The Politics of Food

In January 2009, there were 31,939,110 Americans receiving food stamps; in November 2012, the number rose to 47,692,896, almost a 50% increase. And it increase again in January 2013.

Not content with having more Americans on food stamps than people in Spain, the Obama administration is ringing the dinner bell for illegal aliens. We’ll feed you and not check your status.

As we wrote last July, just as food stamp use has skyrocketed here under President Obama, so have marketing efforts to Hispanics under a partnership with Mexico.

We dubbed the program “Fat and Furious” after the administration’s gun-running program that also seemingly had worthy goals but had unclear motives and pernicious effects.

“USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition assistance,” the USDA explained in a paragraph on its “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics With Nutrition Assistance” Web page. “Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”

Now the watchdog group Judicial Watch has obtained Spanish-language fliers through a Freedom of Information Act request.

It announced Thursday that the “promotion of the food stamp program, now known as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flier provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA.”

The interesting thing about this flier is a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they don’t need to declare their immigration status in order to get aid. Emphasized in bold and underlined, it reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”

They get the carrot, we get the stick! Up our “collective” asses!

This is a huge carrot to incentivize illegal immigration at the same time the Obama administration is pushing what is called “comprehensive immigration reform” designed to assimilate those illegal aliens already here.

But don’t worry about the Border Security and the flood of illegals. Just because in 1986 it was 3 million and now it would be at 12 Million it can’t happen again… 🙂

An administration unwilling to secure our borders is ringing the dinner bell for anyone able to sneak past the U.S. Border Patrol.

Then with Amnesty they can vote for more Democrats!

“The revelation that the USDA is actively working with the Mexican government to promote food stamps for illegal aliens should have a direct impact on the fate of the immigration bill now being debated in Congress,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These disclosures further confirm the fact that the Obama administration cannot be trusted to protect our borders or enforce our immigration laws.”

Indeed it should, for it is contemptible that an administration that has run the U.S. economy into the ground and increased legitimate demand by legal U.S. citizens for food aid to be actively recruiting foreign nationals to further burden American taxpayers who have their own families to feed. (IBD)

But you don’t want children to starve do you? you heartless, mean, cruel, nasty old racist! 🙂

Rep. Tom Marino, R-PA, introduced the SNAP Transparency Act on Friday, which would require the USDA to publicize what food stamps pay for.

“SNAP is a perfect example of how our government spends too much money with too little oversight and accountability,” said Marino in a statement.

A 2012 Yale study estimated Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits, formerly called food stamps, pay for $2 billion in sugary drinks alone every year. A 2010 study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that spending was even higher, estimating soda companies reap as much as $4 billion each year in SNAP money. (WE)

So Liberals want to regulate what foods you can get and what you can drink. How about starting here. 🙂

Oh, sorry, these are the Once and Future Democrat Dependent Majority for life, can’t screw with them…No waste, fraud or abuse here! 🙂

Food stamp fraud has more than doubled since Barack Obama took office in 2009. In 2011, according to the USDA, food stamp fraud was approximately $750 million. The type of fraud noted was derived from selling Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to food retailers for cents on the dollar.

The USDA stated, “In 2011, program costs totaled $75.7 billion. Using the most recent data on trafficking available, USDA estimated that trafficking would be 1 percent of $75 billion, or approximately $750 million.” (Breitbart)

But if you propose “cutting” this out, or tightening the rules to save money, you’re just a asshole who wants kids to starve!

Don’t you dare touch The Dependent Democrat Majority For Life! These are there voters. Their power base. How dare you want to touch them in any way.

Think Progress (a far left “think tank”): Rather than looking for cuts in the food stamp program, perhaps lawmakers could instead focus on crop subsidies that fuel the junk food industry.

Narrow minded, partisan ,anti-capitalist attack instead of cutting The Once and Future Dependent Democrats, wow, what a shocker!

The Politics of Food. 🙂

Politics of Science

‘We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040.’

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. (Voice of Russia)

Yeah, that would screw up their power grab if they had to switch back to Global Cooling hysteria that they had 40 years ago.

Love that “consensus” that says the issue is settled and they are always right. 🙂

Global warming was a tough one for Obama and the rest of his band of witch burners, because it involved actual metrics – which didn’t pan out.

So they changed their meme to “climate change” which has no metrics, no definition, no theoretical basis, no boundaries, no way to prove or disprove – and they can blame every weather event on it.

So Big Brother can call it any way he wants and get the EPA lapdogs to do it for him.

THE AGENDA, not science.

Well, we know now what’s been taking up his time now. Since the FAA debacle didn’t work and our Dear Leader’s only focus is destroying the Republicans in 2014. Jobs, Iran,Syria, North Korea, Jobs, the economy, jobs, Terrorism, border security, jobs don’t really get his Campaign juices flowing…

The campaign group formed to support Barack Obama’s political agenda has launched an initiative to shame members of Congress who deny the science behind climate change.

In an email to supporters on Thursday, Organizing for Action said it was time to call out members of Congress who deny the existence of climate change, saying they had blocked efforts to avoid its most catastrophic consequences.

The email linked to a video mocking Republicans who reject the science on climate change. “Right now, way too many lawmakers in Washington flat-out refuse to face the facts when it comes to climate change,” Jon Carson, executive director of Organizing for Action wrote in the email. “We’re never going to make real progress on this issue unless members of Congress get serious.”

The video mainly features Republican members of the House of Representatives who are notorious for denying the existence of climate change, or positing bizarre notions about its causes.

However, it also includes some national figures such as the Florida senator Marc Rubio and House speaker John Boehner, whose views on climate are not that broadly known. There are no Democrats in the video. (UK Guardian)

Global Warming is the Republicans Fault, don’t you know.

You are supposed to believe everything bad is the Republicans Fault. We are at War with Oceania (Republicans) and always have been, says Big Brother. 🙂

Boo hiss! Everyone have their TWO MINUTE HATE.

Now some of  Big Brother’s “scientists”  have come out and said that Global Cooling ended at the end of the 19th Century, conveniently just after Industrialization, which they blame for Global Warming.

Surely, that a coincidence! 🙂

So, the liberal history now say it has ALWAYS been with us since industrialization so it must be Man that caused it! Right?

The logic errors in that line of “thinking” is not worth my time.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/global-cooling-ended-in-19th-century-130426.htm

So how would  they explain Newsweek November 1975: (they usually just say they had faulty interpretation of data back then of course that absolutely does not mean they have faulty data NOW!) 🙂

a 1975 Newsweek cover story proclaimed:

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually… Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states. To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists… are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.

But as we all know, Big Brother is never wrong and it’s the Ministry’s job to tell you that.

Ah, isn’t the Politics of Science wonderful….

Pathway

“Creating a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country is essential. The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented – by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows – transcends the issue of immigration status. This is a matter of civil and human rights. It is about who we are as a nation. And it goes to the core of our treasured American principle of equal opportunity.”

This would be the same Attorney General who sued the State of Arizona for wanting to enforce Federal immigration Law. The same one who dropped the Black Panther case AFTER the conviction. Who also rushed in to save our Chechan “victim” from spewing his guts out about the Boston bombing by sending in a Magistrate to clamp him down with “rights”.

Attorney General Holder’s claim is more than simply silly; it is also pernicious. It attempts to frame this debate not on the merits of granting a pathway to citizenship for those who have violated our laws; it’s an effort to frame it as a conflict between those who support (good people) and those who oppose (bad people) basic human rights. This is an effort, in other words, to demonize those with whom one disagrees, and therefore creates yet more polarization and anger and self-righteousness in a debate that probably needs less of it. What Holder said also reveals a fairly common mindset of those on the left, which is to characterize whatever position they embrace not simply as correct but as a basic civil right. In other words, as something fundamental and teleological, as a right that is ours based on our nature as human beings. The idea that a person who violates American sovereignty by illegally crossing our borders should be given a pathway to citizenship as a matter of civil and human rights is therefore indefensible, an invention. The attorney general is employing a very serious concept in a reckless way. And it empties the term of meaning, just as promiscuously accusing those who oppose the policies of President Obama of racism empties that charge of meaning. It really ought to stop, since human rights violations and racism really do exist.

No one who comes to this country illegally has a “right” to stay here.  If — if — we end up crafting a political path to legalization and perhaps citizenship, its beneficiaries would be recipients of a profoundly generous gift, not beleaguered victims who’ve finally gained the civil or human rights to which they’ve been entitled all along.  Holder’s insidious remark risks poisoning the well for many would-be supporters of reform.  Question: Is that by design, or is he so steeped in, and surrounded by, leftism that he literally cannot comprehend the ramifications of his words?  Either explanation is plausible in my book.  I’ll leave you with the latest reporting from the indispensable Byron York.  The ‘Gang of Eight’ bill is riddled with loopholes:
 

The green card process would take additional years, meaning the road to full citizenship could take as long as 15, or even 18, years. Unless it doesn’t. A little-noticed exception in the Gang of Eight bill provides a fast track for many — possibly very many — currently illegal immigrants. Under a special provision for immigrants who have labored at least part-time in agriculture, that fast track could mean permanent residency in the U.S., and then citizenship, in half the time Rubio said. And not just for the immigrants themselves — their spouses and children, too. A second provision in the legislation creates another fast track for illegal immigrants who came to the United States before they were 16 — the so-called Dreamers. The concept suggests youth, but the bill has no age limit for such immigrants — or their spouses and children — and despite claims that they must go to college or serve in the military to be eligible, there is an exception to that requirement as well.

So “DREAM kids” would include people who were (or claim to have been) brought here as young children decades ago.  Also, remember that one year window to apply for provisional legal status about which I reported last week?  Turns out that’s a flexible standard, too:

If an illegal immigrant is apprehended by authorities after the passage of the bill, and appears to qualify for blue card status, the law requires the Department of Homeland Security to give him a “reasonable opportunity” to apply for blue card status. He cannot be deported while his application is under review. Even if he is in removal proceedings, the bill says, the Secretary of Homeland Security is required to allow him to apply for blue card status, and immigration authorities are required to “terminate [removal] proceedings without prejudice.” The bill’s supporters point out that the Gang of Eight would limit the period of time in which illegal immigrants can apply for a blue card. That’s true; the bill specifies that applications have to be filed in the year after the last of the rules enforcing the new immigration law have gone into effect. But the bill also gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the discretion to extend that period by another year and a half if she or he determines that “additional time is required” for the applications. The extension can also be granted for any other “good cause.”

Let’s see if I understand this correctly:  If an illegal immigrant hasn’t voluntarily emerged “from the shadows” to seek legal status on his own, US officials would still be required to inform him of his right to apply for a blue card if and when he happens to be apprehended in an unrelated incident?  It seems to me that if someone (a) hasn’t proactively come forward already, for whatever reason — wrongdoing? ignorance? — and (b) has been apprehended for another reason, perhaps this individual shouldn’t be a prime candidate for legal residence at all.  Furthermore, that 365-day limited window could stretch to two-and-a-half years, on the say-so of the DHS Secretary.  How much do you want to bet that Janet Napolitano would decide that “additional time is required”?  After all, the implementation of Kafkaesque Big Government programs are known for going seamlessly, right?  Sen. Rubio downplayed my concerns about vesting Napolitano with more discretionary power during our recent interview.  She’ll be gone sooner or later, was the gist of his argument.  It’s a fair point to some extent, but three years is a long time; Napolitano’s fingerprints and influence would be all over the crucial early stages of implementing the law.  For that reason alone, I’m comforted by the House Judiciary Committee’s slow, deliberative approach to immigration reform.  The only reason to rush this process is to pass a bill before we know what’s in it. (Guy Benson)

Let the genie out of the bottle, then worry about the consequences later…

Talk is not so Cheap

FAA Update:

The White House has endorsed a plan to eliminate FAA spending cuts that have cause air travel delays across the country. The agency has been forced to furlough air traffic controllers as part of the automatic budget cuts that kicked in this spring. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants to end the cuts by claiming savings from the draw down of war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans reject his proposal calling it an accounting gimmick.
Of course it’s an accounting gimmick.  The point is that Democrats are desperate to extricate themselves from this mess, which they orchestrated in a bone-headed attempt to rile public anger against any spending cuts.

Chicago Tribune: Hours before the federal spending sequester began on March 1, when President Barack Obama predicted that “People are going to be hurt,” he did not add, Trust me, I’ll make sure of it. But he might as well have, as this week’s furloughs of air traffic controllers make obvious. The furloughs reflect panic: Having exaggerated their early predictions that the sequester’s small reduction in spending growth would seriously affect Americans, many Democrats are hell-bent to pre-empt those Americans from drawing two logical conclusions: If one level of cuts is this painless, then maybe we should make … more cuts to expenditures. And while we’re at it, maybe we should ignore the politicians who told us that if Washington lowered the spending growth curve … the Earth will fly into the sun….

We’re less certain, though, that this hostage-taking will cut the way the White House expects: The scheme relies on citizens being — how to put this delicately? — stupid enough to think that the Federal Aviation Administration can’t find a more flier-friendly way to save $600 million.

The Trib’s editors also cite polling showing that the public is less and less worried about the sequester cuts by the day, which likely sparked panic inside the White House:  We can’t allow spending cuts to go unnoticed.  People might start getting the wrong idea.  It’s time to deliberately inflict totally avoidable pain on the populace — it’s for their own good, really. (townhall)

A pre-sequester FAA report demonstrated that air traffic controllers were operating at 22 percent over capacity.  Even FAA employees are aware that the pain is political and intentional: “I am disgusted with everything that I see since the sequester took place,” another FAA employee wrote. “Whether in HQ or at the field level it is clear that our management has no intention of managing anything. The only effort that I see is geared towards generating fear and demonstrating failure.” (Townhall)

So the Congress passes a bill and the whole stupid episode goes away, but it’s still not their fault.

Speaking of  flying off on partisan stupidity..

Rep. Hank Johnson (D) (The guy who in 2010 said if too many Marine were on Guam the Island would tip over!) took to the House floor “like a kid at a carnival” Thursday to defend Americans’ right to helium in light of sequester spending cuts.

The Georgia Democrat, irked by his Republican cohorts, gave a snarky, pun-heavy speech in support of the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act of 2013, which would prevent the closure of the Federal
Helium Reserve, scheduled to shutter by October.

“Mr. Speaker, I’m relieved, and I’m sure that the American people are relieved as well, that Congress is finally going to do something about one of the most pressing issues of the day,” he began. “That is we’ve got to ensure access to helium for all.”
The substance of this bill is not the focus of my sarcasm,” he said. “My point is that America would be much better off if this tea party Republican Congress brought to the floor issues that mean the most to Americans.”

(that’s funny, because the Senate has a Left Wing Democrat Majority that refuses to even talk to the other side of the political aisle)

You mean like $7 Trillion Dollars in new Debt and annual deficits near or over a Trillion dollars a year?
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

7.8%+ unemployment for  4 1/2 years?
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

That 20% of all Americans are on Food Stamps.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

Muslim Terrorists.
Sorry, Democrats REALLY don’t want to talk about that.

Border Security.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that. They just want to promote “undocumented Democrats”.

Benghazi.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

Failure of Schools to adequately Educate.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

ObamaCare Costs.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that. (But they do want to exempt themselves!)

The Debt Ceiling.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

The Budget that hasn’t been passed in 4+ years.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

Iran, North Korea, etc.
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

“Knowing that potentially chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria doesn’t tell us when they were used, how they were used,” Mr. Obama told reporters in the Oval Office. “We have to act prudently. We have to make these assessments deliberately.”

Orwell would be proud of your cowardice and lack of backbone about your own “line in the sand”.

Welfare Reform?
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

The abuses of Federal Government Power?
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.

Government Ammo Stockpiling?
Sorry, Democrats don’t want to talk about that.
But they are hopped up on Helium, Sugar, Soda, salt, Gays, Illegals, Their own Hubris, The AGENDA, fundraising for 2014, and your right to defend yourself you evil bastards!

So leave them alone. They have their Priorities…. indeed… 🙂

“Everybody sit down,” Obama said sheepishly. “You’re making me blush.”

He told a crowd at the Planned Parenthood Conference. He is after all, Pro-Choice, as long as you make the Correct Choice! (aka whatever the Liberal says).

After all, AG Holder: He said that establishing legal status for the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants is a “matter of civil and human rights.”

“The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows transcends the issue of immigration status.” “This is a matter of civil and human rights,” Holder continued.

So if being here illegally is a “civil right” then why do we have a border at all. Everyone is entitle to come here at will and at whim (and vote for the Democrats).

So do they want to talk about that, or just high-handed demagoguery? 🙂

Speaking of that…

CRONY CAPITALISM UPDATE

Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm.

But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.

(emphasis added)

Absolutely unbelievable.  Ever wonder how Obama can “need” higher taxes despite going on the biggest spending spree in American history? Perhaps this story offers a clue. (townhall)

Will Democrat want to talk about that?

No.

 

V.D.

The latest available data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) shows that a record number 23 million households in the United States are now on food stamps.

The most recent Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) statistics of the number of households receiving food stamps shows that 23,087,886 households participated in January 2013 – an increase of 889,154 families from January 2012 when the number of households totaled 22,188,732.

The most recent statistics from the United States Census Bureau– from December 2012– puts the number of households in the United States at 115,310,000. If you divide 115,310,000 by 23,087,866, that equals one out of every five households now receiving food stamps.

As CNSNews.com previously reported, food stamp rolls in America recently surpassed the population of Spain. A record number 47,692,896 Americans are now enrolled in the program and the cost of food stamp fraud has more than doubled in just three years.

But if we just spend more money everything would be fine! 🙂

After all, the economy is improving. 🙂

Sep 24, 2012 … One in seven Americans is on food stamps.

We just need to Spend More money!

It’s that those Damn Republican’s Fault!

It’s the Sequester!! 🙂

Let’s just call it what it is: The country has a big, nasty case of V.D. (That’s Virus Democratus).

A particularly invasive, and aggressive strain.

Anywho, as I was saying: The country has a virus similar to the malaise that was going around when Carter was president. Our enemies are treated like friends and our friends are treated like enemies; Gas prices are high, wages are low, and the misery index is on the rise, even if calculated differently today than when Carter was the Worst-President-Ever.

Unemployment that has been 7.8%+ SINCE he took office!

$7 Trillion Dollars in New Debt. But we have to Spend Even More.

Cutting Increases in Spending is Evil, wrong, and “hurts people”. But none of these other factors do?

This is what happens when you put hippies in charge.  Again.

“Free” “love” and “peace” often ends in this type of communicable disease.

Quick: What percentage of people in the Obama administration do you think go to church each week? What percentage of people in the Obama administration smoke weed each week?

Now subtract the one number from the other.  

Any questions?

The lurch to the left that has been institutionalized by our newest Worst-President-Ever – an ideological lurch where appearances don’t matter anymore- is scaring even Democrats.

“And while the president made the big calls, like pushing for a health-care overhaul, he did not always drive the administration’s strategy on getting his agenda achieved. That has now, fully, changed,“ reports BuzzFeed.

Hurray! Obama’s now in charge of EVERYTHING.

“‘You’re talking about somebody who has a tremendous amount of confidence in his own capacities,’” said a top Democrat. “‘On most days it’s hard to tell him he’s wrong about anything.’”

Really? You guys are just figuring this out now?

Ha!

It’s not hard to tell the Democratus apparatus that they deserve exactly what they’ve got coming- while laughing uproariously.

After a decade of letting Obama work on scholarship because of white guilt, demographics and a weak bench of unelectable doofuses- John Edwards, Howard Dean, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton anyone?- now that political results matter to the Democratus Party, some are getting a little shy about the president.  

And can you blame them? These are folks who won’t get the same free pass that Obama gets.  

Imagine when the entire Democrat party is remade in Obama’s image.

Confident.

Capable.

Arrogant.

Irresponsible.

Wrong.

Politico laid out the dilemma facing Democrats even before Obama was sworn in for his second term.

“To the extent that they break with the president, it could be — I don’t want to say it is — a big advantage for them in deep-red states,” a Democrat strategist told Politico in January regarding Democrat Senators up for reelection.

Politico cited particularly the gun issue, where Democrats from more moderate states could be at risk by an aggressively left-wing Obama agenda.

From Politico:

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who could face a tough reelection and has previously opposed reinstating the assault weapons ban, said there needs to be “more emphasis on [mental health issues and counseling families in crisis] as well as enforcing some of the laws that are already on the books.” She added it was important for Washington “not to overreact one way or another.”

[Senator Mark] Begich [D-AK] added: “To start saying we’re going to have more laws and more regulations, I think, would be problematic.”

Udall voiced similar sentiments, though he suggested more of an openness to tightening background checks.

“When you talk about gun rights and the situation in the West, there are very mixed feelings in terms of pushing a nationwide package — a one-size-fits-all package,” [Senator Tom] Udall [D-NM] said, questioning the effectiveness of an assault weapons ban.

From their mouths to Obama’s very large ears, somehow, something in the manner of this warning was lost in translation.

Because Obama’s defeat on the gun issue was both large and stunning.

Or, as Politico pointed out, maybe it was what we could have expected.

Any other president would have been defeated in November based on results. Any other president would have been chastened by the results, not emboldened.

Instead, Obama is acting more like himself, more in charge and exactly in character:

Confident.

Capable.

Arrogant.

Irresponsible.

Wrong.

These are all symptoms of a very bad disease for  the Democrats.

And because it’s communicable, the country is at risk as well.  (John Ransom)

But that’s why they need Amnesty. The 10-12 million new Democrats will give them a voting majority for life and it won’t matter what YOU think or what anyone thinks.

All they have to do is pander to this majority and they are set for life. To a Democrat what could be better than complete and total, uncontested rule over everyone and everything forever!

Heaven on Earth! 🙂

Not for For Me, But for Thee. It’s the Story That Counts.

For Thee, Not for Me.

The chief of the FAA told Congress today that Washington-area airports will largely escape the effects of the air traffic controller furloughs — a blessing for lawmakers who fly out of the nation’s capitol.

Michael Huerta, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, told a congressional panel that the Washington region’s airports are spaced out enough and have enough spare capacity that furloughs to air traffic controllers won’t hurt as much here.

Because, in case you hadn’t heard Obama and his FAA have decided that the Sequester is not causing enough pain so they need to ratchet it up some more., but NOT on themselves though.

The White House accused Republicans of a political distraction Wednesday after House committee chairmen asked President Obama to release a State Department cable that they said would prove Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary off state, signed off on security cuts at the diplomatic post in Benghazi ahead of the attack Sept. 11. (WT)

Not that the whole “internet video” thing wasn’t a massive distraction and politically motivated to begin with.

Not for For Me, But for Thee.

“Green” Update…The Story Continues

Remember the “green” stimulus money that went to a company in Finland to build electric cars (not here in the US, but Finland).

The electric carmaker, which laid off 75% of its employees earlier this month, missed its first loan payment to the Energy Department on Monday. Treasury has already seized $21 million in an effort to get back some of the taxpayer money loaned to it, but most of the $192 million that was given to the company over the three years is very much at risk.

Also at risk is about $21.5 million it received from the state of Delaware because of plans it once had to reopen a closed General Motors plant there.

Company officials and spokesmen are not commenting on the outlook for the company or reports that it is close to a bankruptcy filing.

Fisker is what is known as a story stock. It’s not a public company, of course, but it still qualifies. A story stock is a company that relies upon “a story” to get new investors to pony up more money to keep the story going. 

It can’t point to results, or a business model, or demographics. It has some new, breakthrough technology or process that will revolutionize the world if and when… blah, blah, blah, blah, talk, talk, talk.

And all they need is a bit more money.

And Obama gave Stimulus Money to them.

More Money down the “green” rat hole.

Story stocks suffer from the opposite problem Google and Facebook posed: Story stocks have a revolutionary way to monetize demand for products, but they have little demand.

And the last thing a company with very little demand needs is a bit more money.

A bit more money gives a company with no customers the trappings of success without the fuss and bother of actually selling things; a bit more money allows the story to supplant sales; a bit more money means that the only thing left to do is go out and get a bit more money over and over again.

In the 1990s the fuel of the future was to be ethanol, especially ethanol derived from biomass cellulose waste like switchgrass and cornstalks and sawdust.

All they needed was a bit more money to perfect the technology of refining ethanol from waste products and success was to be ensured.

Sounds like every Liberal idea I’ve ever heard of. When it fails, all we need (perpetually) is more money and it will succeed!  Just that little bit more…!!! 🙂

Twenty years later, all biomass fuels have to show for the story is more research grants from the Department of Energy, more demonstration plants that can’t produce commercial volumes and more need for subsidies from the federal government to stay afloat.

Other than an a food storage because of all the Corn converted to fuel instead of food, that is. 🙂

And regular corn ethanol- a competitor to biomass ethanol- is still only about as economical as regular gasoline, if not a little less so. 

Just a bit more money, please.

“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate,” Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, “when he can’t afford it, and when he can.”

Twain by then had been ruined by a story stock of his own making.

“The author,” he says, “did not gather [these observations] from practice, but from experience.”

Twain invested in, managed and ultimately smothered a new marvel in typesetting technology called the Paige Compositor. Twain had the great disadvantage of knowing a thing or two about typesetting. He was a young apprentice typesetter in Philadelphia, New York and St. Louis.

In Twain’s case- as in other story stocks- a little knowledge proved to be a dangerous thing.  The inventor James Paige beguiled Twain with creating the most perfect machine ever, instead of one that would sell. Consequently the machine never even got to the prototype stage. Instead of merely losing money in the affair, Twain’s quest for a perfect machine finally drove him into bankruptcy- an event from which his creative mind never fully recovered.

According to biographer Justin Kaplan, Twain later indulged in fantasies of locking the inventor of the typesetting machine in a steel trap and watching him die.

The folks from Fisker have no less arduous a trap to face themselves.

“As the years rolled by,” writes Scientific American, “Fisker observers became increasingly suspicious that the company didn’t even possess a working car. At the 2008 debut, Fisker announced that the Karma would go on sale in late 2009. Yet by early 2010, when Bill Gifford profiled the company for Popular Science, no one but the chauffeur for the Crown Prince of Denmark had driven even an early prototype.”

But like most Liberal ideas, it sounded good, noble and tugged at the heart strings of emotion so with good intentions they wasted vast amounts of money. And in stead of admitting they were morons for buying into it they just want to spend even more money to prove their pie-in-the-sky righteousness is correct no matter what.

They actually did build a few cars, but most of them flooded before some spontaneously caught fire, just like the Chevy Volt. Really.

So now the steel trap set for Fisker is in Congress, which of course wants taxpayer money back. But what Congress really wants more than anything is to embarrass Obama, the Department of Energy and the whole green energy scheme, which was produced by a little too much knowledge and way more money than they ever needed.

They have found a willing victim in Fisker.

While Twain could only fantasize about retribution, Congress owns the steel trap of public investigation in which many others who speculate on the public dime have gone to die a slow, and humiliating, death.  

It’ll make a great story.  (Townhall)

The Greatest Story/Show on Earth. 🙂

 

The Obama Years

The Obama Years: For someone who goes out of his way to miniaturize the threat from terrorism, terrorism sure seems to dog this president. When will President Obama face up to this growing evil?

Never. Not within his mindset. He would have to rebel against his Orwellian beliefs.

U.S. officials familiar with the FBI’s counterterrorism training program and its controversial public outreach program to Muslim groups said FBI policy toward Islam—that it should not be used to describe those who seek to wage jihad or holy war against the United States and others they regard as infidels—has prevented both effective counterterrorism investigations and training.

The officials said the problem is that most field agents understand the nature of the threat but have been hamstrung by policies imposed by senior FBI leaders who are acting under orders of political appointees in the Obama administration, including Islamic advisers to the White House. The policies have prevented the FBI from conducting aggressive counterterrorism investigations of Islamic radicals or those who are in the process of being radicalized.

If this is true, it is an outrage.  Political correctness shouldn’t get in the way of the #1 responsibility of the President (and the executive branch he heads): Keeping America safe. (Townhall)’

No, he has to keep THE AGENDA safe. That’s all.

During coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, CNN made a startlingly inaccurate claim about the terror tempo occurring under this administration — one that reflects the administration’s own state of denial about the rising threat.

They also went looking for someone on the right to blame, immediately.

The network’s homeland security analyst, Juliette Kayyem, asserted: “We have not had (even) a small-scale terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11.”

In fact, the nation has suffered several major attacks — and most of them have taken place on Obama’s watch.

Since 2009, terrorists have shot up our military bases, assassinated our diplomats and burned our embassies. And now they’ve murdered and blown off the limbs of innocent spectators, ambushed and shot cops and completely shut down our 10th-largest city.

June 1, 2009: Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad shot and killed one military recruiter and seriously wounded another at a Little Rock, Ark., recruiting station. Muhammad, a convert to Islam, had visited Yemen for 16 months, where he spent time in prison and became radicalized. Muhammad identified with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Nov. 5, 2009: Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major serving as a psychiatrist, opened fire at Fort Hood, Texas. He shouted “Allahu Akbar!” — Allah is Greatest! — as he killed 13 and wounded 29 fellow soldiers. Hasan had received approval for his act from al-Qaida operative Anwar Awlaki.

Remember how the DoD refused to classify Nidal Malik Hasan’s attack as terorrism, referring to it instead as “workplace violence”? 🙂

The only “terrorists” the Left sees is The Right, namely Tea Partiers.

“The ‘tea parties’ and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism,” Mark Potok, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, wrote in a piece titled “Rage On The Right: The Year In Hate And Extremism” from the group’s Spring 2010 edition of its Intelligence Report. (DC 2010)

The AP called Tea Partiers “insurgents” in 2010. “Insurgents” largely has been used of late in the media as a watered-down reference to terrorist.

Hmmm…

March 4, 2010: John Patrick Bedell, a Muslim convert, shot and wounded two Pentagon police officers at a security checkpoint in the Pentagon station of the Washington Metro transit system in Arlington County, Va.

Sept. 11, 2012: Al-Qaida operatives attacked the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. The heavily armed assault began during the night at a compound meant to protect the consulate building. A second assault early the next morning targeted a nearby CIA annex. Four people were killed, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Ten others were injured.

April 15, 2013: In the latest act of terror on Obama’s watch, at least two Muslim jihadists set off pressure-cooker bombs loaded with shrapnel at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring 183. Then, in a second wave of terror, the terrorists shot two police officers, killing one, and also injured several others with military-grade explosives. As this is being written, the terror siege hasn’t ended.

These are just the actual terror attacks. They don’t include all the major plots and near misses, such as:

September 2009: Authorities arrested Afghan native Najibullah Zazi before he could blow up the New York City subway.

September 2009: Police nabbed Jordanian national Hosam Maher Husein Smadi before he could plant a bomb in a Dallas skyscraper.

December 2009: Passengers on a flight bound for Detroit tackled Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he could detonate dangerous PETN and TATP explosives sewn into his underwear. Abdulmutallab was trained in Yemen by al-Qaida.

May 2010: A massive bomb planted by Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan, fails to explode as planned in an SUV parked in Time Square. He was trained and funded by the Taliban.

October 2010: Chicago synagogues discovered explosives packed inside two printer cartridges shipped by cargo planes from al-Qaida in Yemen. Luckily, the attacks failed.

Mr. President, saying there’s no Islamic terrorism doesn’t make it go away.

And canceling the war on terror doesn’t end it. Face it, we are engaged in a long-term war. And it’s not over yet. (IBD)

But didn’t you know in Orwellian Thought that if you can’t think the thought it doesn’t exist?

And they want you to be just like them….OR ELSE! 🙂

Lesson Plan

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”- Orwell

Northwestern University is going to require all students to complete a course in diversity before they can graduate. Have our institutions of higher learning taken leave of their senses?

‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’- Orwell

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”- Orwell

According to a Northwestern student reporting in The College Fix, the school is “busy implementing an ambitious program for diversity on campus” on order to establish a “Social Inequalities and Diversities” requirement that “all students will have to complete before they graduate.”

Once this course is completed, “students will be able to ‘expand their ability to think critically,’ ‘recognize their own positionality in systems of inequality,’ and ‘engage in self-reflection on power and privilege.’“

And what of math, science, literature and a bit of history? Aren’t the instruction of those and a few more academic courses the reason colleges and universities exist?

Higher education should be about teaching young Americans how to think, not what to think.(IBD)

Unless you’re a Liberal. Then it sound perfectly reasonable. After all, Orwell’s 1984, would approve so it must be correct.
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”- Orwell
“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”- Orwell

They must think correctly first and be unconscious.  🙂

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”- Orwell

Like Spending More is “cutting” spending. 🙂  🙂

In 2007, for instance, the University of California-San Diego hired its first chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion. For this position, the state pays $250,000 a year plus benefits.

Three years later, Heather Mac Donald writes in the spring 2013 issue of City Journal, “UC San Francisco appointed its first vice chancellor of diversity and outreach — with the starting salary of $270,000.”

This pseudo-schooling isn’t limited to the Left Coast or a school in Barack Obama’s hometown. Nor is it confined to students. Teachers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute were told a few years ago that promotions and tenure were going to be based on their participation in diversity initiatives, while the University of Louisville has held a “White Privilege Forum,” which delved into the matter of “white persons” running and/or owning “nearly half of the United States.”

Parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars — more than $45,000 year for undergraduates at Northwestern — to school their kids in our finest institutions. Indoctrination into leftist politics should not be a part of the instruction.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”- Orwell

But the Left would see as just “correct” and if you object you must be a narrow-minded, Neanderthal racist, bigot, misogynist, homophobic, right wing extremist tea party “terrorist”, right? 🙂

Then they vote Democrat, believe in Global Warming, veganism,class warfare,anti-capitalism,dependence,”green”, electric cars, and that Freedom is Slavery.

What could be better.

Oh, right, They get there news from Jon Stewart and The Ministry of Truth. 🙂

Nothing to worry about! 🙂

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”-Orwell

The fact that they are ignorant and dumbed down is perfect for manipulation by the Liberals. They like them mad (at non-liberals because it’s their fault!), dumb and happy.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”-Orwell

But some progress can be made:

Here are some of the details from a new study published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

This report surveys the empirical research on school choice. …the empirical evidence consistently shows that choice improves academic outcomes for participants and public schools, saves taxpayer money, moves students into more integrated classrooms, and strengthens the shared civic values and practices essential to American democracy.

The data on academic outcomes surely is the most important bit of information, so let’s specifically review those findings.

Twelve empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the “gold standard” of social science. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found a negative impact.

And since I want to reduce the burden of government spending, let’s see whether school choice is good news for taxpayers.

Six empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers. All six find that school choice saves money for taxpayers. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact. (townhall)

So if we can get better Primary Schools then we have to just get better College so the advantages are not swamped by Liberals.

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”- Orwell

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”- Orwell

 

Happy Earth Day!

The Environmental Protection Agency late last month proposed strict new “clean fuel” standards on gasoline. The EPA said the so-called Tier 3 rule would cut emissions of smog-forming pollutants, as well as toxic emissions like benzene.

What the EPA didn’t say was that levels of these pollutants have been falling steadily for years, and would continue to fall even without the new rule, which the oil industry says will cost tens of billions of dollars.

Indeed, a fact that won’t get much attention on Earth Day — April 22 — is that pollution has been falling across the board for decades, even while the nation’s population and economy have expanded. Overall air pollution levels dropped 62% from 1990 to 2012, while GDP grew 69% and population climbed 26%.

Everything has seen declines: carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, ozone, lead and others. Many are now below the EPA’s safety threshold.

Welcome to The Agenda is The Agenda regardless of the Facts.

The Secretary of state, John Kerry,  is on a tour of the world warning everybody about manmade global warming. He is telling everybody, “The science is settled,” and that we’re the cause of it and we need to be crushed for it.

Meanwhile, places like China That ARE the much bigger polluters just get away with it and Kerry wants their help to screw us WHILE they get away with it!

Kerry: “agreed to elevate the issue of man-made climate change to the ministerial level in bilateral discussions.”

Translation: Screw us over because of our Agenda.

“We are seeing the science of climate change come back to us now at a rate that is far faster and with far greater levels of damage than anything that scientists predicted 10, 15, 20 years ago,” he stated. “Every prediction that has been made is coming true, but coming true bigger and more dangerously.”

The Facts don’t support this view. But the Agenda supports it so that’s all that matters.

Before becoming secretary of state, then-Senator Kerry positioned himself as a leader on the climate change issue, likening those who questioned the notion of human-induced global warming to flat-earthers.

In a Senate floor speech last August, he declared that the climate crisis was as dangerous as the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons or a U.S.-Iran war. He bemoaned the rise the skepticism and blaming it on “a concerted campaign of disinformation.”

During his Senate confirmation hearing last January, the secretary of state-designate described climate change as a “life threatening” issue.

So never get between a Liberal and his Agenda! 🙂

Even carbon dioxide emissions dropped Hayward released the latest almanac on April 16.

Other environmental measures also show steady improvement.

Water quality, including drinking water, has improved over the past several decades. And per-capita water use has declined 30% since 1975, notes the U.S. Geological Survey.

There are about 20 million more acres of forest land now than there were 20 years ago, according to the Forest Service.

But yet, if you elect anyone other than a Tree-hugging, Global Warming Alarmist Democrat you want to rape and pillage the environment for greed and corporate profits!

Even if no new environmental rules were introduced, these improvements will likely continue, as newer, more efficient technology continues to replace older equipment. As Hayward notes, “reductions in air pollution are occurring more rapidly than the EPA’s models have forecast.”

Yet in the face of these successes, the EPA has only accelerated its regulatory efforts.

Because it’s about the power and the control, NOT the results! Just like most of the Liberal Agenda.

The Tier 3 rule, for example, will force oil refiners to cut the sulfur content of gasoline from 30 parts per million down to 10 parts per million. The industry says this will cost $10 billion upfront and more than $2 billion a year, raising gas prices by up to 9 cents a gallon.

But don’t worry, that doesn’t “hurt” the middle class and the poor. 🙂

The EPA claims the rule will help avoid up to 2,400 premature deaths a year. But the existing Tier 2 standard had already cut the sulfur content dramatically from the previous 300 parts per million, and is contributing to substantial gains in air quality.

Levels of volatile organic compounds — a chief ingredient in smog — have dropped 88% since 1970. Nitrogen oxides, another smog forming agent, are down about as much. And levels of benzene, a toxic air pollution that the EPA says its new rule will cut, dropped 66% over the past two decades.

In Los Angeles, these gains have been even more impressive. Since 1980, the city had cut in half the number of times it exceeded the EPA’s current smog standard.

A study commissioned by the oil industry found that the costly Tier 3 standard will do little to improve on these ongoing air pollution gains.

Likewise, the EPA late last year lowered the standard for PM 2.5 — fine particles in the air sometimes called soot — in response to a court order, even though the existing standard is producing steady gains. Then-EPA-head Lisa Jackson said the new rule would “save lives and reduce the burden of illness in our communities.”

Any area that fails to hit that lower standard by 2020 risks losing federal transportation money. In the meantime, communities that exceed the standard will have to file “implementation plans” with the EPA years before that deadline.

The manufacturing industry sued to stop the new rule, saying that it will “crush manufacturers’ plans for growth by restricting counties’ ability to issue permits for new facilities, which makes them less attractive for new business,” according to National Association of Manufacturers CEO Jay Timmons.

EPA Won’t Celebrate

But the agency’s own data show that PM 2.5 levels have dropped 28% since 1999, and the EPA expects levels to continue declining even without the new rule. (IBD)

But the Agenda is the Agenda!

The problem is that the EPA rarely celebrates these environmental successes, and even when it does point out gains, the press largely ignores it.

When the agency announced, for example, that toxic air emissions dropped 8% in 2011 from the year before, and have been steadily dropping since 1998, only a handful of local papers bothered to report the news. (CNS)

Because this is not news worth reporting, especially by The Ministry of Truth.The actual truth does not advance The Agenda so it’s not newsworthy.

Speaking of Not Newsworthy…

BENGHAZI UPDATE

Four Americans, including our sitting ambassador, murdered in a terrorist attack.  Repeated warnings and requests for beefed up security ignored and denied in a notorious jihadi hotspot.  Zero assistance, hour after hour, as two murdered former SEALs begged for back-up.  Let’s wrap this up and move on, says the Obama administration’s top diplomat.  Via Erika Johnsen:

The whole thing is a big yawner for Liberals.

KERRY: Let’s figure out what it is that’s missing, if it’s legitimate or if it isn’t. I don’t think anybody lied to anybody. And let’s find out exactly, together, what happened, because we need — we got a lot more important things to move on to and get done. 

Just so we’re clear, under questioning about significant details of the 9/11 Benghazi massacre, President Obama’s two most recent Secretaries of State have responded, “we got a lot more important things to move on to” and “what difference does it make?”.

Again, don’t annoy the Agenda with irrelevancies.

Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the Benghazi attacks seven months ago. No arrests have been made.
Secretaries Clinton and Kerry might be decidedly uninterested in learning the truth, and the White House may say it’s finished answering questions on the matter. (Guy Benson)

So the lesson on Earth Day 2013 is that The Agenda is The Agenda and nothing and nobody will get in the way of the single-minded, blind to all the universe, pursuit of The Agenda by Progressive Liberals. No force on heaven or earth will stop them.

Certainly nothing as irrelevant as Facts or Truth.

The Progressive Fetish

John Hinderaker at Powerline asks: “Why aren’t more voters repelled by the constant parade of vulgarity, hate and violence that characterizes modern liberalism?”

Blame points back to the national media, which have powerful sway over public opinion. If there’s a shortage of shaming and shunning in America, they may be the main reason.

Mass outrage is fomented by mass media; but when it comes to outrage over left-wing extremism, the media are silent. They have no interest in shaming their kind or shunning their own agenda.

Unfortunately, liberals still control the major networks and the lion’s share of the TV audience, and surveys show most voters still get their political information chiefly from TV.

So beyond the several million voters Fox News can whip up against anti-American radicalism, the vast majority of the electorate sees such radicalism portrayed as normal.

Through a constant barrage of propaganda-masquerading-as-news, the major media manipulate the broader public into accepting homosexual rights, socialism and other extremism as mainstream.

With ample help from Hollywood, the media are indoctrinating the public into believing this is “progress,” and that only the unenlightened cling to traditional America. Only troglodytes reject gay marriage or socialized medicine or man-made global warming.

Hence why I call them The Ministry of Truth (1984), which is was in charge of destroying evidence, changing facts and creating propaganda for the masses.

“Vote For Me, The other Guy’s an Asshole”.

I’m sure they are still bitterly disappointed that the Boston bombers weren’t right wing Tea party “patriots” (a left wing slur meaning ‘terrorist’ in pure Orwellian fashion).

Recall how ABC’s Brian Ross incorrectly suggested there might have been a link between the shooter in the Aurora, Colo., theater killings and the Tea Party. Ross rushed before the cameras after finding a man with the same name listed on the site of the Colorado Tea Party.

The glee they must have felt, for a short while. And when it was revealed that he wasn’t it?

They dropped it like it never happened. In their minds it never did.

The wonders of Orwellian Thought Control.

The Ministry  is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. The word truth in the title Ministry of Truth should warn, by definition, that the “minister” will self-serve its own “truth”; the title implies the willful fooling of posterity using “historical” archives to show “in fact” what “really” happened. As well as administering truth, the administration deploys a new tongue-in-cheek language amongst administrators called Newspeak, in which, for example, truth is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants.

The Ministry of Truth is involved with news media, entertainment, the fine arts and educational books. Its purpose is to rewrite history to change the facts to fit Party doctrine for propaganda effect.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone — to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!

‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

If human equality is to be forever averted—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

The radical left also prevails by fighting dirty.

With no morals, ethics, or standards of decency.

Conservatives still ceremoniously march into battle in perfect formation, like so many I-beam backed redcoats, only to be mowed down by leftist guerrillas lobbing Molotov cocktails and taking potshots from behind trees.

The ever-decent GOP has to start fighting fire with fire, thinking creatively, outside the box, when it engages in tactical warfare.

One of the main reasons for so many deaths in the Civil War was tactics. Napoleonic tactics that were devised for a gun that could kill from 40 yards were now being used against guns that could kill you from 400 yards. Not to mention Cannons and other things.

The straight line forced march was a death march with the technology way ahead of them.

The GOP is using old school tactics. The Liberals are the terrorists just picking them off one by one.

And General “Jar Jar” Boehner is none the wiser.

While vulgarity, hate and violence have no place, the Marquis of Queensbury rules the right follows only work if both sides honor them — and there’s an impartial referee in the ring to make sure they do.

The referee in the ideological and cultural battle to save America’s heritage is anything but fair. It’s the mono-partisan media, who not only side with liberal extremists but throw in a few elbows and low blows of their own.

Winning, no matter what, is the only objective.

Progressives can’t help themselves. When a normal person hears of a tragedy, they feel the natural range of emotions – fear, anger, sympathy, etc. But progressives are not normal humans. When they hear news of a tragedy their first thought is “How can this help the cause?” There’s something oddly perverse about this mental defect that somehow overrides decency in tragedy’s aftermath, but it’s as widespread amongst the political left as freckles are on redheads.

Harsh? Perhaps. But sometimes the truth hurts.

How can I use this to further The Agenda.

MSNBC would not be outdone. The crown-prince of premature projection-ation is Chris Matthews, who said, “Normally, domestic terrorists people tend to be on the far right. Well, that’s not a good category. Just extremists. Let’s call them that.”

From the far right?

Think about that for a second. The political right is about individual liberty and limited government; the political left is about collective action and a strong government. Take the left to the extreme and you find totalitarianism. Along the way you pass socialism, fascism and communism. Take the right to the extreme and you find, essentially, anarchy. Yet when people think of anarchists they think of leftists because what anarchists truly favor is not empowering individuals but for the anarchists themselves to have the power. Anarchists remain at the margins, so it doesn’t matter much. But it’s something to think about the next time you run across a leftist trying to tell you otherwise.

Anytime you talk about progressives the issue of race inevitably comes into play. That’s because dividing and subdividing Americans is what holds their coalition together. That and convincing everyone they’re victims, they shouldn’t bother trying because the system is stacked against them and, more importantly, the only way their lives will improve is through government. Government will protect them from the faceless boogeyman of racism, homophobia, sexism or the big evil corporation that is responsible for their failures. Never can the notion sometimes life happens, sometimes someone is better or more qualified for a job than you, be allowed to seep into the mind. A victim they must forever be.

Because a victim, or someone convinced they are, can be “empowered” by external forces, such as an election. And even when the savior who promises a better life in exchange for a vote does not deliver, the savior is no condemned. He is said to “need more time” because the forces against him are just that powerful. It’s the promise of a glorious future Christmas that never comes. But I digress.

Race came into play in the Boston attack in a way it rarely does – through the front door. Progressives love to play the race card, and many of them, white and black, make their living telling minorities they can’t get ahead so just trust in others. One white guy who does is David Sirota, a pasty Coloradan who specializes in finding new ways to use the term “white privilege” in situations no non-race-obsessed profiteer could fathom, wrote a piece for Salon.com entitled, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” Not, “Let’s hope they’re caught,” but let’s hope their pigment is one I can make money from.

And that power to infect the minds of future generations with their perverted ideas through academia and media may well be the ultimate progressive fetish of them all. (Derek Hunter)

And that is the week that was… Good Night and Good Luck. 🙂

 

Squirm

It is too soon to be absolutely sure the attacks were motivated by jihadist ideology, but the Islamic videos on the website of the older of the two Tsarnaev brothers point very firmly in that direction.
And boy will the Liberals be pissed!

The two words they never want to use at all, let alone together, “Muslim” and “terrorist”.

And it they bombers aren’t angry, white, Tea Partiers or right wing “extremists” so the Left is doubly pissed about that one.

Poor babies. We’ll just have to wait and see how they squirm.

Speaking of squirming…

Meanwhile on the “undocumented Democrat ” we have another gigantic “You have to pass it to know what’s it Amnesty bill.

The Senate’s pending immigration bill includes roughly 400 exemptions, exceptions, waivers, determinations and grants of discretion.

The bill’s complexity is forcing opponents and supporters to comb through its 844 pages before they can declare their conditional support or opposition to the high-stakes measure.

“WAIVER.—The Secretary, in the Secretary’s sole and unreviewable discretion, may waive the application of subparagraph (A) on behalf of an alien,” says one passage on page 71 of the complex document.

The prospective beneficiary of that discretion by a political appointee, according to the bill, is “an alien who departed from the United States while subject to an order of exclusion, deportation, or removal.”

The document mentions “discretion” or “discretionary” 41 times.

It mentions “judge” or “judges” 73 times, and mentions “secretary” 1018 times, normally as the people who decide whether to apply a waiver, exemption, determination or exception.

The complexity has already sparked GOP objections from Sen. Jeff Sessions and other Republicans who say they should be given more time to study and then explain the bill’s myriad complexities and loopholes to the public.

Top Democratic leaders, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, hope to push the bill quickly through the committee and then to the floor by early June.

The eight Senators who drafted the measure in secret for several months are expected presented their bill to the public on Thursday.

The bill mentions “exempt” or “exemption” 18 times.

“The competition requirement under section 253(a) of title 41, United States Code, may be waived or modified by a Federal agency for any procurement conducted to implement this title or the amendments made by this title if the senior procurement executive for the agency conducting the procurement … determines that the waiver or modification is necessary,” the bill declares on 142.

“Except” appears 156 times in the document.

On page 12, one exception allows the secretary to bypass the enforcement mechanisms that limit the award of green cards to former illegal immigrants.

“(B) EXCEPTION.—The Secretary shall permit registered provisional immigrants to apply for an adjustment to lawful permanent resident status if — (i)(I) litigation or a force majeure has prevented one or more of the conditions described in clauses (i) through (iv) of subparagraph (A) from being implemented.”

There’s also a “hardship exception” under Section 245D.

“The Secretary may adjust the status of a registered provisional immigrant to the status of a lawful permanent resident if the alien … demonstrates compelling circumstances for the inability to satisfy the requirement.”

Thee are 94 uses of “waiver,” including a provision on page 198 that allows the secretary to invite a deported illegal immigrant to return and file for the amnesty.

“WAIVER.—The Secretary may waive the application of subparagraph (A)(iii) on behalf of an alien if the alien ‘‘(i) is the spouse or child of a United States citizen … [or] … was physically present in the United States for an aggregate period of not less than 3 years during the 6-year period immediately preceding the date of the enactment of this section.

“Determines” is used 84 times in the bill.

“The Secretary of Homeland Security may permit an alien to remain temporarily in the United States and authorize the alien to engage in employment in the United States if the Secretary determines that the alien … has been helpful, is being helpful, or is likely to be helpful, in the investigation, prosecution of, or pursuit of civil remedies related to the claim arising from a covered violation.”

“Unreviewable” appears seven times in the bill.

On page 568, for example, the bill declares that “the Attorney General may, in the Attorney General’s sole and unreviewable discretion, appoint or provide counsel to aliens in immigration proceedings conducted under section 240 of this Act.”

The six other mentions of unreviewable authority apply to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

In 2012, the immigration flow consisted of 450,000 working-age immigrants, 30,000 older immigrants and 700,000 short-term and long-term workers. The guest workers included roughly 50,000 agriculture workers, 400,000 service workers and 250,000 university-trained workers.

The new law would increase the inflow by at least 350,000 more workers, and exempt university-trained professionals from immigration caps, even when unemployment is above 8 percent. (DC)

Not to mention destroy the country for ever by selling down the liberal progressive “majority” toilet…

The End of America

My 1,300th post.

Coming Soon to a Country near You:  The End

First you start years ago with the stupefying of the populace.

You have to have sheep before you can sheer them.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. -Orwell

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -Orwell

And after the success of the “Vote for Me, The Other Guy’s an Asshole” re-election Campaign (and the Ignore everything- isn’t he Charismatic 2008 election) the populace is ready for that step.

Congress is gone around by regulations.

$7 Trillion in New debt in 5 years. AND they want to spend even More!!

And that’s ok because the people are so drugged up on the Government money, and the government is so drugged up ON the money that no one wants the party to end and be responsible adults.

7.8%+ unemployment for more than 4 years and no one is held accountable for it.

Your basic freedoms are rendered effectively worthless.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.-Orwell

Political Correctness has effectively killed the First Amendment. Unless you like being called a Racist, Heartless,Mean, Cruel, Greed Homophobic,misogynist capitalist terrorist that is. 🙂

“Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.” 

“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”  “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.”

The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.-Orwell

You have a totally complaint Media.They way they swept Benghazi under the carpet is evidence of that. And how they have selective Agenda-driven outrage.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.- Orwell

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.-Orwell

Educate them in the Liberal way. It’s only “fair”.

Emotion overrides logic.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.-Orwell

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

How hallow is that these days?

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind. -Orwell

The Second Amendment is effectively gone. If you support it, you obviously support terrorists and gun-toting psychos who likes/wants to kill children. People should not have guns.

Only Government should have guns. 🙂

The logical fact that criminals don’t get guns in the normal way that you and I would, means nothing.

President Obama: “battle for gun-control will not end”

And background checks can just be another tool for the government to nose around and make decisions about you on their terms (and the fact that there are background checks ALREADY on everything except a private person-to-person sale is not relevant to the Agenda.)

Perception is everything. Perception of Thought, doubly so.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But the government can read your Emails. They can use drones. They can bug your car. After all, if you’re not a terrorist or a subversive what do you have to hide sheepie. Baaaaaa….

The U.S. government — and likely your own government, for that matter — is either watching your online activity every minute of the day through automated methods and non-human eavesdropping techniques, or has the ability to dip in as and when it deems necessary — sometimes with a warrant, sometimes without.

The Obama Administration is headed to court today to argue that warrantless GPS tracking is just fine.

The administration will present its arguments before a federal appeals court today, despite the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruling that a warrant was needed to attach a GPS device to a suspected criminal’s vehicle. (CNET)

CISPA is controversial because it overrules all existing federal and state laws by saying “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” including privacy policies and wiretap laws, companies may share cybersecurity-related information “with any other entity, including the federal government.” It would not, however, require them to do so.

Like they care what the courts say, really…

What the Congress won’t do, Obama will get the regulators to do. It’s not like Liberals give up the Agenda just because some Court or Law says they can’t do it.

ObamaCare, anyone.

Being able to control everyone from before birth to after death!

Now comes the coup de grace: “Immigration Reform”.

The liberals have no intention of “securing” the border. Absolutely none.

They want to have these illegals (and future ones too) made legal.

Then they can vote.

Add 10-15 million new Democrats and you have Cuba/North Korea/Venezuela etc here.

The self-perpetuating election of Liberal Democrats, no matter what you do. They just pander to their new majority base and self-perpetuate themselves and steamroll over everyone and anything that gets in their way.

And they only really need 1 more Justice on the Supreme Court and they have that too.

Come on, Obama isn’t still in Campaign Mode even though he’s not able to run again because that’s all he’s good at (which it is).

No, he wants to crush the Republicans in 2014 and then hand off the Glorious Socialist States of Amerika to President Hilary Clinton and her successors in 2016.

He’s looking for a successor, just like Kim il Sung did when he “created” North Korea. Or Castro’s Cuba, or Chavez in Venezuela.

Create a Legacy. Be the Father of  a new Nation.

The New George Washington. (and he’s black instead of an evil White bastard is appropriate).

They want absolutely incontestable rule.

Where will your Freedoms lie then, Citizen?

In the trash heap of “the old days”, that’s where.

The fat,dumb and happy to be ignorant will have inherited the country in perpetuity.

The Founding Fathers will be those quaint rebels who just got it all wrong and it took over 200 years to get it right.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” – Syme

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…”

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Legislation giving states the power to compel retailers outside their borders to collect online sales taxes, a touchy subject for Internet merchants, is likely to move forward in the Senate next week. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday filed a motion in support of the measure.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

How quaint. How old fashioned. How racist. How mean. How evil.

How, indeed.

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

WAR (0n the wrong thoughts) IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

FEAR IS HOPE

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

So do you see 3 lights or 4 lights, Citizen? And does it matter?? 🙂

Food for the Sowell VIII

Most laws are meant to stop people from doing something, and to penalize those who disregard those laws. More generally, laws are meant to protect the society from the law breakers.

But our immigration laws are different. Here the whole focus is on the “plight” of those who have broken the laws, and on what can be done to lift the stigma and ease the pressures they feel, so that they can “come out of the shadows” and “normalize” their lives.

Merely using the word “illegal” to describe their breaking the law is considered to be a sign of mean-spiritedness, if not racism. The Associated Press refuses to let their reporters refer to people who sneaked across the border into this country, in violation of American immigration laws, as “illegal immigrants.”

On the other hand, if an ordinary American citizen breaks a law, no one cares if he has to live in fear for years — “in the shadows,” as it were — worrying that his illegal act will be discovered and punished. No one bothers to come up with euphemisms to keep from calling what he did illegal.

No cities announce that they will provide “sanctuary,” so that American shoplifters, or even jay-walkers, will be protected from the law. But, in some places, illegal immigrants are treated almost as if they were in a witness protection program.

What is even more remarkable about this special treatment is that you are not supposed to think about it as special treatment. When a new immigration law is proposed that simply overlooks violations of the old law, that is not supposed to be called “amnesty” — even though the word “amnesty” has the same root as “amnesia.” It is all about forgetting.

Why is it not supposed to be called “amnesty”? Because illegal immigrants must “earn” their citizenship. But if an ordinary American citizen gets a traffic ticket, the law is not going to just forget about it, no matter what good deeds he does afterwards.

People who come here perfectly legally have to earn their citizenship. Why is earning citizenship some special reason for ignoring the illegality of others?

Impressive feats of sophistry have become the norm in discussions of illegal immigration.

For example, we are told that there is no way that the government can find all the people who are in the country illegally and deport them. Does anyone imagine that the government can find all the embezzlers, drunk drivers or bank robbers in the country? And does anyone think that this is a reason why the government should stop trying to enforce laws against embezzlement, drunk driving or bank robbery? Or let embezzlers, drunk drivers and bank robbers “come out of the shadows” and “normalize” their lives?

Even if the government does not lift a finger to find illegal immigrants, many will come to the attention of law enforcement officials because of their violations of other laws. But, even then, there is no assurance that they will be deported — and certainly not in “sanctuary” cities.

Why are there immigration laws in the first place? For the benefit of the American people — not for the benefit of people in other countries who want to come here.

But political and media elites treat the American people as if they are the problem — a problem to be circumvented with sophistry and pious promises about border security that have not been kept in all these years since the last amnesty, decades ago.

Making an irreversible decision to add millions of people — and their dissimilar cultures — permanently to the American body politic is something that should take months of careful examination and discussion, both inside and outside of Congress. But it is likely to get less time than you would take to decide whether to buy a house, or perhaps even a car.

What should American immigration policy be? It doesn’t matter what any of us think that policy should be if the borders are not secure, because whoever wants to come across that border will come across anyway, in defiance of whatever the policy might be.

If legal benefits are conferred on illegal immigrants before the border is secured, we may as well give up any pretense that we have an immigration policy, because benefits conferred are never going to be taken back, no matter how porous the border remains.

 

1984- 2013 Gangnam Style

Before I get to my  blog for today I just wanted to congratulate Rep. Barney Frank (D-NY) for solving the Boston Bombing case single-handedly.

The cause: The Sequester!!

The Solution: Spend More Money!

WOW! isn’t that amazing… 🙂

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/barney-frank-demands-higher-taxes-over-boston-bombing-msnbc-anchor-calls-him-out-for-politicizing-attack/

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

Victor Davis Hanson: Imagine if, during the campaign of 2008, someone had written the following: “If Barack Obama is elected president, then each year from now on the federal budget will be a trillion dollars in the red. He will pile up in two terms more debt than all previous presidents combined. Interest rates will stay at near zero; 7.6 percent unemployment will be proof of progress in creating jobs. Record use of food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance will be hallmarks of recovery. The government will take over health care, and the costs will skyrocket. During Obama’s second term, ammunition will vanish from America’s store shelves in panic buying. Gay marriage will become uncontroversial. Women will be eligible for infantry combat. The only question about amnesty for illegal aliens will be when, not if, it is enacted. States will begin legalizing marijuana.” Obviously, such a conspiracist would have been dismissed as an unhinged nut.

You may object that Obama himself has hardly been responsible for all these radical transformations. True, but he helped to create, in brilliant fashion, a “hope and change,” quasi-revolutionary climate — the political cover, if you will, for the media, the universities, federal judges, state legislatures, and Congress to reinvent American popular culture and tradition in a manner rarely if ever seen in the past.

LANGUAGE
First were the necessary changes in language. In the Obama age, as in Orwell’s 1984, the natural meanings of words had to change. See the third book of Thucydides’ history for the details.

Running up serial trillion-dollar deficits was not profligacy, but rather making “investments” for “the children.” Irresponsible borrowing became “stimulus.” Indeed, “trillion” — not a frequently used part of most people’s vocabulary before 2009 — suddenly replaced “billion” as a familiar fiscal numerical adjective. A takeover of health care that would spike premiums and ration services, devices, and procedures was aptly named the “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

“Assault weapons” superseded “semi-automatic rifles,” even as “semi-automatic” and “automatic” were no longer distinct adjectives. The obvious purpose of rapid-fire weapons was to kill innocent children, not to protect your household from intruders, to shoot fast-moving game, or to practice a sport at a shooting range, much less to remind the government, in Second Amendment fashion, that the populace was autonomous and vigilant.

“Illegal alien” disappeared in favor of the inexact “undocumented immigrant” or “undocumented worker,” even though most illegal aliens never had proper documents of any sort, and sizable minorities of them were not working. The key was to convince the American public that millions of people had inadvertently wandered over the poorly demarcated border, all in search of work. They sort of lost track of both their bearings and their legal documents in the process. “Comprehensive immigration reform” superseded “amnesty,” as if the new proposed reforms focused mostly on hordes of brilliant Ph.D.s from the Czech Republic, queuing up to acquire legal authorization to work in Silicon Valley — rather than some 11 million or so Latin Americans who entered the country unlawfully, mostly without capital, English, or a high-school diploma.

“Homosexual” became a derogatory substitute for the proper term “gay,” and male homosexuality was redefined almost as an asexual act — a fun or “gay” Platonic experience rather than one connected with any particular sort of sexual congress.

“Global warming” begat “climate change,” which eventually begat “climate chaos,” once tornadoes, hurricanes, and tsunamis had to be enlisted in the good fight — given that there was no proof of rising temperatures in the last decade, and even the specter of melting polar ice caps, rising seas, and drowning polar bears had not proved enough to scare the public into banning coal and enacting cap-and-trade.

After the language changed, obfuscation followed, designed to wear down the opposition through a bewildering array of incomprehensible regulations that led to an attention overload and confusion of theories with facts. Nancy Pelosi astutely gauged the pulse of an exhausted public that wanted the drawn-out debate over Obamacare just to be done with and go away, when she promised that we could find out what was in the vast, 2,400-page Obamacare bill as soon as it was made law. Likewise, the new “comprehensive immigration reform” bill is reputed to be over 1,500 pages. As many will read that monstrosity as have read the Obamacare document. The “hockey stick” and tree rings from “11,000 years ago” proved global warming in a way that no one could quite fathom until private correspondence was leaked to the public giving the proper academic context. No one quite knows what the advent of gay marriage will entail, once the idea of marriage as the exclusivity of a single man, joined with a single woman, to promote procreation has ended. But the theoretical possibilities of bold new unions, both sincere and cynical, are now as endless as they are taboo to discuss publicly.

SILENCING DEBATE
After language changed and facts were buried beneath bureaucratic avalanches, debate became almost un-American, either silenced or relegated to caricature. Legitimate worries about rising health-insurance premiums and restricted care translated into being against the “young” and “vulnerable.” Object to infringements on the Second Amendment, and Vice President Joe Biden (who, as so often in the mudslinging, was wheeled out to demonize opponents) will charge that one must suffer from some near-sexual fetish to want an “assault weapon” in one’s hands, a thrill like “driving a Ferrari.” (Most Americans, apparently unlike Biden, have no idea of what driving a Ferrari is like.) Biden instead advised the illegal act of blasting a shotgun into the air to scare off intruders. Concerns about the dangers of a nationwide gun registry were tantamount to membership in “the black-helicopter crowd.”

In the debate over illegal immigration, one paradigm was the DREAM Act. The new gospel was that 11 million illegal aliens were denied their futures as neurosurgeons and aeronautical engineers simply by lack of access to the appropriate university. No one was allowed to talk of an “un-DREAM Act” — to point out that for all the hard-working, crime-free, and long-residing illegal aliens, there must be at least some who were on public assistance, had criminal records, and or entered the country only recently in hopes of receiving amnesty. All illegal aliens were desirable newcomers; none were undesirable. Breaking the law, and cutting in front of others who did not, was noble, whereas drawing attention to those who did was ignoble. The illegal-alien debate was framed as involving those who wished to allow José López to finish his M.D., against racists who could not tolerate the idea that people from south of the border were outpacing them to the pinnacles of American success.

To ponder whether females could meet, without adjustments, the brutal physical requirements of Special Forces training was tantamount to being anti-woman. There could be no real debate over gay marriage. America was instead to have happily evolved from the Neanderthal 1990s, when homophobia had made such moral improvement impossible. That earlier public had been obsessed with illegitimate and improper concerns that particular types of sexual congress might lead to new worries over the spread of HIV or the recent transformation of hepatitis into a common sexually transmitted disease.

Anecdote, the age-old enemy of logic, now reigns supreme and trumps induction —  as if the exception is always proof of the rule, as if the public will always forsake reason for emotion. Forget the statistics on Obamacare — my Uncle Joe was denied coverage after he lost his job. The economy is getting better, because my friend Will was offered a job today. Why enforce federal immigration law, when there is no nicer window washer than Herlinda, who comes to my house every Tuesday? It hailed in June here; therefore the world must be experiencing climate change. I would never shoot an AR-15, and therefore there is no need for anyone else to. My nephew is gay, and he’s a great guy; therefore gay marriage is great too. Sally yesterday lifted heavier weights than did three guys in the gym: Presto, female soldiers can do anything that male soldiers can.
DEMONIZATION
Finally, to make the once controversial the new convention, demonization and character assassination were essential. Opposing trillion-dollar deficits meant that you were a fat cat who didn’t build your own business and didn’t know when you had made enough money, a suspect 1-percenter who did not pay “your fair share,” and who junketed to Las Vegas or lopped off patients’ limbs for profit. To oppose Obamacare meant that you wished the vulnerable like Sandra Fluke to have to choose between eating and having access to exorbitantly priced condoms. Or perhaps you wished those with lymphoma to go without medical treatment.

Wariness about Congress’s rush-to-judgment haste to infringe on the Second Amendment was proof that you were callous toward the parents of the Sandy Hook victims, with veritable blood on your hands in a repeat of the Gabby Giffords tragedy. Gun owners were now to be divided into the good Joe Biden and John Kerry types who, outfitted in proper L. L. Bean attire, each year ceremoniously fired off a few rounds at skeet from their Italian shotguns — and the overweight and sunburned clingers who, in places like southern Illinois and rural Pennsylvania, slaughtered deer for the hell of it with sinister black machine guns, when they weren’t indulging in militia play-acting in bandoliers and camouflage.

America may have had the most liberal immigration policy, both legal and illegal, in the world, which inordinately favored illegal entrants from Latin America. But nonetheless the desire to enforce federal legislation was tantamount to being a “nativist” and “racist” who, as “an old angry white guy” could not “get over” “the new demography” — incorrect behavior by “enemies” that warranted a vow from the president to “punish” them. Those who opposed gay marriage but were willing to accept civil unions were “homophobes” who had set out to demonize the children and grandchildren of us all.

*        *        *

What are we to make of this creeping brave new world?

The scary part, at least for now, is not the ends so much as the means used to achieve them. The reason that Orwell, a man of the Left, made his farm animals and lost urban souls the victims of tyrannical left-wing megalomaniacs was his sense that the far Left, much more so than the far Right, could insidiously distort reality and destroy free expression. The right-wing dictator is typically an identifiable thug who transparently stifles free speech to benefit a small coterie of aristocrats and insiders. In contrast, the left-wing dictator is always a misunderstood reformer who was forced by counterrevolutionaries to break a few eggs in order to make the collective omelet. Think of the reaction to drones, renditions, and Guantanamo under Bush compared to that under Obama. After all, there are no Pinochet T-shirts on campus to rival the romantic depiction of Che — a psychopath in service to a Cuban autocracy that came to power killing far more than did Pinochet in Chile. We are long conditioned to airbrush the word “socialism” out of Hitler’s “National Socialism” and must only with care remark that the collectivist Mao was the greatest mass murderer in the history of civilization. Our popular culture is currently engaged in canonizing bombers and murderers from the 1960s campuses, but not the equally violent anti-abortion activists who likewise sometimes took the law into their own hands in service to their own purported sense of the greater good.

We are in revolutionary times, but of the French rather than the American sort. The popular effort is not to preserve liberty from an all-encompassing government, but rather to have an all-powerful state impose an egalitarianism of result — and increasingly by any means necessary.

 

Off to the Races…

Let me say, I had a friend who was there in Boston and ran the Marathon. He’s fine.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/15/shocking-video-shows-boston-explosions/

But the Predictable happens:

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen told host Jake Tapper on Monday that the explosions in Boston could be the work of Al Qaeda terrorists as much as they could be part of a planned assault by “right-wing extremists.” Bergen said he was reminded of the Oklahoma City bombing, and that terrorism on the right could not be ruled out.

“I’ll bet good money it’s a right-wing nutjob. Today is April 15, Boston Harbor was where the original Tea Party took place and the on-going gun-safety legislation makes it the mostly likely culprit,” commenter Linda Ginsburg wrote.

Michael Moore: “2+2 = Tax Day. Patriots Day”.  So it must be a Teabagger right?

“I theorize it’s an NRA radical attack. Being that the families of Newtown were there and the last mile of the race was dedicated”

“it’s a Tea Party Terrorist act.”

Nida Khan, Producer of Al Sharpton’s TV Show: “We don’t know anything yet of course, but it is tax day & my first thought was all these anti-gov groups, but who knows”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer just speculated if anti-tax groups were behind the bombing WITH ZERO EVIDENCE. (and he’s a “journalist”!!)

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted, “Explosion is a reminder that ATF needs a director. Shame on Senate Republicans for blocking apptment.”

Who knew? Bill Ayers, bernardine dohrn, the weather underground and all those 60′s domestic terrorists were on the far right? Thanks for that info tingle leg Chris Matthews. Most domestic terrorists tend to be on the far right. The Black Liberation Army, the Earth Liberation Front, the Fort Hood shooting by Nidal Hassan, all right wing extremists according to tingle leg Chris Matthews. Tingles also tried to bring up the fact it was ‘tax day’ to try and suggest tea party conservatives were responsible for the bombing. If i had a big middle finger ASCII i’d use it right now.

Have you spotted the Liberal meme (talking point) yet?. And this all over the country and within hours of the bombings.

And you doubted me when I compared the left to Bees and Drones having a hive mind. 🙂

CR: If this turns out to be a foreign terrorist, the left will be frantically reporting 24-7 about how this is an isolated incident, cannot condemn a whole people, culture, etc.

If this turns out to be some homegrown anti-gov. nut job, the left will run 24-7 stories about how the tea party and right wing radio and every conservative in the country are to blame.

They will see no disconnect in these positions.

No they won’t. They can’t. Their Doublespeak/Doublethink training doesn’t allow it.

But don’t worry, Obama is on the case: Be Afraid!  He might have to stop Campaigning for 5 minutes.

Obama recycles same talking points from Benghazi attack for Boston

I watched Obama’s press conference earlier on the Boston terrorist attack where he refused to call it a terrorist attack. But I didn’t realize that he used the exactly same lines and talking points in this speech as he did the day after the Benghazi attack when four Americans were killed. Compare and Contrast Obama’s Benghazi and Boston statements and see if you notice the pattern:

Obama recycled talking points with Benghazi and Boston – Weasel Zippers

Hmmmm….. Well, Liberals are big on Recycling…. 🙂

Right Wing Extremists!  Tea Partiers!!  OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

But I bet it made them “feel” good.

So sad…

 

Snob Appeal

America’s ruling class appears to believe that its mission is to subjugate and bring to heel those outside the club – which means you and me. This motley crew – who would never be caught dead jamming to something as déclassé as Mötley Crüe – has always held the rest of the country in contempt. But now that contempt is the basis of policy, and this simply cannot continue.

Big trucks. Country music. Any music not on vinyl. These are just some of the rest of America’s failings. The people who built the country, who fought for it, who unashamedly stand when the Flag is carried past …these people, are an embarrassment and their voices must be silenced so as not to interfere in the glorious works of the ruling class.

Understand that the ruling class is not simply composed of liberal Democrats, though the values (or lack of same) of these Socialist Lite movers and shakers predominate. The NYC-DC conservanerd contingent – the fussy David Frums and David Brooks – are equally horrified by the values, beliefs and preferences of Americans outside their area codes. We even see “conservative” politicians enlist too. You stay in Washington or New York or Los Angeles long enough and the pressure grows to allow yourself to be assimilated, to start looking down on other Americans.

These are the kinds of people who think they get a say in the size of my soft drink because they know what’s good for me. They’re somehow more concerned with my health than I am. They’re smarter than me. They’re smarter than you. They’re smarter than everyone who doesn’t think, feel and believe exactly like them. And, well, we’re just too dumb to live our lives without their benevolent dictates.

This notion sprouts in the insular communities of affluent, over-educated urban dwellers. It grows in the big name universities that tell their students they are the elite – and then releases them back into the world with a degree, yet somehow dumber than when they walked in. And it is encouraged by a media that confuses having access to an electronic podium with having mental and moral virtue.

The same people who brought us Solyndra think we should heed their demands for more power to combat non-existent global warning. The same people who brought us $16 trillion in debt think we should fork over more money to them. The same people who brought us 50 million Americans on food stamps think we should defer to their better judgment about how to run society.

These people have no right to lecture anyone on anything. They have an unbroken track record of failure.

Yet they do lecture, and worse, they legislate with the same smarmy condescension. Just about every issue today is best examined through the prism of pompous jerks trying to tell the rest of us how to live. At the center of all of them is the same vindictive drive to dominate regular Americans, to attack and mock our values, to break our spirit and will to resist.

Didn’t we have a revolution about this kind of nonsense a couple of hundred years ago? Thank God the patriots of the Revolution bitterly clung to their guns and their religion or we’d be as far down the sewer pipe as Britain.

They are less interested in effective policy than in effective persecution. These clowns know their gun-banning campaign won’t stop either the rare psycho shooting spree or the tragic, everyday nightmare of the inner cities’ gang-fueled bloodbath. But these policies aren’t intended for criminals; they are intended for us, to show us who is boss, to acclimate us to the concept that our fundamental rights are up for review, and that we better behave or they will be totally withdrawn.

It’s couched in a sort of Bizarro World morality where up is down, right is wrong. They tell us that if you want to keep your guns, you want children to die. This includes those of us who wore the uniform of this country or of a first responder agency and put our lives on the line to protect children while the ruling class posers sipped lattes, giggled at Jon Stewart’s mugging, and experimented with metrosexuality.

Why won’t the liberals talk about mental health, guarding schools or, heaven forbid, the carnage in the inner cities that their cronies have controlled for decades? Because resolving those issues won’t hurt us. Their goal isn’t to stop the violence – if they cared about violence you would be as able to walk down the streets of Detroit or Washington or any other big liberal city as you are the heavily guarded enclaves of the ruling class. Their goal is to beat us down, to break us, to leave us disarmed, docile and disheartened.

It’s more than just contempt. They hate us.

You’re a racist,misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant, moron for opposing their vast superiority.

They are as far above you as you from a common ant.

They hate our bourgeois values, like faith, family and patriotism. They hate how we don’t acknowledge their mental and moral superiority. Most of all, they hate our unwillingness to yield to their commands.

So they teach your kids to be compliant. They saturate the culture with The Ministry of Truth.

They bribe off many.

That’s why the policies we support are never merely unwise but are always portrayed as evidence of our unrepentant evil. Unhappy about illegal aliens flowing over the border? No, that couldn’t possibly be because of the social chaos illegals cause – not that the establishment would know anything about that. No, their only experience with illegal immigration is cheap labor cleaning their mansions and watching their kids. They aren’t ranchers in Arizona who get murdered by the guys bringing the liberals’ drugs north. They aren’t priced out of the manual labor market by folks who will work for under minimum wage under the table. They aren’t getting rear-ended by some illegal without car insurance.

No, it’s gotta be that we’re horrible racists. That’s the only possible answer.

AMEN!

The new liberal love affair with militant atheism is another manifestation of the same phenomenon. Just a few years ago, it would be considered unbelievably rude to disrespect someone’s religion in public – and it still is, at least to those of us who weren’t figuratively raised by wolves. But now trashing religion, particularly that of devout Christians and Jews, is a cottage industry. Of course, religions that respond to criticism with beheadings are mysteriously exempt. 🙂

You see this manifest in policies like the Obamacare mandates where the liberals seem to be going out of their way to ensure that believers are forced to pay homage to the great god Government and violate their consciences. What reasonable, rational motive exists to force people who do not share the liberals’ views of contraception to subsidize policies that they consider evil?

None, of course. Even Sandra Fluke could afford the few bucks a month to get her pills at her local Wal-Mart. Maybe that’s the rub – maybe the idea that a special snowflake like Ms. Fluke might be forced to mingle with the unclean masses is the real problem.

Now Washington state is suing some flower shop whose owner has religious objections to decorating a gay wedding. Apparently, Seattle is so bereft of orchid peddlers that it must force its citizens to violate their most sacred spiritual beliefs by privileging flower arrangements over faith.

Such floral fascism isn’t wise policy. It’s vindictiveness written into the law.

This is wrong and un-American. It’s also leading to divisions within the nation that we have not seen in generations. Liberals used to talk about “tolerance,” but as with “civil rights” their enthusiasm for it faded when their power grew. Tolerance means not messing with others who choose to live their lives differently. But now tolerance has given way to persecution.

The growing stridency of the liberal establishment keeps pushing and pushing, forcing regular Americans back. But eventually, they will force the rest of us back against the wall, and that’s when things will get ugly. They have a choice for our society – do we splinter or do we come together? If they want the latter, the first step is to stop being snobs. (Townhall)

But that would violate their Holy Right of God that they are smarter, better, and more morally and ethically superior than you and they have a Divine Right to rule over you.

They can’t possibly be vindictive, petty, petulant, amoral adolescent brats and elitist snobs now can they? 🙂

The Life of Riley

The government we entrust our medical records to under ObamaCare has its EPA sharing confidential data on farmers with green groups and the IRS reading your email. Smile and wave at the EPA drone.

The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, violating their privacy rights and acting in collusion with private groups with private political agendas.

In Nixonian fashion, the EPA has provided these environmental groups with the dossiers of farmers it has gathered to help them create an enemies list of potential polluters. The agency acknowledged the information included individual names, email addresses, phone numbers and personal addresses.

The EPA claimed the data were related to farms in 29 states with “concentrated animal feeding operations” and that the released information was part of the agency’s commitment to “ensure clean water and public-health protection.”

How? By giving environmental groups the identities and addresses of those they need to pressure?

“This information details my family’s home address,” J.D. Alexander, a Nebraska cattle farmer and former president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told FarmFutures.com. “The only thing it doesn’t do is chauffeur these extremists to my house.”

Recently we editorialized on how Nebraska’s congressional delegation had sent a justifiably angry letter to then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson complaining that her agency had exceeded its legislative and constitutional authority by conducting drone surveillance flights over Nebraska and Iowa farms looking for Clean Water Act violations.

“They are just way on the outer limits of any authority they’ve been granted,” said Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb.

The EPA argued that the courts, including the Supreme Court, has already authorized aerial surveillance, such as taking photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility. But nobody has their family home in a chemical plant, and such surveillance observes not only the farm, but also the farmers and their families who rightly have an expectation of privacy.

Such warrantless surveillance has found its counterpart in the claim by the Internal Revenue Service that it does not need a warrant to read our emails and that doing so does not violate the Constitution.

Incredibly, IRS attorneys have asserted in documents that the Fourth Amendment — which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures — does not protect email and that a warrant is not needed to plant a GPS location tracker on a car in its owner’s driveway.

“The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on server, because Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications,” says a 2009 “Search Warrant Handbook” by the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel.

The IRS claims that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, government officials only need a subpoena, issued without a judge’s approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request and released the information on Wednesday, begs to differ.

It cites the 2010 Warshak decision by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled the Fourth Amendment’s provisions trumped the provisions of the 1986 ECPA law. That means a warrant is required to read email — no matter where it is stored or how old it is.

In an October 2011 memo obtained by the ACLU, an IRS attorney explained that the Warshak decision applies only in the 6th Circuit, which covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. Since when do our constitutional rights depend on geography?

The Obama administration’s war on the Constitution knows no bounds, whether it be our First Amendment right to religious liberty, our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms or our protection against the government grabbing our possessions unreasonably. (IBD)

OBAMACARE UPDATE

Retired as a city worker, Sheila Pugach lives in a modest home on a quiet street in Albuquerque, N.M., and drives an 18-year-old Subaru.

Pugach doesn’t see herself as upper-income by any stretch, but President Barack Obama’s budget would raise her Medicare premiums and those of other comfortably retired seniors, adding to a surcharge that already costs some 2 million beneficiaries hundreds of dollars a year each.

More importantly, due to the creeping effects of inflation, 20 million Medicare beneficiaries would end up paying higher “income related” premiums for their outpatient and prescription coverage over time.

Administration officials say Obama’s proposal will help improve the financial stability of Medicare by reducing taxpayer subsidies for retirees who can afford to pay a bigger share of costs. Congressional Republicans agree with the president on this one, making it highly likely the idea will become law if there’s a budget deal this year.

But the way Pugach sees it, she’s being penalized for prudence, dinged for saving diligently.

It was the government, she says, that pushed her into a higher income bracket where she’d have to pay additional Medicare premiums.

IRS rules require people age 70-and-a-half and older to make regular minimum withdrawals from tax-deferred retirement nest eggs like 401(k)s. That was enough to nudge her over Medicare’s line.

“We were good soldiers when we were young,” said Pugach, who worked as a computer systems analyst. “I was afraid of not having money for retirement and I put in as much as I could. The consequence is now I have to pay about $500 a year more in Medicare premiums.”

Currently only about 1 in 20 Medicare beneficiaries pays the higher income-based premiums, which start at incomes over $85,000 for individuals and $170,000 for couples. As a reference point, the median or midpoint U.S. household income is about $53,000.

Obama’s budget would change Medicare’s upper-income premiums in several ways. First, it would raise the monthly amounts for those currently paying.

If the proposal were already law, Pugach would be paying about $168 a month for outpatient coverage under Medicare’s Part B, instead of $146.90.

Then, the plan would create five new income brackets to squeeze more revenue from the top tiers of retirees.

But its biggest impact would come through inflation.

The administration is proposing to extend a freeze on the income brackets at which seniors are liable for the higher premiums until 1 in 4 retirees has to pay. It wouldn’t be the top 5 percent anymore, but the top 25 percent.

“Over time, the higher premiums will affect people who by today’s standards are considered middle-income,” explained Tricia Neuman, vice president for Medicare policy at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “At some point, it raises questions about whether (Medicare) premiums will continue to be affordable.”

Required withdrawals from retirement accounts would be the trigger for some of these retirees. For others it could be taking a part-time job.

One consequence could be political problems for Medicare. A growing group of beneficiaries might come together around a shared a sense of grievance.

“That’s part of the problem with the premiums — they simply act like a higher tax based on income,” said David Certner, federal policy director for AARP, the seniors lobby.

“Means testing” of Medicare benefits was introduced in 2007 under President George W. Bush in the form of higher outpatient premiums for the top-earning retirees. Obama’s health care law expanded the policy and also added a surcharge for prescription coverage.

The latest proposal ramps up the reach of means testing and sets up a political confrontation between AARP and liberal groups on one side and fiscal conservatives on the other. The liberals have long argued that support for Medicare will be undermined if the program starts charging more for the well-to-do. Not only are higher-income people more likely to be politically active, they also tend to be in better health.

Fiscal conservatives say it makes no sense for government to provide the same generous subsidies to people who can afford to pay at least some of the cost themselves. As a rule, taxpayers pay for 75 percent of Medicare’s outpatient and prescription benefits. Even millionaires would still get a 10 percent subsidy on their premiums under Obama’s plan. Technically, both programs are voluntary.

“The government has to understand the difference between universal opportunity and universal subsidy,” said David Walker, the former head of the congressional Government Accountability Office. “This is a very modest step towards changing the government subsidy associated with Medicare’s two voluntary programs.”

It still doesn’t sit well with Sheila Pugach. She says she’s been postponing remodeling work on her 58-year-old house because she’s concerned about the cost. Having a convenient utility room so she doesn’t have to go out to the garage to do laundry would help with her back problems.

“They think all old people are living the life of Riley,” she said. (yahoo)

That’s the government’s job, did you know that. They run your life from beginning to end and you just trust that they know best and that everything will come out as it should. You should never doubt them.

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

 

 

Tax Freedom Day

April 18 will be Tax Freedom Day, the day when Americans have worked enough to pay all of their federal and state taxes for 2013 – a round total of $4.22 trillion, according to an analysis done by the Tax Foundation.

That’s five days later than in 2012. And an increase overall of 8 Days SINCE Obama took over.

Tax Freedom Day is five days later than last year, due mainly to the fiscal cliff deal that raised federal taxes on individual income and payroll. Additionally, the Affordable Care Act’s investment tax and excise tax went into effect. Finally, despite these tax increases, the economy is expected to continue its slow recovery, boosting profits, incomes, and tax revenues.

Americans will pay more than $2.76 trillion in federal taxes and $1.45 trillion in state taxes for 2013 — for a total of $4.22 trillion in taxes, or 29.4 percent of income. (Figures are rounded.)

Obama paid 18% for 2012 by the way. I guess what the liberals say about the 1%ers is true. 🙂

April 18 is the 108th day of the year, or 29.4 percent of the calendar year.

And the Good News is: The Liberals and The president want to raise Taxes so they can spending even more!!!

They have run up $7 Trillion in New Debt. So I guess Tax Freedom Day Next year will be even later.

Rejoice!!! 🙂

The latest ever Tax Freedom Day was May 1, 2000 – meaning Americans paid 33.0 percent of their total income in taxes. A century earlier, in 1900, Americans paid only 5.9 percent of their income in taxes, meaning Tax Freedom Day came on January 22.

The new president (Satan Himself- George W. Bush) delivered on his tax cut promises, which, combined with a recession in 2001, caused the tax burden to fall considerably. In 2003, Tax Freedom Day arrived on April 14, more than two weeks earlier than it had in 2000.

By the time of Obama Tax Freedom day in 2009 (before all his crap hit) was April 10th.

World War I tax increases led to a jump in Tax Freedom Day from 1917’s January 24 to 1918’s February 8 to 1921’s February 22. In the 1920s, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described taxes as the price of civilized society, Tax Freedom Day was arriving in February.

The Great Depression and the Hoover/Roosevelt tax increases led not only to a later Tax Freedom Day but a shift in who was collecting. In 1932, Americans spent 10 days paying federal taxes and 46 days paying state and local taxes. By 1940, Americans worked 33 days to pay each. World War II brought increased federal spending and borrowing, with Tax Freedom Day arriving in April for the first time in 1943.

According to the foundation, Americans will spend more on taxes than they will on food, housing, and clothing combined in 2013.

The Tax Foundation has calculated it will take Americans:

— 32 days to pay for federal individual income taxes;

— 24 days to pay for federal social insurance taxes;

— 12 days to pay for state and local sales taxes and excise taxes, as well as property taxes;

— 8 days to pay for state and local individual income taxes, as well as federal corporate income tax;

— 3 days to pay for other federal taxes and another three days to pay for other state and local taxes,

— 2 days to pay for federal excise taxes,

— 1 day to pay for state and local corporate income taxes,

— and three hours to pay for state and local social insurance taxes,

Last year’s Tax Freedom Day — April 13 — was five days earlier, with the difference attributed to increased federal taxes on individual income and payroll as part of the fiscal cliff deal. In addition, investment and excise taxes under Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) have come into effect, as well.

Since 2002, federal expenditures have exceeded income, and the federal budget deficit has exceeded $1 trillion annually since 2009, though this year it is expected to come down to $833 billion. If that deficit spending was included in the calculations — then nationwide tax Freedom Day would be May 9.

Tax Freedom Day has been calculated for individual states since sufficient data first became available in 1990. According to the economists, the day varies — it will fall later in higher-income states, due to the “steep progressivity” of the federal tax system, while lower-income states have earlier dates for the same reason.

The latest Tax Freedom Day in the country this year will be May 13 in Connecticut. March 29 was the earliest day, for both Louisiana and Mississippi.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/tax-freedom-day-2013-april-18-five-days-later-last-year

Tax Freedom Day is the day when Americans finally have earned enough money to pay off their total tax bill for the year. In 2013, Arizona taxpayers worked until April 5th (8th earliest nationally) to pay their total tax bill. The Tax Freedom Days of neighboring states are: California, April 24th (ranked 6th latest nationally); Nevada, April 14th (ranked 21st latest nationally); Utah, April 13th (ranked 24th earliest nationally); Colorado, April 17th (ranked 16th latest nationally); and New Mexico, April 3rd (ranked 5th earliest nationally).

But that does take into account the lovely Phoenix Food Tax… 🙂

The Census data indicates that the most volatile source of combined state and local government tax revenues in the U.S. is corporate income tax, followed by individual income tax and sales and gross receipts taxes. Property tax revenues are the least volatile from year to year. These findings are confirmed by a 2010 Tax Foundation analysis of state tax revenue volatility by tax type, which found that corporate income and personal income tax revenues were the most volatile.[7] Further, the general shape of annual changes in revenues from taxes on corporate income, individual income, and sales and gross receipts closely follows the shape of the overall economy. Changes in income taxes, however, are much more pronounced as the overall economy changes.

Depending on high-income earners for tax revenue is even more problematic. Using 2009 IRS data, we found that millionaire income, in addition to the tax revenues they generate for the federal government, is quite volatile:

Comparing the 2009 data to the pre-recession data for 2007 shows that not only did the number of millionaires fall by 40 percent, but the overall income of millionaires fell by 50 percent. The result for the U.S. Treasury was that 54 percent of the total drop in tax revenues during this period was due to the falling tax collections from millionaires.

Though this example uses federal tax collections, the principle still applies to state and local governments. The more a government relies on volatile sources of revenue, the more unstable overall funding will be when the economy dips. (Tax foundation)

In other words, Class warfare is a very unstable way to make tax policy. Gee, what a shock that is…

 

More Skunk Spray

As Democrats grow increasingly worried that ObamaCare will explode on the launch pad just as midterm elections get going, the Obama administration seeks to pin blame on Republicans. Good luck with that.

Well, let’s think about that for a moment.

The Ministry of Truth is there to lie repeatedly with great gusto to ignorant masses 24/7/365.

Tell a Lie often enough and it can become truth, especially with low and no info voters.

After all, they bought the “Vote For Me the other guys an asshole” Campaign Strategy that Obama had last campaign season.

And he’s still in Campaign mode and still raising money.

It won’t be easy since it was and is his singularly most proud moment. But that just makes the lies more challenging.

Earlier this week, Health and Human Services head Kathleen Sebelius admitted that she didn’t realize how complicated getting ObamaCare off the ground would be.

So you just blame the Republicans for “obstructing” the process as usual. That at least has worked on the moron peasant crowd before.

Sebelius complained that “no one fully anticipated” the difficulties involved in implementing ObamaCare, or how confusing it would be with the public.

Hey, the 2,700 pages of crap that no one in the Congress or The Administration actually read wasn’t a clue!

She wasn’t talking about the massive and impossible task of imposing central planning on one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

Because that was the goal all along and they wanted that. They want to control everyone and everything eventually.

Instead, she was trying to find a way to blame Republicans for ObamaCare’s failures when the inevitable problems start emerging.

And since the Republicans want to get rid of it, lets blame them for the problems and say they created them by trying to “piece meal” UNDO it or there obstruction is “causing” the problems.

Just like doing it to begin with “piece meal” was bad, according to the Left. Which is what the Republicans wanted, if anything.

Then you blame the Republicans “friends”, the industry, rich people, etc… and you have your class warfare element and your next “throw grandma/poor off the cliff” ad.

Rather than say “let’s get on board, let’s make this work,” recalcitrant Republicans have forced her to engage in “state-by-state political battles,” Sebelius said at a Harvard School of Public Health forum. “The politics has been relentless.”

So the war is the Republican’s fault. If they had just let them do it all without a fight there wouldn’t be these problems!

Of course, there would be, probably even worse than these, but that’s not how this game is played.

So let’s see if we get this. Democrats shoved an unpopular, expensive, ill-conceived and poorly written law down the country’s throat with no Republican support, and without bothering to see whether states would want to take on the thankless and costly task of helping the feds implement it.

Yes. So it MUST Be their fault! 🙂

It sure as hell can’t be the Democrats fault. There intentions and ambitions were pure as the driven snow. They are the Angels of Mercy and Compassion…Besides, they can lie about the votes and the support. Hell, that was 4 years ago, the low or no information moron won’t remember it and if we lie about the History well enough…

And now that many of these states are rebelling, it’s the Republicans’ fault?

Of Course it is. Any time you rebel against the yoke of your Morally and Politically Superior Masters on The Left it’s your Fault! 🙂

Sebelius’ fellow Democrat, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, had a more accurate take on the problem the administration faces: the law is “probably the most complicated piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress” and “if it isn’t done right the first time, it will just simply get worse.”

Or it could just be worse to begin with… 🙂

Rockefeller, like a growing number of Democrats, realizes that ObamaCare is shaping up to be a political disaster for the party next November.

So we have to start the Campaign Now to blame someone else for it!

The influential Cook Political Report noted earlier this month that almost all of the Democratic insiders they talked to “voiced concern about the potential for the issue to hurt Democrats in 2014.”

And just what could explain these concerns?

Maybe it’s because even Sebelius now admits that ObamaCare will force insurance claims up 32%.

Gee, that’s a bit of a ways from lowering your premiums by thousands of dollars.

Or possibly it’s because, despite endless assurances that the insurance exchanges would be ready on time, the administration had to delay for a year a key feature meant to give small business a choice of health plans.

Or because neither Sebelius nor the states have provided evidence they can get the rest of the exchanges ready by Oct. 1, when ObamaCare’s open enrollment begins.

Or that a key provision, The High Risk Pool (pre-existing conditions) portion is already bankrupt NOW and will need a “bailout” by the time this all kicks off. 🙂

Or perhaps Democrats’ fears stem from state insurance commissioners warning of a rate shock once ObamaCare’s “community rating” rules and benefit mandates start. Or from rising evidence the law is hurting job growth as small businesses try to avoid its costs.

Townhall: The $1.3 trillion U.S. health-care system overhaul is getting more expensive and will initially accomplish less than intended. Costs for a network of health-insurance exchanges, a core part of the Affordable Care Act, have swelled to $4.4 billion for fiscal 2012 and 2013 combined, and will reach $5.7 billion in 2014, according to the budget President Barack Obama yesterday sent to Congress. That spending would be more than double initial projections, even though less than half the 50 U.S. states are participating. The unanticipated spending is a consequence of an ambitious timetable dictated by Congress and a complex new way of offering people medical coverage, say analysts, lobbyists and administration officials. Combine that with a majority of Republican governors declining to cooperate with a Democratic president and U.S. regulators are left grasping to get the 2010 health law up and running by a Jan. 1, 2014, deadline. For the areas that money can’t solve, the Obama administration is opting for delay. It temporarily backed off some provisions of the law, including restrictions on coverage for executives and a promise to offer small businesses greater choices of health plans. 

And there are still the 1,700 Waivers they gave their friends.
Costing more, and doing less.  What a deal. (sounds like a typical liberal idea) Remember, the federal government simply assumed that every state would set up its own exchange — despite strong public opposition to the law, and high associated costs coupled with heavy-handed federal mandates with scant flexibility.

Oh course they did. They are the Morally Superior Left. Everyone loves them because they are so vastly superior to you morons that you’ll just roll over and do whatever they want you to do.

Why would anyone question that?

And if you fight them, then they have to be the Parent who blames the other one for wanting to be so mean because they are so perfect it can’t possibly be their fault.

None of this, mind you, has anything to do with Republicans. And if the GOP were smart, it’d be focused on making sure that, come next November, the public knows that, too. (IBD)

Yeah, but I’m not convinced they are that smart. They don’t have a great track record of it lately. Especially with “Jar Jar” Boehner at the helm.

Conservatives must resist the temptation to bury their heads in the sand for possible short term political advantage.  That’s what liberals are for!

Which means come 2014 we won’t smell success against Obamacare, just more Skunk spray.

 

The Collective II: The Skunk Defense

Latest From Comrade Harris over at MSNBC

(MSNBC= My Siblings/Self Need to Belong to the Collective)

First she referred to a baby in the womb as a “thing,” that is the individual woman’s sole choice (Pro-Choice), then she declared that our things ,children don’t belong to their parents, now you are “allowed” to earn a “Little more” if your better at something than others but “you have a right to free healthcare, free education, free housing, and free food at all times.”.

So, “just to be clear” 🙂 When it’s a “thing” (not born) the “thing” is the sole right and responsibility of the individual woman. But once it is born it’s the property of The State (aka “community” or “collective”). That is unless it was born alive during an abortion then that gets even weirder.

Doublethink: The ability to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time and believe both are true.

From individual “thing” to “collective” responsibility.

Bottom Line: Children in whatever stage of life are PROPERTY!!

Gee, didn’t we fight a War over this concept once??

So naturally, when she got a lot of heat for her “children don’t belong to their parents” comments she ignored it and changed the argument in a very “well I was misquoted” when I was quoted Liberal fashion of going off on a tangent and proclaim this is is what I meant but you took my exact words the wrong way kind of BS. I am far too arrogant and elitist to admit I put my foot in my mouth by saying out loud exactly what I actually think. So I will cover it up with BS.

Well, not exactly “doubling down.” You see, Perry changed the parameters of the debate by ignoring what she said in the ad, and creating an entirely new argument that is far more mainstream than what she actually implied:

One thing is for sure: I have no intention of apologizing for saying that our children, all of our children, are part of more than our households, they are part of our communities and deserve to have the care, attention, resources, respect and opportunities of those communities.

Is that what she said? No:

In the ad, Harris-Perry calls for “breaking through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents.” Instead, she says, we should “recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

She didn’t say kids were “a part of more than our households.” She said they “belong to whole communities.” That’s a damn sight more radical than what she now claims she said.

Here’s more of her deep thinking:

I believe wholeheartedly, and without apology, that we have a collective responsibility to the children of our communities even if we did not conceive and bear them. Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values. But they should be able to do so in a community that provides safe places to play, quality food to eat, terrific schools to attend, and economic opportunities to support them. No individual household can do that alone. We have to build that world together.

Again, this is not what she said in the ad. Her statement that we should break through “our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents” is a truly shocking statement, one that for all her “non-apologies” she never gets around to explaining. (American Thinker)

She never intends to. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS!

Or of it they object to your super communist pronouncements try and hide it with lots of wordy Orwellian BS.

Don’t defend, Obfuscate! They’ll be so baffled they’ll leave you alone!

The SKUNK defense!! 🙂

Spray your foul scent all over everything and get them to back off and be too confused and busy with the stink to continue the attack. 🙂

OBAMACARE UPDATE

Speaking of Skunk spray…

The $5 billion fund set up by ObamaCare to cover new high-risk insurance pools in each state from pre-existing conditions is already running out of money — a full year before projections.

HA! 🙂 Why am I not surprised…So why should anyone believe ObamaCare’s overall cost projections are any more accurate?Only if you are a mindless liberal or a low to no-info voters.Panicked to control mushrooming costs in its pre-existing conditions insurance plan, or PCIP, the Health and Human Services Department is having to curtail benefits to cancer patients, among others.

So much for Ms. Harris’s “Free Healthcare” 🙂

It’s a bad omen for the larger plan.

ObamaCare funded the PCIP with $5 billion to cover patients with pre-existing conditions from 2010 to 2014. Less than a third of the people HHS projected would enroll in the plan actually signed up for the coverage.

Yet despite the low enrollment, the plan is broke. In fact, it started running out of money at the beginning of this year, which means it busted its budget a full year ahead of projections.

In a 2012 report, HHS conceded that it had miscalculated (though not until page 11 of its 15-page report): “On average, the PCIP program has experienced claims costs 2.5 times higher than anticipated.”

SURPRISE!!!  (only to liberals)

Now it’s cutting off coverage.

What a shock. Guess who’s next?  Look in the Mirror!… 🙂

“I feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me,” a 61-year-old Virginian with breast cancer complained to the Washington Post.

Bet you voted for it too! 🙂

The crisis at PCIP is a harbinger of things to come for the rest of ObamaCare.

Americans can look forward to the same cost overruns followed by cost controls followed by curtailed benefits followed ultimately by denial of care.

Surprise!!! 🙂

Controlling this massive new entitlement will require government-mandated rationing of medical services and care for the sick and higher taxes for the middle class.

Surprise!!! 🙂

If the Democrats in Congress and the White House miscalculated how much it would cost to fund hundreds of thousands of ObamaCare applicants with pre-existing medical problems, imagine how badly it’s low-balling the cost of subsidizing millions of other uninsured Americans, who’ll be eligible for a generous array of “free” preventive-care services?

Imagine how badly they’re underestimating the cost of expanding Medicaid?

The higher-than-expected costs from PCIP “could be an indication that other cost projections for ObamaCare are also underestimated,” the Heritage Foundation recently understated on its blog.

That’s more like a statistical certainty. In 1965, the Johnson administration figured Medicare would cost $12 billion by 1990. Its actual cost was $110 billion. Now it’s almost $600 billion and climbing.

Obama’s comically named Affordable Care Act doesn’t fully go into effect for another nine months, when some 30 million uninsured crash the medical system (not counting illegal immigrants). (sorry, “undocumented Democrats”)

Yet it’s already exploded original cost estimates.

In its first decade, ObamaCare will cost twice as much — more than $2 trillion — than first projected by the Congressional Budget Office.

Obama in 2009 promised to create a new health-delivery system that “cuts costs” and won’t add “one dime to the deficit.” He’s already practicing red medicine, in more ways than one. (IBD)

When in doubt SPRAY!!