elect him! He’s wonderful!

Be Happy!

Hope and Change II is on the way…

The Next Disney Fantasy…

How to Avoid ObamaCare :)

“I can make a firm pledge.  Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.  Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,”
President Obama, September 12, 2008
REAL ESTATE SALES TAX
Beginning January 1, 2013, ObamaCare imposes a 3.8% Medicare tax on unearned income, including the sale of single family homes, townhouses, co-ops, condominiums, and even rental income.

In February 2010, 5.02 million homes were sold, according to the National Association of Realtors.  On any given day, the sale of a house, townhome, condominium, co-op, or income from a rental property can push middle-income families over the $250,000 threshold and slam them with a new tax they can’t afford.

This new ObamaCare tax is the first time the government will apply a 3.8 percent tax on unearned income.  This new tax on home sales and unearned income and other Medicare taxes raise taxes more than $210 billion to pay for ObamaCare.   The National Association of Realtors called this new Medicare tax on unearned income “destructive” and “ill-advised” and warned it would hurt job creation.

•  It raises taxes by more than a half-trillion dollars over the next 10 years B the largest tax increase in American history.

• It cuts more than a half-trillion dollars from Medicare to finance a new entitlement, and includes a series of additional gimmicks that hide the true cost of the legislation.

• It adds to an already unsustainable rate of government spending growth that will overwhelm the Federal budget and sacrifice the Nation’s future prosperity.

But if you can change it, Armageddon! Grandma being thrown off a cliff! Medicare will end and Seniors will be thrown out into streets to fend for themselves against the evil corporate pack wolves and they will be ripped apart by the evil capitalists!!!

You can’t live without Government controlling of your life!

Want to avoid Obamacare:

President Obama’s solicitor general, defending the national health care law on Wednesday, told a federal appeals court that Americans who didn’t like the individual mandate could always avoid it by choosing to earn less money.

Neal Kumar Kaytal, the acting solicitor general, made the argument under questioning before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, which was considering an appeal by the Thomas More Law Center. (Listen to oral arguments here.) The three-judge panel, which was comprised of two Republican-appointed judges and a Democratic-appointed judge, expressed more skepticism about the government’s defense of the health care law than the Fourth Circuit panel that heard the Virginia-based Obamacare challenge last month in Richmond. The Fourth Circuit panel was made up entirely of Democrats, and two of the judges were appointed by Obama himself.

So Obama solicitor general says: If you don’t like mandate, earn less money.

Which by the way qualifies you for, wait for it: GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE!!

TA DA!

The so-called “hardship exemption” in the health care law is limited, and only applies to people who cannot obtain insurance for less than 8 percent of their income. So earning less isn’t necessarily a solution, because it could then qualify the person for government-subsidized insurance which could make their contribution to premiums fall below the 8 percent threshold.

Amazing how that happens.

The new Medicare investment tax provides a disincentive for business expansion. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) reports, “The $250,000/$500,000 thresholds only apply to the sale of a primary residence, so the tax will hit other property sales harder.”

NFIB also points out that this tax “marks the first time that non-wage income is designated to fund Medicare.” Beyond its marginal effects on real estate sales, the new application of the Medicare tax to investment income will have substantial effects on the economy at large. Analysts in Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis write, “Raising the tax burden on investment income further damages the economy and ultimately affects all members of society.” Their findings show that this tax will result in lost job opportunities, a reduction in productivity, losses in gross domestic product, and reductions in household income.

So is there a sales tax on real estate included in the health care law? In some cases, yes. But will the same provision that taxes some profits from real estate cause widespread damage to the economy? Absolutely.

The issue is not whether Medicare costs should be controlled but how. Congress can pursue one of two routes: (1) It can change the structure and culture of Medicare to empower patients to make health care decisions in order to achieve the best value, forcing plans and providers to compete for their dollars (cue the liberals screaming “ending Medicare”), or (2) it can further empower bureaucracy to impose top-down controls on the costs of services. This can indeed reduce spending, but it guarantees a simultaneous reduction in the quality of health care Americans enjoy today.

The first is the path taken by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R–WI) in his fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. Heritage’s Robert Moffit and James Capretta write that a premium support system like the one proposed by Ryan would:

…give Medicare patients control over the flow of dollars and freedom to make decisions about how they access medical services. This will stimulate intense market competition among plans and providers, control costs, and promote rapid innovation and higher productivity through the efficient delivery of quality care, thus guaranteeing value in return for retiree premiums and taxpayer dollars.

Last week, President Obama embraced the alternative: toughen up the bureaucracy and ratchet down Medicare payment to doctors and hospitals. The President described strengthening the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a 15-member board of unelected officials created under Obamacare to rein in the cost of Medicare.

Under Obamacare, the board can tweak Medicare to hold growth in spending beneath its target, mainly by making cuts to provider reimbursement rates. Reducing provider payments means reduced senior access to physicians, another form of rationing of health care that already occurs to some extent in Medicare today.

Strengthening IPAB could have even more alarming consequences. The President suggested further reducing the growth rate target IPAB would act to achieve. The White House would “give IPAB additional tools to improve the quality of care while reducing costs, including allowing it to promote value-based benefit designs that promote proven services like prevention without shifting costs to seniors.” In addition, it would “give IPAB additional enforcement mechanisms such as an automatic sequester as a backstop for IPAB, Congress, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services.”

So you can trust the Government to take care of you, or you can just die horribly or just take a poverty-inducing job –according to Democrats.

Now don’t you feel better!

Are you Swelling with All that Hope & Change!

Selective

We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land nor, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. That chart is the Constitution. Daniel Webster

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. Samuel Adams

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. Thomas Jefferson

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.- Thomas Jefferson

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.-Thomas Jefferson

Obama, as usual, thought that a nice, calm, sit-down meeting with his opposition could solve everything. I suspect that Obama thinks his magic voice and oratory skills are enough to convince Republicans to cave on everything he wants.

    Obama’s meeting with the huge assembly of House Republicans yielded no concrete progress, although both sides said it was productive simply in that both sides of a deeply divided government were able to have a candid discussion.

Part of that candid discussion apparently involved the GOP to nicely ask Obama to just stop lying about the Ryan plan to reform Medicare. We’ll see if their requests get heeded.

There are reportedly behind-the-scenes negotiations that have shown a little bit more promise than this little publicity stunt. Apparently Joe Biden, who’s leading the talks, has a bit more of a flair for negotiation than The One.

In the interest of the stability of financial markets, Speaker John Boehner is pushing for a resolution to the debt ceiling stand-off within the month, despite having an August dead-stop deadline for when the US will have to either default on its debt obligations or cut other spending in order to pay for the debt.

Regardless, it’s clear that this most recent, highly-publicized meeting is unlikely to turn out to lead anywhere. Big surprise! (Townhall.com)

Democrats in Congress recently went all out to try to pass the Dream Act, an amnesty for illegal-alien students willing to enroll — and stay — in college. Most who opposed it were derided as heartless at best, racist at worse. An insolvent California — still struggling with its $15 billion budget shortfall — is trying to advance its own version of the bill that would contravene federal immigration law and cost millions of dollars.

At about the same time, the state has announced plans to release about 40,000 prison inmates due to a shortage of funds needed to address overcrowding. Highly taxed Californians can borrow money to send illegal aliens to school, but not to keep felons in prison.

Americans still seethe about the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. But the “fat-cat bankers,” in fact, were players in a far larger fraud made possible by liberal executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bill Clinton’s appointees and insider friends like Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, and Robert Rubin made millions while agencies and banks they oversaw lost billions.

It was just disclosed that Rep. Barney Frank helped land a job at Fannie Mae for his then-live-in boyfriend Herb Moses — despite at the time sitting on a House oversight committee that monitored the federally regulated agency. Fannie Mae went belly up. Moses made a lot of money. And Frank kept assuring the public in hearings that the nearly insolvent agency was in no financial danger.

When news surfaced about Frank’s conflict of interest, he scoffed, “There is no rule against it at all,” and predicted the story would die. He was right, it will. But substitute scary names like Dick Cheney or Halliburton and it would not have.

Last week, President Obama quietly signed a renewal of the once-hated Patriot Act — rather nonchalantly from the United Kingdom via mechanical autopen. There was no media outrage, there were no hyperbolic campus protests, no juvenile outbursts from a Hollywood celebrity about shredding the Constitution. Most even forgot that senatorial candidate Barack Obama had once promised to help repeal the Patriot Act.

But then such moral outrage belongs to the now fossilized age of George W. Bush’s presidency, when the exalted goal of stopping a conservative Texan justified any means of opposition necessary. We may continue almost all of his antiterrorism protocols, but they can no longer earn elite outrage.

The same holds true of the ongoing efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that somehow reverted to back-page news. Moveon.org could care less about the new involvement in Libya, and the media now could care less about Moveon.org — in the same manner that Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore are now no more than extinct dinosaurs of a forgotten Jurassic age. After all, Iraq magically went from the “worst” mistake in U.S. foreign policy history to one of the Obama administration’s “greatest achievements.”

Social Security and Medicare are nearing implosion. The aging baby boomers are about ready to retire in mass. They have no reputation for either stoic acceptance or self-sacrifice. The people are overtaxed, and the government is running a $1.6 trillion annual deficit. So either the retirement age must be upped, benefits cut, high payroll taxes further increased, or portions of the entitlements privatized to spur competition and efficiency.

And the progressive response to proposed remedies? Instead of a detailed plan of salvation, we see ads portraying a Rep. Paul Ryan look-alike, who is not just throwing an elderly woman out of her wheelchair, but sending her over a cliff as well.

There is a vast machinery of selective liberal outrage, fueled and lubricated by the media, universities and celebrity entertainment. When the redistributive welfare state starts to run out of money, the gears and pulleys are flipped on and shrill charges of greed, cruelty, nativism and racism spew out of the production line. The machine sputters and shuts down when an aggrieved liberal suddenly either must make cuts or adapt the very policies that he used to damn.

Understand the mechanics of selective outrage, and our upside-down politics become comprehensible: A state suing to enforce immigration law is tantamount to a racist intrusion on federal jurisdiction, but a state openly flouting federal statutes for the Dream Act is acting in enlightened humanitarian fashion.

Greedy Wall Street insiders at the center of the 2008 meltdown could not possibly include progressive bureaucrats and their liberal enablers in Congress, who are interested in people first, profits last. Everything in 2006 that we were told was near fascistic about national security suddenly evolved into what is wonderful and necessary.

Heck, General “Betray-Us” is now Obama’s pick to run the CIA!

There is no constant in life like the hypocrisy and selective childishness of The Left.

 

 

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Burger!

Government Nanny Award: Terry Pierce of the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources!

It is illegal in North Carolina to cook or serve a Burger that is anything less than Medium (and apparently has been for some time).

No Rare, but more importantly (to us foodies) NO MEDIUM RARE.

You can read the regulations. They’re in the N.C. Administrative Code, and that’s accessible online, at www.deh.enr.state.nc.us/ehs/rules.htm. You want Section 2600, “Rules Governing The Sanitation of Food Service Establishments.”

In the administrative rules, you will find Rule 2609, Part E:

“Potentially hazardous foods requiring cooking shall be cooked to heat all parts of the food to a temperature of at least 140 degrees F (60 degrees C) except as follows:”

And then: “(3): Ground beef and foods containing ground beef shall be cooked to an internal temperature of at least 155 degrees F (68 degrees C).” (Charlotte Observer).

That’s Medium folks, you know, no pink and on it’s way to shoe leather.

“We don’t get too many complaints,” said Luke Thomas, bar manager at Big Daddy’s Burger in Charlotte. “People are used to it.”

Of course, after 18 years of Nanny State you don’t know anything else (apparently it started after the E.Coli scare of 1993 so Government stepped in to protect you from yourself!). The big wide world is a scary place when Nanny is not there looking out for you!

Just think what ObamaCare will be in 20 Years if it’s not stopped.

Look at Medicare. It’s broke. It’s unsustainable. But if you touch it the Liberal will electrocute you call down the wrath of their Socialist God (The Media) on you.

Restaurants that don’t follow the current state law aren’t shut down for serving a rare burger, but lose points on their sanitation scores, which must be publicly displayed. Some burger joints reportedly insist on cooking to order, but they keep it under wraps.

Black Market Prohibition-style Medium Rare!

I wonder if these people have anxiety attacks if they go a burger joint in another state.

Isn’t your government Nanny wonderful. Just think what will happen when ObamaCare is in full swing, you won’t even get a burger because it’s bad for you to begin with. Evil Meat. Evil Salt. Evil Fat. Killing animals-evil!

So in North Carolina, enjoy your Medium non-pink, non-juicy burgers while you can.

And the rest of us will hope this disease doesn’t spread. But give Liberals an inch they’ll take a light year.

But North Carolina is hardly the only state with such rules. South Carolina and Wyoming also mandate burgers be cooked to 155 degrees. In fact, South Carolinians got so tired of burnt burgers that they revised the law a few years ago to allow customers 18 and older to order up rare burgers at some restaurants — provided the restaurants not be held responsible for the health risk. Similar laws are in place in California and Colorado, where burgers can be cooked at a lower 145 degrees, if cooked for at least three minutes.

In other states, restaurants are allowed to cook burgers to rare or medium-rare if they put a disclaimer on the menu warning you that consuming undercooked meat risks exposure to food-borne illness or they aren’t serving an at-risk population, such as small children, the elderly or people who have compromised immune systems. But in an N.C. restaurant, you cannot do that. It is a violation of the health code.

Gee, no one saw that coming…Lawyers, radical vegans,and Healthy Nannies.

So enjoy that All-American Classic while you can, because Nanny Wants You!

Thomas Sowell Part II: The only thing surprising about Barack Obama’s latest blow against Israel is that there are people who are surprised. As for a Palestinian homeland, that was never a big issue when the Arabs controlled that land, up to 1967.

Obama’s declaration that Israel must give up the land it acquired, after neighboring countries threatened its survival in 1967, is completely consistent with both his ideology of many years and his previous actions as President of the United States.

Whether as a radical student, a community organizer or a far left politician, Barack Obama’s ideology has been based on a vision of the Haves versus the Have Nots. However complex the ramifications of this ideology, and however clever the means by which Obama has camouflaged it, that is what it has amounted to.

No wonder he was moved to tears when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright summarized that ideology in a thundering phrase– “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.”

Israel is one of the Haves. Its neighbors remain among the Have Nots, despite their oil. No wonder that Barack Obama has bent over backward, in addition to bowing low forward, to support the side that his ideology favors.

Whether at home or abroad, Obama’s ideology is an ideology of envy, resentment and payback.

Israel is not simply to have its interests sacrificed and its security undermined. It is to be brought down a peg and– to the extent politically possible– insulted. Obama has already done all these things. His latest pronouncement is just more of the same.

One of the first acts of Barack Obama as president was to send money to the Palestinians, money that can be used to buy rockets to fire into Israel, irrespective of the rationale for the money.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A photograph that should tell us a lot about Barack Obama shows him on the phone, talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Obama was seated, leaning back in his chair, with his feet up on the desk, and the soles of his feet pointed directly at the camera. In the Middle East, showing the soles of your feet is an insult, as Obama undoubtedly knows.

This photograph was no accident. Photographers cannot roam around White House, willy-nilly, taking snapshots of the President of the United States as he talks to leaders of foreign nations.

It was a photograph with a message. No one would have known who was on the other end of the line, unless Obama wanted them to know — and wanted to demonstrate his disdain.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visits to the White House have been unlike previous Israeli leaders’ visits to the White House, and certainly unlike the pomp and circumstance accompanying other nations’ leaders’ visits to the White House over the years.

After one of his meetings with Netanyahu, Barack Obama simply told the prime minister that he was going upstairs to have dinner. You wouldn’t say that to an ordinary neighbor visiting in your home, without inviting him to join you.

Obama knew that. Netanyahu knew that. It was a calculated insult. And the American public would have heard about it, if so much of the media didn’t have such a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil and speak-no-evil attitude in its coverage of Barack Obama.

Visits to the White House by prime ministers of Britain– our oldest and staunchest ally– have likewise been downplayed and Obama’s visit to the Queen of England was likewise conducted without the respect normally shown to a monarch. One of Obama’s first acts upon reaching the White House was to return to the British embassy a bust of Winston Churchill, the most eminent statesman in Britain’s history.

All of this is consistent with Obama’s general approach to foreign policy– selling out our allies to curry favor with our adversaries. He flew to Moscow, shortly after taking office, to renege on the American commitment to put a missile shield in Eastern Europe, in hopes of getting a deal with the Russians.

Obama is politically savvy enough to know how to get his point across without blowing his cover.

The fate of the United States of America may depend on how savvy we the people are in seeing what he is doing– and how soon, before the situation becomes irretrievable.