Janeane Garofalo: “Herman Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican party. Conservative movement and tea party movement, one in the same.
“People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.'”
So if you don’t like Obama’s policies, you’re a racist. And if you like a black Republican it’s just because you ARE racist and just want to hide it…”I have many black friends…” 🙂
So it’s the “So when did you stop beating your wife” false choice fallacy.
SoWhen did you stop being a racist? 🙂
Herman Cain says President Obama’s supporters play the race card to paper over the commander in chief’s failures. “While I don’t believe that Barack Obama used racial issues to get elected, I do believe that many of his supporters selectively use race to cover up some of his failures,”
“Whenever President Obama is criticized over policy mistakes, his surrogates tend to play the race card, as if there’s supposed to be something inherently morally wrong in such criticism,” he adds.
The former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza said, “I have received some of that same vitriol simply because I am running for the Republican nomination as a conservative.”
But he’s not with his brothers in suffrage to the White Man (and Republicans)! 🙂
“This is a great great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades,” Mr. Obama said in response to a question about the country’s economic future. “We need to get back on track.”
So Trillions of dollars on “stimulus”, ObamaCare, massive regulations, choking businesses to death, redistribution of wealth, inflation, and persistent unemployment over 8% for 2 1/2 years is the solution.
Oh wait, he’s running for re-election so what’s he want–More Spending, More taxes, and more regulations. Head Meet Wall!
Yep, that’ll work! If you just do it more it will work! 🙂
We couldn’t be “soft” because he wants everyone dependent on the government and when the rubber meets the road the instinct is to cry for more money and complain about “rich” people having too much give me some of yours. Nah… 🙂
Or as is in his own Jobs Bill that Congress must pass: The job creation bill that President Obama sent to Congress earlier this month includes a provision that would allow unsuccessful job applicants to sue if they think a company of 15 more employees denied them a job because they were unemployed.
That has nothing to do with it… 🙂
Interesting perspective. I wonder where America could have lost its competitive edge. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with a government that blows billions on green energy boondoggles while making it harder to drill for oil while trying to make electricity rates “skyrocket.” It couldn’t have to do with extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks (and rising), or to bailouts or perhaps advice like this offered by Michelle Obama:
“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.” (FOX)
Nope. It’s The Republicans Fault. And those nasty violent, racist Tea-Baggers and evil “corporate jet owners”. 🙂
The Narcissistic “Me” Generation and their kids who feel entitled to other people’s money and success would have nothing to do with it at all!
The schools that teach liberalism and socialism as a good thing to kids who don’t know any better has nothing to do with it at all!
A biased liberal media has nothing to do with it at all.
It’s just a bunch of Racist Republicans that doom us all. 🙂
“Telling those who are scared and struggling that the only way their lives can get better is to diminish the success of others . . . trying to cynically convince those who are suffering that the American economic pie is no longer a growing one . . . insisting that we must tax and take and demonize those who have already achieved the American dream . . . is a demoralizing message for America.” (Larry Kudlow)
Let me illustrate by a conversation I had recently.
The other person (paraphrasing): Times are tough. Companies need to have sympathy for our suffering. Raising their prices is just not right.
Me (paraphrasing): But inflation happens, especially when medical costs are going up, food prices are going up ,etc. (Inflation is up 5% since 2009).
Other person: but it’s not right, they should lower their prices because we are suffering (Notice the word choices that keep popping up).
I want to, but I didn’t ask this person, in times when everything is great and booming is it then ok for them to overcharge you because times are good (by analogy because they are supposed to undercharge you when times are bad). But I know the response: No.
Companies are supposed to think about “Me” First. Me…Me…Me…ME!
Do What I want. What benefits me. Screw you.
Who gives a crap if undercharging people costs jobs and could cause the company to go under (it’s called debt). It benefits me. And besides, “you have enough already”. 🙂
This person would not have cared because it’s all about them! When times are bad, pity me, when times are good kiss my ass.
It’s all about the the Narcissism.
And besides, you have more than you need anyhow. Give me some or I’ll get some to take it from you.
No, that’s not “soft” at all… 🙂
Obama said. “I remember when I was in 8th grade I had to take a class called ethics. Now, ethics is about right and wrong, but if you’d ask me what my favorite subject was back in 8th grade, it was basketball. I don’t think ethics would have made it on the list.” (CNS)
DOH!!
Kinda like being in a Black Liberation Theology Church for 20 years and not hearing a damn thing… 🙂
By the way, as a note on the Obama Jobs Bill that will be the Republican’s Fault when it fails:
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said that, at the moment, Democrats don’t have the votes to pass President Obama’s jobs bill, but Durbin added that that would change.
“Not at the moment, I don’t think we do but, uh, we can work on it,” Durbin said according to Chicago radio station WLS…
“The oil-producing state senators don’t like eliminating or reducing the subsidy for oil companies, “Durbin said. “There are some senators who are up for election who say I’m never gonna vote for a tax increase while I’m up for election, even on the wealthiest people. So, we’re not gonna have 100% Democratic senators. That’s why it needs to be bi-partisan and I hope we can find some Republicans who will join us to make it happen.” (hot air.com)
As a Tea party Independent I have to wonder if these “outraged” Liberals would have felt same way abouthe Bush as Hitler, or a chimp, or the Assassination Movie about killing The President of the United States. Doubt it.
And the light WAS train anyhow, but because it was politically incorrect (fossil fuels you know) it was discontinued because it cost too much with all the new taxes and regulations and ObamaCare it was too much for the evil corporate greedy bastards to care about anymore and all the employees went to work for Solyndra…That went bankrupt you say? Taking $535 Million dollars in taxpayer money with it down the rat hole…well, isn’t that just depressing. 🙂
2 Notes: 1 Yes, there was no blog yesterday. Long Story. 2) Today is the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I still miss you dearly.
Now back to the show… Oh, and more head against wall, breaking wall Liberalism.
The Energy Department announced Wednesday that is has finalized more than $1 billion in loan guarantees for two separate solar energy projects. (Meaning, when they go bust we get stuck with the check AGAIN!).
The decision comes several weeks after Solyndra, a California-based solar manufacturer that received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Obama administration in 2009, filed for bankruptcy and laid off 1,100 workers, setting off a firestorm in Washington.
DOE announced a $737 million loan guarantee to help finance construction of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-megawatt solar-power-generating facility in Nye County, Nev. The project is sponsored by Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve.
The Energy Department said the project will result in 600 construction jobs and 45 permanent jobs.
OOH!!! 45 jobs!!! WOW!!! Impressive.
Lost 1100 jobs and $535 Million on Solyndra so lets do it again with even more more money and create 45!!
That sounds like Obamanomics to a tee doesn’t it!?
Only 14 Million more to go!
Head, meet Wall. Wall, you’re going down! 🙂
Oh, and just in case you forgot about Obama’s “agenda” cronyism…
A Daily Caller investigation has found that in addition to the failed company Solyndra, at least four other solar panel manufacturing companies receiving in excess of $500 million in loan guarantees from the Obama administration employ executives or board members who have donated large sums of money to Democratic campaigns.
And as questions swirl around possible connections between political donations and these preferential financing arrangements, the Obama White House suddenly began deflecting The Daily Caller’s questions on Wednesday to the Democratic National Committee.
We have nothing to hide. We are the “most transparent administration ever”. Yeah, but what it’s transparent about is not good. 🙂
Companies like First Solar, SolarReserve, SunPower Corporation and Abengoa SA have already, collectively, received billions in loans through Obama administration stimulus programs to build solar power plants in the southwestern United States.
Yet each, with the exception of the privately held SolarReserve, has seen its stock price hammered at the same time it was lobbying the Obama administration and Congress for billions in loan guarantees.
The Hill newspaper reported Wednesday that the Santa Monica, Calif.-based SolarReserve has secured a $737 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy for a Nevada solar project.
That company has ties to George Kaiser, the Oklahoma billionaire who raised $53,500 for President Obama’s campaign in 2008. Through his Argonaut Private Equity firm, Kaiser holds a majority stake in Solyndra.
Argonaut has a voting stake on SolarReserve’s board of directors in the person of Steve Mitchell, who also serves on Solyndra’s board of directors.
Ah, Circle of Cronyism Life…
But don’t worry, Obama doesn’t allow lobbyists in his administration. He said so. You trust him, don’t you? He’s never lied to you.
It was George Bush who cut down the Cherry tree. Or was it The Tsunami, ATMS, Tea-baggers, racists,Bankers, “rich” people,or Republicans. 🙂
FAST AND FURIOUS
Evasion.
During a White House roundtable with three Spanish-language media outlets on Wednesday, President Barack Obama skated around questions about Operation Fast and Furious.
“We’re working very hard to have a much more effective interdiction effort … we are checking southbound transit … to capture illegal guns, illegal cash transfers to cartels,” he said at the morning event with representatives from Yahoo!, MSN Latino, and AOL Latino/Huffington Post Latino Voices. “It is something we’ve been building … it’s not yet finished, and there’s more work to do,” he said. (DC)
That’s why we forceably sold 1700 of them to know criminals and forced agents to let them cross the border so they could be lost in Mexico and kill people. Yeah!!
So he’s looking in to it. Just have patience. Sounds familiar some how?
Oh, it’s that “laser like focus”. That’s the ticket! 🙂
Obama blamed budget problems, in part, for what some see as ATF’s incompetence. “Part of the problem is budgetary [and] … we are going to have to figure out ways to operate smarter and more efficiently in investigations without a huge expansion of resources because those resources are aren’t there.”
In other words, lets spend as little as possible looking into this embarrassing screw up. That’s the budgetary problem.
PASS THE BILL
“A chief economist at Moody’s [Mark Zandi] (The people who downgraded us and let the mortgage mess go unchecked) — someone who has advised both Republicans and Democrats — very recently has said that the American Jobs Act will add two percent of growth to the American economy and create almost 2 million badly needed jobs,” Sebelius said at the U.S. Commerce Department’s Annual Minority Enterprise Development Week conference on Wednesday.
Mark Zandi: “The fiscal boost from the jobs package next year would be larger than in the first year of the 2009 economic stimulus,” Zandi said in a statement released by the White House last week.
The only impact the stimulus had was to raise the deficit and more people LOST their jobs. So it’s go big and go home! 🙂
The Stimulus was supposed to keep unemployment below 8%
ObamaCare was supposed to create 4 Million Jobs.
And now the new solar deal will create 45!
So naturally, you have to believe them, right?
Head….Wall! 🙂
Always beware of Democrat who like a “republican/conservative economist”. There’s a RINO in the tent. Or in this case, the Democrats have made it all up.
To his credit, Zandi has never tried to hide his ideological beliefs. “I’m a registered Democrat,” he told The Washington Post in a 2009 profile. He worked with McCain not because he agreed with the GOP’s economic agenda but because of his policy of “help(ing) any policymaker who asks, whether they be a Republican or a Democrat.” According Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief economic advisor, Zandi was brought on to the campaign to provide instant analysis of economic news, not to set policy.
Democrats first began citing Zandi’s tenuous conservative credentials and support for government spending during the debate over Obama’s original stimulus plan. “I’m just saying what Mark Zandi from Moody’s, an adviser to John McCain, is saying: You have to have a package of this robustness if you’re going to make a difference,” then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during a press conference in early 2009.
New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer had referred to him as a “conservative Republican” in an interview with Fox News the month before.
Orwellian dishonesty from Democrats, jeez whodathunkit?! 🙂
Barney Keller, a spokesman for the influential Club for Growth. “He’s about as conservative as Paul Krugman, and wrong just as often.” (DC)
After all, Obama is the President of all “57 States”. 🙂
The White House mixed up Wyoming and Colorado when issuing press credentials for President Barack Obama’s tour of Western states this week. The press credentials show California, Washington, and Wyoming highlighted in white. However, the president spoke Tuesday in the other rectangular-shaped state: Colorado. (where he was met by protesters from the Left who were mad at him for not be Leftist enough).
All those square states look the same anyway. (NRO)
Trust Us, We are from the Government and we are here to help you! 🙂
OBAMACARE
The signature legislation of the Obama Administration, the Affordable Care Act, came under damaging assault Wednesday from a Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found it has already partially contributed to increasing health care costs.
The Kaiser survey helps to shed some light on why so few employers are hiring, as health care costs for employers are spiraling upwards.
The survey found that insurance premiums rose by 9 percent in 2011. Healthcare costs for a single worker went up on average from $5,049 to $5,429, and for a family, costs rose from $13,770 to $15,073, on average.
The survey also found that some provisions of the Affordable Care Act already in place — including the allowance for young people up to 26 years of age to remain on their parents insurance policy — contributed to 20 percent of that increase.
And in case you were wondering, the majority of Americans still hate ObamaCare and favor repeal.
But don’t tell the Mainstream Media or the Democrats, they are too busy with “pass the bill” and pass the buck to care what you think. They just want you to think what they want you to think. That’s all. 🙂
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner didn’t dispute a Harvard economist’s estimate that each job in the White House’s jobs plan would cost $200,000, but said the price tag is the wrong way to measure the bill’s worth.
“You’ve got to think about the costs of the alternatives,” Geithner said when asked about Harvard economist Martin Feldstein’s calculation that each job created by President Obama’s American Jobs Act would cost taxpayers about $200,000.
And since around 4 million have lost their jobs since Obama took office that’s only $800,000,000,000,000 if everyone who wasn’t unemployed in 2008 got a job under this bill.
Such a deal! 🙂 You can’t pass that up now can you? Really, are you that heartless and cruel and want to protect rich people that much? 🙂
“If government does nothing, it does nothing now because they’re scared by politics or they want to debate what’s perfect, then there will be fewer Americans back to work, the economy will be weaker,” he said. (ABC)
Only government can solve this. Government is the only answer! And only Liberals have the answer!
And at $200,000 per job it’s a bargain and no one could possibly do better, certainly no those evil “obstructionist” “partisan” Republicans. 🙂
Cutting Corporate Taxes (so we aren’t the highest in the world) and cutting regulations that cost $$$ could not possibly work and is only designed to benefit the rich so that’s absolutely impossible.
Any questions… 🙂
“If the alternative plan is for Washington to do nothing, that’s unacceptable,” Geithner said. “If the alternative plan is to sit there and say we’re going to cut our way out of this by just cutting spending, that would make the economy weaker. Or we’re going to sit here and just complain about regulation. … That will not do anything to help the average family now still suffering so much from the crisis.”
Clueless aren’t they? Blinded by ideology.
“The focus right now from him [Obama] is ‘pass my whole bill, pass my whole bill,’ [and] some of the struggle with that is no Democrat in the House has even taken his bill and filed it yet. (But when it fails it will be the Republican’s fault, mind you) So we can’t even pass the bill because no one wants to put their name on it and say, ‘this is my bill’ and file it in the House,” said Rep. Lankford in a September 23 interview at the U.S. Capitol.
According to a report by the Office of Personnel Management and reported in Ed O’Keefe’s “The Federal Eye” column in the Washington Post, our government has been sending checks to dead people. “In the last five years,” O’Keefe writes, “the Office of Personnel Management has made more than $601 million in payments to dead federal retirees, according to the agency’s inspector general. Total annual payouts range between $100 million and $150 million.”
This isn’t something new. Inspector General (IG) Patrick McFarland had urged OPM in 2005 and again in 2008 to more closely monitor such payments. It appears his advice has gone unheeded.
“Improper payments to dead retirees are up 70 percent in the last five years,” cites the OPM report. In one outrageous case, the son of a deceased annuitant kept receiving federal benefits for 37 years after his father’s death. OPM didn’t learn about the improper payments until after the son died. Of course, the agency never recovered any of the money. Could this be why the government has no qualms about spending other people’s money?
According to Citizens Against Government Waste (www.cagw.org), “The USPS has 600,000 employees and is the second largest employer in America behind Wal-Mart. The USPS Office of Inspector General reported that employees were paid $21.9 million for 875,540 hours of ‘stand-by’ time in FY 2010, and $4.3 million for 170,666 hours in the first half of FY 2011. The USPS also has a 24 percent vacancy rate in its 284 million square feet of interior office space.”
Also last week, Senate Democrats rejected a continuing spending resolution passed by the House because, among other reasons, it contains cuts in the very solar energy program that funded Solyndra. So just because a company or a person dies does not necessarily disqualify them from receiving additional taxpayer money (borrowed from the Chinese, of course).
It is beyond disgraceful that so many elected officials and unelected bureaucrats continue to waste so much of our money, all the while demanding we be taxed more because they can’t “afford” to cut a dime and some of us allegedly aren’t contributing our “fair share.”
We are past not being able to afford our government and it’s long past time to start cutting them off, much as a parent might stop sending money to a spendthrift college student who wastes it on partying and high-living.(Cal Thomas)
The EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency has said new greenhouse gas regulations, as proposed, may be “absurd” in application and “impossible to administer” by its self-imposed 2016 deadline. But the agency is still asking for taxpayers to shoulder the burden of up to 230,000 new bureaucrats — at a cost of $21 billion — to attempt to implement the rules.
The EPA aims to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the Clean Air Act, even though the law doesn’t give the EPA explicit power to do so. The agency’s authority to move forward is being challenged in court by petitioners who argue that such a decision should be left for Congress to make.
The proposed regulations would set greenhouse gas emission thresholds above which businesses must file for an EPA permit and complete extra paperwork in order to continue operating. If the EPA wins its court battle and fully rolls out the greenhouse gas regulations, the number of businesses forced into this regulatory regime would grow tremendously — from approximately 14,000 now to as many as 6.1 million.
These new regulatory efforts are not likely to succeed, the EPA admits, but it has decided to move forward regardless. “While EPA acknowledges that come 2016, the administrative burdens may still be so great that compliance … may still be absurd or impossible to administer at that time, that does not mean that the Agency is not moving toward the statutory thresholds,” The EPA is asking taxpayers to fund up to 230,000 new government workers to process all the extra paperwork, at an estimated cost of $21 billion. That cost does not include the economic impact of the regulations themselves. (DC)
Don’t worry, be happy and “feel” good. It’s good for the environment! 🙂
The Senate passed a continuing resolution by a vote of 79-12 funding the federal government through Nov. 18. The bill must still be approved by the House, but the Senate also passed a short term bill funding government through Oct. 4, giving both chambers additional breathing room.
They passed the buck and kicked the can down the road a piece.
Remember, Oct 1st is the beginning of a new fiscal year for Congress and the Senate Democrats have refused to pass any budget since April 2009!
It’s all continuing resolutions and stop-gap measures.
So how does that make you feel about the “super committee”?? 🙂
In Washington, “the problem is that things have gotten so ideologically driven, and everybody is focused on the election, and putting party ahead of country,” he claimed, in yet another repetition of the controversial claim that Republicans are unpatriotic for disagreeing with his progressive, big-government policies.“That [GOP disagreement] has got to change, and [that is] why your voices are so important,” he said. “I need everybody here to be speaking out on behalf of the things you care about … and to say to legislators you’ve elected, to say to them, act responsibly.”-President Obama 9/27/11
It’s Not Him, it’s Them!!!
Vote for me the other guys the problem not me!
Obama’s malcontent leftist friends on the Leftist Coast agree that he has not been liberal enough. So to regain their favor, he jetted out West in that covered wagon known as Air Force One and pleaded with them to understand the predicament he is in with nasty Republicans opposing him every step of the way. He is, he assured them, as radical as they are.
In Seattle, representing the downtrodden, Obama told the 65 guests who were paying a paltry $35,800 per couple, “From the moment I took office, what we’ve seen is a constant ideological push-back against any kind of sensible reforms that would make our economy work better and give people more opportunity.”
The bipartisan Obama told his fellow warriors for the poor that the Republican alternative “is an approach to government that will fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21st century.”
That’s the ticket. Unless we agree to Obama’s spending $450 billion more in borrowed money on the grounds that increasing the national debt will decrease the national debt, we will be crippling America. If we demand fiscal responsibility, we simply cannot be trusted to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Why is it so hard for some people to grasp that neither government tax and regulatory roadblocks against economic growth nor massive wealth redistribution programs improve the plight of lower- and middle-income groups? When will a greater percentage of blacks realize that liberal prescriptions harm rather than improve their economic conditions? When will they realize they are being exploited and injured by the very leaders who say they are the only ones who care about them?
These demagogues had better hope minorities and lower- and middle-income groups never systematically study the damning results of their policies. Obama scapegoats Republican obstruction for the failure of his policies, but no matter how hard he dissembles, he had his way the first two years of his term.
Nevertheless, he persists. On the next stop on his propaganda tour, Obama told his audience that the 2012 election will be even more important than the one in 2008. It will be “a contest of values.”
Finally, there’s something we can all agree on. It will indeed be a contest of values. Unfortunately for Obama, recent polls show that essentially half the American people fear his beloved federal government.
So let’s get ready to rumble. (David Limbaugh)
Ronald Reagan noted the only proof of eternal life on Earth is a government program. And Obama and Co want Even More!
And if you don’t give it to them, well, you’re just an “obstructionist” right wing tea-bagger racist who just wants to crush the poor and save the rich.
San Antonio, TX: “When you get to name calling that just shows that there is no logic to your argument any further. It’s all emotion, ” said George Rodriguez, President of the San Antonio Tea Party.
The teacher’s emotion came from a panelist’s comment that school administration should deport undocumented students.
“So you would have students in this room deported?” asked the teacher.
The panelist replied, “Yes, I would if they were illegal. You bet.”
Rodriguez also told the teacher if the person is here illegally, they are breaking the law.
“You know what I would have? I would have you teach more balanced – conservative,” added Rodriguez.
After those remarks is when the teacher made the Nazi comment saying, “You can just say what you are – a Nazi.”
Edgewood ISD will not be taking any disciplinary action against the teacher.
“He realized he shouldn’t have gone that far, and he gave us a statement and expressed his concern and regret,” said district spokesperson Maclovio Perez.
Perez adds the teacher was at the town hall meeting on his own time and students were invited, but not required to go. Perez went onto to say the teacher is a good educator and has been with the district for more than six years.
The Tea Party would like the chance to go and speak to the districts high school students “to explain to them our position in a controlled, quite, calm manner” added Rodriguez.
Perez said he will proposed the idea to the school administration. (WOAI)
And they will politely blow it off. The Left yet again goes over the cliff and no one on the Left cares.It’s no big deal and we have the excuses to prove it. So what if this was the GOVERNMENT teacher. Gee, I wonder if he even teaches the Constitution?
Your kids are in good Hands at this school. 🙂
Proof: Eyehatehicks (comments): Good for him! lol All these tea party hicks want to name call Obama a socialist all the time! But we cant call them a Nazi when they act like fascists? lol yeah right, you feeble minded Republicans can talk a lot of trash but you cant back it up! Good job! lmao
That’s what your dealing with, 2 years olds. Get used to it. (bet he doesn’t even know what the words mean…can you hear the parrot voice in his head?).
Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. In other words, Godwin observed that, given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis.
That’s especially true of Liberals. You’re either a Racist, a Nazi, or just too stupid to understand their superiority.
If you feel so inclined to post a respectful disagreement with our dear Liberal email: Jonathan.Bryant@eisd.net
But do not violate Godwin’s Law in the process. But also, don’t expect a reply either.
But it is curious that that in the same town in May 2010 they were talking about suspending a teacher for even bringing up SB1070 in class because it was an “attack” on Mexicans.
But a Liberal calling someone a Nazi. No big deal. Move on, nothing to see here. 🙂
Commenter atomic weasal: You’re not officially winning an argument with a liberal until he stomps his foot, calls you a Nazi, takes his ball, and goes on home.
Or a racist, or some other childish assertion. Liberals don’t like debate.
Obama said 2012 would be an especially tough election because people are discouraged and disillusioned with government, but he also said he was determined because so much is at stake.
The GOP alternative, Obama said Sunday, is “an approach to government that will fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21st century.”
Remember “civility”, “compromise”, “unity” he doesn’t. 🙂
Another Government shutdown, you say?
At issue is a small part of the almost $4 trillion budget intended for an infrequent purpose: federal dollars to help victims of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters and whether some of the expense should be offset by cuts in other government spending.
The current standoff raises a question: If lawmakers can’t even agree to help victims of natural disasters, how are they going to strike a deal to cut $1.5 trillion in spending this fall in the white-hot climate of presidential and congressional politics? (townhall.com)
They can’t. And they won’t. It’s that simple.
If Americans want to see some really fancy footwork, just watch the senior members of the Obama Administration as they do the hokey pokey. The President is, perhaps, the greatest dancer of all as he constantly talks about his policy goals, waves it all about, only to take it all back as he turns himself around.
He knows his speech/bill is not going to pass. He just wants the Republicans to take the blame for it. He throws a stink bomb in the run, it goes off, and it’s the Republicans fault. That’s all it is.
Vote for me, the other guys an asshole who doesn’t want to do anything and I do.
But the cure being worse than the disease is not on his mind. Just re-election at any cost.
President Obama puts his Left hand in, then takes his Left hand out; he does the hokey pokey and he twists himself around, and that’s what it’s all about! (Lurita Doan)
A LUMP OF COAL IN YOUR STOCKING
EPA: Causing electricity costs to necessarily skyrocket while killing American jobs one ridiculous regulation at a time.
Get ready, the EPA has implemented a new regulation called the “Cross-State Air Pollution Rule,” and it’s going to cost a lot of a money and Americans will pay with their jobs. The new rule will force coal power plants to limit emissions and pay for emissions that cross state lines through the air. From the EPA website:
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that protects the health of millions of Americans by helping states reduce air pollution and attain clean air standards. This rule, known as the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), requires 27 states to significantly improve air quality by reducing power plant emissions that contribute to ozone and/or fine particle pollution in other states. (Sounds a Bit “Cap & Trade”-y doesn’t it!) 🙂
“The EPA is ignoring the cumulative economic damage new regulations will cause,” said Steve Miller, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. “America’s coal-fueled electric industry has been doing its part for the environment and the economy, but our industry needs adequate time to install clean coal technologies to comply with new regulations. Unfortunately, EPA doesn’t seem to care.”
Susan Kraemer at CleanTechnica can barely contain her excitement at the prospect of environmental regulations. In an article titled “Obama’s EPA Cues 130 Billion Race to Cut Pollution By 2015”, she reports that the EPA will shut down 20 percent of coal plants through the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule. She acknowledges the cost of these regulations ($130 billion), but insists that this is actually good for the economy.
How, pray tell, does $130 billion in regulatory expenses transform into a $130 billion boon?
Because it will push coal plants out of the way and free up energy production for green technology, of course! (the fact that “green” energy is at least 20 years from viability doesn’t matter- The Agenda is The Agenda! ans we’ll force it on you whether you like or need it we don’t care. It makes us “feel” good.)
The EPA will shut down an estimated 20% of the nation’s coal plants through the ground-level ozone rule (the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) ) through cap and trade that is about to be implemented in January 2012. Opponents of the Obama administration’s “over-reaching” EPA say these are costly regulations. Financial analysts estimate that the cost of this rule will be $130 billion by 2015. But if that figure is correct, that’s good news for the US economy.
Because there is another way of looking at that $130 billion “expense”. One industry’s expense is another industry’s sales bonanza. For the coal industry’s balance sheet, it is an expense, but think about who is going to perform this $130 billion cleanup – fairies? Hardly. This is a job for real American industries.
In the most depressed economy since the Great Depression, a slew of US companies will be selling the clean energy solutions (and adding employees to manufacture them) as coal companies must begin a race to have the least polluting coal plants.
Real American industries? Like Solyndra? Given all the green scandals that are coming to light, now might not be the best time to advocate these types of solutions. The kicker, though, comes in the last paragraph of the article:
A hand-full of coal industry plutocrats are simply not able to inject $130 billion into the US economy just taking cruise trips around the Mediterranean or whatever it is that they do with the profits that they don’t spend cleaning up.
If the concern is that coal plants don’t put enough money into the economy, then what’s going to happen once there are fewer of them? My guess is that we will be left on the hook for more large loans to green technology companies that eventually go bankrupt, and other goodies that could only come about when people like Kraemer decide they know best how companies should spend their profits. (townhall.com)
Say, are poor people going to be hurt by this? 🙂
So get out your vastly underpowered, over priced solar panels out and heat up your government approved no-fat, no-salt, no taste gruel then drive your electric car /hybrid car (if you can afford one that is)-according to the Energy Information Administration, vehicles that currently cost $15,000 will be regulated out of existence and be replaced by more expensive cars that meet fuel economy and emissions requirements. They claim they want to help poor people – but maybe they just want them dependent on the government for their transportation needs.
But what we really don’t understand is why the Obama Administration would work to eliminate hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs – many of them filled with union workers who swore a loyal oath to the President…the DeFour Group. . . estimates that auto industry job loss when the 55 to 66 mpg fuel standards are met in 2025 could reach 220,000) to your government approved job and be happy that the government runs your life for you.
Think I’m being hyperbolic? Tom Vilsack, the same guy who said Food Stamps was an economic stimulus:
It’s not like you have a choice.
Perish the Thought. As a matter of fact, perish all thoughts. It’s much easier that way. That way you can never be a racist, politically incorrect, or a Nazi ever again.
Is’t that just peachy-keen neato! Like totally, for sure… 🙂
In a fiery summons to an important voting block, President Obama told blacks on Saturday to quit crying and complaining and “put on your marching shoes” to follow him into battle for jobs and opportunity.
And though he didn’t say it directly, for a second term, too.
“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”
Shut up and do as you are told! 🙂 Gotta keep the slaves..I mean troops, in line…
“If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House,” the caucus chairman, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, recently told McClatchy Newspapers.
But Cleaver said his members also are keeping their gripes in check because “nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.” (WP)
But he’s black and we don’t want to do it to a black man. Gee, now isn’t that fascinating. 😦
So just shut and vote mindlessly. That’s what this country needs, more people who just shut up and vote mindlessly. 🙂
Meanwhile, there is a black Republican running, Herman Cain, but he’s an Uncle Tom, so we’ll just ignore him… 🙂
The program, called “Operation Vote,” underscores how the tide has turned for Obama, whose 2008 brand was built on calls to unite “red and blue America.” Then, he presented himself as a politician who could transcend traditional partisan divisions, and many white centrists were drawn to the coalition that helped elect the country’s first black president.
Today, the political realities of a sputtering economy, a more polarized Washington and fast-sinking presidential job approval ratings, particularly among white independents, are forcing the Obama campaign to adjust its tactics.
Operation Vote will function as a large, centralized department in the Chicago campaign office for reaching ethnic, religious and other voter groups. It will coordinate recruitment of an ethnic volunteer base and push out targeted messages online and through the media to groups such as blacks, Hispanics, Jews, women, seniors, young people, gays and Asian Americans. (WP)
So much for the Unity President. 🙂
So this stuff should make you laugh (cynically):
And I will do everything that I can as long as I am President of the United States to remind the American people that we are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation. -Barack Obama 9/11/10
Also on 9/11/10: “This is a time of difficulty for our country,” he said. “And it is often in such moments that some try to stoke bitterness – to divide us based on our differences, to blind us to what we have in common. But on this day, we are reminded that at our best, we do not give in to this temptation. We stand with one another. We fight alongside one another. We do not allow ourselves to be defined by fear, but by the hopes we have for our families, for our nation, and for a brighter future.”
Have you reached for your barf bag yet?
I can make a firm pledge, under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.
How about now?
I don’t care whether you’re driving a hybrid or an SUV. If you’re headed for a cliff, you have to change direction. That’s what the American people called for in November, and that’s what we intend to deliver.
Well, if you haven’t recycled your last meal yet, this should push you over the edge:
I don’t take a dime of their [lobbyist] money, and when I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House.
Solyndra, Light Squared, etc etc ad nauseating…
I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.
I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.
If we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, if we choose to keep a tax break for corporate jet owners, if we choose to keep tax breaks for oil and gas companies that are making hundreds of billions of dollars, then that means we’ve got to cut some kids off from getting a college scholarship.
If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.
IF YOU BANG YOUR HEAD AGAINST THE WALL HARD ENOUGH EVENTUALLY YOU WILL BREAK THE WALL!!! 🙂
In fact, the best thing we could do on taxes for all Americans is to simplify the individual tax code. This will be a tough job, but members of both parties have expressed an interest in doing this, and I am prepared to join them.
Have I driven your blood pressure to spurt out of your nose yet?
In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? — The Audicity of Hope By Sen. Barack Obama
I was laughing hysterically after this one…Bob is all Kool-Aid all the time. It’s what makes him entertaining to a cynic like me.
The Brilliant Charles Krauthammer:
Now, a “Racist” Tea Party Update:
I like him as an actor, but otherwise, he’s an ignorant race-baiting kool-aid bleeding partisan fool.
Morgan Freeman, in an interview to be aired on CNN Friday evening, says that President Obama has made racism worse in America.
Maybe it was the $16 Muffins in the “Green” room. 🙂
Chatting with Piers Morgan, the Oscar-winning actor also blames the Tea Party saying they’re “going to do whatever [they] can to get this black man outta here”
PIERS MORGAN, HOST: Has Obama helped the process of eradicating racism, or has it in a strange way made it worse.
MORGAN FREEMAN: Made it worse. Made it worse. Look at, look, the Tea Partiers, who are controlling the Republican Party, stated, and what’s this guy’s name, Mitch O’Connell. Is that his, O’Connell?
MORGAN: Yeah, Mitch McConnell, yeah.
FREEMAN: Mitch McConnell. Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? “Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.”
Should I bring up the George Bush as a chimp, Hitler, a baby, mentally retarded, et al or the Assassination Movie made by the Left during his term. Nope. Only people on the right “hate”. The Left is filled with the Angels that walk the earth amongst the heathens. 🙂
MORGAN: But is that necessarily a racist thing?
FREEMAN: It is a racist thing.
The Man is old enough to know better, but his Kool-Aid Liberalism has stopped his brain from functioning on this. Very sad.
MORGAN: Is it not Republicans, wouldn’t that say that about any Democrat president?
FREEMAN: No, they would have gotten rid of Bill Clinton if they could have.
The Tea Party was created in 2009 so how would they have gotten rid of Clinton?
MORGAN: Does it unnerve you that the Tea Party are gaining such traction?
FREEMAN: Yes.
MORGAN: Why?
FREEMAN: Well, it just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. “Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.” You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water.
It couldn’t have been an awakening to massive spending and ObamaCare, no it’s solely based on the fact that Obama is black.
That’s just ignorant and dare I say, RACIST in and of itself, Mr. Freeman.
I guess he didn’t learn anything from “Glory” or “Deep Impact”. They were just a job.
Sad, really. He’s got so much kool-aid ruining a fine actor.
Unfortunately, such accusations are destined to get louder and more frequent as we near Election Day and the chances for a second Obama victory based on nothing but hope, change, and ether continue to diminish.
Then folks like Freeman will really be shouting “racism.”
So much for the election of the first black president bringing our nation together.
And on this I agree with Freeman: Obama has made racism worse. (NewBusters)
Only not in the way he and many liberals think.
Comment on the article: Of course racism will NEVER go away!! There are to many African Americans that are racist or live off of racism for it to happen. Let’s tell the truth, they want the race card. It’s like a free pass.
Amen to that. Sad, really…
And expect it to get much more frequent, virulent, and loud as November 2012 approaches.
With around 25 employees, John King owns one of the largest non-union electrical contracting businesses in the Toledo, Ohio area. As a non-union contractor, his business happens to be doing well at a time when unions in the construction industry are suffering. This, it seems, has made the usual animosity unions have for him even greater, making him a prime target of union thugs. So much so, that one of them tried to kill him last week at his home.
John King didn’t plan on being an enemy of unions. In fact, he says all he’s ever wanted to do is work at something he loves doing and be successful at it—something that most normal Americans would call ‘The American Dream.’
After high school and some college, Mr. King briefly worked for an IBEW contractor before being drafted into the military. Following his service in the early 70s, King became his own boss by going into business as the youngest electrical contractor in Toledo.
Over the years, King Electrical Services had always been a small business. However, during the Great Recession, King’s business has actually improved as his union competitors have priced themselves out of work.
Unfortunately, being a non-union electrical company, King has always been on the radar of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). In fact, in 2006, he won a significant case against the IBEW at the US Court of Appeals, after the union had improperly promised his electricians jobs on union sites if they voted the union into King’s company.
Since he’s been in business, in addition to the legal battles and verbal abuse, King’s company has been vandalized and threatened on numerous occasions.
“Back then, it was nothing to have to regularly buy a new set of tires.” King said during a telephone interview on Tuesday. “The ice pick was the weapon of choice.”
Until Wednesday, the worst of the union attacks on King and his business came in the mid-eighties during the UAW strike at AP Parts. During a lull during the lengthy strike, King’s business was picketed by more than 50 IBEW picketers. This was at a time when he only had eight or nine employees. One of his employees, whose car was trashed by the union picketers, was also beaten up by IBEW thugs.
Unfortunately, the vandalism has never stopped. This year alone, he’s had to report three incidents of damage to police. This doesn’t include the incidents of stalking he and his men have to go through while they’re working.
In one incident earlier this year, rocks were thrown through the front windows of his shop, one of which had the word “kill” written on it.
Last Wednesday, however, the attacks on Mr. King became much more serious when he was awakened late in the evening at his home in Monroe County, Michigan and saw that the motion lights in his driveway had come on. When he looked out his front window, he saw a figure near his SUV and went outside.
As soon as he got outside his front door, King yelled at the individual who was crouched down by King’s vehicle. As soon as King yelled, the suspect stood and, without hesitation, fired a shot at Mr. King.
Luckily for King, as he yelled, he also stumbled. If it weren’t for that, however, John King’s injuries might have been much, much worse. In fact, he might have been killed.
Upon scrambling back into his house, King got to his cell phone and called 911. However, due to the pain in his knees and shoulder from falling, King was unaware that he had been shot in the arm.
At first, King thought that his assailant was merely trying to break into his vehicle. Little did he know, however, that the perpetrator was targeting him–because of his non-union company.
The night of the shooting, police recovered a shell casing from a small caliber handgun. In addition to the shell casing, police also found a Swiss Army knife that police say was likely going to be used to slice the tires on King’s SUV.
While neither the police, nor Mr. King can say which union was behind the attack, it is very clear by the word ‘scab’ scrawled on his SUV that it the attack was union-related.
“The police have been very thorough,” King says. “I cannot praise the Monroe County Sheriff’s department enough.”
The Monroe County Sheriff’s office is encouraging anyone with information to call 734-240-7530.
In addition, Mr. King is offering a $10,000 reward for information that will lead to the arrest and conviction of the suspect. (Labor Union report.com)
Now, in Buffalo, New York, a case involving outrageous allegations of labor-racketeering and union violence aimed at non-union construction workers and company owners is proceeding through the judicial process.
Forget for a moment that a man was stabbed in the throat, hot coffee thrown on non-union workers, sand put into gas tanks and a woman threatened with sexual assault. Forget the fact that the judge presiding over the federal racketeering case against Operating Engineers, Local 22, in Buffalo, NY ultimately rejected the AFL-CIO’s attempt to file a amicus brief, the sheer fact that the national AFL-CIO even attempted to intervene speaks volumes:
“We’re not condoning the allegations or arguing that union officials are completely immune from prosecution,” said Jonathan D. Newman, a lawyer for the AFL-CIO. “Instead, we simply want to make sure that the [federal law] is not interpreted in a way that could have a chilling effect on legitimate union activity.”
The union violence as a ‘legitimate union activity’ that the AFL-CIO’s Newman is referring to is a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case called United States vs. Enmons, in which the Supremes upheld a District Court ruling determining that unions could not be found in violation of an anti-racketeering law called the Hobbs Act if the violence was in pursuit of legitimate union objectives.
In 1946 Congress passed the Hobbs Act, aimed at a wide spectrum of union violence. Among other things, it defined criminal extortion as “the obtaining of property . . . by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence or fear [emphasis added].” In using the word “wrongful,” Kendrick says, “Congress left a narrow opening through which the U.S. Supreme Court would push a bulldozer in 1973.” In its decision in United States v. Enmons, the Court upheld a lower court ruling that three electrical union members indicted for sabotaging a substation and other violence had done nothing illegal because they were pursuing “legitimate” union objectives.
Actually, the ’sabotage’ to the substation (referred to above) was described in the Enmons decision as the “firing high-powered rifles at three Company transformers, draining the oil from a Company transformer, and blowing up a transformer substation owned by the Company.” However, since it was done during a lawful strike, it did not fall under the Court’s definition of extortion under the Hobbs Act.
Back in Buffalo, according to the attorney for Operating Engineers, Local 17, Catherine Creighton: ”Their actions were more extreme than what is alleged in the Local 17 case.” Apparently, according to attorney Creighton, shooting a substation is less violent than being stabbed in the neck.
Interestingly, Creighton’s former law partner happens to be someone whose name may sound familiar, newly-appointed NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce.
The guy who wants to shut down a Boeing plant because it was going to have non-union workers.
Another Obama “Jobs” program. Only, you have to have the “right” kind of people, or else. That’s the Chicago Way…
So the right kind of job.
The right kind of food.
The right kind of car.
The right kind of energy.
The right kind of industry.
The right kind of Health Care.
The right kind of wealth.
The right kind of skin color.
The right kind of speech.
The right kind of earnings.
The right kind of labor.
The right kind of civility.
The right of objections (none!).
The right kind of employer.
The right kind of spending.
The right kind of taxes.
The right kind of re-distribution.
The right kind of Thought.
The right kind of Freedom.
But don’t worry, if you disagree, you’re a racist! Just ask Morgan Freeman… 🙂
“If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state for no other reason than that they’ve been brought their through no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said. “We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society. I think that’s what Texans wanted to do. Out of 181 members of the Texas legislature when this issue came up [there were] only four dissenting votes. This was a state issue. Texas voted on it. And I still support it today.”
Sounds like an Open Borders Liberal to me.
I have no allegiance to a candidate at this time. Perry’s Pro-Illegal stance makes me mad. RomneyCare makes me made. And this is the best the Republicans can do??
Good Grief. We’re Doomed…
Liberal Economist God, Paul Krugman: we have the claim that the rich have the right to keep their money — which misses the point that all of us live in and benefit from being part of a larger society.
The community comes first. Not the individual. The Collective comes first.
Thanks comrade.
Liberal Elizabeth Warren (whom Obama wanted for The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is a (D) from Massachusetts): “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,”
No individual can succeed merely on their own.
“Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good’.” — Ayn Rand
Sound Familiar?
Sound American or Soviet? You decide.
“Individualism regards man — every man — as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights — and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.” — Ayn Rand
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”–Ayn Rand
“Collectivism often sounds humane because it stresses the importance of human needs. In reality, it is little more than a rationalization for sacrificing you and me to the desires of others.” — Jarret B. Wollstein in The Causes of Aggression
“A social system is a code of laws which men observe in order to live together. Such a code must have a basic principle, a starting point, or it cannot be devised. The starting point is the question: Is the power of society limited or unlimited? “Individualism answers: The power of society is limited by the inalienable, individual rights of man. Society may make only such laws as do not violate these rights. “Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.” — Ayn Rand
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence. So which are we, and which should we be?
And our favourite fat ass rags-to-riches Millionaire Liberal (who came from working in a Flint,Mi local paper to a Hollywood Filmmaker): “The smart rich know they can only build the gate so high. And, and, sooner or later history proves that people when they’ve had enough aren’t going to take it anymore. And much better to deal with it nonviolently now, through the political system, than what could possibly happen in the future, which nobody wants to see,” Michael Moore said on Current TV’s “Countdown” program.
Moore was alluding to riots, which he was discussing with “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann prior to his comment to deal with things nonviolently now.
Was that a Threat? Probably. But it shows that Liberals are capable of anything if they don’t get their way.
So we have to repent and all bow down to the Collective and let the government guide our miserable and worthless lives or else the Liberals will riot and take it by force.
Gee, talk about a false choice.
Lawyers should be allowed to win financial damages from companies that refuse to hire unemployed people, according to a coalition of Democratic legislators, progressive advocates and entrepreneurial trial lawyers.
The existence of even a few advertisements excluding unemployed applicants in the national marketplace justifies a federal law creating a novel market for legal skills, say the advocates.
“We don’t know for sure how extensive it is … [but] if it is on one [job advertisement] website, that’s too extensive for me,” the bill’s chief backer, Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, told the TheDC.
The advocacy campaign was kicked into gear by the National Employment Law Project, a union-led advocacy group.
Law firms, however, see potential revenue amid the recession.
“We represent employes and people looking for work,” said Marilyn Widman, a partner at the law firm Allotta, Farley and Widman, based in Toledo, Ohio. The proposed law would forbid companies from openly barring unemployed applicants, but it would also allow lawyers to investigate companies that may be discriminating, she said during a joint phone press conference with Brown.
“If it a appears from all the facts that someone’s unemployment was a factor [in that person not being hired], there would be a cause of action,” and the company could be required to compensate the applicant and pay additional damages, she said.
“When businesses are investing money to hire lawyers, that’s money they’re not using to grow their businesses and create jobs,” Saltsman said.
The controversy, he said, also gives false hopes to unemployed people. “It is false hope for somebody who is unemployed, or for a country that is grappling with the fact that our labor market has not recovered.” For politicians dealing with unemployed constituents, “it is a diversionary tactic to … another topic of conversation,” said Saltsman.
Can’t win an argument, hire a lawyer to sue them into submission. Sounds like a Liberal.
Can’t get a job, sue the employer that’ll make ’em hire you!
So the reason you can’t get a job is the employer’s fault, not the fault of over-regulation, uncertainty, and a government out to get businesses anyway they can.
Damn those evil rich people! 🙂
So vote for me, the guy’s an asshole protecting the rich, the businesses and screwing you. The fact that I’m screwing you even worse doesn’t matter. It’s all a matter of perception anyhow. 🙂
Michelle Malkin: President Obama still hasn’t learned the classic First Rule of Holes: When you’re in one, stop digging. Up to his earlobes in failed stimulus grants and tainted federal loan guarantees, the shoveler in chief tunneled forward this week on his latest Government Loans to Nowhere bill. His willful ignorance is America’s abyss.
Little noticed in the White House jobs-for-cronies proposal is a provision creating yet another corruption-friendly “government corporation” that would dole out public infrastructure loans and loan guarantees.
Because, you know, the government-chartered, political hack-stacked Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “public-private partnerships” — which have incurred an estimated $400 billion in losses while enriching bipartisan Beltway operatives — worked out so well for American taxpayers.
The new monstrosity, dubbed the “American Infrastructure Financing Authority” (AIFA), would “provide direct loans and loan guarantees to facilitate investment in economically viable infrastructure projects of regional or national significance,” according to the White House plan.
President Obama would have the power to appoint AIFA’s chief executive officer and a seven-member board of directors. No doubt the nominees would include the likes of AFL-CIO Chief Richard Trumka on the left and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the right — strange Obama bedfellows who have formed a Big Labor-Big Business-Big Government alliance supporting Obama’s infrastructure slush fund.
In addition, a new bureaucracy to support AIFA would be created, including a “Chief Lending Officer” in charge of “all functions of AIFA relating to the development of project pipeline, financial structuring of projects, selection of infrastructure projects”; the “creation and management of a Center for Excellence to provide technical assistance to public sector borrowers in the development and financing of infrastructure projects”; and creation and funding of “an Office of Rural Assistance to provide technical assistance in the development and financing of rural infrastructure projects.”
In its first two years, AIFA would rake in $10 billion in congressional appropriations; $20 billion over the next seven years; and $50 billion per fiscal year after that. How would Obama ensure the loan review process is protected from special interest favor-trading and White House meddling? If the ongoing, half-billion-dollar stimulus-funded Solyndra solar company loan debacle is any indication, the answer is: not very well.
And consider Obama’s naked partisan stunt on Thursday at the Brent Spence Bridge connecting GOP House Speaker John Boehner’s home state of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky. “There’s no reason for Republicans in Congress to stand in the way of more construction projects. There’s no reason to stand in the way of more jobs,” he railed. “Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge. Help us rebuild America. Help us put this country back to work. Pass this jobs bill right away!”
While he has high-mindedly called on “Washington” (as if he isn’t at the center of it) to put country over politics, he continues to use tax dollars to travel the country for campaign events assailing Republicans in front of decrepit bridges that wouldn’t see a dime of his “immediate” jobs bill money for years. If ever.
The point was made not by evil GOP obstructionists, but by the local Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper, which pointed out that the Brent Spence Bridge is not named in Obama’s jobs bill, has no guarantee of funding in the jobs bill, and “is still in the preliminary engineering and environmental clearance phase. In a best case scenario, the earliest that workers would be hired would be in 2013, but more likely 2015.”
It gets worse. Obama’s infrastructure loan corps wouldn’t just oversee bridge loans to nowhere. The AIFA board would get to dispense billions and score political points for their favorite photo-op-ready roads, mass transit, inland waterways, commercial ports, airports, air traffic control systems, passenger rail, high-speed rail, freight rail, wastewater treatment facilities, storm water management systems, dams, solid-waste disposal facilities, drinking water treatment facilities, levees, power transmission and distribution, storage, and energy-efficiency enhancements for buildings.
As I reported in my Tuesday column, a separate $6 billion “private nonprofit corporation” would be created by the Obama jobs plan to oversee the “Public Safety Broadband Corporation.” The panel would consist of 11 board members and four Obama administration officials. It, too, would be tasked with choosing winners and losers. Instead of local and state governments overseeing construction, this new federally created investing entity would “hold the single public safety wireless license granted under section 281 and take all actions necessary to ensure the building, deployment, and operation of a secure and resilient nationwide public safety interoperable broadband network.”
Given last week’s bombshell revelations of White House pressure on military and government officials to promote the president’s old broadband cronies at shady LightSquared Inc., the idea of empowering a new Obama bureaucracy to dole out more broadband contracts in the name of “public safety” is unsettling at best. Deeper and deeper we go.
When in Debt, SPEND EVEN MORE.
When in doubt, Double Down.
The Individual is subordinate to the Collective Good.
Because if you just keep hitting your head against that wall eventually you will break that wall.
To make this easier I have removed the Trillions (now dollars) and the like to simplify it.
You take in $2.00
You spend $3.60
So now when people are screaming at you to cut spending you say “ok I’ll promise that my ‘super committee’ will cut .15 cents a year (That’s a $1.50 over TEN years) if you let me spend another $1 NOW on top of what I am ALREADY spending.
I will gladly pay you .15 cents on Thursday if you loan me a dollar now.
Oh, you don’t want to?
Well, rich Uncle Warren can afford it. He has more than he needs so let’s force him to give it to me.
And that will solve everything.
It’s only “fair” He has more than me, or you, after all.
And what are you going to do with that dollar, young man, you might ask? Pay down your debts?
No. I’m going to spend it on my union buddies,entitlements, and government jobs so they can kick it back to me for my campaign just like I have done before.
So how is that going to create more jobs?
It will create government jobs (government jobs are paid for by whom exactly? — taxpayers! and unions make up how much of the actual workforce- 18%!!).
The Top 2% spend 1/3 of all the consumer cash in this country. They also pay the most taxes.
The Top 1% pay nearly 40% of all the income taxes.
47% of all American pay no income taxes AT ALL.
But the rich are the greedy bastards who have to be taken down by the Bolsheviks.
Hate them!
Mind you they create most of the actual jobs.
But they are evil, hoarding little bastards and we must take their money.
Not cut spending or pay down the debt. We need to give out more freebies to my apparatchiks and monetary drug dealers.
The number of households receiving food stamps swelled by 2 million to 13.6 million, meaning that nearly 1 in 8 receives the government aid.
But food stamps are an economic stimulus according to Obama Administration officials. So it’s all good.
In record-setting numbers, young adults struggling to find work are shunning long-distance moves to live with Mom and Dad, delaying marriage and buying fewer homes, often raising kids out of wedlock. They suffer from the highest unemployment since World War II and risk living in poverty more than others – nearly 1 in 5.
“We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers,” said Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. He noted that for recent college grads now getting by with waitressing, bartending and odd jobs, they will have to compete with new graduates for entry-level career positions when the job market eventually does improve.
“Their really high levels of underemployment and unemployment will haunt young people for at least another decade,” Andrew Sum, an economist and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University said.
In all, the employment-to-population ratio for all age groups from 2007-2010 dropped faster than for any similar period since the government began tracking the data in 1948. In the past year, 43 of the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas continued to post declines in employment, led by Charlotte, N.C., Jacksonville, Fla., Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Detroit, all cities experiencing a severe housing bust, budget deficits or meltdowns in industries such as banking or manufacturing.
Without work, young adults aren’t starting careers and lives in new cities, instead hanging out with their parents.
“Many young adults are essentially postponing adulthood and all of the family responsibilities and extra costs that go along with it,” said Mark Mather, an associate vice president at the private Population Reference Bureau. He described a shift toward a new U.S. norm – commonly seen in Europe – in which more people wait until their 30s to leave the parental nest. (AP)
And it’s “the rich”‘s fault don’t you know!. And Republicans “protect” the rich so vote for me (the Democrat) because the other guy’s an asshole!
If we just SPEND EVEN MORE and have even more government largess everything will eventually work out.
If you bang your head against the wall hard enough YOU WILL BREAK THE WALL!
The Wimpy President : Wimpy is soft-spoken, very intelligent, and well educated, but also cowardly, very lazy, overly parsimonious and utterly gluttonous. He is also something of a scam artist and, especially in the newspaper strip, can be notoriously underhanded at times.
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”
I’ll gladly cut $1.5 Trillion OVER TEN YEARS (most of which I won’t be the President for) if I can spend yet another Trillion Now!
And if you don’t let me “pass the bill now” you’re just an obstructionist protecting greedy rich people, and a violent tea-bagger racist! 🙂
New campaign ad for Obama in Spanish only, “In the face of Republicans, the President can’t do it alone. Read the plan. Stand together for more jobs.”
Welcome to Obamanomics. The Land of Opportunists and Apparatchiks!
As the U.S. government grapples to find ways to trim the bloated federal deficit, a new report suggests officials might start with cutting out $16 muffins and $10 cookies.
“We found the Department (of Justice) spent $16 on each of the 250 muffins served at an August 2009 legal conference in Washington,” said a DOJ Office of Inspector General report released on Tuesday.
The DOJ spent $121 million on conferences in fiscal 2008 and 2009, which exceeded its own spending limits and appeared to be extravagant and wasteful, according to the report that examined 10 conferences held during that period.
The review turned up the expensive muffins, which came from the Capital Hilton Hotel just blocks from the White House, as well as cookies and brownies that cost almost $10 each.
The department spent $32 per person on snacks of Cracker Jack, popcorn, and candy bars and coffee that cost $8.24 per cup at another conference, the report said.
The DOJ also spent nearly $600,000 for event planning services for five conferences, the document said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said most of the gathering were held when there were no strict limits on food and beverage costs, adding the DOJ had taken steps since 2009 “to ensure that these problems do not occur again.”
Word of the agency’s extravagant spending drew a swift response from Capitol Hill.
Senator Chuck Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee which has oversight of the Justice Department, said the report was a blueprint for the first cuts that should be made by the “super committee” searching for at least $1.2 trillion in savings.
“Sixteen dollar muffins and $600,000 for event planning services are what make Americans cynical about government and why they are demanding change,” Grassley said in a statement. “People are outraged, and rightly so.” (yahoo)
IBD: Over the weekend, President Obama encouraged everyone to read his jobs proposal and judge it for themselves. We took him up on his offer, and found five more reasons to kill the bill.
We’ve noted how Obama’s so-called jobs bill is an expensive rehash of all the policy failures he’s already imposed on the country, with the only new idea being several job-killing tax hikes.
But when he urged Americans during his weekly Saturday address to read the bill and decide for themselves, we thought we’d give the 155-page bill another try. Our conclusion: It’s even worse than we thought. Among the dumber ideas tucked in:
• Wage insurance: The bill would let states use unemployment funds to make up the difference between an over-50 worker’s previous wage and what he gets paid at his new job. Why not? Isn’t it written in the Bill of Rights somewhere that no American shall ever be forced to take a job paying less than his previous one?
• Bridge to nowhere: Obama claims his “Bridge to Work” idea will let people on unemployment “participate in temporary work as a way to build their skills,” citing the Georgia Works program as an example. But as Reuters reported, only 92 had signed up for that program since February and, according to the person in charge, it’s “fraught with problems.”
• 48th federal jobs training program: Obama would also create a $50 million training program for transportation jobs. Does he really think another federal jobs training program on top of the 47 existing failures — costing a combined $18 billion — will make a difference?
• Let’s share: Borrowing from job-creation machines such as Italy, the bill would let companies cut workers’ hours, rather than lay them off, with unemployment insurance making up most of the difference in pay.
Sounds great, except that it would be ripe for abuse. And while more than a dozen states — including California and New York — already have similar “work share” programs, almost no one uses them because of all the fraud-preventing red tape involved.
• Sued for hiring: How do you get jittery businesses to hire? Threaten to sue them if they hire someone who already has a job! At least, that’s how the White House thinks. It stuffed in a provision to make it illegal to “discriminate” against the unemployed when hiring.
Given all this dreck, is it any wonder that so few have bothered to take Obama up on his oft-repeated call for citizens to flood lawmakers’ offices with demands that they “pass this bill”?
But if you don’t you’re an “obstructionist”, a “do-nothing” “tea bagger” “racist” 🙂
And where is the actual spending cuts? Look in the mirror, see the smoke…
Gee, that make me feel better now. How about you? 🙂
MORE GREEN FRAUD
Shortly after taking office, President Barack Obama defended the weatherization portion of the stimulus bill in a February 2009 CBS interview, saying it would immediately put people back to work, reduce energy costs and lay the groundwork for future energy independence.
“What would be a more effective stimulus package than that?” said Obama at the time. “That’s exactly the kind of program that we should be funding.”
In total, the stimulus program allocated about $5 billion to the cause of home weatherization, outfitting homes with the latest green technology in order to reduce energy prices.
But in October 2010, Gregory H. Friedman, Inspector General at the Department of Energy, issued a scathing report on Illinois’ weatherization program funded with stimulus dollars.
Among his findings were that 14 out of 15 “weatherized” homes failed final inspection because of poor workmanship and 12 out of 15 homes contained substandard work that could have “resulted in significant property damage or injury to the homeowners.”
But Friedman’s report didn’t stop there.
In one weatherized home, 11 out of 14 items the weatherization contractor installed failed inspection. Another home had an improperly installed exhaust system that turned out to be a potential fire hazard.
The audit also found that the number of gas leaks discovered was “alarming.”
Worst still, Friedman reported that contractors hired to weatherize homes charged homeowners prices significantly higher than market value for the items they installed.
“For example, CEDA’s published prices for smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, and thermostats ranged from about 120 percent to 200 percent over the average retail price,” reads the audit report. “Neither CEDA nor State officials could justify such large mark-ups on materials.”
The IG’s audit also turned up erroneous billing practices, where contractors would over-charge for services that were never carried out.
“Additionally, a contractor had installed one carbon monoxide detector, but had billed CEDA for 3; another contractor had installed 12 light bulbs, but had billed CEDA for 20; and, yet another had failed to install a gas shut-off valve, but had billed for the work. In addition, a contractor had billed for almost four times the amount of drywall actually installed,” reads the report.
When contacted by TheDC, a DOE spokesperson Bill Gibbons said, “The weatherization programs are creating thousands of jobs, helping families save money, and deploying new clean energy technologies in local communities around the country.”
“We always expected that it would take some time to get these programs fully up and running in the beginning, but we are on track to significantly exceed the 600,000 home goal set for the program,” Gibbons added. “The Department takes any reported case of abuse or poor performance very seriously, but these have been the exception rather than the rule and we have taken aggressive actions to address the issues and hold those responsible accountable.”
Still, one member of the advisory board overseeing the state program, Republican state Sen. Dan Duffy, resigned from the non-voting position in March 2011 because he so incensed at what he saw to be an obvious waste of taxpayer money
“The more questions I asked, the more I was told ‘Dan, you don’t really have a vote,’” Duffy told TheDC.
“I guess I don’t understand, when the state of Illinois literally cannot pay its bills and is going bankrupt, is this really the best use of money?” Duffy added. “I don’t care if its state or federal. Why are we spending millions of dollars with absolutely no credibility of how the spend that money?”
The story of Illinois’ weatherization program, however, doesn’t stop there.
The state-run program is being promoted by four separate public relations firms. Two of those firms have close ties to the Obama administration.
Gee, I guess we just need to spend even more money and give it more time. 🙂
Isn’t that the Liberal answer to everything?
But Illinois isn’t the only state that struggled with its weatherization program. Delaware suspended its program altogether after only nine months when it became apparent the fraud and mismanagement was getting out of control.
A state audit in Tennessee, which received more than $100 million in stimulus funds for weatherization, also found rampant waste and abuse. The 260-page report uncovered problems very similar to those in Illinois: work was done improperly and funds went to homeowners not even eligible for the program.
Illinois, Delaware and Tennessee are only three examples, but numerous reports show the mismanagement is widespread throughout then entire nationwide program.
“It was a set up for failure,” Duffy told TheDC.
But it “felt good”. And if some Democrat cronies benefit, so much the better. 🙂
But now he wants $1.5 Trillion in new taxes now so he can allegedly cut $4 trillion over 10 years (so how much would he SPEND in 10 years, you should be asking yourself before you fall for this accounting trick and that 1/2 of it was for things that were already going to happen or are cuts in increase – not decreasing at all).
You should ask. But then you’d be an “obstructionist” “tea-bagger” now wouldn’t you… 🙂
“Tickets to Monday’s [fundraising] dinner were $35,800 per person, with $5,000 going to the Obama campaign and the rest going to the Democratic National Committee. That’s the maximum contribution allowed by law.”
So it’s no wonder the president didn’t mention his plan to hike taxes on the rich!
Hours after delivering a White House speech that called on wealthy Americans to pay higher taxes, President Barack Obama dined with some of these very Americans in New York. He was expected to raise more than $2 million for his reelection campaign.
He didn’t mention his plan to tax the rich, at least not in front of reporters.
Instead, the president seemed to think he was speaking to “ordinary folks,” according to Politico:
Despite the well-heeled nature of the audience, Obama suggested at one point that the group was intimately familiar with the devastation caused by the economic downturn. “A lot of people in this room have seen directly the damage that’s been done by this recession,” the president said. “Ordinary folks have been hurting badly,” he added later in his remarks, before commenting on the unemployment rate and other “hardship.” (weekly standard)
No one here but us “ordinary folks”. Are millionaire ideologues stupid and not listening to what he’s saying? Bet they are.
So in the presence of rich people he talk about “ordinary folks hurting” but when in the presence of those ordinary folks he talks about how unfair, greedy and rotten the rich are.
Playing both sides against each other. Divide and Conquer.
Fascinating…
It’s not just millionaires who’d pay more under President Barack Obama’s latest plan to combat the deficit.
Air travelers, federal workers, military retirees, wealthier Medicare beneficiaries and people taking out new mortgages are among those who would pay more than $130 billion in government revenues raised through new or increased fees.
Airline passengers would see their federal security fees double from $5 to $10 for a nonstop round-trip flight and triple to $15 by 2017, raising $25 billion over the coming decade. Federal workers would face an additional 1.2 percentage point deduction from their paychecks to contribute $21 billion more for their pensions over the same period. Military retirees would pay a $200 fee upon turning 65 to have the government pay their out-of-pocket Medicare expenses. They’d also pay more for non-generic prescription drugs.
And it’ll cost corporate jet owners a new $100 fee for each flight.
The fees aren’t taxes. They’re charged to people who use government services or receive benefits such as taxpayer-subsidized health care, and they typically defray the government’s cost of providing a service. The fee on corporate jets and other private passenger planes, for example, would raise about $1 billion a year to help finance the cost of air traffic control. Recreational flyers won’t have to pay.
Many of Obama’s proposals are retreads from earlier budget proposals, including those submitted by his predecessors. Most have been rejected year after year. Some ideas, like requiring wealthier veterans to pay more for their health care, stir up opposition from powerful interest groups. Others, like the bigger security fee for flyers, seem too close to a ticket tax increase.
Administration budget documents describe the fees as savings.
Would this be like the “fees” in Obamacare that weren’t taxes until they got into a court and suddenly the fees were taxes but when you pressed them about it they became fees again.
Orwellian confusion. Classic.
“Why (would) the administration … propose a Social Security payroll tax holiday in its jobs bill, but simultaneously suggest a tax increase for middle-class federal workers?” asked Joseph Beaudoin, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association.
Another new fee would increase by one-tenth of a percentage point the fee that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge lenders to guarantee repayment of new mortgage loans. The administration says the fee increase would add $15 a month to the monthly cost of an average new mortgage. Even without existing mortgages being affected, the fee increase would raise $28 billion over 10 years.
Some of the fees tilt toward the arcane. There’s a plan to save $3 million a year by developing an electronic records system for hazardous waste shipments. Another would produce $7 million more a year by giving the federal government a 50 percent share of receipts from geothermal leases on federal lands instead of 25 percent, with the remainder going to the states.
Another proposal would charge $4 an acre on non-producing oil and gas leases on federal lands, raising $1 billion over a decade. The idea is to prod energy companies to get their leases into production or give them up and allow others to develop them.
You mean the oil moratorium that the Obama Administration imposed so that you can’t use those leases anyhow or it will take Millions of dollars and 10 years or more to develop, maybe. remember, the last Nuclear Plant built in this country was 33 years ago. When was the last oil platform built? 🙂
So now he can tax them and prevent them from using the leases. That will get them to give up completely on fossil fuels. That’s what he wants anyhow, so why not make some money on it.
Ingenious. I won’t let you use this land. I will tax you because you don’t use this land I won’t let you use.
Brilliant.
HAS ANYONE MENTIONED ACTUALLY CUTTING SPENDING? Or LIVING WITH IN OUR MEANS?
Of course not. Divide and Conquer Class Warfare. Page 1 of the Liberal Playbook.
It could almost make your head spin. With an economy on the front end of another recession, President Obama’s tax attack on the folks who are most likely to succeed, invest, start new businesses and create jobs is nothing short of staggering. Only liberal-left class-warfare ideology can explain this.
Remember that the top 1 percent of income-tax payers shoulders 40 percent of all income taxes. They are paying their fair share. Then remember that 50 percent of income-tax filers don’t pay any income tax at all.
But you’re not supposed to remember that. It’s just not “fair”. 🙂
Clearly, the logic here is political, not economic. And it’s equally clear that Mr. Obama is now catering to his liberal-left base. I guess his logic is that even though so many people don’t have jobs, they’ll feel much better knowing that 22,000 rich people will have a higher tax rate.
Make sense?
Adding to this bizarre scenario, Obama knows full well that the debt-ceiling deal now moving to the phase-two super committee rules out tax increases. He also knows full well that none of these tax hikes will ever get through the GOP House. Perhaps, as Congressman Paul Ryan notes, class warfare makes for good politics. But lousy economics. Perhaps.
Today, the president’s militant tax-hike threats, along with Obamacare and unmanageable regulatory costs, are holding back job-creators.
And lower growth means higher deficits
At the end of the day, it sure looks like our president wants to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and large corporations in order to spend more and enlarge the size and scope of government. From the standpoint of jobs, growth and prosperity, it just won’t work. (Larry Kudlow)
But you have to ask yourself, what it’s supposed to work for then.
From the standpoint of Orwellian Liberal Ideology it’s perfectly acceptable.
And the Grand Deception continues.
So his purpose isn’t to help the economy but to push a false image of the GOP as obstructionists in a “do-nothing Congress” (read: republicans) into voters’ minds for the 2012 election.
Say a lie often enough, and 24/7 on the Mainstream Media, and people will start to believe it.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s proposal to reduce long-term deficits with $1.5 trillion in new taxes is less an opening bid in a negotiation than it is an opening salvo in a struggle to draw sharp contrasts with congressional Republicans.
Yeah, they are “obstructionists”, “racists” and “partisans” and we aren’t! 🙂 Just pass my bill or else!
“No more division or delay,” he said.
Just do as I say and shut up!
Obama’s proposal is aimed predominantly at the wealthy and comes just days after House Speaker John Boehner ruled out tax increases to lower deficits. It also comes amid a clamor in his own Democratic Party for Obama to take a tougher stance against Republicans. And while the plan stands little chance of passing Congress, its populist pitch is one that the White House believes the public can support.
The core of the president’s plan totals just more than $2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. It combines the new taxes with $580 billion in cuts to mandatory benefit programs, including $248 billion from Medicare. (Does that include the $500 Billion from Medicare in Obamacare that was double counted as “savings”)??
The administration also counts savings of $1 trillion over 10 years from the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Which was ALREADY going to happen so that’s an accounting trick. So is Spending nearly as much now as would be “saved” over 10 years.
Oh, and it’s up to the “super committee” of partisan Congressmen it’s not truly him. But he will blame you if you don’t do exactly as he says.
The deficit reduction plan represents an economic bookend to the $447 billion in tax cuts and new public works spending that Obama has proposed as a short-term measure to stimulate the economy and create jobs. He’s submitting his deficit fighting plan to a special joint committee of Congress that is charged with recommending deficit reductions of up to $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
In a defiant note, administration officials made clear Sunday that Obama would veto any Medicare benefit cuts that aren’t paired with tax increases on upper-income people.
So just past his bill 100% and don’t complain about it or you’re an “obstructionist” and coddling rich people!
A win-win for the “unity” president that wants a bi-partisan “compromise” in Congress.
As a result, it includes no changes in Social Security and no increase in the Medicare eligibility age, which the president had been willing to accept this summer.
So the entitlements that have to reformed or the whole thing goes down the toilet because THEY ARE the biggest problem won’t be touched by Obama because of his politics. But if you object to his craziness you’re a “partisan”.
Moreover, the new tax revenue Obama is seeking is nearly double the $800 billion that Boehner had been willing to consider in July. Republicans were already lining up against the president’s tax proposal before they even knew the magnitude of what he intended to recommend.
“Class warfare may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics,” GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, said Sunday in reaction to one Obama tax proposal to impose a minimum tax rate on wealthy filers.
“We don’t need a system that seeks to prey on people’s fear, envy and anxiety. We need a system that creates jobs and innovation and removes these barriers for entrepreneurs to go out and rehire people.”
Sen Durbin (D): “What’s the Republican alternative? Do nothing and protect the millionaires.”
Class warfare childish is the response. Gee, that makes me feel better… 🙂
Administration officials said 90 percent of the $248 billion in 10-year Medicare cuts would be squeezed from service providers. The plan does shift some additional costs to beneficiaries, but those changes would not start until 2017.
So he’s going to squeeze the insurance companies, which will RAISE the cost to seniors and the rest will be up on a Congress 6 years from now that will have to agree to it.
A Summary: “I’ll agree to spending cuts with and over the next 10 years if you’ll raise Trillions in taxes now so I can spend them now!”
Ugh. Barf Bag on standby!
Swallow all liquids in your mouth before reading any further.
Updated numbers for the national debt are just out: It’s now $14,639,000,000,000.
When Barack Obama took the oath of office twice on Jan. 20, 2009, CBS’ amazing number cruncher Mark Knoller reports, the national debt was $10,626,000,000,000.
That means the debt that our federal government owes a whole lot of somebodies including China has increased $4,247,000,000,000 in just 945 days. That’s the fastest increase under any president ever.
The nation’s debt increased $4.9 trillion under President Bush too, btw. But it took him 2,648 days to do it. Obama will surpass that sum during this term. (Andrew Malcolm)
But remember, that’s Bush’s Fault! 🙂
And the 9.1% unemployment? That’s Japanese Earthquakes, ATMs, Republicans, Tea Partiers, Hurricanes, floods,Rich people, Businesses, et al’s fault. 🙂
By the way, where were “jobs” mentioned? 🙂
A New York Times/CBS News poll released Friday showed nearly half of those surveyed worried the economy was headed for another recession and nearly three out of four said they believe the country is on the wrong track.
But he doesn’t care. Just pass his damn bill 100%, shut and sit down.
Damn Republicans! 🙂
Obama’s proposal would reduce payroll taxes on workers, cut them in half for most businesses and offer incentives for employers to hire. It would spend tens of billions of dollars on new public works projects, extend unemployment benefits for long-term jobless and help states and localities avoid layoffs of teachers and emergency workers. (AP)
Sounds like the Stimulus in 2009. Why? BECAUSE IT IS. But you’re not supposed to notice.
“But right now, we’ve got to get Congress to pass this jobs bill,” Obama said. Aka The Republicans. 🙂
The Republicans are now the “How great is it to be stupid?” party. In perpetrating the idea that there’s no intellectual requirement for the office of the presidency, the right wing of the party offers a Farrelly Brothers “Dumb and Dumber” primary in which evolution is avant-garde. (Maureen Dowd)
So, given the president’s professed urgency, the next day, Sept. 9, everyone asked where was his jobs legislation?
And, well, it seems the urgent jobs bill hadn’t actually been written yet but should be ready in a week or two. When the laughter died, the White House said on second thought the legislation would be ready for a photo op the next Monday.
Well, here we are on the next Monday after that next Monday and we’ve just learned from the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, that actually it seems that body won’t really be seriously getting into the legislation for a while yet. The Senate has some other more important business to handle. And then there’s this month’s congressional vacation, which in Washington is called “a recess,” like elementary school.
Here’s the revealing exchange with a persistent host Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union:”
CROWLEY: When is the bill going to get on the floor?
DURBIN: The bill is on the calendar. Majority leader Reid moved it to the calendar. It is ready and poised. There are a couple other items we may get into this week not on the bill and some related issues that may create jobs. But we’re going to move forward on the president’s bill. There will be a healthy debate. I hope the Republicans will come to…
CROWLEY: After the recess, so next month? Or when will it actually begin to act on?
DURBIN: I think that’s more realistic it would be next month.
So, as of right now, “right now” uttered on Sept. 8 really means sometime at least one month later.
Good thing the president’s own Democratic party controls the Senate. Because, otherwise, there might be some kind of silly, unnecessary delays in deliberating Obama’s urgent jobs bill that he says will surely help the nation’s unemployed millions if only those Republicans don’t connive to slow things down. (Andrew Malcolm)
Damn those Republicans! Damn those Rich people! 🙂
We have to urgently run them into the ground, then we can blame them for not passing the bill and nothing gets done, but it’s not our (Democrats) fault!
President Barack Obama is expected to seek a new base tax rate for the wealthy to ensure that millionaires pay at least at the same percentage as middle income taxpayers. (The fact that they more taxes period doesn’t matter-class warfare does!)
A White House official said the proposal would be included in the president’s proposal for long term deficit reduction that he will announce Monday. The official spoke anonymously because the plan has not been officially announced.
Obama is going to call it the “Buffett Rule” for Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor who has complained that rich people like him pay a smaller share of their income in federal taxes than middle-class taxpayers.
Buffett wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last month that he and his rich friends “have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.”
Yeah, and who made them “friendly” by giving them lots of money for favors, Hmmm?
Something smells very fishy…
The measure would be in addition to $447 billion in new tax revenue that Obama is seeking to pay for his short-term spending and tax cutting plan to jump start the economy.
Long term spending cuts, anyone? Nope. Just enough to get him to 2013 he hopes. Then he can let loose the hounds…
So permanent Tax Increases and short term tax cuts! Gee, that’s sounds like the usual Tax and Spend Liberalism pig just dressed up with a new lipstick.
“We counted, in the Republican debate [hosted by MSNBC at the Reagan Library], we counted 26 ideological questions…. Out 26 questions, how many do you think came with a left-wing ideological bent?” NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell asked Fox News host Sean Hannity on his eponymous program last night.
“Twenty-five out of 26” Bozell informed a stumped Hannity, referring to a study released Tuesday by Media Research Center (MRC) deputy research director Geoff Dickens.
“Now, that’s perfectly fine if you’re going to play devil’s advocate… but that’s not what these questions are,” MRC founder Bozell added, noting that the media don’t hit Obama from the right on policy questions in interviews.
Now will they be “fair” and ask these kinds of slanted “gotcha” questions of Barack Hussein Obama or the Democrats?
OF COURSE NOT!!! Don’t be silly. Why would they.
Ultimately, Obama’s American Jobs Act (AJA) will kill more jobs than it creates because it does not reduce uncertainty, fails to permanently reduce business operation costs and focuses on “one and done” jobs that result in employees being fired the moment the AJA has blown through its $450 billion in borrowed funds. Examples of AJA job-killing attributes are:
1. The AJA imposes eight different tax increases on the already high-taxed oil production industry, thereby costing jobs in the domestic oil industry and driving up costs for gasoline and heating oil (which makes American businesses less competitive and costs more jobs).
After all, the future is “green jobs” so might as well get rid of the evil jobs now. Pnly problem is, “green job” killers Like Solyndra keep popping up despite Millions of $$$ in stimulus money.
But if we keep banging our head against the wall, eventually we will break the wall (in 20 years or so…maybe). But we have to keep pounding!
2. Increasing America’s debt by another $450 billion, thereby promoting economic uncertainty resulting from increased risk of a federal government insolvency and bankruptcy.
Debt limit, anyone? Cutting Spending long Term, anyone?
3. Promoting costly, frivolous litigation by empowering disgruntled job applicants to sue job creators anytime an applicant believes (rightly or wrongly) an employer did not hire him because of his unemployed status.
See more below.
4. Hurting churches, synagogues and other charitable institutions by increasing taxes on tithes and charitable contributions (and cutting revenues that create jobs in America’s charity sector).
5. Creating at least two more federal government bureaucracies with over $10 billion to spend and the power to interfere with free markets as they wish.
Over the long haul, these AJA costs and burdens kill jobs by driving employers out of business or encouraging them to relocate to foreign countries. (DC)
Let’s look at #3 again:
WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act, introduced this week, includes provisions that would prohibit discrimination against job applicants on the basis of their unemployment status and that would levy fines of up to $1,000 a day.
So you go to apply for a job. You don’t get it. You file a complaint that you didn’t get it because you were “unemployed” and that potential employer could get fined for not hiring you because you were unemployed.
Do you detect a problem here??
Why would an employer hire ANYBODY under such conditions?
They wouldn’t.
But Liberals can’t and won’t see that, you know. It’s not “fair”.
The unemployment discrimination proposal begins with Section 371 of the jobs act, which calls the proposal the Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011. It states, “Congress finds that denial of employment opportunities to individuals because of their status as unemployed is discriminatory and burdens commerce” by “reducing personal consumption and undermining economic stability,” among other impacts.
Gee, Nancy Pelosi said Unemployment was a stimulus to economic growth.
The proposal states the Act’s purpose includes prohibiting employers from disqualifying individuals because of their unemployed status.
And, of course, a Government bureaucracy was scanning the field to see if it could pounce on you. The EEOC hearing this month in which the commission explored whether employers are hiring only the employed, and if this has a disparate impact on protected groups. (BI)
Government is watching your every move.
Orwell, anyone? 🙂
President Obama promised to take his economic message “to every corner of this country.” He’s done this and America has said “no.” Wall Street heard Obama’s economic message and the Dow dropped 300 points the next day. Voters in Nevada and New York City heard his economic message and Republican congressional candidates scored stunning victories (including a 54%-46% win in a district with a 3-1 Democrat registration advantage that had not elected a Republican in more than eight decades).
America’s economy has serious structural issues that presidential band-aids and make-up don’t fix and can’t hide. President Obama’s jobs bill simply is not up to the challenge.
President Obama’s American “Jobless” Act should be defeated because it is poorly thought-out, bad economic policy, will cost Americans jobs and has been resoundingly rejected by the voting public. (DC)
But when it is, it will be the Republican’s Fault! Those dame obstructionists!
The fact that the Act is total crap on a stick doesn’t matter. The Liberals just want more “evidence” of “obstructionist” Republicans for their “Vote for me the Other Guy is an Asshole” re-election campaign of Fear and Loathing.
And, of course, it’s always going to be the ultimate fault of the most evil, conniving, malicious, throw-grandma-of-a-cliff, extremists, racists of all– The Tea Party. 🙂
But the Liberals, Democrats, and the Mainstream Media aren’t biased and self-serving,calculating, and manipulative, now are they… 🙂
Rep. Jan Schakowsky: “You Don’t Deserve To Keep All Your Money”
In a interview with Chicago’s Don Wade & Roma radio show this morning, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky claimed that Americans aren’t entitled to all of their own money.
Toward the end of a wide-ranging interview, the hosts played a clip from this week’s Republican Presidential Debate where California teenager Tyler Hinsley asked, “Of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think I deserve to keep?” Co-host Don Wade asked Schakowsky to answer the same question.
After some initial back-and-forth, she replied, “I’ll put it this way, you don’t deserve to keep all of it. It’s not a question of deserving, because what government is, is those things that we decide to do together.”
Despite the hosts’ persistence, Schakowsky declined to answer what percentage of a person’s income they deserved to keep. “I pay at a 35% tax rate, happy to do it,” she explained when the hosts persisted with their question. She again declined to say how much more she would personally be willing to pay.
But Rep. Schakowsky is not alone. Her views are sadly typical of a liberal worldview that sees a person’s earnings as belonging first to the state. In fact, the left is now doubling down on this misguided belief, with the President pushing for more stimulus spending despite the failures of earlier “stimulus.”
But while the left continues to promote the same failed policies—more taxes, more regulation, more big government—conservatives need to trumpet the benefits of low taxes, sensible regulations, and small government. As Heritage’s Dubay explains:
The best way to grow revenues is to promote faster economic growth, which will increase the number of taxpayers and taxable income more rapidly. Tax hikes—whether through higher tax rates or slashing credits, deductions, and exemptions without offsetting reductions elsewhere—will not do the job. Under President Obama’s current policies, spending will continue to grow at a faster rate than can be paid for by tax hikes—even assuming the huge tax increases the President insists upon. To add insult to injury, as history has shown, tax hikes would slow economic growth and make it even harder for unemployed Americans to find a job.
Democrat Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said that most Americans do not understand that federal entitlements are not “bank account” programs that hold their money, adding that Social Security is not even a legal guarantee.
“Are these vested benefits? Are these contractual benefits?” Cooper asked of Social Security benefits. “Well, it turns out they’re not. Legally, they’re not even promises. They’re scheduled benefits and most Americans are not even aware of that.”
Cooper, asked about potential reforms to Medicare and Medicaid, said that the core problem was that the public does not understand the true nature of entitlements.
“Many Americans don’t really realize that Medicare is a government program,” Cooper said at a press conference with fellow Blue Dogs on Wednesday. “We have to start first with diagnosing the problem, helping all Americans understand the true nature of the programs.”
“Many people think that Social Security and Medicare are bank account programs, and money that they’ve paid in is stored up in their name just for them,” he said. “That is a widespread misconception.”
Cooper said that Congress could do itself a favors by explaining to Americans that the payroll taxes deducted from their paychecks go into the government’s coffers and are used to pay benefits for current retirees and are not saved for their retirement.
“There’s a lot we could do to help people understand that the payroll taxes they pay in this month are paid out next month to somebody they’ve never met, a complete stranger,” he explained.
Cooper also said that Congress should be explaining that it does not account for entitlement spending in the normal way, but puts it off on what he called a “government credit card,” rather than accounting for it through the normal budgeting process.
“There’s another huge set of issues having to do with government accounting,” Cooper said. “We put most of these precious, vital programs on the government credit card, as opposed to treating them in the regular budget process.”
Cooper is referring to a process known as off-budget accounting whereby Congress accounts for the Social Security and Medicare trust funds separately from its regular revenue and spending calculations. This process separates entitlement spending from the regular yearly budget, often making it difficult to gauge how much money the government actually spends in a given year. senior citizens, Social Security COLA
Many critics have argued that bringing entitlements back into the regular budgeting process is a more honest way to account for them because it would allow the public to see the entirety of federal spending and taxation every year.
Cooper noted one final misconception that Congress should correct–that most people believe that Social Security benefits are legal obligations of the federal government. In fact, he noted, they are nothing of the sort. Instead they are merely “scheduled benefits” that can be altered at any time.
“A further issue has to do with the legal treatment of these programs,” Cooper said. “Are these vested benefits? Are these contractual benefits? Well, it turns out they’re not. Legally, they’re not even promises.Tthey’re scheduled benefits and most Americans are not even aware of that.”
Cooper said Congress has “a lot of work to do” to educate the public about the true nature of entitlement programs.
“So we have a lot of work to do here as a Congress to start getting people’s heads in the game and understand the true nature of the dilemma,” he said.
And this was a Democrat, folks! A Democrat! Think about that for a moment, and be afraid, be very afraid!
The Next Scandal:
If Justice Department shenanigans aren’t enough, if crony capitalism, favoritism, Taxpayers funding union pensions under the guise of “jobs” Solyndra, and more aren’t enough. Now we have Light Squared.
While the stink from the Solyndra political corruption scandal continues to grow, a new one involving a 4-star Air Force General and military intelligence erupted yesterday from Capitol Hill.
According to reports published by The Daily Beast, General William Shelton, Commander of the Air Force Space Command Center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, said the “White House tried to pressure him to change his testimony to make it more favorable to a company tied to a large Democratic donor. “
The company is LightSquared, a Virginia wireless broadband provider seeking approval for a coast-to-coast wireless network. The majority owner of LightSquared is Harbinger Capital Partners an investment fund whose CEO, Philip Falcone, is a large Democrat Party donor.
The bandwidth spectrum proposed to be used by LightSquared would be very close to the global GPS system used by private industry as well as the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Although LightSquared maintains their proposal would be “quiet neighborhood” network, the Pentagon and industry experts have voiced serious concerns that the “tens of thousands of ground stations for a wireless network could drown out the GPS signal.”
Prior to appearing before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, the White House reviewed and recommended changes to General Shelton’s testimony that would have been favorable to LightSquared. “There was an attempt to influence the text of the testimony and to engage LightSquared in the process in order to bias his (Gen. Shelton’s) testimony.” Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the Committee Chairman told The Daily Beast. “The only people who were involved in the process in preparation for the hearing included the Department of Defense, the White House, and the Office of Management and Budget.”
According to the report, the White House pressed Gen. Shelton to alter his testimony on two critical points: first, that the General supported the White House policy to add more broadband for commercial use (a campaign pledge by Obama), and secondly that the Pentagon would try to resolve the questions around LightSquared with testing in just 90 days. Instead of caving to the White House pressure, General Shelton “chafed at the intervention” and blew the whistle.
Consistent with what has become standard-operating-procedure, the White House issued a statement denying any wrong doing or pressure on the General.
LightSquared was granted conditional approval for their system in 2004, but the go-ahead for build out of the whole system has been stalled because technical experts have warned that the “proposal to build tens of thousands of ground stations for a wireless network could drown out the GPS signal.”
Indeed, General Shelton testified that preliminary tests concluded that only a portion of the band that was licensed in 2004 “would cause significant disruptions to GPS.”
Members of Congress have smelled a rat in the LightSquared deal for some time recognizing that the Administration and the FCC have been trying to rush through an approval for the proposal. “The FCC’s fast-tracking of LightSquared raises questions about whether the government is rushing this project at the expense of all kinds of other things, including national security and everyone who uses GPS, from agriculture to emergency medical technicians,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley who has been suspicious since at least last April. “Without transparency, and with media coverage of political connections in this case, there’s no way to know whether the agency is trying to help friends in need or really looking out for the public’s interest.”
In April, Grassley asked the Chairman of the FCC Julius Genachowski to hand over all records of communications, including emails between Falcone and the FCC, and LightSquared and the FCC. Genachowski declined to turn over those records.
Genachowski is a political appointee of Barack Obama. He cut his teeth as an aid to New York Senator Chuck Schumer before making millions in the telecommunications industry. He was a classmate of Obama’s at the Harvard law school, and became a critical member of the 2008 campaign and transition team credited for the development of the sophisticated campaign communications system utilizing social media networks.
Perhaps trying to get ahead of a developing scandal involving one of the military’s top commanders, on Tuesday the FCC issued a public notice prohibiting LightSquared from further build out until more testing proves GPS would not be damaged.
But Obama’s cronies won’t be happy. And when your cronies aren’t happy, you aren’t happy…
If voters believe Stimulus 1.0 got the job done, they should be open to accepting version 2.0. But did it succeed? Let’s examine the evidence: (1) The president’s economic advisors projected that in the stimulus would halt unemployment at eight percent. In its absence, they warned, unemployment could reach as high as nine percent. This was a major selling point of the bill. Two years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the national unemployment rate remains above nine percent, and the numbers aren’t improving. If the active labor force were the same size as it was when Obama took office (it has shrunk considerably due to discouraged workers), the national unemployment rate would be approaching 12 percent.
(2) The president said the stimulus would “lift two million Americans from poverty.” US poverty levels have now reached all-time highs. In the year after the stimulus passed, 2.6 million Americans fell into poverty.
(3) The president said middle class family incomes would soar by thousands of dollars thanks to his stimulus. As reported above, the national median income (a good measure of the middle class’ collective financial standing) has dipped to its lowest level since 1997.
(4) The president incessantly trumpeted the promise of countless “shovel-ready” projects to sell the public on the stimulus. Earlier this year, Obama himself joked that such projects didn’t really exist. Hilarious!
(5) The president guaranteed “unprecedented transparency” in the process of doling out stimulus dollars. Funds were then released to phantom Congressional districts and tax cheats, and were used to subsidize wasteful, redundant, and useless pork projects. As we now know, this “unprecedented transparency” also entailed rushing approval for reckless multimillion dollar loan guarantees to a politically-connected “green” firm, ignoring internal warning flags, and deliberately concealing evidence of impending failure until it was too late for Congress to intervene. Unprecedented!
(6) As I’ve discussed on several occasions, even if you *fully accept* the White House’s own “jobs saved and/or created by the stimulus” numbers (OMB pegs this statistic at 2.4 million, still a million short of the presidents boasts in 2009), the math works out to nearly $300,000 per job. Early analysis suggests that the president’s new jobs plan would likely trigger a reprise of that breathtakingly inefficient undertaking. Also, an independent on-the-ground study that doesn’t rely on flawed government multipliers and formulas to measure the stimulus’ true employment impact reveals that OMB and CBO’s numbers are way off. (7) Roughly two million fewer Americans have jobs today than when the stimulus passed.
If Leftists view all of this as “success,” and believe suggestions to the contrary are “lies,” I suppose I’m finally beginning to understand why they still love President Obama. The trouble for them is that Average Americans just aren’t drinking the hope-flavored Kool Aid any longer. That’s gotta burn. In fact, several prominent Democrats — including Harry Reid — don’t seem especially eager to pass Stimulus 2.0. Neither does the public. This has got me, got me questioning, where is the love? (Guy Benson)
And now along with Solyndra, there has been at least 4 more companies (mostly “green”) that got stimulus money went bankrupt.
Now that’s the kind of record of success we all want a repeat of don’t we?
Sources close to the Congressional investigation into the loans that the Obama administration made to bankrupt solar company Solyndra, say that Congress is likely to attempt to scuttle an agreement that the administration reached last February that allowed major investors to take precedent over US taxpayers in the liquidation of the company.
In February 2011, Solyndra renegotiated with creditors, including the United States Government, in order to try to avoid bankruptcy. In that deal, an investment group funded by Obama donor George Kaiser, gave Solyndra $75 million in additional money in the form of debt on the condition that the US Government took a subordinated position in any bankruptcy after the first $150 million was returned to the government.
What that means is that in a liquidation of Solyndra, the administration will allow that the first $150 million goes to the government, the next $75 million goes to Kaiser’s fund. That would leave the government with a balance of $377 million outstanding unless a liquidation fetches more than $225 million.
In that case, the Kaiser investor group would likely control the amount of money that is eventually paid out to the government and other creditors and shareholders. This is a technique, known as a “cram down,” that is often used by investors looking to gain control of a troubled company at the expense of other investors.
Those “investors” being Taxpayers. 🙂
But good Democrat Billionaires (who is not evil by the way) must be protected so he can give Obama more money for his re-election after all.
Instead of embracing the economic philosophies of Hayek or Keynes the Obama administration follows the teachings of another influential thinker: J. Wellington Wimpy, the notorious hamburger moocher of the old Popeye cartoons.
Wimpy used to say, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a Hamburger today.” President Obama says, “I’ll gladly pay you next decade for a $450 billion jobs bill today.” In his speech to Congress, the president demanded immediate passage of his program, promising to reveal later how he planned to fund it.
Now it’s clear he wants $460 billion in new taxes, but only over 10 years—covering barely 10 percent of the program when the money’s spent next year. Obama knows Congress won’t approve, making clear the only job his plan is meant to save is his own. Wimpy-nomics may be amusing in a cartoon, but alarming in a commander-in-chief. (townhall)
Wimpy used to say, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a Hamburger today.” President Obama says, “I’ll gladly pay you next decade for a $450 billion jobs” In his speech to Congress, the president demanded immediate passage of his program, promising to reveal later how he planned to fund it. (townhall)
This week’s Obamacare scandal du jour comes from a congressional panel that concludes the administration lied to push a costly long-term care program known as Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS). Internal documents obtained by lawmakers from a committee of House and Senate Republicans reveal officials in Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were acutely aware that the program was unsustainable and suppressed the information from Congress and the public.
The bicameral committee lists its findings in a scathing report that says HHS knew CLASS was likely to collapse as it pushed hard to pass it. While senior HHS officials publicly confirmed that CLASS was solvent, they privately called it “a recipe for disaster” in internal communications obtained as part of the probe. In fact, they had been warned by federal healthcare experts that the entitlement program would likely require a federal bailout or another insurance mandate.
CLASS is supposed to provide long-term care insurance, including nursing home payments and in-home nursing care. Benefits are supposed to be funded with contributors’ premiums and not taxpayer money. However, under the current structure, it would need more enrollees (234 million) than the entire American workforce. Internal communications released this week indicate CLASS would essentially require federal subsidies or a mandate forcing all workers to pay into the government’s new program. (Judical Watch)
The Obama campaign has outdone itself again. First the creepy tapping e-mails. Now this — Attack Watch, a site designed to “Get the facts. Fight the smears . . . and help stop the attacks on the President before they start.”
This, like most features of the Obama reelection campaign, is a less appealing version of Something That Worked in 2008. In 2008, it was called Fight the Smears. The interface was friendly and hope-colored.
This time, it’s dark and angry and Web 1.0. It looks like the guy who designs 9/11 conspiracy Web sites finally got his big break.
Nothing says, “Wow, we’re feeling really good going into the election season” like “HERE IS AN ANGRY PREEMPTIVE WEBSITE WITH ATTACK IN ITS NAME.”
But this is like telling your audience not to think about elephants. “Especially do not think of voting for elephants,” Attack Watch adds.
Stop attacks before they start? This is like that old trick where you ask political candidates, “And how many times did you murder your wife?” We all know how this turns out. We’ve seen “Inception.”
Liberal Education & Officious Bureaucracy Strikes again:
So remember:
Student: Do you know the Constitution? Administrator: Yes I do.
Student: You do? What does the First Amendment state?
Administrator:[It states] free speech [is permitted] in a designated time, place and manner.
And as you say 4 other officious little wanna-be Orwellians came by and parroted the same crap.
BTW, the “time place and manner” decision by the Supreme Court that these Liberals are hiding behind:
In conclusion, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that the crucial question [for application of time, place and manner restrictions] is whether the manner of expression is basically incompatible with the normal activity of a particular place at a particular time.@ Grayned v. Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 116-18, 92 S.Ct. 2294 (1972). To that end, time, place and manner restrictions may be placed on expressive activities that Amaterially and substantially disrupt the operation or function of a university or interfere with the rights of its students to obtain an education.
Time, place and manner restrictions permit the University to avoid disruptions and protect the rights of speakers and those who want to listen. Examples of proper restrictions include those required to prevent disruptive activity, obstruction of vehicular or pedestrian traffic, excessive noise levels or noise that interferes with classroom‚ business or other university activities, interference with the normal functions and processes of the university or the rights of others to effectively use university facilities and property, blocking doorways, or an imminent threat of physical violence or destruction of property. On most university campuses, the responsibility for making time, place and manner determinations and decisions rests with the Dean of Students or similar representative.
So the administration called the cops and had their student records tarred.
Aren’t Liberals and Liberal Bureaucrats fun.
Oh, and media bias: The Young American Foundation, that sponsored the event was referred to repeated as “The NAU Conservatives”. Fascinating…
Speaking of that…Our Dear Leaders “All or Nothing!” ‘Jobs’ Bill:
Clearly, after watching the video below, these students were not in violation of the law. They did not disrupt students, obstruct traffic, or interfere with the rights of others. Nevertheless, four different school administrators tried to silence them by forcing them into “designated spaces” away from the student body.
You Should Read Title 4 of the “American Jobs Act”. Then puke.
This is pure cowardly Obama. Over on the White House site, you can read the summary of the goodies. But when it gets to the part of paying for it, hahaha. That’s to come “later”.
Well, later for everybody who doesn’t know how to google up things. Here’s the text of the bill:
The tax increases are in Title IV, which starts around page 134-ish. Basically, it’s Obamunist class warfare on everybody making $125k (for married filing separately) or better.
From what I can tell, and I’m not a tax attorney (and you need to be one to read this gobbledygook pile of crap), ALL deductions are limited if you’re in the upper income bracket defined there. It looks like you’d get a nice haircut on your deductions including your mortgage. All without bracket relief. Gotta love that Obama.
It’s also got a lot of “The Secretary Shalls” in it, which is Obamaspeak for “We’ll make up the rules as we go along”. Obama needs a little Colonel’s outfit and some Idi Amin dark sunglasses. He’d be right at home running some South American banana republic.
The act also repeals tax breaks for new oil and gas drilling. The beat goes on. That’s in Subtitle D.
The other interesting thing is that the tax increases DO go into effect AND the Joint Committe is supposed to come up with $450 billion in new “deficit reduction”, which in Obamaspeak means more taxes. So he’s raising taxes by $450 billion with this act and then it also forces the joint committe to either cut spending (LOL) or raise taxes by another $450 billion.
A couple of other things:
*As far as I can tell, this bill is just like Porkulus I: A wealth transfer from the upper middle class to the construction unions. It’s got the usual state subsidies in there so the teacher’s unions stay funded. *If you’re near AMT territory now, this bill ensures you will be smack in the middle of it as your deductions get whacked. This will force thousands more people into the AMT adders, and their tax bills will SKYROCKET from that. *It also has some great perverse incentives. “Work sharing” will go into effect. Let’s say you’re sick of the 8 to 5 grind. Well, has Obama got a deal for you! Instead of getting laid off, you can voluntarily reduce your hours *and* have the feds pay you partial unemployment. The best of both worlds! Tell your boss, “Smell ya later!” at 12 noon and hit the beach for some waves. But still go to the bank and get paid for a full day. What’s not to love?!
*Here’s the thing about the SuperCommittee: We all know they’re never going to agree to just cut $1.5T in spending. Oh, no. There WILL be new taxes out of this. By upping the ceiling by ANOTHER half a trillion, Obama figures he can wring even more taxes out of folks without anyone really tying it to him. Because if the SC can’t agree, then the automatic triggers for defense and Medicare provider cuts kick in…and the GOP gets the blame.
Also, read Section 366 on the “Career Academies” and other assorted pork in the bill. You’ll love it.
David Axelrod gave away the game this morning by declaring that there will be no negotiations on the bill (Hat tip to HotAir): Axelrod speaketh
“We’re not in a negotiation to break up the package. It’s not an à la carte menu. It’s a strategy to get this country moving,” Axelrod said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“The president has a package; the package works together. We need to do many things to get this economy moving,” Axelrod said.
So in other words, you can stuff bipartisan compromise. We want to have our cake and eat it, too. And we want you to swallow this tax-and-transfer payola scheme so we can get kickbacks to the democrat party via all the unions we’re going to fund with taxpayer dollars.
GOP: Circular-file this bill the second it shows up. Most. Dishonest. President. Ever.
And if you don’t do exactly as we say you’re and obstructionist, extremist, partisan racist! 🙂
Where’s my industrial strength Barf bag….
The Democrats only held that seat for the last 90 years! Nothing to see here…move along…
But at At least the well-connected Billionaire Obama supporter will get paid back BY THE TAXPAYERS. It’s always fun to gamble and lose with other people’s money, isn’t it! 🙂
Arizona, a state that is regularly accused of having a serious issue with people of color, received another stain to its reputation. Last week, four white female students at Arizona State University showed up to a football game wearing Black face. The school asked students to wear all-Black attire to celebrate the new uniforms in their game against the Missouri Tigers. This is when a few students took it too far. At least four Arizona State fans attended Saturday’s college football game against the University of Missouri in Blackface. The broadcast, which aired on ESPN, showed four young white women with their faces, necks and arms painted all Black. Arizona State would win 37-30, thus validating the practice of white (and other) folks painting their faces Black as part of an audience gimmick. So, on a scale of 1-10 how racist is this? And how ignorant? I’m going to give these girls just a four out of 10 for racism, but a solid 7.5 for ignorance. (Ology and other goofy websites)
Problem (amongst many): Other than creating “racism where it doesn’t exist. If you look closely enough you will notice that one of these girls is actually Black For real!!
Whoops!
But don’t expect the “outraged” liberals to care about that. No sir, not one bit.
I wonder if they are offended by burnt toast (it’s black you know) or “blackened” fish?
or “black” coffee. or “colored pencils”??
Or “blackened” fish?
or “blackouts” or “Black Friday” sales?
or Black Light?
Pretty White Clouds become menacing dark black clouds, so is Mother Nature Racist??
Or are you just hunting for racism where it doesn’t exist to just satisfy your craving for hatred?
Are you going to address the Southern Democrats, Like Al Gore Sr, who voted against the Civil Rights Acts?
Nope.
It’s just hate for hate sake. And it’s a knee jerk reaction that obvious made their brains fall out.
I would give the liberal article writers an 11 for racism and Infinity for ignorance.
***********
Green Jobs Boondoggle
The Solyndra case. Here’s the cliffsnotes version: A solar panel manufacturing company that received over half-a-billion taxpayer dollars in federal “stimulus” loan guarantees from the Obama administration in 2009 has filed for bankruptcy and laid off all of its employees. One of the principal investors in Solyndra was a major Obama donor. He and various Solyndra officials visited the White House repeatedly before and after the controversial loan was approved. The president toured the company’s California headquarters in 2010, using the setting to tout his green energy agenda and the Recovery Act. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Solyndra imploded last month. Last week, the FBI raided Solyndra’s offices, seeking undisclosed information. We also learned that Obama Energy Department representatives sat in on numerous Solyndra board meetings in the months leading up to the company’s failure. They knew it was coming. Oh well, the White House argues, there are always risks in these sorts of things — and besides, the Solyndra loan process began during the Bush administration. That house of cards is now collapsing. Yesterday, ABC News dropped the bombshell that Bush era Energy auditors actually nixed the loan as unsound, and that Obama OMB staffers raised similar concerns upon their own evaluation. The White House’s political team seemed to disagree, putting the deal on a “fast track.” Just days later, the massive government loan to the unstable “green” poster-child — backed by major Obama donor cash — was fortuitously approved.
So you, the tax payers are on the hook for $535 MILLION dollars in payola to a company that even with that much cash went bankrupt in just over a year!
Now that’s betting on the horse from the glue factory. But since it was “green” the left won’t care and the media will try to bury it.
The results of the Congressional probe shared Tuesday with ABC News show that less than two weeks before President Bush left office, on January 9, 2009, the Energy Department’s credit committee had voted against offering a loan commitment to Solyndra. Even after Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, analysts in the Energy Department and in the Office of Management and Budget were repeatedly questioning the wisdom of the loan. In one exchange, an Energy official wrote of “a major outstanding issue” — namely, that Solyndra’s numbers showed it would run out of cash in September 2011. There was also concern about the high-risk nature of the project. Internally, the Office of Management and Budget wrote that “the risk rating for the project sponsor [Solyndra] … seems high.” Outside analysts had warned for months that the company might not be a sound investment.
So, again, Solyndra’s Bush-era application was denied because of concerns over the company’s balance sheets and business model. Obama’s own OMB staffers were waving bright red flags, essentially shouting “no!” One even presciently predicted that Solyndra could run out of money….right about now. Funny, that. And yet, the irresponsible loan was fast-tracked for approval, apparently at the behest of Obama’s “West Wing” (ie, political) aides. Remember, these aides were regularly conferring with one of the company’s primary investors, George Kaiser, — who just happened to be a top Obama campaign fundraising “bundler” during the last campaign. After misleading the public about the Bush administration’s role in this mess, the Obama White House now tells us all of those meetings with Kaiser had nothing to do with the risky loan in question. Does anyone believe that? Anyone? This is far from over. (townhall)
After receiving the president’s jobs proposal politely after he unveiled it before Congress last week, Boehner and other Republicans grew notably more skeptical Monday once the White House announced plans to pay for the costly measure entirely with tax increases on the rich and corporations that the GOP has already rejected.
Yeah, that’ll make them want to create more jobs. So much for “tax cuts”. 🙂
The bulk of the payment comes from nearly $400 billion from limiting the deductions on charitable contributions and other items that wealthy people can take. There’s also $40 billion from closing oil and gas loopholes, $18 billion from hiking taxes on certain income made by fund managers, and $3 billion from changing the tax treatment of corporate jets.
Obama has said he’s asking the wealthy to pay their fair share, and he called on Congress to pass the bill without delay.
“The only thing that’s stopping it is politics,” Obama said Monday. “And we can’t afford these same political games. Not now.”
Yeah, just ignore HIS POLITICS!!! Just ignore HIS POLITICAL GAMES!
I know the Ministry of Truth Media will. They will be too busy Cheerleading.
“We remain eager to work together on ways to support job growth, but this proposal doesn’t appear to have been offered in that bipartisan spirit,” said Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck.
It’s the Democrats BY-Partisan bi-partisanship where you do everything they want and if you don’t then you’re just being a partisan. 🙂
Obama’s top campaign strategist, David Axelrod, said Tuesday that the White House wants Congress to act on the entire bill rather than approaching it piecemeal. “We’re not in a negotiation to break up the package,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It’s not an a la carte menu.”
It’s ALL or Nothing. Do it now or else!. That’s your bi-partisan, no games, no politics, STIMULUS Tax and Spend Package. (Did any mention cutting spending?- NOPE and neither will they…)
Rejoice!
And if you don’t agree, you’re a partisan extremist, racist “terrorist”. Now don’t you feel better? 🙂
The White House, which has gotten burned in the past by making overly optimistic job-creation predictions, has avoided estimating how many jobs the package would create. But in an interview Monday on NBC News, Obama embraced an estimate from an outside economist, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, and said the bill “could mean an additional 2 million jobs.”
So if they aren’t “saved of created” they didn’t say it. So don’t blame them when it falls flat and bombs spectacularly.
With 14 Million unemployed, he’s really shooting for greatness! Gee, didn’t they say that ObamaCare would create millions of Jobs AND lower the deficit…why yes, they did…
Of Course they’ll largely be short term jobs (just enough to get him to 2013 perhaps??) and union jobs (more slush money for his re-election).
But no Games. No Politics. No narcissism involved. 🙂
But if you don’t do EXACTLY as THEY SAY with NO DEVIATIONS you’re just a partisan who wants to hurt people and be an obstructionist! 🙂
Thomas Sowell: Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy?
Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president proposing? More spending! Only the words have changed — from “stimulus” to “jobs” and from “shovel-ready projects” to “jobs for construction workers.”
If government spending were the answer, we would by now have a booming economy with plenty of jobs, after all the record trillions of dollars that have been poured down a bottomless pit. Are we to keep on doing the same things, just because those things have been repackaged in different words?
Or just because Obama now assures us that “everything in this bill will be paid for”? This is the same man who told us that he could provide health insurance to millions more people without increasing the cost.
When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies — more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers’ unions, and “thousands of transportation projects.”
The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can “grow the economy” by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it — so long as they call spending “investment.”
Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy.
Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.
Obama says he wants “federal housing agencies” to “help more people refinance their mortgages.” What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?
No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. When people pay the price of their own mistakes, that is when there is the greatest pressure to correct those mistakes. But when taxpayers who had nothing to do with those mistakes are forced to pay the costs, that is when those and other mistakes can continue to flourish — and to mess up the economy.
Whatever his deficiencies in economics, Barack Obama is a master of politics — including the great political game of “Heads I win and tails you lose.”
Any policy that shows any sign of achieving its goals will of course be trumpeted across the land as a success. But, in the far more frequent cases where the policy fails or turns out to be counterproductive, the political response is: “Things would have been even worse without this policy.”
It’s heads I win and tails you lose.
Thus, when unemployment went up after the massive spending that was supposed to bring it down, we were told that unemployment would have been far worse if it had not been for that spending.
Are we really supposed to fall for ploys like this? The answer is clearly “yes,” as far as Obama and his allies in the media are concerned.
Our intelligence was insulted even further in President Obama’s speech to Congress, when he set up this straw man as what his critics believe — that “the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.”
Have you heard anybody in any part of the political spectrum advocate that? If not, then why was the President of the United States saying such things, unless he thought we were fools enough to buy it — and that the media would never call him on it?
Bravo!
ROTFL!
But I still have to wonder why the Republicans keep having Liberals doing the questions so they throw “gotcha”-laden questions at them?
Oh well, since virtually all of the media is liberal it’s the cross you have to bear.
But at least if you do everything they want, you won’t be an obstructionist, extremist, racist, “terrorist” who just wants to get grandma out into the cold off a cliff and let her starve and freeze!!
Don’t you feel better now… 🙂
Wouldn’t want to offend the Muslims, after all…. 😦
What is there to say about Barack Obama’s speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.
Projection. That’s psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. “This isn’t political grandstanding,” Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, “You lie!”). “This isn’t class warfare.”
These sentences came four paragraphs after Obama insisted that “the most affluent citizens and corporations” should pay more taxes (which spurs job creation how?) and not long before he promised to “take that message to every corner of the country.”
Lest there be an doubt about Obama’s real intentions, consider that his speech was obviously modeled on Harry Truman’s call for a special session of the Republican Congress in the summer of 1948 so he could campaign against it. And consider that Obama pointedly refused to rebuke Jim Hoffa’s “let’s take these sons of bitches out” — meaning Republicans — when he introduced him last Monday in Detroit.
Pragmatism. Perceptive writers like David Brooks of The New York Times told us in 2008 that Obama was basically a pragmatist, a slave to no ideology but simply a student of what works. Brooks was apparently impressed by Obama’s mention of Edmund Burke and the sharp crease in his pants.
But a pragmatist would probably not choose to call for more of the policies that plainly haven’t worked. Infrastructure spending (shovel ready, anyone?), subsidies of teachers’ salaries, fixing roofs and windows on schools — these were all in the 2009 stimulus package, which has led to the stagnant economy we have today.
A pragmatist doesn’t keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn’t open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what’s wrong.
Paid for. “Everything in this bill,” Obama said in his eighth paragraph, “will be paid for. Everything.”
By whom? Well, in the 24th paragraph he tells us that he is asking the 12-member super-committee Congress set up under the debt ceiling bill to add another $450,000,000,000 or so to the $1,500,000,000,000 in savings it is charged to come up with. The roving camera showed the ordinarily hardy super-committee member Sen. Jon Kyl looking queasy.
Who thinks the Supercommitte will pas some watered,partisan, lame ass do-nothing piece of crap at 11:59:59.9999 on the night of the deadline?
I do I do! 🙂
Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, “I’ll stand drinks for everyone in the house,” and then adds, “Those guys over there are going to pay for them.”
What’s fascinating here is that once again the supposedly pragmatic and sometimes professorial president is not making use of the first class professionals in the Office of Management and Budget to come up with specifics, but is leaving that to members of Congress, maybe in a midnight marathon session with deadlines pending. Same as on the stimulus package and Obamacare.
Pathetic promises. Perhaps he hoped people wouldn’t notice, but Obama did put in two words — “faster trains” — as a plug for his pet project of high-speed rail. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum calls California’s HSR project, the largest in the nation, “a fantastic boondoggle,” likely to cost three or four times estimates and with ridership estimates that are “fantasies.” “We have way better uses for this dough,” Drum concludes.
Political payoffs. Nearly one-quarter of this latest stimulus package — sorry, American Jobs Act — is aid to state and local government, to keep teachers and other public employee union members on the job and paying dues to the unions. Altogether unions gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. Pretty good return on their “investment,” eh? (and considering he spent $750 million last time and is projected to want to spend a Billion this time thqt Union money is critical and everyone is just along for the ride)
Pettifoggery. Obama impressed many conservative writers in 2008 with his ability to state their positions in fair terms — which led some to think that surely he must agree with them. But he seems to have lost this knack.
Conservatives, according to this speech, want to “wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades” and “simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations.”
“Most” means more than 50 percent. Does the White House have documentation for the claim that Republicans want to cut government spending by more than 50 percent? And what “basic protections” do they want to “wipe out”?
There are none, but it creates Fear and we all know with this White House FEAR IS HOPE.
Barack Obama seemed like an unhappy warrior Thursday night, still unreconciled to the results of the 2010 elections, “seeming desperate and condescending at the same time,” in the words of maverick liberal blogger Mickey Kaus. That darn garage door just won’t open! (Michael Barone)
And Preciously fast. He wants the bill passed too fast for anyone to get a real look at it. So don’t look at the Monster behind the curtain it will only distress you. Just pass the bill and stop being “obstructionist”. 🙂
Spend Now Cut Later..Much Later…
The Final P’s for today (and not Obama Peas either): Preposterous, Pretentious, and Perfidious…
Krugman Loses it again
The left’s favourite economist for fantasy role-playing games Paul Krugman was at it again over the weekend.
“What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not,” writes Krugman as his sick 9/11 tribute, “was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue.”
Way to unify us Paul.
“Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush,” says Krugman “raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”
Can’t you hear MSNBC cheering right now, “Go Paul Go! Tell it like it is!” 🙂
This is the Reality. Not some whitewashed Liberal fantasy of Political Correctness.
That’s what we have to collectively remember.
3,000 innocent lives snuffed out
in a moment of blind hatred.
And with the hate-filled partisanship we have now, we have to remember that day.
And these are the Men who did. Radical Muslims. Not George Bush, Not the CIA, not Dick Cheney or any other ridiculously partisan silliness.
And No Political Correctness.
But you can see in the “Truthers” is the modern day birth of the hyper-partisan. The need to destroy at all costs your political enemies and to believe or say any wild ass thing as long as you believe it advances your ideology and denigrates the the “enemy”.
At San Diego State University an international student, Zewdalem Kebede, overheard students talking in Arabic expressing delight about the attacks. When Kebede challenged them, he was accused of engaging in “abusive behavior” and warned that any similar behavior in the future would result in “serious disciplinary sanctions.” At Penn State, a professor who advocated an aggressive military response to the attacks on his webpage received a letter from the vice provost for academic affairs chastising him for engaging in speech that was “insensitive and perhaps even intimidating.” (Keep in mind that engaging in “intimidating” speech was grounds for termination at Penn State at the time.) Meanwhile, at Johns Hopkins, a professor who publicly advocated going after the countries that supported al Qaeda and similar terrorist organizations found himself reprimanded and removed as the director of the university’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute.
But it was truly eye-opening for me to see that most of the attempts to stifle speech on campus in the wake of September 11 were directed at what were normal responses of anger and solidarity that most Americans felt in those days and weeks after the attacks. What is so bizarre about these cases is that the same colleges and universities that present themselves as civilized and tolerant showed such startling myopia and intolerance towards the sadness and outrage of their fellow citizens.
It was just the start of my experiences fighting campus censors — and ten years later, the fight is far from over. (Greg Lukianoff is an attorney and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education).
But now we should just Remember, in the face of Political Correctness.
“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for you are with me.” -Psalm 23:4
10:03 am ET – At this exact moment ten years ago, brave patriots aboard United Airlines flight 93 forced Islamist hijackers to bring the airliner down in a Pennsylvania field, thwarting another attack on the nation’s capital:
The Pentagon:
Guy Benson:One of the most striking and disturbing images of 9/11 is a photograph of an unidentified man plunging from the World Trade Center towers to his death. Facing the reality that no rescue effort was feasible, this citizen — like dozens of others — chose to leap to his demise rather than be incinerated by the blaze. This picture is extraordinarily difficult to stomach. Much of the media, which has decided to sanitize 9/11 to the greatest extent possible, won’t show it:
Onlookers were terrified, horrified, and overcome with grief: This was not a “tragedy.” It was an atrocity, committed by radical Muslims whose fanatical, murderous hatred for western civilization has not abated. They cannot be coddled. They cannot be placated. They can only be captured and interrogated, or killed. May those whose lives were ripped away ten years ago never be forgotten. May their loved ones find peace. May God bless our military, intelligence community, and first responders. And may God bless our great country.
Amen.
I will note for historical record that in spring of 1979 I stood atop one of the Towers in New York. I can never do that again in my life.
Michelle Malkin: Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden’s henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.
“Know your enemy, name your enemy” is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders. Our military leaders refuse to expunge them from uniformed ranks until it’s too late (see: Fort Hood massacre). The j-word is discouraged in Obama intelligence circles, and the term “Islamic extremism” was removed from the U.S. national security strategy document last year.
Similarly, too many teachers refuse to show and tell who the perpetrators of 9/11 were and who their heirs are today. My own daughter was one year old when the Twin Towers collapsed, the Pentagon went up in flames and Shanksville, Pa., became hallowed ground for the brave passengers of United Flight 93. In second grade, her teachers read touchy-feely stories about peace and diversity to honor the 9/11 dead. They whitewashed Osama bin Laden, militant Islam and centuries-old jihad out of the curriculum. Apparently, the youngsters weren’t ready to learn even the most basic information about the evil masterminds of Islamic terrorism.
Mary Beth Hicks, author of the new book “Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid,” points to a recent review of 10 widely used textbooks in which the concepts of jihad and sharia were either watered down or absent. These childhood experts have determined that grade school is too early to delve into the specifics of the homicidal clash of Allah’s sharia-avenging soldiers with the freedom-loving Western world.
Yet, many of the same protectors of fragile elementary-school pupils can’t wait to teach them all the ins and outs of condoms, cross-dressers and crack addictions.
We pulled our daughter out of a cesspool of academic and moral relativism and found a reality-grounded, rigorous charter school where no-nonsense teachers refuse to sugarcoat inconvenient facts and history. Many of the students are children of soldiers and servicemen and women who — inspired by the heroes of 9/11 — have voluntarily deployed time and time again to kill the American Dream destroyers abroad before they kill us over here.
There’s no better way to hammer home the message that “freedom is not free” than to have your kids go to school with other kids whose dads and moms are gone for years at a time — missing births and birthday parties, recitals and soccer practice, Christmas pageants and Independence Day fireworks.
But instead of unfettered pride in our armed forces, social justice educators in high schools and colleges across the country indoctrinate American students into viewing our volunteer armed forces as victims, monsters and pawns in a leftist “social struggle.”
A decade after the 9/11 attacks, Blame America-ism still permeates classrooms and the culture. A special 9/11 curriculum distributed in New Jersey schools advises teachers to “avoid graphic details or dramatizing the destruction” wrought by the 9/11 hijackers, and instead focus elementary school students’ attention on broadly defined “intolerance” and “hurtful words.”
No surprise: Jihadist utterances such as “Kill the Jews,” “Allahu Akbar” and “Behead all those who insult Islam” are not among the “hurtful words” studied.
Middle-schoolers are directed to “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And high-school students are taught “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” – pop-psychology claptrap used to excuse jihadists’ behavior based on their purported low self-esteem and oppressed status caused by “European colonialism.”
It is no wonder that a new poll released this week showed that Americans today “are generally more willing to believe that U.S. policies in the Middle East might have motivated the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon,” according to Reuters.
To make matters worse, we have an appeaser-in-chief who wrote shortly after the jihadist attacks a decade ago that the “essence of this tragedy” derives “from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.” A “climate of poverty and ignorance” caused the attacks, then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama preached. Never mind the Ivy League and Oxford educations, the oil wealth and the middle-class status of legions of al-Qaida plotters and operatives.
9/11 was a deliberate, carefully planned evil act of the long-waged war on the West by Koran-inspired soldiers of Allah around the world. They hated us before George W. Bush was in office. They hated us before Israel existed. And the avengers of the religion of perpetual outrage will keep hating us no matter how much we try to appease them.
The post-9/11 problem isn’t whether we’ll forget. The problem is: Will we ever learn?
College Threatens to Nix 9/11 Tribute As Too American: Human Events
If you thought that something as innocuous as putting up 3,000 American flags on school grounds to pay tribute to those murdered on September 11 couldn’t be controversial, you haven’t been to Marietta College.
Administrators at this liberal arts college in southeast Ohio are threatening to cancel a 9/11 memorial planned by their students if flags from other countries are not observed in the activities as well.
In addition to organizing a candlelight vigil, Snow sought to plant 3,000 American flags around campus starting this Sunday morning. She received approval from the Office of Student Life on June 23, more than two months ago. But when she returned to campus for the fall semester, days before the memorial was to begin, the vice president of Student Life, Robert Pastoor, vowed to terminate the tribute unless foreign flags were mixed together with American ones.
“He [Robert Pastoor] insisted we add the international flags for the reason that it was a ‘global perspective’ school,”
“Other nationalities were killed in the twin towers as well” and that Marietta must “consider how the Muslim and Chinese students will feel about the [American flag] display.”
The school backed down, but Marietta officials are hosting 9/11 events on their own, but those activities pertain to how American Muslims are treated in a post-9/11 world.
DETROIT SCHOOLS: Debbie Schlussel
At Brother Rice, Kuschel — who teaches history and government — will focus on what the attacks did to American society and constitutional freedoms. “It’s important to understand who did this to us and why. Kids want to know why we’re resented abroad.”
Kuschel said he’ll look for a good, short video for students to watch, and then have them write responses to questions he poses online. Having had to focus their thoughts, those answers will provide the grist for in-class discussions.
Gregory Evans teaches seventh-grade geography at Bates Academy in the Detroit Public Schools. Since his students are younger — and because Evans remembers his own fears during the Cold War — he doesn’t want to alarm them. But he does think it’s important they understand how American policies affect people overseas, “and how our good intentions aren’t always perceived as good.”
Yes, apologists like these two jerks populate schools across America, poisoning your kids’ and grandkids’ minds and blaming America.
Ten years later, it’s amazing we still have people spouting this “here’s why they hate us” BS. What we need to be asking is “why don’t we hate them” yet. 3,000 Americans, the Fort Hood massacre, the Underwear and Times Square bombers, multiple other failed attempts that might have succeeded. All done by Muslims. And these “teachers” are still using the same old excuses for it all.
Until we learn to hate our enemies and treat them in kind, we will continue to lose the battle. Not just on the involuntary battlefields like the twin towers and the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. But willingly and insidiously throughout our culture and our society.
We are already losing that battle and have for ten years.
Seventy years ago we weren’t wasting times and minds asking and telling kids why the Nazis hated us. We spent the time hating and defeating them.
And that’s why we’ll never defeat these jihadists or their sister and brother Muslims who pose an equally sinister Islamic threat.
Middle School Analysis:
In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.”
Mark Steyn:And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.
Hugh Hewitt w/ Mark Steyn: But if half of what I read is true, that there will be no preachers, prayers, religious portion of this commemoration, I will think we have just absolutely lost our collective minds in Manhattan. What do you understand to be what’s planned for 9/11, and its implications, if any?
Wouldn’t want to offend the Muslims now would we! 🙂
MS: Well, I think there will be eunuch celebrations. They will be equivolist and mired in a kind of cultural relativism that says the real lesson we need to learn from 9/11 is that we need far more multicultural outreach. I think that’s the reason, by the way, that Nanny Bloomberg isn’t having any members of the clergy there, because if he had a Catholic preacher, or an Episcopalian, or whatever, there would probably be pressure on him to have a Rabbi. And then if he has a Rabbi, he’s probably got to have a big shot Imam. And then if he had a big shot Imam at the service, there would be people who would be objecting to him standing next to an Imam at the 9/11 commemoration. And that’s a good example of where we’ve come, by the way, because I don’t think if you’d had a sort of multi-faith civic service before 9/11, anyone would have thought you needed necessarily to have some big shot Imam in on the party. And the fact that 9/11, we are such a perversely, self-loathing culture, that the lesson we are supposed to draw from 9/11 is we need to be nicer to the people in whose faith 3,000 people died, I think gets to the heart of the 9/11 question. It’s not about them, it’s about us.
Marvin McCardle (ordinary liberal moron): Of course he was relaxed. He already knew of the attack. 911 was a conspiracy. The facts bear this out. He was not surprised at all. Some day the truth will come out, but unfortunately Bush will be gone and the shame of it all will fall on his grandchildren.
In San Francisco they are have a 9/11 Conspiracy Movie Marathon!
Guy Benson: Excerpt from AFL-CIO’s Head Skullcracker’s 9/11 Letter to his Union Members:
Just 10 years after 9/11, despite our vows, the public servants, construction workers and others who lost their lives or still suffer with the cancerous remnants of the Twin Towers haven’t just been forgotten. They’ve been vilified. The extremist small government posse has turned them into public enemy No. 1, as though teachers and firefighters, EMTs and nurses and union construction workers ruined America’s economy.
In state after state this year—with the heroism of 9/11 less than a decade behind us—politicians targeted the paychecks, benefits and basic rights of these workers in a rabid campaign to shift government support to tax breaks for the wealthy and already profitable corporations. Wealthy CEOs, anti-government extremist front groups and frothing talk show hosts—from the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks to the Koch brothers, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council—also pushed open the door to hate.
Make no mistake—setting workers against workers is a highly profitable endeavor. How many times during the vilest state attacks on public workers did we hear the question: “Other people don’t have pensions. Why should he?” Prompting that question required twisting the American psyche—which, by its founding nature, seeks to lift the common good. The appropriate question should have been, “Why doesn’t everybody have a pension?” followed by collective action for retirement security.
We’ve seen the costs of hatred in ill-thought wars, in shameful attacks on immigrants and our LGBT neighbors. We saw it in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. We saw it in the racism that has found overt and covert expression since Barack Obama began his run for office—from outright declarations of people who said out loud they would never vote for a black man to the ridiculously persistent obsession with our president’s birth certificate. Regardless of his policies or priorities, President Obama is shadowed by the drumbeat of suspicion based on his “other”-ness. And those suspicions are fed and watered constantly by forces that were threatened by his message of “hope and change.”
We’ve seen the cost of greed in the recklessness of financial institutions that created the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression and the devastating jobs crisis that persists today. But I remember that other door that opened on 9/11—the door to our better selves, to our understanding that we are one and our values require us to care for one another.
That’s what sent 347 firefighters to their death at the Twin Towers 10 years ago. It’s also what sent firefighters to stand with teachers in Wisconsin even though Gov. Scott Walker had exempted them from his attack on public employees. It’s what moves employed people now to demand good jobs for the 26 million Americans who are looking for work. It’s what gives us the courage to take on a crumbling economy and the politicians preaching austerity and ignoring our jobs crisis—to take them on and say, “We are America. We are better than this. And we are one.” Brothers and sisters, friends, I hope you will join me in marking this solemn anniversary by committing to redouble your activism on behalf of America’s everyday working heroes. We will rise or fall together. This is appalling, and requires no further commentary. It truly speaks for itself. My only concern was that it was so cartoonish and vile that it might not be authentic. I called the AFL-CIO, and a representative told me it “appears to be legitimate.” She said she’d get back to me with final confirmation, but conceded that it’s a fair assumption that Trumka is, in fact, the piece’s author. Egads. UPDATE – I received the following confirmation from an AFL-CIO spokesperson: “The September 11 (9/11) page on the AFL-CIO’s website is valid, per our phone conversation earlier. Thank you for your patience as we verified this.”
I feel so much better now, don’t you?
The White House Speaks:
The White House has issued detailed guidelines to government officials on how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, with instructions to honor the memory of those who died on American soil but also to recall that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups have since carried out attacks elsewhere in the world, from Mumbai to Manila.
The White House in recent days has quietly disseminated two sets of documents. One is framed for overseas allies and their citizens and was sent to American embassies and consulates around the globe. The other includes themes for Americans here and underscores the importance of national service and what the government has done to prevent another major attack in the United States. That single-page document was issued to all federal agencies, officials said.
So depending on who you are you got a tailored politically correct message. He was talking out of 3 sides of his mouth at once. Say what you have to to the group in front of you but stand for nothing.
Sounds like him.
“The important theme is to show the world how much we realize that 9/11 — the attacks themselves and violent extremism writ large — is not ‘just about us,’ ” said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal White House planning.
Smelling a theme are we?
This is one American citizen’s response to the president’s “Guidelines on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 observances,” saying that 9/11 wasn’t just about us and that our actions to defend our nation after 9/11 angered other nations and we must be sensitive to that. I suppose we should have apologized after being attacked at Pearl Harbor.
9/11 is about us.
9/11 is about terror and the first act of war directly on the American mainland.
9/11 is about those unbelievably heroic firemen, policemen and ordinary citizens who entered the twin towers knowing they would never come out again.
9/11 is watching fellow Americans knowingly choose to jump to their deaths rather than burn alive. Think about that.
9/11 is about the unbelievable heroes of Flight 93. They personified the uniquely American spirit.
9/11 is about radical Islamic terrorists carefully and coldly plotting for years to target the primary symbol of freedom in this world, the United States of America. Saying that may not be politically correct, but it is the truth.
9/11 is about Americans putting aside differences to unite against a common enemy — evil personified.
9/11 is about all Americans praying together and honoring and respecting their religious traditions and differences. Hear that, Mayor Bloomberg?
9/11 is about all freedom and peace loving people throughout the world saying “We are with you. We are all Americans today.”
9/11 is about truth, not fear, not political correctness and not moral equivalency. To equate 9/11 with a nightclub bombing or other terror attacks does a grave disservice to those who died on 9/11.
9/11 is about confronting our enemies and supporting and defending those who seek to live in freedom and peace.
9/11 is about not apologizing for what we did to defend our nation and our freedom.
9/11 is about the millions of Americans who died defending not only the freedoms this nation cherishes, but the lives and freedoms of millions throughout the world since the founding of this nation.
9/11 is about being proud, not ashamed, of American exceptionalism, our Judeo-Christian heritage and our uncompromising principle of freedom of, and freedom from, religion for all.
9/11 is about being unabashedly and unashamedly patriotic. Other countries don’t apologize for their love of country. We shouldn’t either.
9/11 is about admitting our mistakes as a nation and correcting them.
9/11 is about freedom and not about the government telling its citizens what to say or not to say on a most sacred national observance. To do so does not do justice to the memory of those who died that day and to the millions of brave men and women who died defending our freedom, as citizens, to speak.
L.C. Ketter, Federal Way,Washington. (Federal Way Mirror)
But at At least the well-connected Billionaire Obama supporter will get paid back BY THE TAXPAYERS. It’s always fun to gamble and lose with other people’s money, isn’t it! 🙂
Indyfromaz's Blog: The Thoughts of An Independent Arizonan 