A Specimen

So by one Vote the Senate finally passes a budget after over 1,400 days largely because 1 person, a democrat, “missed” the vote.

The Murray budget contains $975 billion in spending cuts, including $275 billion in new cuts to Medicare and Medicaid spending. But it also turns off $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts scheduled over nine years. Factoring that in, the budget does not constitute a net spending cut.

“Now that the Senate majority has written a plan we can finally begin this conversation: Do we balance the budget and grow the economy for all Americans? Or do we continue to enrich the bureaucracy at the expense of the people?” Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said after the budget passed.

Well, since the Democrats want even bigger government I guess we know which one they favor?

“This budget is a rehash of the extreme policies that continue to hobble the economy and crush the middle class,” Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “The only good news is that the fiscal path the Democrats laid out in their Budget Resolution won’t become law.”

Passage of the budget at approximately 5 a.m. came after a marathon “vote-a-rama” on the floor during which leaders tried to tackle 562 filed amendments.

So there was no lack of trying to kill it. And what came out was basically a liberal spend fest anyhow.

So after 4 years of incontinence (and incompetence) they pooped it out and it still stinks.

Reconciling the budgets would bring order to the annual appropriations process for 2014 by settling the top-line spending number.

In practice, the Murray and Ryan budgets are so different, there is little chance they can be reconciled. Ryan’s budget cuts spending by $5.7 trillion compared to the Congressional Budget Office baseline, an amount Democrats say would destroy government services and severely harm the poor.

4 years of high unemployment, higher taxes, and inflation have hurt “the poor” more, dearie.

Key amendment votes put the Senate on record—by a vote of 79 to 20–supporting the repeal of a 2.3 percent medical device tax that passed as part of Obama’s healthcare reform…

You know the “You have to pass it  to find out what’s in it” 2,700 page bill they didn’t read 3 years ago to begin with!

Another amendment backed construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. The 62-37 vote gives supporters another argument with which to pressure the Obama administration to approve the Canada-to-Gulf pipe, which is opposed by environmentalists.

The Senate went on record against imposing taxes on industrial carbon emissions in a pair of symbolic votes Friday, providing clear evidence that major climate change legislation lacks political traction.

Lawmakers voted 41-58 to reject Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) proposal to ensure that revenue from any carbon tax be returned to the U.S. public through deficit reduction, reducing other rates and other “direct” benefits.

The Rhode Island Democrat suggested the new Pope would be on his side.

“We have a new Pope, Pope Francis, who said last week that our relation with God’s creation is not very good right now,” Whitehouse said.

“God’s creation runs by laws — the laws of nature, the laws of physics, the laws of chemistry, and God gave us the power of reason to understand those laws,” added Whitehouse, who speaks often on the floor about the dangers of climate change.

“But they are not negotiable, they are not subject to amendment or appeal, and the arrogance of our thinking that they are is an offence to his creation,” he said.

Blunt countered Whitehouse’s analysis of the Pope.

“I know the Pope also mentioned — more times that he mentioned carbon tax — helping the poor,” said Blunt.

So have the Democrats.

He said carbon taxes would hurt the economy and struggling families, noting, “the most vulnerable among us are the most impacted by this.”

Blunt also said a carbon tax would hurt manufacturing. “Energy intensive jobs are the first to go when utility prices get uncompetitive,” he said later in the debate. (The Hill)

The amendments may not be binding and symbolic so they’ll be ignored by the Left- except for re-election purposes, but they can still be used for fodder.

Speaking of “the poor”:

The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of 95 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. That’s more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in those areas.

“I think we have an outdated perception of where poverty is and who it is affecting,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the research. “We tend to think of it as a very urban and a very rural phenomenon, but it is increasingly suburban.”

The rate of poverty among single mothers actually improved dramatically through the 1990s, thanks to a strong economy, more favorable tax breaks and the success of so-called welfare-to-work programs. But two recessions and years of high unemployment erased many of those gains. (CNBC)

 

Planned Dependence

Fiscal Cliff Update: According to the Congressional Budget Office, the last-minute fiscal cliff deal reached by congressional leaders and President Barack Obama cuts only $15 billion in spending while increasing tax revenues by $620 billion—a 41:1 ratio of tax increases to spending cuts. (breitbart)

At the current borrowing rate of $5 Billion a day that saves us from 3 days of overspending! Hurry, we’re saved!!!

Way to go, Jar Jar…

More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes.(bloomberg)

And the payroll tax holiday expired yesterday for everyone.

So with all that in mind….

The federal government spent enough money on federal means-tested welfare programs to have sent each impoverished household a check for nearly $60,000, according to figures from the Census Bureau and the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

According to a report from the CRS produced for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), $1 trillion was spent on federal welfare programs during fiscal year 2011 – with $746 billion in federal funds and $254 in state matching funds.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported that there were approximately 16.8 million households living below the federal poverty level of $23,000 per year for a family of four in 2011. ( See:  2011 Households Below Poverty 2011.pdf  -Report)

If each of the estimated 16.8 million households with income below the poverty level were to have received an equal share of the total welfare spending for fiscal year 2011, they each would have received $59,523.

If only the 2011 federal share of welfare spending (no state matching funds) were spent as direct cash payments, each household would have received $44,404, which is nearly double the federal poverty level for a family of four.

This federal welfare spending does not include programs such as Medicare and Social Security, because they are not means-tested programs. Means-tested programs are those that only pay out benefits to people whose incomes fall below a certain threshold, such as food stamps, traditional cash welfare, and Medicaid.

In other words, if the government were to discontinue its myriad federal welfare programs, such as housing vouchers, food stamps, and Medicaid, and instead just wrote every poor household a check, it would nearly quadruple their income: increasing it from at most $23,000 per year to nearly $83,000 per year. (CNS)

“The Poor” would make more than your average middle class person.

So why don’t they do it if they are so concerned with the poor?

Simple. It’s about THEM, not the poor. The Poor are a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

The Bureaucrats who have a job (millions of them)  suck the life out of it and get their own petty power from it. The self-aggrandizing politicians who “cares” and proposed these things to begin with out of “compassion” and “fairness” so that suckers will vote for them.

After all, if you propose cuts or reforms you hate the poor and you wanna throw grandma off a cliff. You’re mean, heartless and cruel bastards!

As I have said, The politicians are addicted to the power that money brings them. And so THEY have to be seen as the drug dealer and that they “care” so that the ill-informed, uninformed, don’t-wanna-be-informed will vote for them so they can maintain and/or grow their own power to do even more of it.

And then there’s the dependent class they create. They get them to believe that the only way to survive is to be dependent on their good graces and that they “are fighting for them” and that they and only they can make life “fair” for them.

In fiscal year 2013, more than 8 million people will receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments at a federal cost of about $50 billion. Over the last two decades, participation in SSI among disabled adults (ages 18 to 64) has increased substantially, partly because of the relaxing of eligibility rules. In contrast, the share of the aged (65 or over) who participate has declined steadily.

Temporary unemployment insurance benefits are set to expire at the end of 2012 (but the “fiscal cliff deal” extends them, funny how that happened) Between 2007 and 2010, unemployment benefits expanded nearly five-fold owing to:

• High unemployment due to the weak economy, and
• Decisions by policymakers to increase the number of weeks for which eligible unemployed workers could receive benefits. (CBO)

So after something like $15 Trillion dollars on the “War on Poverty” we have EVEN MORE poor people and EVEN MORE dependency than ever before.

Funny how that work out.

Almost as if it was planned.

 

 

 

The Future’s So Bright…

NASA astronaut and “the first mother to fly in space” Dr. Anna Fisher took a veiled shot at President Obamaand his space policies Tuesday during an interview with a local anchor at Dulles International Airport where Discovery was making its last flight before being retired at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The local anchor Kristin Fisher pulled a little boy named Ethan out of the crowd who was dressed up as a NASA pilot and asked him if he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, which he answered in the affirmative.

“Any advice for Ethan, an aspiring astronaut?” she asked her mom.

“Study Russian,” Fisher quipped, to laughter. (Mediaite)

Or Chinese.

There is truth in comedy.

*************

A bill already passed by the Senate and set to be rubber stamped by the House would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to be fitted with black box data recorders from 2015 onwards.

Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 (known as MAP-21), calls for “Mandatory Event Data Recorders” to be installed in all new automobiles and legislates for civil penalties to be imposed against individuals for failing to do so.

“Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall revise part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, to require, beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder that meets the requirements under that part,” states the bill.

Although the text of legislation states that such data would remain the property of the owner of the vehicle, the government would have the power to access it in a number of circumstances, including by court order, if the owner consents to make it available, and pursuant to an investigation or inspection conducted by the Secretary of Transportation.

Given the innumerable examples of both government and industry illegally using supposedly privacy-protected information to spy on individuals, this represents the slippery slope to total Big Brother surveillance of every American’s transport habits and location data.

The legislation, which has been given the Orwellian title ‘Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act’, sailed through the Senate after being heavily promoted by Democrats Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and is also expected to pass the Republican-controlled House.

Given the fact that the same bill also includes a controversial provision that would empower the IRS to revoke passports of citizens merely accused of owing over $50,000 in back taxes, stripping them of their mobility rights, could the mandatory black boxes or a similar technology be used for the same purpose?

Biometric face-recognition and transdermol sensor technology that prevents an inebriated person from driving a car by disabling the automobile has already been developed, in addition to systems that refuse to allow the vehicle to start if the driver is deemed to be overtired.

The ultimate Big Brother scenario would be a system whereby every driver had to get de facto permission from the state to drive each time they get behind the wheel, once it had been determined from an iris scan that they were good citizens who have paid all their taxes and not misbehaved.

The push to pressure car manufacturers to install black box tracking devices in all new cars has been ongoing for over a decade. In 2006, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration encouraged but did not require automobile manufacturers to install the systems.

However, in February last year NHTSA administrator David Strickland said the government was considering making the technology mandatory in the wake of recalls of millions of Toyota vehicles.

Earlier this year it was reported that the NHTSA would soon formally announce that all new cars would be mandated to have the devices fitted by law, which has now been codified into the MAP-21 bill.

And now 10 years later what is there argument, “it would take 10 years”…Funny how that worked out.

• There would be no production out of [ANWR] for at least 7 years.” -Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.)
• “Oil extracted from [ANWR] would not reach refineries for seven to ten years.” -Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
• “No oil will flow from ANWR…until from 7 to 10 years from now.” -Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
• “Oil exploration in ANWR will not actually start producing oil for as many as 10 years.” -Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
• “Even if we started drilling [in ANWR] tomorrow, the first barrel of crude oil would not make it to the market for at least 10 years.” -Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)

Ten years later, oil and gas production on federal lands is at a nine-year low, a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline costs an average $3.90, and the president is busy blaming “speculators” for high oil prices – a scapegoat that even a former Democratic Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner rejects.

1086 Days later!

What you’re looking at is a view of today’s Senate Budget Committee meeting, at which Chairman Kent Conrad conducted a faux “markup” of his party’s FY 2013 budget resolution.  The near side of the table is where Democrats were supposed to sit.  Granted, this entire exercise was somewhat academic because its resulting product would receive neither a vote in this committee, nor in the Senate at large.  Details!  Throughout much of the session, all 11 Republican members were present to, you know, do their jobs.  Of the 12 committee Democrats, no more than 3 or 4 were in attendance at any given time, according to sources inside the meeting.  “[The Democrats] showed absolutely no interest in discussing our big picture problems or offering solutions,” a GOP budget aide tells Townhall. “Those who were there showed up only to make a brief statement for the record, then took off.  The photo speaks for itself.”  That it does.  In fact, in this particular photo, every single Democrat seat is vacant, except for that of Chairman Conrad.  What to make of this?  On one hand, why bother participating in a total farce?  On the other, these Dems could have at least feigned interest in a requirement of their own public service.  Senate Democrats have effectively renounced all pretense of responsible governance.  They have done so in an attempt to avoid losing their precious majority — the very purpose of which, I thought, was to govern.  We face a debt crisis that threatens to obliterate the America we know and love, yet an entire American political team has willfully and deliberately decided to eschew productive solutions in favor of sitting on the sidelines and shouting insults at their opponents. 

“Give it a rest, Guy,” I can practically hear you saying, “you’ve been beating this dead horse for months.”  Yes.  Guilty as charged.  This is a disgrace, and I’ll keep flogging this story every chance I get — especially as the MSM largely shrugs and offers its preferred party a pass.  Here we have an entire house of Congress intentionally ignoring the law for political gain, as our nation approaches a terrifying solvency rubicon.  Conservatives cannot, and will not, shut up about this.  Parting thoughts:  (1) Since the year 2009, not one single Democrat or Democrat-aligned member of the United States Senate has voted “yes” on any budget.  They’ve refused to present their own ideas, of course, but they’ve also unanimously voted down every last alternative, from both Republicans and their own party’s president.  Think about that.  (2) Here the Democrats on the upper house’s Budget Committee, other than its retiring chairman.  Name ‘em and shame ‘em:
 

(1) DSCC Chair Patty Murray (D-WA)
(2) Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has at least worked with Paul Ryan on a solid Medicare reform plan.
(3) Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), who is in a tough 2012 re-election fight.
(4) Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), who also faces re-election this year.
(5) Sen. Ben Cardin (D- MD)
(6) Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
(7) “Moderate” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
(8) Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
(9) “Moderate” Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK)
(10) Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE)

(11) Last but not least, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who did manage to find the time to blather on behalf of the defeated “Buffett Rule” on the Senate floor this week.  During his speech, Whitehouse all but conceded that the measure serves no practical purpose beyond electoral positioning and “fairness:”

“The Senate Republican Leader has described the bill as yet another proposal from the White House that won’t create a single job or lower the price at the pump by a penny. Well, the Minority Leader is absolutely right that the aim of this bill is not to lower the unemployment rate or the price of gasoline.”
Party of ideas Folks!  (townhall.com)

The Future’s so bright I have to wear Blinders!

The Stakes Are Raised

Who cares if we don’t have a budget — let’s spend more! President Obama has decided to raise the debt ceiling once more, and forget about needing Congressional approval. Thanks to the agreement reached in August, it’s still going up.

President Obama formally notified Congress on Thursday of his intent to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion, two weeks after he had postponed the requestto give lawmakers more time to consider the action.

Congress will have had 15 days to say no before the nation’s debt ceiling automatically is raised from $15.2 trillion to $16.4 trillion.

In a letter to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Obama wrote that ”further borrowing is required to meet existing commitments.”

Obama had sought to make the request at the end of last month, when the Treasury came within $100 billion of its borrowing limit. However, with Congress on recess, lawmakers from both parties asked the president to hold off. The House is out of session until Jan. 17, and the Senate until Jan. 23.

Since then Treasury officials have used special revenue and accounting measures to maintain the nation’s solvency. Yet the White House cast the delay as a technicality, saying there is no chance the limit will not be increased, even if Republican lawmakers attempt to object.

Hey, what’s another trillion? Chump change at this point.(townhall.com)

When in Debt Spend Even More!

Yet the White House cast the <previous> delay as a technicality, saying there is no chance the limit will not be increased, even if Republican lawmakers attempt to object.

Under an agreement reached in August, Congress and the White House moved to raise the debt limit in three increments while also implementing $2.4 trillion in budget cuts. The deal, however, also gave Congress the option of voting to block each of the debt-ceiling increases by passing a “resolution of disapproval.”

Even if such a resolution were passed, Obama could veto it, and he could be overridden only by a two-thirds supermajority in each chamber.

In September, when the first debt-limit hike was scheduled to take effect, the Republican-led House passed a disapproval resolution, but the Democrat-controlled Senate blocked it and the debt ceiling was raised

White House officials said they do not expect the Senate to support a disapproval resolution this time even if the House passes one again. (WP)

Democrat Control anyone?

Oh right, it’s a “do nothing” Congress and everything is their fault…

Obama said, “Everything that we fought for is now at stake in this election.”

Very true. Liberal Socialism is on the line.

I just wish it was a firing line. But I’m not sure the Republicans aren’t the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight!

Under any of these possibilities, the fact remains that he is hellbent on accelerating his present course, not reversing it, on dictating, not working within his constitutional constraints, much less building a bipartisan consensus.

Hubris and defiance are his trademarks, not humility. He said, “If you’re willing to work even harder in this election than you did in the last election, I promise you, change will come.”

And considering the “change” we already have I pity the fool who wants more of it.

He has repeatedly indicated that he is frustrated with the process of republican government and that he would be much more comfortable as a dictator.

Just consider how brazenly Obama has pursued his unpopular agenda even while facing re-election. Think how he joked about having made a hollow promise of shovel-ready jobs when there is no such thing and how he is unchastened by the colossal waste of Solyndra and pursuing more of the same. Consider how he cavalierly refuses to account for his promise to keep unemployment capped at 8 percent and how he assured us, on his honor, that his designated stimulus cop, Vice President Joe Biden, wouldn’t allow a dollar of waste to go unpunished in his stimulus plan. Chew on his refusal to listen to the public when it resoundingly rejected Obamacare, rebuffing his agenda in the U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts and again in the 2010 congressional elections. Ponder his petty partisanship, bullying, demonizing and class warfare and his frequent invocation of the race card. Can you conceive of how he’d act as a four-year lame duck?

You all surely heard Obama, thinking he was speaking only to friends, boast that he was for a single-payer plan but that it might take 15 years to implement it. Remember this when his supporters tell you Obamacare won’t degenerate into socialized medicine. Those waivers he unilaterally issued to buy off companies now won’t be available next time around when the full force of Obamacare rains down its dark waters.

Think about his Independent Payment Advisory Board, which will have 15 bureaucrats once Obamacare is up and running, when he won’t have to worry about 2016. Before you pooh-pooh this, you’d better do your research on his health care mentors’ (e.g., Tom Daschle, Donald Berwick) philosophy about the macabre rationing of health care for the aged.

So, call me an alarmist if you will, but I think it’s almost irrational not to be very concerned about an Obama second term. Even if you don’t subscribe to some of the horror scenarios of death panels and the like, how about his intention to continue to press forward with his radical green agenda despite the fact that it won’t work to reduce global temperatures and despite the public’s opposition to it?

More importantly, how about his absolute refusal to restructure entitlements or his refusal to lead his party’s Senate to pass a budget after 1,000 days? Or his insistence on another stimulus package when unemployment — even using the distorted metrics the administration is now using — is still at 8.5 percent and it would add another half-trillion dollars to the national debt?

By rights, Obama shouldn’t get 10 percent of the vote in November. Even those who want to punish the “wealthy” should understand that once you completely gnaw off the hand that feeds you, you will starve, too.(David Limbaugh)

The record of President Obama’s first three years in office is in, and nothing that happens now can go back and change that. What that record shows is that President Obama, with his throwback, old-fashioned, 1970s Keynesian economics, has put America through the worst recovery from a recession since the Great Depression.

The recession started in December, 2007. Go to the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org <file://localhost/owa/redir.aspx>) to see the complete history of America’s recessions. What that history reveals is that before this last recession, since the Great Depression recessions in America have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months.

When President Obama entered office in January, 2009, the recession was already in its 13th month. His responsibility was to manage a timely, robust recovery to get America back on track again. Based on the historical record, that recovery was imminent, within a couple of months or so. Despite widespread fear, nothing fundamental had changed to deprive America of the long term, world-leading prosperity it had enjoyed going back 300 years.

Supposedly a forward looking progressive, Obama proved to be America’s first backward looking regressive. His first act was to increase federal borrowing, the national debt and the deficit by nearly a trillion dollars to finance a supposed “stimulus” package, based on the discredited Keynesian theory left for dead 30 years ago holding that increased government spending, deficits and debt are what promote economic growth and recovery. That theory arose in the 1930s as the answer to the Great Depression, which, of course, never worked.

Unemployment actually rose after June, 2009, and did not fall back down below that level until 18 months later in December, 2010. Instead of a recovery, America has suffered the longest period of unemployment near 9% or above since the Great Depression, under President Obama’s public policy malpractice. Even today, 49 months after the recession started, the U6 unemployment rate counting the unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers is still 15.2%. And that doesn’t include all the workers who have fled the workforce under Obama’s economic oppression. The unemployment rate with the full measure of discouraged workers is reported at http://www.shadowstats.com <file://localhost/owa/redir.aspx> as about 23%, which is depression level unemployment.

Under President Obama, America has suffered the longest period with so many in such long-term unemployment since the Great Depression.

Going to be a fun year. Enjoy Friday the 13th!

 

Lying is Complicated

Last week, the DOJ took the rare step of formally withdrawing a letter it sent to Congress in February that falsely claimed the program being executed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives did not allow guns to “walk” into Mexico.

Confronted about this by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., Holder defended the DOJ.

“Nobody at the Justice Department has lied,” Holder insisted.

When Sensenbrenner pressed Holder on the distinction between lying and misleading Congress, Holder said it was a matter of a person’s “state of mind.”

‘Lying’ Is Such A Complicated Concept.

“First let me make something very clear, in response to an assertion you made, or hinted at: Nobody in the Justice Department has lied,” Holder said in response to accusations that he or his confidantes lied to Congress. “Nobody has lied.”

“Then why was the letter withdrawn?,” Sensenbrenner retorted, referring to a factually inaccurate letter one of Holder’s deputies, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich, sent to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley on February 4. In that letter, Weich claimed that guns were never allowed to walk.

Holder and one of his other deputies, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, have both admitted that statement was false in recent Senate hearings.

“The letter was withdrawn because there was information in there that was inaccurate,” Holder replied to Sensenbrenner’s question.

Still unsatisfied, Sensenbrenner followed up again. “Tell me what the difference is between lying and misleading Congress in this context?,” he asked Holder.

Holder responded that whether a statement is a lie or misleading comment depends on what the person making it is thinking at the time.

“If you want to have this legal conversation, it all has to do with your state of mind, and whether or not you had the requisite intent to come up with something that can be considered perjury or a lie,” Holder said. “The information that was provided in that February 4 letter was gleaned by the people who drafted the letter after they interacted with people who they thought were in the best position to have the information.

I guess it depends on the definition of what “is” is.

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

PICTURES: ATF “Gunwalking” scandal timeline

In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the “big fish.” But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called “gunwalking,” and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3″. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:

“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.” 

More Fast and Furious coverage:
Memos contradict Holder on Fast and Furious
Agent: I was ordered to let guns “walk” into Mexico
Gunwalking scandal uncovered at ATF

On Jan. 4, 2011, as ATF prepared a press conference to announce arrests in Fast and Furious, Newell saw it as “(A)nother time to address Multiple Sale on Long Guns issue.” And a day after the press conference, Chait emailed Newell: “Bill–well done yesterday… (I)n light of our request for Demand letter 3, this case could be a strong supporting factor if we can determine how many multiple sales of long guns occurred during the course of this case.” 

This revelation angers gun rights advocates. Larry Keane, a spokesman for National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group, calls the discussion of Fast and Furious to argue for Demand Letter 3 “disappointing and ironic.” Keane says it’s “deeply troubling” if sales made by gun dealers “voluntarily cooperating with ATF’s flawed ‘Operation Fast & Furious’ were going to be used by some individuals within ATF to justify imposing a multiple sales reporting requirement for rifles.” (DC)

The Gun Dealers’ Quandary

Several gun dealers who cooperated with ATF told CBS News and Congressional investigators they only went through with suspicious sales because ATF asked them to.

Sometimes it was against the gun dealer’s own best judgment.

Read the email

In April, 2010 a licensed gun dealer cooperating with ATF was increasingly concerned about selling so many guns. “We just want to make sure we are cooperating with ATF and that we are not viewed as selling to the bad guys,” writes the gun dealer to ATF Phoenix officials, “(W)e were hoping to put together something like a letter of understanding to alleviate concerns of some type of recourse against us down the road for selling these items.”

Read the email

ATF’s group supervisor on Fast and Furious David Voth assures the gun dealer there’s nothing to worry about. “We (ATF) are continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of investigative techniques which I cannot go into detail.”

Two months later, the same gun dealer grew more agitated.

“I wanted to make sure that none of the firearms that were sold per our conversation with you and various ATF agents could or would ever end up south of the border or in the hands of the bad guys. I guess I am looking for a bit of reassurance that the guns are not getting south or in the wrong hands…I want to help ATF with its investigation but not at the risk of agents (sic) safety because I have some very close friends that are US Border Patrol agents in southern AZ as well as my concern for all the agents (sic) safety that protect our country.” 

“It’s like ATF created or added to the problem so they could be the solution to it and pat themselves on the back,” says one law enforcement source familiar with the facts. “It’s a circular way of thinking.”

The Justice Department and ATF declined to comment. ATF officials mentioned in this report did not respond to requests from CBS News to speak with them.

The “Demand Letter 3″ Debate

The two sides in the gun debate have long clashed over whether gun dealers should have to report multiple rifle sales. On one side, ATF officials argue that a large number of semi-automatic, high-caliber rifles from the U.S. are being used by violent cartels in Mexico. They believe more reporting requirements would help ATF crack down. On the other side, gun rights advocates say that’s unconstitutional, and would not make a difference in Mexican cartel crimes.

Two earlier Demand Letters were initiated in 2000 and affected a relatively small number of gun shops. Demand Letter 3 was to be much more sweeping, affecting 8,500 firearms dealers in four southwest border states: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. ATF chose those states because they “have a significant number of crime guns traced back to them from Mexico.” The reporting requirements were to apply if a gun dealer sells two or more long guns to a single person within five business days, and only if the guns are semi-automatic, greater than .22 caliber and can be fitted with a detachable magazine.

On April 25, 2011, ATF announced plans to implement Demand Letter 3. The National Shooting Sports Foundation is suing the ATF to stop the new rules. It calls the regulation an illegal attempt to enforce a law Congress never passed. ATF counters that it has reasonably targeted guns used most often to “commit violent crimes in Mexico, especially by drug gangs.”

Reaction

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is investigating Fast and Furious, as well as the alleged use of the case to advance gun regulations. “There’s plenty of evidence showing that this administration planned to use the tragedies of Fast and Furious as rationale to further their goals of a long gun reporting requirement. But, we’ve learned from our investigation that reporting multiple long gun sales would do nothing to stop the flow of firearms to known straw purchasers because many Federal Firearms Dealers are already voluntarily reporting suspicious transactions. It’s pretty clear that the problem isn’t lack of burdensome reporting requirements.”

On July 12, 2011, Sen. Grassley and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., wrote Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department oversees ATF. They asked Holder whether officials in his agency discussed how “Fast and Furious could be used to justify additional regulatory authorities.” So far, they have not received a response. CBS News asked the Justice Department for comment and context on ATF emails about Fast and Furious and Demand Letter 3, but officials declined to speak with us.

“In light of the evidence, the Justice Department’s refusal to answer questions about the role Operation Fast and Furious was supposed to play in advancing new firearms regulations is simply unacceptable,” Rep. Issa told CBS News.

Oh and by the way:

Selling weapons to Mexico – where cartel violence is out of control – is controversial because so many guns fall into the wrong hands due to incompetence and corruption. The Mexican military recently reported nearly 9,000 police weapons “missing.”

Yet the U.S. has approved the sale of more guns to Mexico in recent years than ever before through a program called “direct commercial sales.” It’s a program that some say is worse than the highly-criticized “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal, where U.S. agents allowed thousands of weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels.

The problem of weapons legally sold to Mexico – then diverted to violent cartels – is becoming more urgent. That’s because the U.S. has quietly authorized a massive escalation in the number of guns sold to Mexico through “direct commercial sales. It’s a way foreign countries can acquire firearms faster and with less disclosure than going through the Pentagon.

Here’s how it works: A foreign government fills out an application to buy weapons from private gun manufacturers in the U.S. Then the State Department decides whether to approve.

And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves.

Mexico is now one of the world’s largest purchasers of U.S. guns through direct commercial sales, beating out countries like Iraq.

Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee continually asked Holder what Congress can do to stop the trafficking of firearms into Mexico, implying Congress should be implementing more gun control as a result of this program.(DC)

DOH!

At least 300 people in Mexico were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, as was U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

It’s All Politics Folks!

The Obama campaign sent out an email today asking supporters to urge Congress to at least vote on the president’s jobs bill almost immediately after Democratic majority leader Harry Reid blocked a vote on the bill in the Senate.

On the Senate floor today, Republican leader Mitch McConnell asked for unanimous consent to proceed on voting on the bill. Reid, who has struggled to find enough votes for the bill in the Democratic caucus, objected to the motion and killed the opportunity for a vote. 

About ten minutes later, Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, emailed this message to supporters:

President Obama is in Dallas today urging Americans who support the American Jobs Act to demand that Congress pass it already.

Though it’s been nearly a month since he laid out this plan, House Republicans haven’t acted to pass it. And House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is out there actually bragging that they won’t even put the jobs package up for a vote — ever.

It’s not clear which part of the bill they now object to: building roads, hiring teachers, getting veterans back to work. They’re willing to block the American Jobs Act — and they think you won’t do anything about it.

But here’s something you can do: Find Republican members of Congress on Twitter, call them out, and demand they pass this bill.

So will the Obama campaign be asking its supporters to “call out” Harry Reid and “demand” he and Senate Democrats pass the bill?

So they want the bill passed now, they just don’t want the bill passed NOW!. Hilarious!

It just proves that the bill was not designed to be passed by Congress but to blame the Republicans for NOT passing it. A purely partisan political maneuver rather than an actual plan.

Fascinating. And very typical of the Left and Obama. Cheap political points and childish “gotcha” moments over anything that’s actually serious.

The legislative gambit will not bar a Senate vote on the bill later this month, but it blunts a Democratic effort to maneuver the GOP into accepting sole responsibility for blocking the package that includes provisions that are popular with voters.

McConnell noted that Obama has asked Congress for an immediate vote on the measure at least 12 separate times.

“I want to disabuse [Obama] of the notion that we are somehow unwilling to vote” on the bill, McConnell said.

Reid objected to McConnell’s request. He used a procedural tactic to block amendments to the bill. “To tack this on to the China currency manipulation legislation is nothing more than a political stunt,” he said. (Weekly Standard)

So was the “pass the bill” crap. But that was their stunt and wasn’t a stunt because they were doing it.

But it’s nice to see the Republicans doing something other than rolling over and “compromising”.

Oh, and by the way–Eric Holder was warned about Fast & Furious over a year ago. Just thought you’d like to know that “justice” and truth is alive and well in the Obama Administration.

New documents obtained by news organizations show Attorney General Eric Holder was sent briefings on the controversial Fast and Furious operation as far back as July 2010. That directly contradicts his statement to Congress.

Internal Justice Department documents show that at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing Fast and Furious.

In Fast and Furious, ATF agents allegedly allowed thousands of weapons to cross the border and fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

It’s called letting guns “walk,” and it remained secret to the public until Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered last December. Two guns from Fast and Furious were found at the scene, and ATF agent John Dodson blew the whistle on the operation.

Ever since, the Justice Department has publicly tried to distance itself. But the new documents leave no doubt that high level Justice officials knew guns were being “walked.”

Oh, and President Obama knew about Solyndra’s potential financial problems BEFORE he even endorsed them but did it anyways for politics and his agenda.

New e-mails released Monday show the White House was warned about Solyndra’s potential problems even before President Obama visited the company’s Fremont, Calif., headquarters and used it as a backdrop for his push for renewable energy investment and green jobs.

“A number of us are concerned that the president is visiting Solyndra,” Steve Westly, managing partner of Westly Group, wrote in an e-mail to Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett on May 24, 2010, a day before the president’s well publicized trip to Solyndra. “[T]here is an increasing concern about the company because their auditors, Coopers and Lybrand, have issued a ‘going concern’ letter … Many of us believe the company’s cost structure will make it difficult for them to survive long term.”

“I just want to help protect the president from anything that could result in negative or unfair press,” Westly wrote. “If it’s too late to change/postpone the meeting, the president should be careful about unrealistic/optimistic forecasts that could haunt him in the next 18 months if Solyndra hits the wall, files for bankruptcy, etc.”

“DOE … has one loan guarantee to monitor and they seem completely oblivious to this issue,” one OMB analyst said to another in an April 2, 2010, email.

“What’s terrifying is that after looking at some of the ones that came next, this one [Solyndra] started to look better,” another OMB e-mail exchange said of Solyndra. “Bad days are coming.” (National Journal)

President Barack Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives suffered another major blow late Monday, as the nonprofit National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, announced a plan to lay off roughly 10 percent of its staff through a voluntary buy-out plan.

According to the Denver Post, the lab plans to eliminate between 100 and 150 of its 1,350 jobs. The Obama administration supported the NREL in 2009 with roughly $200 million in stimulus grants. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu visited Golden in May 2009 to promote the NREL as a beneficiary of those funds. (DC)

Amy Oliver of Colorado’s conservative Independence Institute said one way to look at these potential “green jobs” shortcomings is that the NREL is exaggerating its claims. Oliver told The Daily Caller that the government-funded lab has seen a surge in government funding in recent years.

“Their funding for 2008 was $328 million,” Oliver said in a phone interview. “In 2010 it was $536.5 million. They’ve had a 64 percent increase in their funding during the Obama administration.”

And it’s doing so well! Lots of money down a rat hole and more people get laid off. The perfect Obama plan.

Candidate Obama pledged in 2008 that he would add 5 million green jobs to the economy, but Republican lawmakers in Washington, D.C. now say the White House has stretched what it defines as a “green job” in order to pad its numbers.

At one recent House oversight committee hearing, Republicans prodded Obama’s Labor secretary Hilda Solis to explain why a bus driver who happens to drive a vehicle powered by “green” or “renewable” energy is classified by Obama administration officials as holding a “green job.” Solis struggled with the answer, instead arguing with Florida GOP Rep. Connie Mack, who asked her the question.

Oliver told TheDC that ordinary jobs with peripheral connections to  “renewable energy” are frequently misclassified as “green jobs” in Colorado. With Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter in charge, a strong environmental lobby using local, state and federal government to protect its interests, and news media unwilling to push for answers, Oliver said progressive causes have abused taxpayer dollars at institutions like NREL for years.

The Agenda is The Agenda and reality be damned!

And we have a new class of “saved or created”  ‘green’ Jobs to fudge up the number and puff up the Administration.

Gee, that’s never happened before!!!

And if you think they don’t want to cover up their skeletons:

In an obvious effort to protect President Barack Obama, a group of congressional Democrats has introduced legislation to create an official process that will allow the commander-in-chief to keep presidential records secret after he leaves office.

Ironically, Obama revoked <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ExecutiveOrderPresidentialRecords> a similar George W. Bush order in one of his first official acts as president.

That’s far more important than Obama’s “jobs Bill”.

Isn’t politics, especially on the left, fun.

The political left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the “hunger in America” hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.

Burgers, pizzas and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of September 25th by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is “to get people to see cooking as a joy.” For this, he says, “we need action both cultural and political.” In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!

It’s very true that the boxed meals are more expensive than doing it yourself. Fast Food and convenience foods are more expensive in the long run. But making your own food is more time consuming and requires more labor and some skill. Now, does that sound like something a Liberal wants to do when they can just mandate that the government force everyone else to do it for them?

An arrogant elite’s condescension toward the people — treating them as children who have to be jollied along — is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening a society.

Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.

We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air-conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and own either a car or a truck.

Why are such people called “poor”? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.

Those who believe in an expansive, nanny state government need a large number of people in “poverty” to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.

Politicians, welfare state bureaucrats and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment in their lives by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency. (thomas sowell)

But it’s “fair” that the not-poor pay for the poor. That the rich be taken down to benefit the rest of us, right?

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs)–Karl Marx

And it’s not “fair” that others get more than me. So what if they work harder, longer and are smarter than me. That’s just not “fair”.

It’s all THEIR fault!

And he’s black! Now that will REALLY annoy the Left!

Round Two: The Enemy of The Good

The Republican have passed yet another debt ceiling bill.

The Democrats hate it already. They’ve voted it down already. I bet they didn’t even read it…:)

It’s not THEIR Bill.

Remember, to compromise with a liberal YOU must give in to everything THEY want. That’s compromise in their minds.

“Unless there is a compromise or they accept my bill, we’re headed for economic disaster,” <Senate Majority Leader> Reid said.

But in a phone call Friday evening, <Senate Minority Leader> McConnell told Reid he wanted the White House at the table and expressed frustration that President Obama had rejected an emerging compromise between the two Senate leaders last weekend. Aides said McConnell expected to speak with administration officials Friday night and tamped down talk of an impasse. But Senate Democratic leaders reacted with outrage, accusing McConnell of blocking a deal.

Blocking the Deal = You haven’t kissed MY Liberal Ass enough yet! :0

“Yes, people can be critical of what we’ve done, but where are the other ideas?” Boehner said on the House floor. “At this point in time, the House is going to act and we’re going to act together.”

Ultimately, it was for naught. Within two hours, the Senate tabled the measure, 59 to 41, with six conservative Republicans joining all 53 senators in the Democratic caucus in voting against the bill.

Now that’s compromise!

<Senate Minority Leader> McConnell keeps pointing out how ironic it is that Reid is blocking an immediate vote on his own plan, then turning around and accusing the GOP of filibustering.  How can Republicans be “filibustering” a bill for which they are actively seeking a vote?  Reid then calls Republicans uncompromising obstructionists, rattling off a laundry list of bipartisan negotiations Republicans have supposedly undermined.  He curiously omits the three GOP plans his party own has defeated, as well as the bipartisan framework he himself agreed to last weekend before President Obama nixed it.  Selective memories are a common Democratic trait.  Speaking of which, Reid is also pretending that the demand for a 60 vote threshold to proceed is a tactic invented by Republicans.  This doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

But it’s the Republican’s Fault.

“We need to go some ways beyond that,” he continued, “because otherwise, we’re looking at incredibly grim scenarios — not in 2050 and 2070 with these other absurd CBO projections. We’re looking at grim scenarios kicking in around 2015, 2017 and 2018.” Columnist Mark Steyn.

The Democrats don’t have that kind of ability, you know. They want what they want when they want it and simply because they want it.

Obama also called on his supporters to pressure legislators to back a “compromise” bill, and emphasized his desire for a bill that would fund federal agencies until 2013.

Funding until 2013 is important for the White House, because it would help sideline campaign-year debates on the national debt and annual deficits.

Yeah, we don’t want the impending economic doom of the country to get in the way of  Our Dear leader’s Re-election campaign. God Forbid!!

The Senate also killed the Cut, Cap, Balance Act last Friday and has yet to vote on a formal proposal. Having passed two proposals and with little time to attempt another bill, the House now waits to act on a Senate bill.

“I stuck my neck out a mile to get an agreement with the president of the United States,” Boehner thundered from the floor after the vote. “It’s time for the administration and time for our colleagues across the aisle to put something on the table. Tell us where you are!”

But don’t worry, it’s still the Republican’s fault. Remember that.

“The door was open all day. Nobody knocked, nobody walked in,” Sen. {UP}Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, said at the press conference. “We will not solve this problem by standing there and folding our arms and saying ‘I am not talking to anybody.’”

Just that two bills get passed by the House and the Senate quickly squashes both of them, that’s “I’m not talking to anybody” because the bills had nothing the Democrats wanted to hear. Much like “the Republicans have no plan” because they aren’t proposing anything the Democrats want to hear.

So eventually, the Democrats will pass the Reid plan at the last second, the Republicans will vote that down. The mainstream Media and the Democrats will have another round of 24/7 Armageddon scaremongering and hate-filled bile and forget they will forget that they  voted down 2 Republican proposals.

The downgrade will occur anyhow.

And that’s still will be the Republican’s Fault,by the way.

Isn’t “bi-partisan” “compromise” fun…

So now the president has resorted to hunkering down at the White House, leaving the tough decisions to Congress. Every now and then we hear from him on TV, begging Americans to call on Congress like a child asking one parent to convince the other to use their credit card. While job creators are struggling to make payroll and forced to make layoffs, the president marches on with his tax, spend and borrow policies that will only kill more jobs and continue to stifle economic growth.

But that’s the Republican’s Fault for not “compromising” with the Democrats, aka give them everything they wanted- Higher Taxes, more Spending and all the Class Warfare pie they stuff themselves with. It won’t actually fix the problem, but damn, it will make THEM feel better.

I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

But the Democrats will.

 

Good Grief…

“We have now run out of time,” a visibly angry Obama declared at a hastily arranged press conference in the White House briefing room.

This from the guy who utter the following:

“If the American people looked at this, theyd say, boy, some of these decisions are tough, but they dont require us to gut Medicare or Social Security. They dont require us to stop helping young people go to college. They dont require us to stop helping families who’ve got a disabled child. They dont require us to violate our obligations to our veterans. And they dont require ‘job-killing tax cuts.’

Sidebar: remember there were $500 Billion dollars cut from Medicare by Obamacare so it could be double counted as savings…

“I expect them to have an answer as to how they will get this thing done over the next week,” Obama said. Both sides agree that a proposal should be hammered out over the weekend.

Talks now begin between Boehner and senate leaders on a far less ambitious a Plan B.

Boehner held his own press conference after 7 p.m. Friday night and said the talks broke down because “The White House moved the goal posts.”

Specifically, he said the two sides had agreed on an unspecified amount of revenue to be included in deficit reduction, achieved by broadening the number of Americans who pay taxes and lowering general tax rates. But he said President Obama on Thursday demanded another $400 billion in revenue, which Boehner said “was going to be nothing more than a tax hike on the American people.”

Well, Liberals don’t know how to do anything but Tax and Spend. It’s beyond their capabilities to understand cutting anything without over-the-top fearmongering and hyperbole.

Boehner sent a letter to his Republican colleagues explaining his decision to pull out of talks for a “grand bargain.” Here are some highlights:

“It has become evident that the White House is not serious about ending the spending binge that is destroying jobs and endangering our children’s future,” he wrote, adding, “A deal was never reached, and was never really close.

“The president is emphatic that taxes have to be raised. … The president is emphatic that we cannot make fundamental changes to our entitlement programs,” Boehner wrote.

“For these reasons, I have decided to end discussions with the White House and begin conversations with the leaders in the Senate in an effort to find a path forward.”

So what happened? Immediately, the left said the Republicans abandoned the talks and Boehner chickened out.

Negotiating with children is nearly impossible.

But don’t worry, the Liberals and their Media will blame the Republican no matter what.

And the Republicans won’t fight back.

That’s almost guaranteed.

“I am confident because I cannot believe that congress would be that irresponsible” as to inflict a “self-inflicted wound” on the economy said President Obama.

The frustration was mutual. Shortly after Obama’s press conference ended, the press secretary for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Brad Daysrping, tweeted that president Obama threw a tantrum:

“As if there’s really a question whether President Obama threw a tantrum at the White House last week – same guy just appeared.”

Obama said he would reject any short-term deal to raise the borrowing limit. Now the White House says he could make an exception.

By early evening, the outlines of a two-stage strategy were emerging. First, lawmakers would vote on a package to cut agency spending by as much as $1 trillion over the next decade and raise the debt limit, currently set at $14.3 trillion, by the same amount. That would give Geithner enough borrowing authority to cover the nation’s bills through the end of this year.

Then Congress would go to work to produce as much as $3 trillion in additional savings through an overhaul of the tax code and major changes to Social Security and Medicare, the biggest drivers of federal spending. To identify those savings, Congress would create a new bipartisan debt-reduction committee comprising 12 lawmakers from both the House and Senate, an idea offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

But the two sides were still fighting over how to force Congress to produce the second round of savings. Boehner wants to set another debt-limit vote early next year, while Democrats are insisting on a plan that would postpone another debt-limit showdown until after the 2012 presidential election.

Good luck with that.

So Welcome to Hell.

Game Time

Two days after scolding Congress that;s he’s here and that they need to get their job done, he went on Vacation AGAIN.

His message was clear: A crisis is upon us, so we don’t have time to play games.  Get to work. 

Never let a crisis go to waste! Now, where’s my golf tee…

Gotta love that Leadership. He’s really concerned, about his Golf Game!

Republicans responded by successfully lobbying the majority to kill next week’s scheduled recess in order to allow the upper chamber to, ahem, do its job.  Mitch McConnell then invited the president to come to Capitol Hill and meet with Republicans behind closed doors to discuss the urgent issue.  The White House unceremoniously declined, snippily declaring that such a conversation was “not a conversation worth having.”  Instead, Obama is attending to more pressing business: Political fundraising. 

Our Dear Leader: “…I will not reduce our deficit by sacrificing our kids’ education. I’m not going to reduce our deficit by eliminating medical research being done by our scientists. I won’t sacrifice rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our airports.” at a fundraiser for HIM.

But he’s not fearmongering and pretell, how do you do medical research without scientists?
Oh, that’s right The Government will get to decide whether you live or die, silly me.
It’ll be done by Bureaucrats! That’s MUCH better.

Oh, it was arranged by Comcast (parent of NBC,MSNBC, etc) who raised 1.2 million dollars for Obama, But don’t worry they’ll be “fair and balanced” during the re-coronation attempt by Obama.

****

A Nigerian man boarded a airplane from JFK to LAX, without a passport or valid ticket, TSA officials say.

TSA admits today that Olajide Oluwaseum Noibi, a foreign national,  slipped right through TSAs tough security and onto a plane with an  expired ticket.

He was only arrested yesterday, five-days after he landed, while  trying to board a plane to Atlanta, with an expired boarding pass.

A Virgin America stewardess, mid-flight, even saw the expired ticket, and didnt say anything.

‘Every passenger that passes through security checkpoints is subject  to many layers of security including thorough physical screening at the  checkpoint,’ TSA spokesperson Greg Soule said.

According to The Daily Mail,  the boarding pass belonged to a man who said his boarding pass went  missing from his pocket on his way to the airport June 23. Noibi boarded  the plane with the expired pass the next day.

When the law enforcement officials stopped him, he was trying to  board a delta flight to Atlanta. On him they found 10 other expired  plane tickets.

He has been charged with being a stowaway.
I’m going guess they couldn’t catch him because he wasn’t 95 years old, and dying with a depends diaper on in a wheelchair. That they “caught”

***************

The Obama Administration has stepped up drone attacks in Somalia.

Since this administration considers drone a non-war, does this mean he’s starting a 2nd Non-War War?

Gee, I bet the Nobel Peace Prize People are eating their medals right about now

*****************************

By maladroitly exposing his own fundamental unseriousness, the president opened himself up to political attack — and darned if Senate Republicans didn’t oblige him. Without further ado, please enjoy a full half-hour of withering criticism, via an all-star lineup of GOP freshmen — with a few veterans thrown in for good measure:

Said Sen. Rubio of Obama’s recent comments: “It’s class warfare, and it’s the kind of language you would expect from a leader of a third world country, not the President of the United States.”  That’s going to leave a mark.

 

Me

It’s all about me.

Screw you.

That’s what we have now.

Thomas Sowell: The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.

Nothing shows the utter cynicism of the unions and the politicians who do their bidding like the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act” that the Obama administration tried to push through Congress. Employees’ free choice as to whether or not to join a union is precisely what that legislation would destroy.

Workers already have a free choice in secret-ballot elections conducted under existing laws. As more and more workers in the private sector have voted to reject having a union represent them, the unions’ answer has been to take away secret-ballot elections.

Under the “Employee Free Choice Act,” unions would not have to win in secret-ballot elections in order to represent the workers. Instead, union representatives could simply collect signatures from the workers until they had a majority.

Why do we have secret ballots in the first place, whether in elections for unions or elections for government officials? To prevent intimidation and allow people to vote how they want to, without fear of retaliation.

This is a crucial right that unions want to take away from workers. The actions of union mobs in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere give us a free home demonstration of how little they respect the rights of those who disagree with them and how much they rely on harassment and threats to get what they want.

It takes world-class chutzpah to call circumventing secret ballots the “Employee Free Choice Act.” To unions, workers are just the raw material used to create union power, just as iron ore is the raw material used by U.S. Steel and bauxite is the raw material used by the Aluminum Company of America.

The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether those others are businesses or the taxpayers.

There are limits to how long unions can siphon off money from businesses, without facing serious economic repercussions.

The most famous labor union leader, the legendary John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers from 1920 to 1960, secured rising wages and job benefits for the coal miners, far beyond what they could have gotten out of a free market based on supply and demand.

But there is no free lunch.

An economist at the University of Chicago called John L. Lewis “the world’s greatest oil salesman.”
His strikes that interrupted the supply of coal, as well as the resulting wage increases that raised its price, caused many individuals and businesses to switch from using coal to using oil, leading to reduced employment of coal miners. The higher wage rates also led coal companies to replace many miners with machines.

The net result was a huge decline in employment in the coal mining industry, leaving many mining towns virtually ghost towns by the 1960s. There is no free lunch.

Similar things happened in the unionized steel industry and in the unionized automobile industry. At one time, U.S. Steel was the largest steel producer in the world and General Motors the largest automobile manufacturer. No more. Their unions were riding high in their heyday, but they too discovered that there is no free lunch, as their members lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

Workers have also learned that there is no free lunch, which is why they have, over the years, increasingly voted against being represented by unions in secret ballot elections.

One set of workers, however, remained largely immune to such repercussions. These are government workers represented by public sector unions.

While oil could replace coal, while U.S. Steel dropped from number one in the world to number ten, and Toyota could replace General Motors as the world’s leading producer of cars, government is a monopoly. Nobody is likely to replace the federal or state bureaucracies, no matter how much money the unions drain from the taxpayers.

That is why government unions continue to thrive while private sector unions decline. Taxpayers provide their free lunch.

Then there’s Obama and The Democrats jockeying for 2012.

The political fortunes of Senate Democrats and President Obama are moving in opposite directions, complicating their efforts to win a titanic battle against Republicans over federal spending.

Obama’s reelection forecast has improved since the midterms, when he looked like a one-term president. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, must defend 23 seats next year, handing Republicans a strong chance to win back the upper chamber even if Obama cruises to a second term.

The dynamic opens the door to intra-party tension that has already broken through the surface unity.

What’s political hay for the president and White House, after all, isn’t necessarily good for his party’s majority in the Senate. That’s one reason Obama has left much of the work of dealing with Republicans on spending cuts to party leaders in the House and Senate.

“I imagine the president doesn’t want to really get his hands dirty with this until he can walk away with an agreement, which isn’t helping the leadership at the moment,” said one Democratic strategist. “Now, does that have something to do with 2012? Sure it does.”

The short-term result, say several Capitol Hill staffers, is that the “every man for himself” attitude of an election year has arrived even sooner than expected. Senate Democrats wonder if or when the White
House will take the reins in a budget fight that has several of their vulnerable colleagues in a vise.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) used a floor speech to criticize Obama for not being a leader in the spending fight.

A few days later, several Democratic senators gave White House officials an earful after Vice President Biden was appointed to lead talks on a spending deal, and then promptly left the country.

The tension, said Democratic pollster Stefan Hankin, is that if one side of the budget debate on Capitol Hill bends and an agreement is reached, “Obama can look like the great arbitrator and he wins.”

For the White House, Hankin added, it doesn’t much matter which side blinks. “If there’s an agreement, it will most likely be viewed as the president working with Republicans. So the president stands to get much more credit than Senate Democrats do,” he said.

And the compliant Mainstream Media will be more than happy to be the cheerleaders for him.

After all, it’s all about them too.

Then there’s Social Security:

Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – Social Security is the most solvable.

Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett’s check gets redirected to a senior in need.

The relative ease of the fix is what makes President Obama’s Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem. As Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is off the table in debt-reduction talks.

This claim is a breathtaking fraud.

The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction.

If you don’t believe me, listen to the OMB’s own explanation (in the Clinton administration budget for fiscal year 2000 under then-Director Jack Lew, the very same). The OMB explained that these trust fund “balances” are nothing more than a “bookkeeping” device. “They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.” In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains – nothing.

Here’s why. When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it’s kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury – and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever – spent, gone.

In return for that $100, the Treasury sends the Social Security Administration a piece of paper that says: IOU $100. There are countless such pieces of paper in the lockbox. They are called “special issue” bonds.

Special they are: They are worthless. As the OMB explained, they are nothing more than “claims on the Treasury (i.e., promises) that, when redeemed (when you retire and are awaiting your check), will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.” That’s what it means to have a so-called trust fund with no “real economic assets.” When you retire, the “trust fund” will have to go to the Treasury for the money for your Social Security check.

Bottom line? The OMB again: “The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the government’s ability to pay benefits.” No impact: The lockbox, the balances, the little pieces of paper, amount to nothing.

So that when Jack Lew tells you that there are trillions in this lockbox that keep the system solvent until 2037, he is perpetrating a fiction certified as such by his own OMB. What happens when you retire? Your Social Security will come out of the taxes and borrowing of that fiscal year.

Why is this a problem? Because as of 2010, the pay-as-you-go Social Security system is in the red. For decades it had been in the black, taking in more in FICA taxes than it sent out in Social Security benefits. The surplus, scooped up by the Treasury, reduced the federal debt by tens of billions. But demography is destiny. The ratio of workers to retirees is shrinking year by year. Instead of Social Security producing annual surpluses that reduce the federal deficit, it is now producing shortfalls that increase the federal deficit – $37 billion in 2010. It will only get worse as the baby boomers retire.

That’s what makes this administration’s claim that Social Security is solvent so cynical. The Republicans have said that their April budget will contain real entitlement reform. Obama is preparing the ground to demagogue Social Security right through the 2012 elections. The ad writes itself: Those heartless Republicans don’t just want to throw Granny in the snow, they want to throw Granny in the snow to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist! Vote Obama.

On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia denounced Obama for lack of leadership on the debt. It’s worse than that. Obama is showing leadership. With Lew’s preposterous claim that Social Security is solvent for 26 years, Obama is preparing to lead the charge against entitlement reform as his ticket to reelection. (Charles Krauthammer)

And again, the Media will be right their to pump up the Talking Points for Obama and not be very critical of his outrageous claims.

Why?

What else, it’s all about them!

Screw you.

Next we’ll look at ONE TRILLION dollars. This is that number we’ve been hearing about so much. What is a trillion dollars? Well, it’s a million million. It’s a thousand billion. It’s a one followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this? It’s pretty surprising. Go ahead… Scroll down…

Ladies and gentlemen… I give you $1 trillion dollars…(in $10,000 bundles)

And the National Debt is FOURTEEN TIMES THIS!!!

But not worry, according to Michael Moore “we aren’t broke” and this is really a problem.

And the Republicans and Democrats are so obsessed with 2012 re-election that they are talking about cut $61 Billion from this fiscal year and the vote fails!!

Doesn’t it give you confidence that it’s not all about them.

Whine & Cheese Monday

I have been in a news blackout for the weekend. My annual trek to Gallifrey One, the largest “Doctor Who” convention on this continent. A record breaking 2,100 people showed to share their love and appreciation of the world’s longest running Sci-Fi show that will turn 48 late this year.

So now back to the sad reality…

WISCONSIN DEMS: WE’RE ON THE LAM UNTIL WALKER TALKS

Aka he gives in and capitulates to the Liberals demands. Thats spirit of “compromise”, “bi-partisanship” and “civility” is alive in Madison, WI.

The headline and following picture are on the front page of the Huffington Post, you know the liberal bastion that just joined with AOL making Arianna Huffington a very rich person in a very capitalistic deal…

Funny last time I saw signs similar to this the protesters were called “astroturf”, “stupid”, “morons”, “idiots”, violent”, “domestic terrorists”…Oh sorry that was people protesting the Liberals!

This was considered “offensive” by the Huffington Post in 2009 (Look it up):

How dare they use Children! EVIL!

How many children can you spot in the first picture on the front page of today’s Huffington Post.

Just remember, Do as I say, Not as I do. – The Liberal Creed! 

The Wisconsin Senate I understand is still childishly hiding out in Illinois, probably on the taxpayers dime!

And the Liberals are happy!

These are “good” Protesters. Tea Party protesters are EVIL!

Wisconsin Republicans to move all the furniture around while Dems are hiding in Illinois — If Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators thought they pulled a fast one by booking it for Illinois rather than allowing their Republican colleagues to rescind the collective bargaining privileges of public servants, they thought wrong. While twenty senators are required for a quorum on fiscal issues, and there are only 19 Republicans, “a simple majority of 17 members constitutes a quorum for other bills in the 33-seat state senate.” When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker calls the Senate into session this week, “there is a whole legislative agenda that Republicans in the senate and assembly can start acting on that only requires simple majorities” Walker told National Review Online. “If [Dems] want to do their jobs, and have a say, they better show up.” (DC)

The Liberal View (from the San Jose Sentinel): MADISON, Wis. — To end a high-stakes stalemate over union rights that has captured the nation’s attention, a handful of Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin might have to stand up to their new governor.

There’s that spirit of “compromise” and “Bi-partisanship”. You will have to compromise YOUR principles. YOU will have to give in to OUR demands.

The very thought of they, the Liberals, having to compromise is so ludicrous they can’t even fathom it.

Protesters who crowded inside the Capitol for a sixth day Sunday had a similar message. They hung a banner in the Capitol reading “Wisconsin needs 3 cou(R)ageous Senators,” referring to the number of Republicans needed to join with Democrats to block the bill.

That’s why I say “bi-partisanship” and “compromise” are Liberal buzzwords for agree with me, shut up, and sit down and don’t do that again!

As for “civility”: Same thing.  You are being uncivil when you do as Liberal asks or you ask THEM to do something for you. You are their servants, not the other way around.

Wisconsin State Senator Mark Miller Calls Governor Scott Walker’s Budget Tactics ‘Insulting,’ Asks for ‘Respect’.

In other, shut up!, sit down, and don’t you dare do that again, young man!

“We hope that the governor will respect the workers of Wisconsin and maintain the long standing tradition of sitting down and negotiating issues, sit down and treat people like human beings, like the human beings that provided such valuable public services and that’s our goal,” he said.

Ohhh! So now The Governor’s an evil  inhuman monster!! And he should be talked to like a child who had knocked over the family’s priceless  crystal vase!

Next thing you know they’ll ask for a “time out” in the corner next. That is if they ever come back to Wisconsin and don’t just hide out like cowards in Illinois.

And then you go for the Talking Points: <<Drum roll please>>

“We had a much bigger deficit at the end of the Bush recession that hit our state and every state like a thunderclap. It was a $6.6 billion deficit and we solved that deficit and employees stepped up,” Miller told me. (ABC)

Oh course the huge budget deficit left by the Democrat Governor and the Democrat legislature is BUSH’s FAULT!!!

<<rimshot>>

So predictable….

What the Democrats don’t like isn’t dictatorship, it is democracy. That is why the Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate fled the state en masse–they prevented a quorum, so that a vote they were going to lose couldn’t take place. Once again, it is democracy they are trying to frustrate, not dictatorship.

Dictatorship are much easier for Liberals to fathom because then everyone has no choice but to do whatever they say, no matter how balmy and narcissistic it is.

With state budgets collapsing around the nation, an increasingly bright spotlight has been focused on the activities of many public sector unions, perhaps none more so than the teachers unions. Since most of the news is rather alarming to say the least, here at Hot Air we feel obliged to bring you a true feel-good story of union activity to brighten your winter days.

The story focuses on Central Falls school in Rhode Island, an educational institute in such a sorry state of affairs that their drop-out rates were staggering and many students didn’t even log enough classroom time to receive a grade. Last year, in an apparent sign of throwing up their hands in despair, the school board took the drastic measure of firing all 88 of Central Falls’ teachers.

Now, I already know what you’re thinking here. “But Jazz, what about those poor, unemployed teachers? Couldn’t anyone do anything to help them?”

Fear not! In charged the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, who not only got all of their jobs back… they landed them a raise. And all of this is taking place in a community which wouldn’t even qualify as “working class” by most standards. The average wages in the Central Falls region are very low.

So in this town where the average income is $22,000 the average teacher is now making $76,000. What are the community members paying for?

James Parisi: The highest paid teachers are making about $76,000, which frankly I don’t think is enough for the committed professionals that are in that school district.

CNN: You had a 93% fail rate. That’s undeniable.

JP: And you think that’s caused by teacher’s actions?

CNN: Absolutely.

JP: I don’t think the teachers are responsible.

Oh course not!…sing it with me….IT WAS GEORGE W BUSH’s FAULT!!!!!!!!

Frank Flynn, president of the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, said he called Chafee Tuesday morning and asked him to help “move this school forward, because the students of Central Falls deserve nothing less.”

Ever notice how Liberals always want to look to the future or “move forward” (or “lean forward if you’re MSDNC) when people want to talk about their screw ups but they are obsessed with the past when they are talking about those who oppose them!

And how did that work out? Not so well, apparently, as 93% of the students are still failing to meet minimum standards in math and reading, with large numbers once again not even receiving a grade of any sort.

The teacher’s aren’t taking all of this unwanted attention lying down, though. This fall they staged a “sick out” in protest of the increasing demands for improved performance. Also, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten visited the area to demand that everyone “stop playing the blame game,” and focus on the real needs of the students. (These needs apparently don’t include new, better teachers in the opinion of Ms. Weingarten.)

So there you have it. The feel good story of the week. See? And you thought the unions weren’t out there doing anything productive. (Hot Air)

Why is failure, year after year, not only tolerated but welcomed at the administrative level?

Why?

Because Liberals are never wrong, that’s why. At least they think so.

And you can’t prove them wrong, because they never are.

Just ask them.

Class Warfare Breaks Out

For the last couple of days there has been near riotous mob of angry people protesting the  government.
They have signs saying the guy in charge is a dictator.
The compare him to Hitler.
The call him Satan.
He’s evil incarnate.
They say things no one should reprint.
“Kill The Bill” was a chanting war cry!!!

But it’s not a Tea Party Rally.
It’s a Union Protest!
Yes, the “civility” and “bi-Partisan” Left is mad as hornets at the Governor Of Wisconsin.
And the Liberal media loves them for it.

And his crime?
Asking fat cat, narcissistic Liberal Unions members to contribute more to their own pensions

and health benefits (even less than private sector workers).
Well, you’d think he just outlawed Cheese or the Packers or said something derogatory about Muslims!
Because the Unions surely have declared Jihad.

Teachers have staged sick outs.
The 14 Democrats from the State Senate have snuck off to a resort in Illinois (at taxpayer expense no doubt) to prevent the vote on the bill from happening.

And the protesters are yelling and have signage portraying things even I won’t print.
But that’s ok, because it’s liberal outrage. That’s politically acceptable to the Left and The Media.

It’s righteous, in fact.

And I’m sure they would all agree that it’s not “uncivil” the crude things they are saying about their Governor. After all, they are the ones saying them, so they can’t possibly be wrong.

So just remember, when a leftist complains about your “hate speech” just try poking their sacred cows and you’ll get so much toxic vitriol that it will make your great-great-grandmother blush with embarrassment and make sailors look like saints.

And the hypocrisy of it all is completely lost on them, by them way.
Because, after all, it’s “Do what I say! Not what I do”.
They can do it. You can’t.
Simple.

And the president is behind them. “Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally, seems like more of an assault on unions,” President Obama told TMJ4 in Milwaukee.

He’s supporting these “terrorists” (as the Tea party was called) and there are reports that his campaign committee has sent “operatives” into the situation to help fight the evil anti-union thugs. The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America arm — the remnant of the 2008 Obama campaign — is playing an active role in organizing protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
But that’s not “astroturf” though.

The State of Wisconsin was overwhelming turned into a Republican legislature in 2010 by the voters who had had enough of overspending and debt.
The State is 3.6 Billion in the red thanks to the Liberals.
Now the Republicans want to do something about it that doesn’t involves “taxing the rich” and overregulating and strangling businessmen. Class Warfare, where’s the Class Warfare!!?? The Left would ask.
And that’s what makes the Left mad.
They are the spoilt children of a greedy generation and they don’t want to have to be more grown -up about it.
They just want to sit in the State house in Madison and wave their hateful and very uncivil signs and yell and scream about Hitler and The Governor are equivalent.
You will not take away any of their toys.
It’s there’s and you can’t make them pay for it! They are ENTITLED.
“We are all willing to come to the table. We’ve all been willing from day one,” said Madison teacher Rita Miller. “But you can’t take A, B, C, D and everything we’ve worked for in one fell swoop.”

Seems to me, when this agrument was made about ObamaCare to the Liberals they laughed it off and said you can’t possible do it “piece meal”.

What is good for the Liberal Goose is not good for the Anti-Liberal Gander apparently. These are rules set up by Liberals to benefit Liberals and you aren’t suppose to challenge your superiors on it.

They will just sit down, hold their breath, and turn blue.
Then the media will come along and do their children-are-being-hurt,you’ll have no police,  no firefighters (even though they were exempt in the bill) the media and the Left don’t care.

It’s point scoring time!
Armageddon has come to earth and landed in Madison, Wisconsin.
The End of the World has arrived.
It’s the End of Days!
Yeah, it’s the end of Let’s spend our way out of debt and tax the rich to make up for it.
Oh, and state employees will have to actually contribute real money to their lavish pensions and massively generous health care.
EVIL!
Pure EVIL!

But if you get 250,000 people protesting the Left, say on ObamaCare, well, they are just  “astroturf”, “stupid”, “dupes”, morons and will have scron and ridicule heeped on them by the ton. The amount of ridicule and contempt a Liberal has for people who disagree with them is incalculable.
But in Madison, they are courageous freedom fighters fighters for your children and they are all saintly in every way–while they are yelling that their Governor is Hitler!!

But don’t ever call them “astroturf”, “stupid”, “morons”, “domestic terrorists” while they are calling you a turd, a dictator, or other very uncivil things.
Because they are the Left, and only their rules apply.

America, what a country!

 

BUT DON’T EVER TELL THEM THEY ARE BEING “UNCIVIL”!!!

 

Queen Pelosi and Her Empire Strikes Back

Queen of Her own Empire, Nancy Pelosi (does she realize she was repudiated on Nov 2?- in short, NO!): “We will continue discussions with the President and our Democratic and Republican colleagues in the days ahead to improve the proposal before it comes to the House floor for a vote,” Pelosi said.

“Democratic priorities remain clear: to provide a tax cut for working families, to create jobs and economic growth, to assist millions of our fellow Americans who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and to do this in a fiscally sound way.”

Aka, Class Warfare or Die! Victory or Death! Victory or Your Death!

Screw you!

One unidentified lawmaker went so far as to mutter “f— the president” in a Democratic Caucus meeting. The anger aimed at the bill was widespread. As Democrats moved to block the bill from coming up on the floor, chants of “Just say no!” could be heard by reporters outside the room. (The Hill)

Class Warfare or Die! Victory or Death!

Class Warfare or Die! Victory or Death!

Class Warfare or Die! Victory or Death!

The Democrats are so delusional they don’t even understand that they lost the last election. BIG. 63 seats in the House lost, the biggest Republican victory in nearly 90 years!

Forty-seven percent (47%) of those in President Obama’s party say the country is on the wrong track.  Eighty-eight percent (88%) of Republicans and 75% of voters not affiliated with either political party agree. (Rasmussen)

And, frankly, THEY DON’T CARE!

And you can bet Minority Leader Pelosi will not change in January.

“If everybody took out what they didn’t like, we would have nothing,” Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said. “And we know the consequences of doing nothing.”

The Democrats don’t care!

Simple as that.

They don’t give a crap on a stick if your taxes go up Jan 1, 2011. If they can’t have their Class Warfare then they’ll take their marbles and go home!

F*uck you!

“We have given our leadership license to force the Senate and the White House back to the table to get a better deal for the American people,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.)said.

Asked if leadership had agreed to do that, DeFazio replied, “Well, they’re not going to get a bill if they don’t.”

Louisiana Kickback recipient Sen, Mary Landreiu had the gal to call the deal “moral recklessness”. This would be funny from the lady who got a $300 million dollar bribe to vote for ObamaCare, if it wasn’t so incredible in it’s arrogance.

Class Warfare or Die! Victory or Death!

Class Warfare or Die! Victory or Death!

Class Warfare or Die! Victory or Death!

The President for his part did lovingly call the Republicans, “Hostage Takers”.

So Tax Increases (because they aren’t “cuts”) are being held hostage by Class Warriors and the ones who aren’t fighting a class war are the terrorists!

Now, that’s politics 2010.

“A clear majority of the U.S. House of Representatives supports this plan,” Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) said in a statement. “We are allowing the liberal wing of the Democratic Caucus to hold these critically needed tax cuts hostage.”

But the ultimate power in this situation is Queen of Her Own Universe, the still Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

If she wants to be a one liberal roadblock to your taxes going up, damn she’s going to squat in the middle of the road, hold her breath until you turn blue to save her Class Warfare!

The question is will they blink after all this bluster and cry-baby tactics?

Personally, I’m too much of cynic to think so. Ultimately, I have no faith.

Liberals don’t compromise, they dictate.

They want YOU to compromise with them. There is no quid pro quo.

They are spoiled bratty little children who will cry and whine and throw a tantrum if you don’t do exactly as they want. They want what they want, when they want it. Nothing less.

They have got the maturity to deal with reality. So they don’t.

And at the top of this heap of crap is the Queen Dung Beetle, Nancy Pelosi, the Queen of all she surveys.

 

 

 

Blind Man’s Bluff

Well, the Republicans, and some Democrats called the President and the Far Left’s bluff yesterday, voting down the Raise the Taxes on the rich so their base of the loonie left get that message.

But, of course that wouldn’t be the message. Most Democrats said that showed them siding with “millionaires and billionaires” over the middle class. (NYT)

And that was the symbolic gesture they wanted, to toss some red meat to their psychotic base before they allow themselves to be bribed into going along with something else.

Call it the sugar pill before the medicine.

Now, though, comes the bribery. What will it cost us taxpayers to buy off the Democrats and their class warfare this time. It certainly will not go away. It’s all they really have anymore.

“I feel like I am in the twilight zone,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. “It’s depressing to me that we have gotten to this level of posturing, that they are saying if you do not give people a tax break on their second million, that nobody gets one.”

The Democrats posturing, excluded, of course.

And let’s not forget the paternal contempt of the Left:

Sen. Schumer, pressing for his proposal (to make the cap $1 million), said: “It’s not that we want to punish wealthy people. We want to praise them. But they’re doing fine, and they’re not going to spend the money and stimulate the economy.”

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him It surely wasn’t the other way around.

Right now there is little goodwill on the left toward the president. Liberals are up in arms amid talk of compromise on extending the George W. Bush tax cuts for all Americans, rather than allowing rates to rise for the wealthiest. They see Obama today as weak, vacillating and lacking either convictions or the gumption to fight for the principles they believe got him elected. They want a fighter in the White House who will put the Republicans in their place.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), an unabashed liberal, was quoted last week as saying that if Obama caves on tax cuts, “he’s going to have a lot of swimming upstream” to do. Liberal blogger Jane Hamsher accused Obama of “cynical charades” in his discussions about a compromise on tax cuts and unemployment insurance. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called Obama’s freeze on federal workers’ pay “transparently cynical.”

But other Democrats see dangers in a strategy of confrontation and argue that an alternative approach can win back the independent Democrats lost last month.

Liberals may be disillusioned, but they still voted for Democrats in the midterms. Independents defected in significant numbers. Many are worried about the president’s policies, and many think he has failed to fulfill his promise to reduce partisanship and change the way Washington works. They want results and expect cooperation between the parties.

What is the right strategy for Obama to regain the political initiative and put his presidency back on track? Should he hold firm, push a liberal agenda and provoke fights with the Republicans, as Truman did? That would reenergize his liberal base and sharpen his profile with the public.

Or should he be a conciliator, as Clinton tried to be, cooperating when possible with congressional Republicans but resisting when he believes they have gone too far right? That might show the Republicans as obstructionists and bring independents back to his side heading toward 2012. (Washington Post)

Well, this independent won’t be back if he plays cynical political games. But at least the left now sees the weakness that we all saw more than 2 years ago.

Only they see it for their own ideology, not reality. As usual.

It’s all Chicken Crap!

Speaker-Designate John Boehner yesterday when the Liberal Democrats pulled a petullant and childish partisan political stunt had it right.

“I’m trying to catch my breath so I don’t refer to this maneuver going on today as chicken crap, all right?” Boehner told reporters in the Capitol Thursday. “But this is nonsense. All right? The election was one month ago. We’re 23 months from the next election, and the political games have already started, trying to set up the next election. We had an honest conversation at the White House about the challenges that we face to get out of here and to take care of what the American people expect of us. And they roll this vote out today; it really is just what you think I was going to say anyway.”

Just days after a “White House Summit” on the Bush Era Tax issue (They are not “Cuts” because if they are not renewed your taxes go UP, if they are renewed NOTHING HAPPENS to your taxes. They DON”T GO DOWN. They are not “cuts!”) Nancy Pelosi personally orchestrates a F*CK YOU maneuver very reminiscent of what happened right after the Health Care Summit where the Democrats said that was fun, now we are going to do what we want, because we want, and F*ck you!

So in show of total hyper-partisanship and a pie in the face to their own President the petulant little children in the House passed in a warp speed maneuver that would make the Picard Maneuver look like a turtle on Valium as they thumbed their collective noses at everyone and passed their “middle class tax cut” regardless.

The fact that it’s not a “cut” is perfectly ignored by Liberals in Congress and Liberals in the media.

But the petulant children did it anyways. You can almost see Pelosi just sticking her tongue and waggling her fingers at everyone.

So they passed what they want. No negotiation. No Compromise. No amendments. No discussion.

Just rammed it through and f*ck you!

Gotta preserve that core addiction that Liberals have for Class Warfare.

And, it would definitely be a great boon to job seekers everywhere if there potential bosses taxes were raised right now. That will surely make everything much better!

And you know they are cutting 2012 campaign commercials right now, “Republicans voted to not to cut taxes on the middle class”, “Republicans wanted to give tax cuts to the rich!”

The same old mantra.

And if you think Democrats are intellectually capable of understanding how childish this all was…Think again.

We Dare you to vote against a “Middle Class Tax Cut”. Go ahead we double dog Dare you! We Triple dog dare you!

We have lots of friends in the liberal media who’ll bash you for the next 2 years 24/7  if you do!!

Intellectual maturity this isn’t.

It was a political stunt, by people who lost an election big because that’s all they have done for the last 2 years is one cramdown stunt after another.

Learn anything after the election, of course not.

They are far, far too narcissistic and ideologically hell bent for that.

They know it’s Dead on Arrival in the Senate, but they don’t care. It’s all show. It’s all just a game.

A petulant child’s game.

We the People deserve better.

Sign of the Times

Uber Progressive Leftist Alan Colmes on Megyn Kelly’s America Live yesterday discussing the 1/1/11 Tax Increases and Congress in general in getting things done implicitly said that 1-party rule (meaning Democrats) is the only way Washington can function anymore.

“But you don’t have 60 votes in The Senate to override a Republican filibuster”-Colmes

So unless you have an absolute supermajority  1- party rule where everyone is in lock step the minority is going to muck everything up.

Mind you, before Scott Brown’s election in January 2010 the Democrats did have a supermajority and STILL couldn’t pass their agenda. It took legislative trickery and dishonesty to pass ObamaCare after 15 months of wrangling, horse-trading,back room deals and manipulation by DEMOCRATS to pass it.

But even then, it was still the Republican’s fault!

So “Bi-partisan” is a myth.

The Democrats want total control or everything is going to go to hell. After all, they are the vastly superior economic and moral beings- if only those damn Republicans and those damn Tea Partiers would just get out of their way!

1- party rule (THEM) or bust!

I wonder if it will shift on the minority view when the Democrats are in the minority in the House starting in January?

It will still be the Republican’s fault, after all. Everything in life is, you know.

The “party of no” indeed…

But what do the Democrats want to do?

Here, for instance, is The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberley Strassel:

“According to (Nevadan Harry Reid), Senate Democrats are going to confirm judges, rewrite immigration law, extend unemployment insurance, fix the issue of gays in the military, reorganize the FDA, forestall tax hikes, re-fund the government, and ratify a nuclear arms treaty (and the DREAM act) – all in two, maybe three, weeks. This is the same institution that needs a month to rename a post office.”

Or 15 months to pass Socialized medicine even with a Super-Majority!

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can afford to have all the tax rates go up in January because they couldn’t get together and pass a bill to prevent that from happening (but the Democrats will do it just to preserve their class warfare ideology). But the nature of that bill matters, not just for politicians but — far more important — for the economy.

Speaking of the economy, another sign of the times:

The Soon-to-be Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi just this week: “But it’s also the right thing to do to grow our economy.  Economists tell us that unemployment insurance — the non-partisan Urban Institute estimated that unemployment insurance returns $2 to the economy for every $1 spent. This is money that is needed by families to buy necessities, to heat their homes… and immediately injects demand into the economy — creating jobs.”

Yes, folks, you heard it here- Unemployment creates Jobs and stimulates growth!

So more unemployment must therefore be a good thing.

Let’s all lose our jobs, sit home and watch Oprah and collect our Unemployment $$$ . It should be  a Utopia by Pelosi’s reasoning.

And Speaking of Pelosi:

In one of her first acts as speaker in 2007, Pelosi, a California Democrat, created the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to draw attention to climate-change science and showcase how a cap on carbon dioxide needn’t be a threat to economic growth.

Republicans, who won control of the House in the Nov. 2 election, have opposed legislative efforts to regulate carbon emissions as a tax on energy. When the panel convened today, Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, said that the hearing “will be the last of the select committee.”

Too Bad Nancy, I guess you’ll have to peddle your Global Warming fraud another way…How about The EPA….

Republicans are assuming that cap-and-trade (aka cap-and-tax) is dead because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lacks the votes to bring up the House-passed bill and because this issue proved a loser in the 2010 House races. Like the famous Mark Twain saying, its death may be exaggerated.

The Senate’s environmentalism expert, Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., warns us that the Obama administration is trying to implement cap-and-trade anyway by bureaucratic regulations. Directives issued by the Environmental Protection Agency are coming down the pike to increase energy costs and kill jobs.

Last May, the EPA issued what it called a tailoring rule to govern new power plants, oil refineries and factories that yearly emit 100,000 tons or more of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons or sulfur hexafluoride. Inhofe reports that this tailoring rule will further reduce our manufacturing base and especially hurt the poor and elderly.

Inhofe predicts that the EPA standards planned for commercial and industrial boilers will cost 798,000 jobs. He also warns about the harmful effects on jobs caused by new rules on ozone emissions.

Since Barack Obama moved into the White House, the EPA has proposed or finalized 29 major regulations and 172 major policy rules. The EPA is, for the first time, simultaneously toughening the regulations on all six major traditional pollutants such as ozone and sulfur dioxide.

Before Climate-gate exposed the politics behind the “science” of global warming, a 5-to-4 Supreme Court ordered the EPA to consider regulating emissions based on that unsubstantiated and now largely discredited theory.

Despite a long record of supporting Obama stimulus and spending legislation, the expected chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., says, “We are not going to allow this administration to regulate what they have been unable to legislate.”

Opposition to EPA’s new rules is remarkably bipartisan. Seventeen Democrats signed a letter to EPA Director Lisa Jackson opposing them.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was elected after running a TV ad showing himself firing a rifle to put a bullet through a copy of the cap-and-trade bill, and he promised to fight EPA attempts to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. He may have a difficult task because Jackson is plotting to force mass retirements of the coal plants that provide half of U.S. electricity.

EPA’s aggressive overregulation is forcing the electric industry to choose between continuing to operate while taking on major capital costs of complying with heavy new burdens or closing down and building new plants that use more expensive sources such as natural gas. The public will surely end up paying higher electric rates (aka a big tax increase).

The ObamaCare law was deviously designed to take decision-making away from our elected representatives and give it to 15 “expert” members of the Obama-appointed Independent Payment Advisory Board. Many provisions of this law prohibit Congress from repealing or changing decisions of the “experts.”

The Obama administration is using administrative regulations to implement what is known as card check, which even the Democratic Congress refuses to legislate. Obama’s recess appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, Craig Becker, has lined up a 3-to-2 board majority to repeal the rule that requires secret ballots in unionization elections.

Currently, a secret ballot of workers is mandated to unionize a company. Becker’s new regulation will eliminate workers’ right and make them subject to coercion and bullying to induce them to vote yes on a card visible to union bosses.

The Obama administration is also toying with a plan to substitute administrative regulations for treaties. Several years ago, the Council on Foreign Relations fingered the treaty provision of the U.S. Constitution as its most objectionable section, and now an ex-Clinton administration State Department bureaucrat, James P. Rubin, has floated a New York Times op-ed suggesting that treaties are not “worth the trouble anymore,” and we should substitute domestic regulations.

The globalists find it inconvenient that our Constitution requires a two-thirds Senate vote for treaty ratification. Horrors! That, they say, causes “international frustration” with America.

This frustration broke into print because there are not enough Senate votes to ratify the New START Treaty that Obama signed with Russia. Rubin’s solution is to ditch the ratification process and substitute executive agreements and pronouncements.

Rubin reminds us that after it became clear the Senate was not going to ratify a climate-change treaty, Obama just used EPA regulations, and so we can do likewise with arms-control treaties. Let’s just ignore the Constitution and let Obama bureaucrats make all important decisions. (IBD)

Or Food, let’s get them where they eat.

A questionable food safety bill in search of a crisis passed the Senate, but may hit a snag in the House. This power grab of the nation’s food supply may end up benefiting a certain Hungarian billionaire. (aka George Soros, puppetmaster of the extreme Left).

Why would the Senate take up precious time in the lame duck session considering a food safety bill?

Just as ObamaCare wasn’t really about health care reform but about government power, S510 is not really about food safety but about government control of agriculture and the nation’s food producers. The Food Safety Modernization Act would give the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented power to govern how farmers produce their crops. The FDA would be able to control soil, water, hygiene, and even temperature, on farms. Through the law, the agency could regulate animal activity in the fields.

“This legislation means that parents who tell their kids to eat their spinach can be assured it won’t make them sick,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who wrote the bill, referring to a recent e-coli outbreak traced to spinach.

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, even if you have to manufacture one. As the Heritage Foundation reports, the nation’s food supply is the world’s safest and getting safer all the time. Incidences of food-borne illnesses, despite headlines about massive egg recalls, have been declining for more than a decade.

In 1996, there were 51.2 cases of confirmed food-borne bacterial contamination per 100,000 people.

By 2009, this fell by a third to 34.8 cases per 100,000 people. So it would seem it’s getting safer for kids to eat their spinach. But then again, this bill isn’t about spinach.

S510 transfers authority over food regulation enforcement from the FDA to the Homeland Security Department, which brought us the TSA, naked body scanners and the groping of our junk. The bill requires the EPA to “participate” in regulating the food chain.

The bill expands government authority and control over America’s 2.2 million farms, 28,000 food manufacturing facilities, 149,000 food and beverage stores, and 505,000 residents and similar facilities. It increases inspections of all food “facilities.”

Because it taxes them for the privilege, the House must pass a new version of the bill to be sent back to the Senate. The Constitution requires all tax bills to originate in the House, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who opened the session with a five-minute soliloquy on football, should have known that.

One interesting feature of the bill is a bunch of new regulations regarding seeds and seed cleaning that requires expensive equipment. Smaller concerns might not be able to handle the added burden, concentrating the handling of seed production in the hands of corporate giants like Monsanto.

Curiously, George Soros’ hedge fund has just bought 897,813 shares (valued at $312.6 million) of Monsanto. His hand seems to be in anything that weakens individual freedom and destabilizes currencies and free governments, and makes him money in the process.

Governments at all levels have been busy telling us what we should eat and how our restaurants should prepare our food. Trans fats are bad and must be banned, as must vending machines that dispense candy bars and soda. There’s talk of putting federally funded salad bars in our public schools.

So much for the pursuit of happiness — we’re from the government and we have ways to make you healthy. Thomas Jefferson once said: “If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”

Well, ObamaCare has taken care of the medicine part, and now government is after our spinach, too.

You can have our turnips when you pry them from our cold, dead hands. Bon appetit, America. (IBD)

And there’s still the FCC with Net Neutrality and The Fairness Doctrine. The FTC with new regulations on businesses.

This Alphabet soup of liberal regulations is bad for anyone’s health.

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”– Thomas Jefferson

We are from the Government and we are here to help you…

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”-Thomas Jefferson

Veni Vidi Vici…Almost

The Republicans are going to pick up more seats  in the House in the election than anyone’s done since WWII.

Can you say Queen of Her own Narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, is tossed out on her butt as Speaker. Maybe she’ll be MINORITY Leader.

But Prince Harry Reid and the Democrats managed to hold onto the Senate. But will Give ‘em All Hell Harry still be Speaker in January??

The Republicans only picked up 6 Seats. But now you have 49 Democrats, 2 Liberal Independents and 46 Republicans.

Maybe in 2012!  Along with Obama we can sweep the cockroaches out of  the People’s Congress.

So this is far from over!

Jan Brewer easily beat Terry Goddard. Thank the Lord. And we have a majority of Republicans in the House again. The Legislature is solidly Republican.

Lots of  New Republican Governors so far also.

But The race to unseat Mr. “Boycott My State”  Raul Grijalva was lost by 570 votes! (that went to 3rd party candidates) DAMN!

We passed by proposition  to ban Affirmative Action, so I wonder if Eric Holder is going to sue us YET AGAIN!

We also passed a Constitution Amendment against The Health Care Mandates of ObamaCare.

So I’m sure we’ll get sue YET AGAIN!.

Bring it on Eric!

Jan 2009: President Obama listened to Republican gripes about his stimulus package during a meeting with congressional leaders Friday morning – but he also left no doubt about who’s in charge of these negotiations. “I won,” Obama noted matter-of-factly, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

Nov 2, 2010: YOU LOST!  Now what? Elections do have Consequences!

****************

Here is an ironclad certainty: It’s too little too late for the antagonist-in-chief to paper over two years of relentless Democratic incivility and hate toward his domestic “enemies.” Voters have spoken: They’ve had enough. Enough of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s rhetorical abuse. Enough of his feints at bipartisanship. Whatever the final tally, this week’s turnover in Congress is a GOP mandate for legislative pugilism, not peace. Voters have had enough of big government meddlers “getting things done.” They are sending fresh blood to the nation’s Capitol to get things undone.

Just two short years ago, Obama campaigned as the transcendent unifier. “Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states,” he proclaimed. “We have been and always will be the United States of America.” It’s been an Us vs. Them freefall ever since.

“We don’t mind the Republicans joining us,” Obama taunted a few weeks ago. “They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

As voters who have been maligned by the ruling majority as stupid, unwashed, racist, selfish and violent headed to the polls Tuesday, Democrats released “talking points” attacking Republican leaders who “are not willing to compromise.” But “no compromise” is exactly the message that un-American Americans delivered to Washington this campaign season:

No more compromising deals behind closed doors. No more compromising bailouts in times of manufactured crisis. No more compromising conservative principles for D.C. party elites. No more compromising the American economy for left-wing special interests. No more compromising transparency and ethics for bureaucratic self-preservation.

Let us be clear, in case it hasn’t fully sunk into the minds of Obama and the trash-talking Democrats yet: You can take your faux olive branch and shove it. Thank you. (Michelle Malkin)

Will the Democrats be humbled by having their head chopped off?

NO.

Expect the Senate to be the Liberal Firewall against the House’s Reform agenda.

Obstuctionism, in the Liberal’s view, is now in vogue. It’s no longer an excuse it’s a moral imperative to stop the vast right wing conspiracy against their Socialist greatness.

So Enjoy the victory, but it’s far from over!

We may have destroyed the Death Star, but the Empire is still building another one in secret to menace the people again. So we have much more work to do.

This was “The New Hope” so we still more to go before 2012 and the “Return of the People”.

The Empire is not going to go quietly.

 

Putting the *Me* in Mea Culpa

Back in early 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was asked on “Meet the Press” how quickly he could create jobs. Oh, very fast, he said. He’d already consulted with a gaggle of governors, and “all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.” When Obama revealed the members of his energy team, he explained that they were part of his effort to get started on “shovel-ready projects all across the country.” When he unveiled his education secretary, he assured everyone that he was going to get started “helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects.”

In interviews, job summits and press conferences, it was shovel-ready this, shovel-ready that. Search the White House website for the term “shovel-ready” and you’ll drown in press releases about all the shovels ready to shove shovel-ready projects into the 21st century, where no shovel is left behind.

Only now it turns out that the president was shoveling something all right when he was talking about shovel-ready jobs — a whole pile of steaming something. (Jonah Goldberg)

In the magazine article, Mr. Obama reflects on his presidency, admitting that he let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend Democrat,” realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” and perhaps should have “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” in the stimulus.

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/obama-no-shovel-ready-jobs-krauthammer-pounces

“Well, that is quite an admission. You know, a year and a half and half a trillion dollars later he says these things that I talked about endlessly don’t exist (“shovel ready jobs”). It’s not actually surprising that he doesn’t know what a shovel ready project is. Having never worked in the private sector he wouldn’t be sure what a project is and there isn’t a lot of shoveling at Harvard Law School.” So I can understand that this was one of the greatest “Oops” in American history. And it’s going to be hard for a democrat when you show one tape against another. They’re goint to say, “So you supported a trillion dollars offered by a president who didn’t even know that this stuff that this stuff is not going to happen?”– Charles Krauthammer

And somehow now, as president, things are messy and they don’t always work as planned and people are mad at us,” Mr. Obama said. (New York Times)

DOH!

It’s not that Obama was lying when he said all that stuff. It’s just that he didn’t know what he was talking about. All it took was nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus money and 20-plus months of on-the-job training for him to discover that he was talking nonsense.

But does he really mean it?

Hell No. it’s just a cynical political ploy to garner sympathy and evoke fake pathos.

How do I know, well…

When the Republicans and the American people thump him, well that just means you’ll have to kiss his ass even more.

In an hour-long interview with the Times’s White House correspondent, Peter Baker, Mr. Obama predicted that his political rivals would either be chastened by falling short of their electoral goals (complete takeover of both House and Senate) or burdened with the new responsibility that comes from achieving them.

“It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible, either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them,” Mr. Obama said. “Or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.”

Essentially, it comes down to: Remember all the things I said repeatedly on the campaign trail and then as President, well, I guess I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and I should have been more understanding of Republicans, so don’t vote my party out of office because we are totally incompetent and tone deaf. I’m sorry.

Where’s my barf bag?

“Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama explains, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and PR and public opinion.” (New York Times)

So that’s why you were on TV every 5 minutes during the Health care debate and had town halls and press conferences, meet and greets, and now backyard meetings and arena-sized multi-media events, because you weren’t doing enough PR.

Barf bag Alert!

This is an old progressive lament: Our product is perfect, we just didn’t sell it convincingly to the rubes.

I’m sorry you’re too stupid and unenlightened to understand how fantastic I am and how fantastic our Socialist Utopia is.

We don’t want to work with you Mr. President. WE WANT TO STOP YOU!

PERIOD!

But you’re too narcissistic to even see that!

The mea culpa that is more about ME than culpa.

“Historically, when you look at how America has evolved, typically we make progress on race relations in fits and starts,” President Obama said at a town hall event with young Americans.

The “casted” MTV special that is.

He then suggested that the recession has played a part in driving racial antagonism while he has been in office.

Yeah, Democrats and Liberals calling everyone who disagrees with them a racist at the drop of any hat has nothing to do with it!

Opposition to the “first black President” must be racist. But that has nothing to do with the rise in racial tensions.

“Often times misunderstandings and antagonisms surface most strongly when times are tough. And that’s not surprising,” Mr. Obama said, arguing that Americans are less worried when things are going well.

How would he know, it’s only gotten worse under his watch.

He added that anxiety over not being able to pay bills – or having lost a job or a home – sometimes “organizes itself around kind of a tribal attitude, and issues of race become more prominent.”

So is that why Democrats, especially Southern Democrats, were against freeing the slaves or Civil Rights or Women’s Sufferage?

No.

But it sounds good. It’s complete diversionary crap. But I sounds good.

If everyone was wonderful and we all lived in the Socialist Utopia that’s in his head there would be no strife.

Kumbuya!

“We’ve got a little bit of everybody in this country,” the president said, arguing that “our strength comes from unity, not division.”

So that’s why I’ve spent the last 2 years dividing people in to “rich” and “poor”, “black”, “white”, “latino” , “Main Street”, Wall Street”, Tea Partiers and Government Union Thugs, Socialists and Capitalists, haves and have nots, the insured and the uninsured, the legal and the illegal (sorry, undocumented).

I want to unite people behind dividing and conquering them.

Orwell would be proud of you my son.

As would your soul brother, Saul Alinsky.

But don’t worry, you’re just a racist if you disagree.

Veteran Democratic operative Pat Caddell is unloading on the White House, saying he’s had enough with the president whose “hypocrisy” on campaign finance “is just mind-blowing.”

President Obama has made a point while campaigning to call out conservative-leaning groups for hurting the integrity of elections by not voluntarily disclosing donors. Caddell says Obama has no room to talk.

“My problem with Obama started the day he blew up public financing of presidential campaigns,” Caddell said in an interview with The Daily Caller. “He’s the man whose done the most to destroy whatever integrity there was in campaign financing.”

Obama declined public funding of his presidential campaign in 2008.

His entire campaign, some $750 Billion dollars was funded by “private” donations.

People like Foreign socialist Billionaire and his moveon.org and other tentacles had nothing to do with it.

Caddell, who has worked for a number of presidential campaigns, including Joe Biden’s in 1988, said making outside money an election issue is a risky strategy for the Democrats. “You’re 21 days out from an election and this is what you’ve got? That’s it? Nothing about jobs or the economy?”

It won’t be pretty for his party, Caddell says. “Come the morning of November 2, they’re going to have a cold shower. It’s going to be an Arctic temperature.”

Caddell also took a swing at Obama’s inner circle.

“These are naive idiots who’ve come out of academia and have never done anything real in their lives, and they are actually in power,” he said. “These are the people we never let in the room when we had serious business to do. Now they’re running the country.”

And they will say or do anything to keep it.

And use anyone to keep as much of it as possible.

First Lady Michelle Obama reportedly violated Illinois election laws by encouraging voters to support President Obama at a polling place in Chicago Thursday morning.

Election laws in Illinois prohibit anyone from engaging in “any political discussion within any polling place,” or “within 100 feet of any polling place.”

The first lady was reportedly speaking with other voters in a polling place and urged them to keep President Obama’s agenda going.

“Technical violation, perhaps. But what are mere technical violations of voting laws to the Obama administration!” said Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, a conservative, non-partisan, public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption.

Illinois law has a broad-ban on any person engaging in political discussion within the polling place.

“Even if her conversations didn’t constitute electioneering, they almost certainly violated the broader Sec. 17-29 ban on engaging in ‘any political discussion within any polling place,’” said Charlie Spies, an election attorney with Clark Hill, PLC. (Drudge)

But don’t expect anyone on the Democrat side to care. Hell, they don’t care if you stand outside the polling place with truncheons and yell racial hatred as long as you’re black and a Democrat. So why would this bother them?

After all, it’s all about them. And him, Obama, specifically.

Obama likes to win, too, of course. But he is so ideological, so deeply marinated in leftism (he picked up the false accusation about the Chamber of Commerce, for example, from a left-wing website), that asking him to compromise with Republicans may well cause a system crash. Though he now acknowledges that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects,” he continues to see his presidency in such empyrean terms (and his opponents as so lacking in good faith) that compromise seems remote.–Mona Charen

Maybe it’s unfair for people to think Obama is just another tax-and-spend Democrat. After all, some tax-and-spend Democrats are actually competent at it.-Jonah Goldberg

Or maybe it’s not. After all, he puts the Me in Mea Culpa!

It’s Recess Time, Children

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama bypassed the Senate Wednesday and appointed Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor and patient care specialist, to run Medicare and Medicaid.

The decision to use a so-called recess appointment to install Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services drew immediate fire from the GOP. Republicans have raised concerns about Berwick’s views on rationing of care and other matters and said it was wrong for Obama to go around the normal Senate confirmation process. That view was echoed by a key Democratic committee chairman, although the recess appointment is a tool used by presidents of both parties.

“Democrats haven’t scheduled so much as a committee hearing for Donald Berwick but the mere possibility of allowing the American people the opportunity to hear what he intends to do with their health care is evidently reason enough for this administration to sneak him through without public scrutiny,” said McConnell, R-Ky.

Could that be because Dr Berwick has been quoted as saying he “loves” the NHS (the British Health Care system) and that rationing of care is absolutely necessary and that it also a “redistribution of wealth” issue??

Gee, I wonder why no one wanted to talk about that?

Berwick, 63, is a pediatrician, Harvard University professor and leader of a health care think tank, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, that works to develop and implement concepts for improving patient care. The programs he will oversee — Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly, poor and disabled, along with the Children’s Health Insurance Program — provide care to about 100 million people, or around 1 in 3 Americans.

So he’s yet another Harvard Ivy Tower Academic Liberal.

I know I’m excited.

Dr Berwin: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly.“

April 2009: Senator Max Baucus, told CNSNews in April, “There is no rationing of health care at all” in the proposed reform. (and the Baucus bill was the ‘bi-partisan’ one!)

He was the Chair of the committee that wouldn’t schedule the hearings on the Doctor’s confirmation, by the way.

And The President ran around during the debate last year that saying  “rationing” was just a scare tactic.

Hmmm…

It’s just those echoes of the health care debate that Democrats would prefer not to replay on the Senate floor.

So let’s not and say we did, and just call the whole thing off and just appoint him without any coverage at all.

Let’s just sweep it under the rug…Nothing to see here….

Dr Berwin 2008: “Any health care funding plan that is just equitable civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”

Redistribution of wealth? Where have I heard that before?

Karl Marx?

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

“If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.”

“But, The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.

“One of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that.” —That would be Illinois State Senator Barack Obama in 2001.

In Obama’s America, we’ll finally be able to break free of the “constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution” — and in so doing, achieve “social justice” through “redistributive change.”

Well, then. Fine .

But this is not the America I knew… (Michelle Malkin)

So the “transparent” President strikes again.

Only, what he’s transparent about isn’t what people thought he meant by that when they foolishly voted for him.

“I am romantic about the National Health Service,” he told a London audience in 2008, referring to the British single-payer system. “I love it,” Dr. Berwick added, going on to call it “such a seductress” and “a global treasure.” He routinely points to the NHS as a health-care model for the U.S. (WSJ)

According to a “topline message points” document on his nomination that we obtained, “The fact is, rationing is rampant in the system today, as insurers make arbitrary decisions about who can get the care they need. Don Berwick wants to see a system in which those decisions are transparent—and that the people who make them are held accountable.”

The people who can write such things with a straight face believe there is no difference between rationing through individual choices and price signals and rationing through politics and bureaucratic omniscience. In an influential 1996 book “New Rules,” Dr. Berwick and a co-author argued that one of “the primary functions” of health regulation is “to constrain decentralized, individual decision making” and “to weigh public welfare against the choices of private consumers.”

He then recommended “protocols, guidelines, and algorithms for care,” with the “common underlying notion that someone knows or can discover the ‘best way’ to carry out a task to reach a decision, and that improvement can come from standardizing processes and behaviors to conform to this ideal model.” And guess who will determine the “best way”?

As I said repeatedly during the Health care “debate”, the government wants to decide who lives and who dies.

Nothing more, Nothing Less.

Now doesn’t that make you feel better.

The Slaughter House!

Just when you thought the Democrats had hit a new low in contempt and disrespect and the Heights of Arrogance and abuse of power, they try and trump even themselves.

We have now arrived at the doorstep of full dictatorship.

The consent of the governed is not only ignored but scorned, vilified, and now they want bury it and ignore everything except their own selfish desires.

It’s called, ironically, “The Slaughter Solution”.

It’s Named after House Rules Committee Chairwoman, Louise Slaughter.

The even the Fates are amused by The Democrats.

In the Slaughter Solution, the rule would declare that the House “deems” the Senate version of Obamacare to have been passed by the House. House members would still have to vote on whether to accept the rule, but they would then be able to say they only voted for a rule, not for the bill itself.

Yeah, that’s democracy, and a representative one,  in action.

Would House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow House Democratic leaders try to cram the Senate version of Obamacare through the House without actually having a recorded vote on the bill?

Not only is the answer yes, they would, they have figured out a way to do it, according to National Journal’s Congress Daily:

“House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.

“Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

“Slaughter has not taken the plan to Speaker Pelosi as Democrats await CBO scores on the corrections bill. ‘Once the CBO gives us the score, we’ll spring right on it,’ she said.”

And then they dump it on the Senate and wash their hands of it.

Not having voted for or against the bill itself, but for a new parliamentary trick.

The ultimate in political cowardice.

A short interview in the The Daily Caller (a “right wing” internet news service ) had a brief Interview with the designated Rules chairwoman.

In my opinion, she comes off  as aloof, disrespectful and doesn’t seem to care. At one point she seems to think it’s all a big joke.

Just another soldier in Pelosi’s Army following orders.

DAILY CALLER: How realistic is it that they would do that?

SLAUGHTER: Pretty good.

DAILY CALLER: Pretty good?

SLAUGHTER: I, no, I don’t know. I’m just being a smart aleck. That decision’s not been made yet.

DAILY CALLER: Who’s going to make it?

SLAUGHTER: Well, I think the Speaker and I will probably be in on that.

DAILY CALLER: Now, can I ask you a rhetorical question? If you do this, can’t your opponents still say, ‘Well they didn’t technically vote for it but they still—’

SLAUGHTER: Your opponents can say anything.

DAILY CALLER: Right, but which argument will win?

SLAUGHTER: What we’ve got to do here is the right thing. (emphasis mine)

DAILY CALLER: Do you think that the abortion caucus, the pro-life caucus, will go for this? Have you talked to them about it?

SLAUGHTER: No. I haven’t got time to do that. But that will only come, as you know, for the Senate bill. The House bill is not in this context here. You understand that?

DAILY CALLER: I think so. I think I understand the procedure pretty well.

SLAUGHTER: It’s the Senate bill—

DAILY CALLER: –that you’re fixing.

SLAUGHTER: Yes. So Stupak is not in the Senate bill.

DAILY CALLER: Right, but he wants the language fixed in the Senate bill.

SLAUGHTER: There is already language in the Senate bill.

DAILY CALLER: The abortion language.

SLAUGHTER: Right.

DAILY CALLER: He wants it changed.

SLAUGHTER: Well I don’t know that we’re going to do that. I haven’t discussed that with them. I’ve just been up here working.

Thank you  for that Nuremburg Defense…

And then the Democrats trotted out an 11-year kid to pimp for them on Obama’s Campaign Tour III.

They have no shame.

No decency.

No conscience.

Nothing.

Kids and tricks.

Oh, and the Democrats are back to secret, closed door meetings.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered committee chairmen not to conduct scheduled hearings on Thursday so that what is described as “backroom negotiations” could be finished.

Transparency has evaporated again!

That’s The US Congress in 2010 for you.

And we are the Lambs to the Slaughter.

So let’s put on a Marathon of “American Idol” and just don’t pay attention to the rotating knives…