7 Year Rash

Today is the 7th Anniversary of this blog. For a long time this year I considered making this one my last because, quite simply, The Stupid Have Inherited the Earth. Intelligence and Common Sense (let alone <gasp> Logic) are Politically Incorrect. Hell, some Leftists have decreed that just saying “politically incorrect” is Politically Incorrect. 😦

So instead I thought I’d revisit one of my favorites from the last 7 years.

This also goes out the #NeverTrump -ers who are so mindlessly obsessed with hating Donald Trump that they are willing Hillary into the White House.

Hate never felt so Right. 🙂

And a special shout out to the Sabotage Republicans (The Establishment ones and their followers) WHO ALSO want Hillary.

The Generations (and possibly permanent) of damage you want to inflict on what’s LEFT of this country is so short-sighted you deserve her.

It will be YOUR fault.

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! -George Orwell

So with that in mind, cast your mindless adherence to January 21, 2012  and this Blog and see yourselves currently in it also.

THE ZOMBIE HOARD

They are just a zombie hoard.

Remorseless. Merciless. Incapable of shame, morals or ethics.

They want want what they want when they want it and because they want it and will do anything to get it. Relentlessly.

And what they want is YOU. You to be either converted or cow-towed to their every whim. To do whatever they want when they want it.

Evidence John King, the CNN Liberal Moderator of the South Carolina Debate. He opens the debate with a salicious question to Gingrich about his “open marriage” and Gingrich blows him to bits for it and the crowd goes wild.

He did this to prove his “courage” to stand up to the evil “right wingers” and puff out his chest that he was “journalist” and was going to bravely confront the issue. Meanwhile, anything remotely damaging to President Obama is ignored with great speed and spin.🙂

2016: Just Like they do with Hillary. The Debate will be set up to show that Trump is grumpy, unstable and mean. The fact that Hillary is a congenital, sociopathica Liar has no bearing on the debates whatsover.

Their will be more Candy Crowley moments than ever.

And the Zombie hoard will eat it up like candy. “Brains…”

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.- George Orwell.

And their has never been more deceit now than ever in American History and more mindless Zombie Hoards out to make sure “What difference does it make, anyways?”

Rush Limbaugh (who I rarely get a chance to listen to because of my work schedule): Now, let me tell you one thing here, folks: You cannot shame the mainstream media. If any of you are thinking that the media learned a lesson — if any of you believe that the media finally had it handed to ’em, if you believe that the media had their eyes opened and they are fully awake now and they understand what they’re dealing with — forget it. John King is proud of what happened last night. John King is a hero in the Main Street media because he didn’t back down, because he continued to illustrate how it is that the media does really control the agenda. That was a demonstration of the power they hold over every public figure’s head, that they choose to hold like a guillotine. John King… There may even be some jealousy and envy within the journalist ranks (well, not journalists; within the Democrat Party ranks) because John King is a guy that got in Newt’s face, stared him down — and the fact that Newt told him off? It’s a badge of honor. If you are thinking that John King was embarrassed and ran away with his tail tucked between his legs and learned his lesson and it’ll never happen again? Ah, ah, ah, ah. You cannot shame the mainstream media. They are proud of this. They delight in their power to destroy candidates that they don’t like.

And they don’t like anyone who doesn’t cow-tow to them.

2016: They made THEIR Choice. Now it’s you’re Zombie duty to vote for it or else.

“At the end of the day the message to every conservative who hasn’t run for office is: “You want a piece of this? You want some of this? You want Brian Ross hounding you and your ex-wife and then you want me asking you about it on national TV the next night? Come on in. We’re ready.” That’s the message from John King and CNN last night, and do not doubt me on this.”

2016: look at the evidence, every time new “evidence” comes out about Hillary they bury it. Every time Trump even raises his voice or say one less than perfect political phrase they are on it like flies on shit and they stick to it like super glue and blow it up.

So the alternative is to cow-tow. To live in fear of the Liberal wrath.

2016: To acquiesce. Given in, the Ministry of Truth has the system rigged.

Hell, the Democrats got caught rigging the Primary, blatantly.

No one really cared.

The Zombie Hoard just went, “oh” and moved on. The Media covered it up.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was sacrificed.

End of Story.

#2: Hillary is caught re-handed on the Email Scandal. The FBI even says so. But since Comey has connections to Clinton and doesn’t want to have a mysterious “accident” she is not prosecuted.

Future Hillary Supreme Court Nominee Loretta Lynch, Attorney General and Clinton Cronie refuses to prosecute her.

Other people not connected to Clinton aren’t so lucky.

And the reaction from the Zombie Hoard, “Yawn”.

Hillary is still leading in the Polls!

“Brains…”

The Food Police. The TSA. The EPA. The Justice Department. Homeland Security. The FCC.

Because if they can’t make you a zombie, they can at least make you a peasant in fear of your Masters who will not challenge them or not have the power to challenge them.

“[…]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

They’ll just turn your children into zombies instead. 12 years of Grade School and 4 years of College is a lot of Zombie Voodoo time after all. And “getting them while they are young” is entirely within the Zombie Liberal playbook. Make them a zombie before they even know what one is and then make them as immune as possible to any anti-virus and get them addicted to their own Kool-Aid. Feed it to them constantly through the Media and the Internet.

2016: They’ll DEMAND Segregation, “Safe Spaces”, “Diversity” and “Inclusion” mindlessly and will trample Free Speech because they don’t want to be “offended”.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

WAR (Class, Gender, Race, Religion) IS PEACE

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Hell, even white people getting a tan will set the little zombie off…

What it does is illustrate that they can be dealt with. But you can’t beat ’em. They’re not gonna be shamed. They’re not going to be shamed into stopping the coverage of conservatives as they do it. It’s going to continue. No matter what kind of shame you think they suffer in a contest like that — no matter how much money they lose, no matter how many of them get fired, no matter how many magazines or TV stations or newspapers get shut down — they are not gonna change. They are hard-core, leftists”

And as I have said over and over again, they are have no morals or ethics because they are governed not by logic and reason but by emotions, mostly the most basic of primitive emotions, Fear, Lust (for power), anger, jealousy, ENVY, etc. –Raw emotions.

2016: THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS!

Which is why when you engage them they sound and act like an immature 5 year old. And as we all know from childhood development the child has to develop a sense of shame by have having boundaries and limitations and consequences. And if they don’t, they will grow up with little to no sense of shame.

2016: “Microaggressions” anyone?

They are usually called sociopaths. I can call them Liberal Zombies.

2016: And the #Never Trumpers and Establishment RINOs.

Liberals have no shame. They want what they want when they want it because they want it.

2016: And the #Never Trumpers and Establishment RINOs.

“…one of the upsides that isn’t gonna happen is the media saying, “Gosh, we’ve been so mean to these people and so unfair. You know, maybe we ought to start being fair.” That’s not going to happen.

Liberals talk about being “fair” which means you’re being unfair to them and should do what they want.

Liberals talk about “compassion” but it’s to make you feel guilty, not them, and to do what they want.

Liberals will talk about “bi-partisanship” but that just means you have to compromise your principles so they can do what they want.

“Diversity” means you’re evil and need to do what they say to repent for your sins.

2016: “Inclusion” Means you include everything THEY say and do it without hesitation.

They are a remorseless hoard. They want what they want when they want it and on their terms only.

Give them everything they want or they’ll cry, scream, bitch, moan, pout and lash out at you.

2016: “White Privilege” anyone?

That is their primitive zombie hoard mentality. And they want YOU.

“Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“Most people don’t believe something can happen until it already has. That’s not stupidity or weakness, that’s just human nature.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent
thinking clearly is never time wasted.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“They feel no fear, why should you?”– Max Brooks

“The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

Get rid of one zombie, and 10 more will take it’s place. So you have to be ready to do battle constantly.

Look at 2010. The Democrats suffered the worst defeat in 80 years. Does it look like they learned ANYTHING?

No.

As a matter of fact the zombie hoard is even tighter, even more determined than ever. They want it EVEN MORE.

So if we defeat then in 2012 will they go away?

HELL NO!

2016: They weren’t defeated. Even more hoards joined them. So if they are beat in 2016 will they finally be defeated and go away.

HELL NO!

They will just keep coming back like a remorseless zombie hoard until you are overwhelmed.

Which is why you will have to fight them all of your days, your kids days and their kids days until the infection is wiped out.

But like any good zombie plaque it only takes 1 to re-ignite it and spread it all over again.

And these zombies have Media and Internet outlets! (and Europe!)

“Looking back, I still can’t believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of ‘experts’ all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more ‘shocking’ and ‘in-depth’ than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. “Fear,” he used to say, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.” That blew me away. “Turn on the TV,” he’d say. “What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.” Fuckin’ A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

The Democrat Party in a nutshell.

FEAR IS HOPE!

My own personal Fourth Orwellian Precept (which includes WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH).

“If you believe you can accomplish everything by “cramming” at the eleventh hour, by all means, don’t lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining”
― Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide

“When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“. . . show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they’re going to be okay.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren’t just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don’t have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don’t have a common heritage, we don’t have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have…is what we want to be.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

“…We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they would be powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war’s greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth’s once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War

The Future is yours. So is living through “The Walking Dead” and “1984” for real.

Patience is a Virtue Lost

Derke Hunter: There’s a reason liberals have been so successful in advancing their agenda in the past few decades. It’s not just electoral victories – they’ve played a part, and it’s easier to make things happen if you win elections. But the main factor in their victories is one thing we conservatives are losing sight of: patience. 

ObamaCare took 90 years and they still want more but are patient.

Political Correctness took 2 generations to condition stupid people to be even stupider.

Socialism is good took generations of indoctrination.

Global Warming has been going on for nearly 100 years.

Liberals are very patient for the long game.

In the time of Twitter breaking news, Tinder, microwaves, On Demand, etc., patience is as dead as detectives wearing Fedoras and calling people “Mac.” But it’s key in politics, and conservatives have forgotten that.

Ronald Reagan – the real man, not the myth created with his name – understood the importance of patience. He almost won the GOP nomination in 1976 but lost to President Gerald Ford. 

Although Ford was no conservative, Reagan didn’t turn on him. He supported him. When Ford lost, that opened the door to Reagan’s victory four years later. Had Reagan refused to support Ford, or actively criticized Ford and hurt him in the 1976 election, there’s a chance 1980 would’ve turned out differently. 

Even as president, Reagan understood the importance of patience. His victories in dealing with Congress and the Soviet Union (not much of a difference there, in many respects) didn’t come immediately. Incrementalism was a key weapon – you take what you can get and keep fighting for the rest. What Reagan didn’t do was throw up his hands when he didn’t get all he wanted, leaving small victories on the table because total victory wasn’t, at that moment, obtainable. 

 

Far too many conservatives have forgotten that political victories take time, even if the loss they’re trying to reverse is still fresh. 

Libertarians are famously inpatient. It’s why, outside of a few court victories, they are mostly irrelevant. I take no pleasure in saying this; the country would be much better off if we were significantly more libertarian. But when there’s a political fight to be had, they sit on the sidelines criticizing both sides rather than putting their weight behind the side moving the ball in the direction they want to go.

The purity of libertarians is to be admired, at least in the sense of ideals. The practical implementation of purity as a guide for conducting politics is not. Far too many oppose actions which would move the country in the direction they want because it doesn’t go far enough. They want it all, and they want it now – and anything short of that is a sell-out. 

Many conservatives have adopted this attitude. 

Liberals have been successful because they’ve adopted the opposite stance. For generations, liberals have sought to seize control over health care in the United States. They haven’t yet, but every move they’re made on health care has pushed them closer to that goal. 

Medicare covers the elderly and disabled; Medicaid covers the poor. Liberals have been fighting to lower the age of Medicare eligibility for decades, but they’ve, thankfully, been blocked. They’ve also been fighting to raise the income eligibility for Medicaid for decades, and they’ve been winning. This left a shrinking middle uncovered by government insurance. Obamacare is changing that.

For all the problems with Obamacare, it’s serving its purpose of crowding out private coverage. It was never designed to be the endgame; it’s an increment. It moves the country closer to a government takeover of health care. That was its purpose; that is their plan. And they waited decades for it.

Conservatives, on the other hand, don’t have that kind of patience. With every new electoral victory, they expect some massive shift in the country immediately, if not sooner.

Sadly, much of liberalism is engrained in our laws, our courts and our culture, so it will take time to uncouple it. 

 

Real conservatives are a small percentage of the Republican Party and Republicans in Congress. Yet many conservatives, particularly in media, think each electoral victory immediately should bring about massive conservative change. When that doesn’t happen, they attack with a ferocity they don’t reserve even for liberals. 

No single election is going to turn the tide back toward constitutionally limited government; no one person elected to office will be as pure as the wind-driven snow in their conservatism. It’s going to be a long slog; there are going to be losses. Losing a battle does not constitute losing a war. But quitting does.

There never will be a “silver bullet” election or candidate; that’s impossible. Many times you have to stop getting worse before you start getting better.

In addition to electoral victories, the courts have to change – that will take time. The culture of dependency has to change – that will take time. 

For all their shunning of Christianity, Democrats have the patience of Job when it comes to their agenda. Republicans, on the other hand, are Veruca Salt. They want a Golden Goose and they want it NOW! 

Veruca ended up going down the garbage chute. If conservatives don’t regain some strategic patience, they’ll suffer the same fate. And the country won’t be far behind…

It’s a Drag

Everywhere you turn these days, liberals are bemoaning the harm caused by “austerity.” The left-wing Center for American Progress claims spending cuts will cost 2 million jobs over the next seven years. The Brookings Institution says they’ve already cost 2 million.

Former Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers complained last week that austerity postponed “the acceleration of recovery . . . more than it needed.” Democratic National Committee communications director Brad Woodhouse took to Twitter to wonder “what our economy would be doing if not for #GOPSequester, GOP refusal to make needed investments.”

The press has swallowed this and routinely blames bad economic news on “Washington’s austerity drive.”

The liberals’ mantra is understandable, since it supports their belief in an endlessly increasing federal government while blaming any bad economic news at Republicans who have been pushing spending cuts.

But researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco looked at the data and came to a completely different conclusion. They find that it’s not the modest spending restraint pushed by Republicans that’s harming growth prospects, it’s the massive tax cuts Obama has engineered — tax hikes that liberals and the mainstream press ignore when they whine about austerity.

The researchers compared recent and projected spending and taxes to the historic norms at similar points in a business cycle. They found while deficits have fallen of late, spending is still higher, and tax receipts lower, than the norm at this point in a recovery. Fiscal policy, they say, has held back the recovery only “slightly to date.”

Over the next three years, however, the fiscal drag on the economy is “much bigger” — cutting projected growth by about 1 percentage point. But that’s not because of sequester-forced spending cuts.

“Despite all the attention federal spending cuts and sequestration have received, our calculations suggest they are not the main contributors to this projected drag,” they wrote. Even with the sequester, they found, outlays will stay above historic norms over the next three years.

Instead, the researchers found, “the excess fiscal drag on the horizon comes almost entirely from raising taxes.”

Taxes as a share of GDP are on track to rise well above historic averages and well above rates at comparable periods in previous recoveries.

And what explains this “super-cyclical” rise in taxes?

Well, let’s see. Obama forced through a $600 billion tax hike on upper-income families at the start of this year in the name of “fairness.”

Before that, he and his fellow Democrats imposed $1 trillion of new taxes for ObamaCare, taxes that are just now hitting the economy.

As a result, federal tax revenues as a share of GDP will hit 19.3% of GDP by 2015, a level reached just six times since World War II and well above the 17.9% average over the previous 40 years.

We’d only add that Obama’s other economic policies — an out-of-control regulatory state, the looming disaster known as ObamaCare, various attempts at industrial policy among them — have also weakened what should have been a robust recovery. (IBD)

But since it all fits The Agenda, it’s good. 🙂

After years of ignoring increasingly dire warnings, America is now facing a debilitating disability crisis — one draining tax dollars (and workers) from our economy.

Yet rather than reforming our broken entitlement programs, policymakers continue turning a blind eye to the root problems associated with these unsustainable behemoths: liberally defined benefits, lax bureaucrats, rubberstamping judges and rampant overpayments.

According to Cornell University’s latest “Disability Status Report,” 37.3 million Americans (or 12.1% of our population) claimed a disability in 2011. Many of these were legitimate ailments afflicting older retirees — but America’s disability epidemic cannot be chalked up exclusively to an aging population.

According to the U.S. Social Security Administration, 10.9 million working age Americans (and family members) received disability insurance payments in February — while another 8.2 million received supplemental security income payments.

Over the course of the year the total tab for these benefits could exceed $180 billion, an ongoing explosion of disability-related dependency that has pushed this program to the brink of insolvency.

That’s not hyperbole, either. A year ago the Social Security Board of Trustees announced the disability trust fund would be exhausted in 2016 — two years earlier than the previous estimate.

Open Definition

How did we arrive at this point? Well, after remaining relatively flat during the late 1970s and 1980s, the number of disability dependents spiked by 84% from 1990-2003 while the costs associated with the program climbed from $38 billion to $77 billion annually.

The last five years have seen even more unsustainable growth as the number of workers receiving disability payments jumped from 7.1 million in December 2007 to 8.8 million in February 2013 — a 22.5% increase. Meanwhile, annual applications for disability benefits nearly doubled over the last decade — from 1.5 million in 2001 to 2.8 million a year ago.

The primary driver of this unchecked expansion is government’s ever-expanding definition of “disability” — with mitigating factor presumptions, combinations of non-severe impairments (such as “persistent anxiety” and “chronic fatigue”) and liberal interpretation standards making it much easier for individuals to claim a “total disability.”

Government even takes into account external factors such as the job market in reaching its determination.

“If there are not a ‘significant number’ of jobs available, then a claimant … is deemed to be ‘disabled’ even though he or she is still capable of competitive work, albeit at a reduced level of performance,” an article in the Cato Institute’s Regulation Magazine noted.

The impact of downwardly defining “disability” can be seen in a recent analysis of government data conducted by reporter Chana Joffe-Walt of NPR. According to Joffe-Walt’s report, there has been a fundamental shift in the nature of disability claims — away from serious and easily provable conditions and toward more dubious ailments.

In 1961 heart disease, stroke and related ailments made up the largest category of disability recipients (25.7%) — while a much smaller group (8.3%) cited harder-to-prove “back pain and other musculoskeletal problems.”

Flawed System

As of 2011, however, the heart disease and stroke category shrank to 10.6% of the dependent population while the back pain group exploded to 33.8%. Meanwhile, mental illness — another harder-to-prove category — saw its share of the disability population climb from 9.6% to 19.2%.

Last September, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., — a medical doctor — exposed several other major problems with the system when he conducted an investigation into disability benefit award decisions. According to his report, more than a quarter of disability cases analyzed by his committee “failed to properly address insufficient, contradictory or incomplete evidence.”

Coburn’s probe also found disability examiners and Social Security administrative law judges authorizing benefits “without citing adequate, objective medical evidence to support the finding; without explaining the medical basis for the decision; without showing how the claimant met basic listing elements; or at times without taking into account or explaining contradictory evidence.”

Poor hearing practices, late and insufficient evidence, misuse of medical listings and woefully outdated job listings for claimants with limited disabilities were also among the problems uncovered by Coburn’s investigation.

Taxpayers should not be forced to continue subsidizing such an inherently flawed, financially unsustainable system.

Unless action is taken now, bailout demands will likely overwhelm politicians of both parties who ignored the oncoming default all these years.

Unfortunately, with the exception of a handful of leaders such as Coburn, there remains virtually no appetite in Washington, D.C., to substantively address either the disability problem or our government’s broader entitlement addiction.

Gotta kiss up tio the dependent. They vote for politician to feed their drug habits. And politicians want them to feed their power addiction.

 

Doing The Math

The number of American workers collecting federal disability payments climbed to yet another record of 8,853,614 in March, up from 8,840,427 in February, according to newly released data from the Social Security Administration.

But don’t worry, the economy is “improving”. 🙂

The Obama administration wants banks to lower lending standards, and Fannie and Freddie are back in the black. The stage is set for a replay of some very unpleasant history.

Do you miss the thrill you felt when your wealth got vaporized in 2008?

Well, they want to do it again. Because it’s only “fair”….And after all, it was the Banks’ fault! 🙂

Let’s do the math: We have nearly 30 million uninsured people about to get medical coverage under the health care law come January. And we have a projected shortage of 45,000 primary care physicians by 2020. Add to that the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP), with 43,000 members who say they can offer basic care if state laws would just let them set up an independent practice without doctor supervision.

And the answer is …

The nurse-practitioners, of course, say it’s a matter of simple addition: New laws are needed to give them more autonomy.

But doctors say it’s a miscalculation to think that patient safety won’t be compromised by not having a doctor overseeing things. Family physicians have more than four times as much education and training, accumulating an average of 21,700 hours, whereas nurse-practitioners receive 5,350 hours, the American Academy of Family Physicians points out.

So you’ll get the clerk instead of the mechanic to fix you up.

But fear not! Obama is here to save you.

Last week, one of the world’s leading consulting firms, Milliman, warned about sticker shock ahead for individuals and families buying health insurance.

How did the White House respond? In its usual Orwellian fashion, it said, “Health care costs are falling, thanks to the reform law.” Falling is correct only if you’re standing on your head.

President Obama repeatedly promised that insurance exchanges would save families up to $2,300 a year.

He couldn’t possibly have believed it. From day one, it was obvious the law would push up premiums.

That’s because it requires insurers to cover services rarely covered in the past, puts sick people in the same risk pool with the healthy and slaps insurers with $100 billion in taxes to pass along to consumers.

Who will be clobbered by high premiums? Everyone buying insurance on the exchanges.

Those are people who customarily buy their own insurance (about 25 million) and people who are currently uninsured but have to get it beginning in 2014, and finally millions of people whose employers will drop coverage in response to the law’s costly requirements. Milliman predicts 67 million people in all by 2017.

These people will have no choice but to buy the one-size-fits-all “essential benefits package.”

That includes treatment for drug addiction, maternity care and dental and vision care for children. Only 2% of plans currently include all these services. When the law compels insurers to cover more, it compels consumers to pay more.

The Ohio Department of Insurance says the requirements will push up premiums 20% to 30%.It cheats the couple not having any more children and the straight-arrows who will never shoot heroin.

The healthy also get whacked. Until now, most states helped people with pre-existing conditions by setting up separate, subsidized risk pools.

Someone in the sickest 5% of the population will use 17 times as much care as a healthy person, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The Obama health law pools everyone together and requires the healthy to pay as much as the sick.

This is like asking you to subsidize the premiums of the guy who has 15 speeding tickets and 5 DUIs but is required to have insurance! (they do exist by the way- High risk pools)

See Adverse Selection. 🙂

So what’s the answer…Slick Marketing!! 🙂

Uninsured: The White House recently released details about how it plans to market ObamaCare to the uninsured. What it reveals is that most of them don’t want what the administration is trying to force them to buy.

In a series of slides posted on the Health and Human Services’ website, the administration explains how it plans to market ObamaCare to the uninsured.

Let’s leave aside for a minute the oddity of this effort. Its backers have endlessly touted ObamaCare as a miracle of modern government that will at long last bring insurance within reach of 48 million people who desperately want it. Besides, the law mandates that everyone buy ObamaCare coverage.

So why the need for a big marketing push at all?

Once you look at the marketing slides the HHS has produced, you find the answer.

It turns out that the Democrats and the Obama administration apparently didn’t bother to investigate who these uninsured people actually are before they forced through a $1.8 trillion plan to help them.

What they’ve learned since is that more than half of the 48 million who the government says are uninsured aren’t interested in health insurance, which is why they don’t bother to buy it in the first place.

The administration now admits that vast numbers of the uninsured will be unlikely to respond to ObamaCare’s marketing pitches.

The biggest market segment identified by HHS, in fact, is what it describes as “healthy and young,” who make up 48% of the uninsured population.

They have “a low motivation to enroll” because they are in “excellent to very good health” and so “take health for granted.”

Plus, as the HHS has apparently just discovered, most of them say that cost is the main reason they don’t have coverage.

Then there are the “passive and unengaged,” which make up 15% of the uninsured and also have a “low motivation to enroll” because they “live for today.” They also cite cost as a key factor.

The problem, of course, is that ObamaCare will make insurance vastly more expensive for many of those who fall into these groups by larding on new benefit mandates and placing limits on premium-lowering deductions and co-pays. It will also introduce insurance market rules that force the young and healthy to subsidize premiums for those older and sicker.

State insurance commissioners have been warning the administration about how all this will cause “rate shocks.”

And even ObamaCare’s backers admit that its subsidies won’t compensate for all the new costs these rules will impose, making it even less likely that these groups will sign.

Indeed, the only group likely to rush into ObamaCare’s arms are the 29% who the HHS says are “sick, active and worried” who will have the “highest predicted responsiveness” to mass media ads.

See adverse selection. And Moral Hazard. And you should understand why this whole thing is so doomed….

If only these people sign up, ObamaCare’s premiums will spiral out of control, as the pool of insured gets sicker and more expensive.

And that, in turn, will cause still more of the young and healthy to drop insurance and taxpayer subsidy costs to skyrocket.

Democrats may think that a big, slick marketing campaign can change all this. Our guess is that it will be about as effective as Ford’s was for the Edsel. (IBD)

But you get to pay for it, in perpetuity!! 🙂

Imagine if you and your friends split the tab for coffee every day, and then someone who orders a five-course meal joins the group. Oliver Wyman, management consultants, reported that putting people with pre-existing conditions in the risk pool will push up premiums 40%.

Similarly, Milliman predicts medical claims going up 32% on average and by as much as 62% in California and 80% in Ohio by 2017.

$100 billion in new federal sales taxes on health plans over the next decade will clobber consumers, too. In New York, where premiums will be highest, the taxes will add $900 a year to the cost of a family plan, Oliver Wyman estimates.

The White House dismisses concerns about rising premiums, saying consumers with moderate incomes will get subsidies. That’s like arguing that it’s OK for food prices to double because the needy can get food stamps. Taxpayers foot the bill for subsidies. And consumers ineligible for them get socked with sky-high costs.

Even with subsidies, millions of people coerced to sign up will stop paying premiums. A family with two adults, two kids and a household income of $35,300 will be eligible for an $11,090 subsidy paid directly to the insurer, but they will have to pay at least $118 a month toward the premium.

Families living paycheck to paycheck will default in order to make rent or car payments.

This is the mortgage crisis and the college loan crisis all over again. Another gift from the politicians who think Washington knows best. (IBD)

‘Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.’ –George Washington

Obama, The Economy Slayer

Last Time the US Senate passed a Budget: 1,413 days ago

The iPad wasn”t even on the Market back then!

The budget deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.4 trillion, followed by $1.3 trillion deficits in 2010 and 2011.  In fiscal year 2012 the deficit again surpassed the $1 trillion mark, the Treasury announced in October. And 2013 is expected to be just as bad.

But ask a Liberal about this and the raving pit bull slobbering with hate with try and bite your face off. It’s all those “Obstructionist” Republicans fault. They won’t pass a Budget that the Democrats like so they ignore it, pretend it never existed, and blame them for the whole problem to begin with.

If only they would just do what the Republicans want. If only every American would just do what they want, when they want them them to, because they want them too.

Simple enough, right?  Just do as you’re told when you’re told. That’s it.

Utopia, peace, and BY-Partisanship awaits you if you just do as your told without question. 🙂

If you want a sense of just how massive the nation’s debt problem is, consider this: The U.S. added $226 billion in new debt in just the 35 days since President Obama missed the legal deadline to submit his budget.

That’s more than the government will spend this year on education, homeland security, law enforcement, housing aid, energy and the environment, combined.

Do that 5 times and you have an amount equal to the OMG! The Sky is Falling decrease in the increase called the Sequester.

A 1921 law requires the president to submit his budget plan to Congress on the first Monday in February, but Obama so far hasn’t produced one, and the White House says it won’t release its plan to get the nation’s deficits and debt under control until sometime in April.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, haven’t produced an annual budget — also required by law — since 2009. Over that time, the nation’s debt has climbed $5.5 trillion, according to the Treasury Department.

But as we know, that’s all Bush’s Fault. Democrats are completely free of any responsibility for even one dime of this. 🙂

And they can’t fix it because of “Obstructionist” Republicans. 🙂

Senate Budget Committee Democrats are now promising to introduce a budget plan this week.

Believe it when I don’t see it. Can you make one out of Smoke & Mirrors?

April Fools?

Obama initially claimed the holdup on his fiscal year 2014 budget was the last-minute “fiscal cliff” deal, which required them to redo their budget figures.

That agreement let the Bush tax cuts expire for people with incomes over $400,000, while making the rest of the lower Bush tax rates permanent. It also extended unemployment insurance, put off the automatic sequester spending cuts by two months, and let the Social Security payroll tax break expire.

“Because these issues were not resolved until the American Taxpayer Relief Act was enacted on Jan. 2, 2013, the administration was forced to delay some of its FY 2014 budget preparations, which in turn will delay the budget’s submission to Congress,” Jeffrey Zients, a director at the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan in mid-January.

But the fiscal cliff deal delayed by just one day the Congressional Budget Office’s annual report, which also had to account for all those fiscal cliff changes. The CBO budget and economic outlook report came out on Feb. 5.

The budget holdup comes as Obama and Democrats try to figure out how to deal with the nation’s debt crisis while protecting their favored spending programs and claiming only to want to raise taxes on the “rich.”

As the Hill reported this week, “disputes over tax cuts, spending reductions and entitlement reform all present challenges to Budget Committee chairwoman Patty Murray and Majority Leader Harry Reid.”

Meanwhile, Obama has been talking up a grand bargain again with Republicans, trading entitlement reforms for more tax hikes, before releasing his own detailed plan on how he would do it.

During the 2012 campaign, Obama told voters that all America needed to get its deficits under control was to ask the rich to pay “a little more so we can pay down our debt in a balanced way.”

After he won re-election, he talked as though the debt crisis was nearly solved. At a press conference early this year, he said the only thing left to do was “closing some additional loopholes (and) doing some additional cuts.”

But the latest CBO report makes it clear that the debt crisis is far from over, despite an intervening $620 billion tax hike on the wealthy that Obama secured as part of the fiscal cliff deal.

The CBO projects that under current law, deficits will fall for the next two years, then start climbing again. By 2023, red ink will be near $1 trillion again.

And debt as a share of the economy will start climbing as well, starting in 2018. The CBO predicts that just publicly traded federal debt will reach 77% of the economy in a decade’s time. Debt averaged just 41% of GDP from 1948 to 2008.

Entitlements Key

Obama has also said he will consider only modest changes to Medicare and Medicaid, and wants hands off Social Security. Leading congressional Democrats have vowed to fight any significant changes to entitlements.

But the CBO also makes clear that these programs must be ad dressed: “Unless the laws governing those programs are changed,” it noted, “debt will rise sharply relative to GDP after 2023.”

With Ryan promising a plan that not only cuts the deficit without more tax hikes but also produces a balanced budget in a decade, the debate over spending, taxes and the national debt is about to get very interesting.

Ancient Chinese Curse: “May you live in Interesting Times” 🙂

The Next great Crisis is coming and boy the drama, the hair pulling, the teeth nashing, Sky is Falling, Name-Calling, OMG! It’s the End of the World, grandma will be eating dog food, kids will starve,The Rich are Evil, “fairness” continues.

Situation Normal, All F*cked Up. 🙂

Two Face

The Sky is falling and we’re going to make you suffer for the sequester by ratcheting up the pain and the fear.

BUT…we will give millions to a Nation run by Terrorists that we helped create!!!!

Calling it a “good-faith effort” to help the Egyptian people, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry released $250 million in economic aid.

Oh, and after 4 years and 7,000 comments I was banned from The Huffington post for “offensive” and “abusive” ad hominem attacks.

Ever been there? It’s nothing BUT offensive and abusive ad hominem attacks.

Liberals are so two-faced.

Speaking of the Sky is not Falling…

The White House is retreated from its doomsday predictions about the impact of the $85 billion in federal spending cuts as they enter a second week — with Republican leaders appearing at least satisfied about delivering on their promise to limit government spending and hold down taxes.

Gene Sperling, the White House’s top economic adviser, repeatedly said Sunday the cuts will not hurt as much on “Day One” as they will over the long haul.   

“Nobody ever suggested that this … was going to have all its impact in the first few days,” he told “NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It is a slow grind.”

His remarks are in contrast to weeks of President Obama and his Cabinet warning that the cuts will result in furloughs or pay cuts for middle-class wage-earners such as teachers, Capitol Hill janitors and air traffic controllers, which they said could cause 90-minutes delays at major U.S. airports.

Sperling declined at least twice to directly answer questions about whether the worst-case-scenario rhetoric has hurt the president’s credibility on the issue. He instead stuck to his argument that independent economists forecast the cuts will result in 750,000 fewer jobs and that corporate executives now anticipate slower economic growth.

“These are not the Sky is Falling! Doomsday Predictions you are looking for….” (ala Star Wars at Mos Eisley).

Oh no! it will be slower than the slowest recovery in 80 years!

Martha, bar the door, the Apocalypse is here!

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN’s “State of the Union” Americans absorbed similar cuts once already this year.

“This modest reduction of 2.4 percent in spending over the next six months is a little more than the average American experienced just two months ago, when their own pay went down when the payroll tax holiday expired,” the Kentucky Republican said.

Congress agreed to the cuts, known as sequester, in 2011 after failing to agree on more measure reductions — to defense and some domestic spending. However, the cuts were intended to be so drastic that Democrats and Republicans would be forced to compromise before they started.

Still, Sperling rejected several Republican-backed plans and said no compromise would be reached unless the party agrees to tax increases.

My way or the Highway!

“This is not a win for Republicans,” Sperling said. “This cuts into military preparedness.”

BUT liberals hate the military and want to slash it to the bone anyhow! This is EXACTLY what they wanted. Which is why it was in e Sequester to make the Republicans blink in the first place.

“Our hope is as more Republicans start to see this pain in their own districts they will choose bipartisan compromise over this absolutist position,” he said.

Aka, we’ll ratchet up the pain and make them do it our way or ELSE you’ll “Regret it”! 🙂

And our absolutist position on the need for more Tax increases is non-negotiable and not bi-partisan nor a compromise!!

So Two Faced…

DON’T DO AS I DO, DO AS I SAY!

But because the next great Crisis to end civilization is coming….

All of this comes ahead of a new, March 27 deadline that could spell a government shutdown and a debt-ceiling clash coming in May.

And, of course it will be the Republicans fault. The Democrats are perfectly reasonable about their absolutist fear mongering.

And Grandma will out in the cold eating dog food.

Republicans will be stealing candy from babies.

You’ll have no cops or firefighters.

They’ll make you wait an extra 90 minutes at the airport.

More Illegals we wanted to release anyways will be released.

We’ll stop pretending we care about the border.

And you’ll get even more horse in your meat.

AND IT WILL BE ALL YOUR FAULT!

So Blame the Republicans!

Blame the Rich!

Blame Corporate America!

But don’t you Ever dare to blame Obama and The Democrats!

You’ll “regret” that if you do, you racist, homophobic, misogynist, Obstructionist TEA BAGGER idiot. You piece of human filth!

And just imagine what it will be like when they are forced to cut spending?

The billions in cuts apply to the remainder of fiscal 2013, which ends Sept. 30. But without a deal they will continue slashing government spending by about $1 trillion more over a 10-year period.

That’s 100 Billion a year. Obama and Democrats blow through that in 20 days.

So what big deal…

All Hail Armageddon! 🙂

The Audacity of Dishonesty

1. Announcing a massive $26 billion mortgage deal with “abusive” banks, the president blamed everybody for record foreclosures except the party most culpable: government.

Speaking Thursday from the White House, Obama scolded “irresponsible” and “reckless” lenders, who “sold homes to people who couldn’t afford them.”

Yeah, they dragged people into it, held them down and forced them to do it!

And the people came in and demanded it first!

Back in 2003, as the Examiner’s Philip Klein points out, <Barney> Frank said that the government-sponsored entities were not in any sort of crisis. “The more people exaggerate these problems,” Frank told the New York Times, “the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

For the most part, private firms such as Countrywide Financial were issuing “nontraditional” mortgages in order to package them off to Wall Street and make money, not to please Barney Frank. Like most policymakers, Frank didn’t appear to see the housing bubble or looming subprime crisis before it was too late. (WP)

He <Obama> also cited buyers who bought homes bigger than their budgets, and Wall Street bankers who packaged the shaky mortgages and traded them for “profit.”

“It was wrong,” he asserted. And now the nation’s “biggest banks will be required to right these wrongs.”

Obama acts as if the private sector bears all the responsibility for the mortgage mess. But he and his attorney general know it’s merely a scapegoat for the reckless government housing policies they and their ilk drafted and enforced in the run-up to the crisis.

Starting in the mid-1990s — in a historic first — it became federal regulatory policy to force all U.S. lenders to scrap traditional lending standards for home loans on the grounds they were “racially discriminatory.”

President Clinton fretted that blacks and other minorities could not qualify for mortgages at nearly the same rates as whites and Asians. So Clinton codified more “flexible” underwriting standards in a “Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending,” and entered it into the Federal Register.

At the same time, he set up a little-known federal body made up of 10 regulatory agencies — the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending — to enforce the looser standards. It threatened lenders to either ease credit for low-income borrowers or face investigations for lending discrimination and suffer the related bad publicity. It also threatened to deny them expansion plans and access to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“The agencies will not tolerate lending discrimination in any form,” the 20-page document warned financial institutions. The task force enforced these policies throughout the Bush administration.

According to Peter Ferrara, senior fellow at the Carleson Center for Public Policy:

“This overregulation reached the point of forcing lenders to discount bad credit history, no credit history, no savings, lack of steady employment, a high ratio of mortgage obligations to income, undocumented income, and inability to finance down payment and closing costs, while counting unemployment benefits and even welfare as income in qualifying for a mortgage.

“This” he said, “turned into government-sanctioned looting of the banks.”

The Justice Department — along with HUD, which regulated Fannie and Freddie — proved the most aggressive members of the fair-lending task force. Eric Holder, then acting as deputy AG, ordered lenders to actually “target” African-Americans for home mortgages they couldn’t otherwise afford. Obama cheered Holder on as an inner-city community organizer who also pressured banks to ease credit for home borrowers.

In other words, the same two officials now leading the charge to punish “abusive” lenders had egged them on before the crisis.(IBD)

2. The Obama administration is now telling liberals that it is not backing down on its new health-care mandate, even as it coos of compromise to religious groups appalled by it. These messages may seem to be contradictory, but actually the administration has been quite consistent: Nothing it has ever said on this issue has been trustworthy.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has been the leading misleader. The administration, recall, has decided that almost all employers must cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance plans — even if those employers are religious universities, hospitals, and charities that reject those practices.

So she has tried to make the mandate seem more moderate than it is. In USA Today, she writes that “in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith.” Taken at face value, this statement would seem to imply that Notre Dame could escape the mandate if it fired its non-Catholic employees. That policy would be outrageous: What gives the federal government the legitimate authority to tell a religious institution how it should structure its mission? But in fact the administration would make the university jump through several more hoops. It would also have to expel its non-Catholic students. And even these changes would not be enough, since the university would continue to do much more than attempt to inculcate religious beliefs in its students — which is another test the administration requires for the exemption to apply.

Sebelius says that three states have religious exemptions as narrow as the one the federal government has adopted. The notion that the federal government is imposing the model of three very liberal states — New York, Oregon, and Vermont — on the entire country is not comforting. But even in those states, some employers have been able to sidestep the mandates by, for example, organizing their insurance under federal regulation, which until now has not overridden conscience. The new mandate eliminates that escape route.

Joel Hunter, one of Obama’s pet pastors, says “this policy can be nuanced.” (“I have come to bring nuance,” as Matthew 10:34 does not say.) He is wrong. Either the administration will back off, and allow religious organizations to follow their consciences, or it will not. If it chooses the former course, it may still find a way to increase access to contraception — which is not especially scarce, by the way — but it will have to replace its current policy, not just “nuance” it. (NR)

“Nuance” is the new Orwellian phrase for LYING. 🙂

It’s “complicated” 🙂

But the assurances were greeted Tuesday with skepticism from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has been leading the opposition to the new requirement.

“So far, ‘work this thing through’ is just the sugar-coated version of ‘force you to comply,’ ” Anthony R. Picarello Jr., general counsel for the conference, said in an e-mail.

Remember, compromise with a Liberal means that you compromise your principles to do what THEY want you to do.

3. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked to respond to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s comment that the lack of a budget creates “uncertainty” which is “negative for growth.”

Carney responded: “I have no opinion; the White House has no opinion on Chairman Bernanke’s assessment of how the Senate ought to do its business.”

1,017 Days and Counting!

4. EPIC <The Electronic Privacy Information Center >director Ginger McCall notes that monitoring what people are saying about government policies goes too far and has a chilling effect on free speech.

“The Department of Homeland Security’s monitoring of political dissent has no legal basis and is contrary to core First Amendment principles,” she said.

“The language in the documents makes it quite clear that they are looking for media reports that are critical of the agency and the U.S. government more broadly,” said McCall. “This is entirely outside of the bounds of the agency’s statutory duties.”

DHS officials have admitted that monitoring of social networks for negative opinion was undertaken by the agency, but claim that the operation was a one off test and was quickly dropped as it did not meet “operational requirements or privacy standards,” which “expressly prohibit reporting on individuals’ First Amendment activities.”

EPIC argues otherwise and has presented evidence that suggests the practice is being held up by the DHS an an example that should be emulated.

“They are completely out of bounds here,” McCall said. “The idea that the government is constantly peering over your shoulder and listening to what you are saying creates a very chilling effect to legitimate dissent.(Info Wars)

5. Mexican cartel suspects targeted in the troubled gun-trafficking probe known as Operation Fast and Furious were actually working as FBI informants at the time, according to a congressional memo that describes the case’s mission as a “failure.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has acknowledged that guns were allowed into the hands of Mexican criminals for more than a year in the hope of catching “big fish.”

The memorandum from staffers with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform says the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration were investigating a drug-trafficking organization and had identified cartel associates a year before the ATF even learned who they were. At some point before the ATF’s Fast and Furious investigation progressed — congressional investigators don’t know when — the cartel members became FBI informants.

“These were the ‘big fish,’ ” says the memo, written on behalf of Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “DEA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had jointly opened a separate investigation targeting these two cartel associates. … Yet, ATF spent the next year engaging in the reckless tactics of Fast and Furious in attempting to identify them.”

According to Issa and Grassley, the cartel suspects, whose names were not released, were regarded by FBI as “national-security assets.” One pleaded guilty to a minor offense. The other was not charged. “Both became FBI informants and are now considered unindictable,” the memo says. “This means that the entire goal of Fast and Furious — to target these two individuals and bring them to justice — was a failure.”

Representatives with the Justice Department and its subagencies declined to comment.

6. Deputy Attorney General James Cole had informed the committee in a letter last week that it would be “impossible” to comply with the document request by Issa’s deadline.

At issue are thousands of pages of internal Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) documents from last year which the Justice Department has provided to the investigating Justice Inspector General, but which the Justice Department initially indicated are not subject to congressional review because of the constitutional separation of powers.

7. Last Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to answer questions about his role in the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. However, instead of answers, Congress got more defiance, more arrogance, and more wasted time with an attorney general who clearly feels no sense of obligation to the American people or our rule of law. …

In a rash attempt to deflect attention away from himself and his own irresponsibility, Holder let Congress know that the Obama administration is still working toward the day when it can reinstate former President Bill Clinton’s so-called “assault weapons” ban. According to Holder:

“This administration has consistently favored the reinstitution of the assault weapons ban. It is something that we think was useful in the past with regard to the reduction that we’ve seen in crime, and certainly would have a positive impact on our relationship and the crime situation in Mexico.”

It’s difficult to follow Holder’s logic here, but it goes something like this …

The Obama administration — particularly Eric Holder’s Justice Department — oversaw an epic scandal whereby our own federal government illegally funneled thousands of firearms into the hands of Mexican drug lords. This contributed to the death of one U.S. Border Patrol agent and hundreds of Mexicans.

Despite being head of the Justice Department and our nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Eric Holder claims he doesn’t know how or why this scandal occurred, or even who under his charge may have authorized it. He also refuses to turn over critical documents to congressional investigators that could help prevent something this tragic and corrupt from ever happening again.

Therefore, Obama and Holder are confident that if they can ban a large number of the legal firearms that law-abiding Americans use every day for self-defense, hunting, and recreational and competitive target shooting, it will help solve Mexico’s crime problem.

Now don’t you feel better… 🙂

The Game is a Foot

Debt: Wasn’t it just last summer Republicans and Democrats nearly came to blows over raising the debt ceiling? Well, guess what — President Obama is back, asking for another $1.2 trillion. Are we being gamed here?

After last summer’s imbroglio, the debt limit was raised to $15.194 trillion. At the time, in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling, the GOP sought token spending cuts. But on the now widely discredited notion that government spending boosts the economy the Democrats wanted to spend and borrow even more.

Now, with the economy struggling and 2012 looming, we’re “just” $100 billion away from hitting the debt ceiling again, and President Obama wants the OK for another $1.2 trillion in debt, lifting the total to $16.394 trillion.

Coming just after Democrats in Congress threatened to close the government unless Republicans agreed to extend payroll tax cuts for two months, we’re beginning to see a pattern: Democrats create a crisis, blame Republicans for it, then reap the political benefits.

Cynical as it sounds, it’s working. President Obama’s favorability in a recent Gallup Poll showed a hefty 10-point gain from earlier in the year. And many congressional Democrats believe they can win in 2012.

Knowing full well their ideas don’t sell, Democrats are intentionally manufacturing these minicrises, using people’s fear of chaos and a pliant liberal media to blame the GOP for Democrats’ own failures.

Quite a feat, considering how unpopular Democratic policies are. A new Rasmussen Poll shows that 77% of Americans want deficits cut, 71% want spending cut and 59% want taxes cut.

Americans see their once-bright future systematically being destroyed by a mountain of debt. And President Obama has presided over the largest increase in debt in U.S. history, adding $5 trillion to our debt load.

Today, each taxpayer owes $132,744 — $48,000 of it added since 2008. At current rates, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio may rise from 100% now to 250% by 2035 — twice the level of bankrupt Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal.

Even so, it’s 960 days — 2.6 years — since the Democrats even passed a budget as required by law. Yet, the media look the other way — it doesn’t fit the narrative.

If you ask Americans, they blame Republicans for this malfeasance as much as Democrats, though Democrats held sole control of Congress from 2006 to 2010, and the White House since 2008.

Democrats are building an ever larger and more oppressive government, ignoring the people’s expressed wishes — all the while saddling taxpayers with trillions more in debt, pushing us toward national bankruptcy and making it look like it’s the Republicans’ fault.

Let’s hope voters come to realize on their own, without help from the feckless GOP, how they’re being played for chumps.

I won’t bet on it.

Super Progressive Liberal Eugene Robinson: Let me be clear that I applaud President Obama and the Democrats for the political victory they won last week. The impact was to weaken the influence of the most reactionary and clueless faction in Congress — the Tea Party Republicans — and strengthen the hand of both progressives and pragmatic conservatives. This can only be a good thing.

BUT

But let me also be honest: It’s crazy to have spent so much brainpower and energy on a skirmish that was purely tactical, while blithely ignoring the enormous challenges we face. It would be difficult to squander all of our nation’s tremendous advantages. At present, however, we seem to be doing our best.

Yeah, and the Liberal Democrats are leading the charge for party politics uber alles and celebrating their petty political childishness where winning the political bully fight is more important than anything.

And the Republican just stand there like the nerdy kid as he gets the wedgie repeatedly, the Three Stooges eye poke then laughed at, and then beaten to a pulp by the bully and his friends and finally hung up on a door hanger by his underwear.

And they continue to do it repeatedly.

So frustrating.

 

 

Leadership

Obama is off to Asia, as the Budget and Spending Cuts heats up again. Now that’s Leadership!! 🙂

The president gave the “super committee” on deficits his proposals in September but has not since worked directly with the bipartisan group, whose report is due by November 23, a few days after he returns from Asia.

The panel has struggled to bridge the differences between Republicans and Democrats. If their negotiations stall or fail while he is away, Obama could face tough questions about why he did not do more to help broker an agreement.

Under a deal struck in August after a fractious fight to raise the U.S. debt ceiling, Congress needs to accept the super committee’s proposals by December 23 or there will be sharp cuts to military, social service and other budgets.

Republicans have accused the president of already turning his back on Congress, focusing on the 2012 election and pushing through executive actions instead of working with lawmakers on jobs and other issues.

“While he was involved in the spending and debt limit talks, the president has completely removed himself this time around,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

It will be the latest sobering economic milestone that few were hoping to see: The U.S. national debt – any day now – will soar above the $15 trillion mark. (but you can have some solace that it is all Bush’s Fault! and those “obstructionist” Republicans!) 🙂

As of this writing, the total debt is $14.97 trillion, so moving beyond the symbolic $15 trillion is a foregone conclusion. When the unwelcome milestone is reached, it will come at a volatile time both in this country and abroad.

In Washington, a polarized Congress has ground to a halt in the dispute on how to jumpstart the economy and reduce the country’s deficits. Only a few months ago, the acrimonious debate on Capitol Hill about raising the debt ceiling – a debate that almost caused the Treasury Department to default on its debts – illustrated the enormous partisan divide that still shows no signs of improving.

The jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America’s unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

Never Let a Crisis go to waste!! 🙂

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent — a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

From late 2007, when the recession began, to early 2010, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits rose more than four-fold, to 11.5 million.

But the economy has remained so weak that an analysis of long-term unemployment data suggests that about 2 million people have used up 99 weeks of checks and still can’t find work.

Lawmakers will have to decide whether to continue the extended benefits by the end of this year. If the program ends, nearly 2.2 million people will be cut off by February.

So what do the Democrats want to do: SPEND EVEN MORE! And if they can’t do that they will just sit in a corner, hold their breath and turn blue until you vote out those evil Republicans who won’t let them do it!

And The Republicans?  Wimps! They want to be like to much to do anything productive and just whine.

So expect the same crap for “super committee” that occurred for the Debt Ceiling fight. The Democrats will demonize and lie and fearmonger and the Republicans will cave and nothing of substance will happen and everyone will in the media will blame the Republicans.

So will get some wimpy smoke blown up our asses that “does something” that does nothing at all.

After , the “target” of the Supercommittee is 1.5 trillion over 10 years (150 billion a year) is spend by Congress in just over a Month!

IT’S A JOKE!

But fear not, Obama is on it! (after he get back from his ‘rock star’ tour of Asia and some golf!)

The federal agency that’s spending huge sums to recruit more food-stamp recipients, transform the inner city diet and track what minority kids eat for lunch is investing millions to train “underserved” Hispanic students to someday work for it.

It’s part of the Obama Administration’s ongoing effort to help minorities advance with publicly-funded programs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has given “Hispanic-serving institutions” $8.8 million to “support underserved students” interested in “critical issues” related to agriculture. The idea is to boost the number of Hispanics on the agency’s payroll.

The money will pay for programs that tackle global food security and hunger, climate change, bio-based energy development, childhood obesity (Michelle Obama’s favorite topic) and food safety, according to a USDA announcement. In all, 20 “Hispanic-serving institutions” or HSIs will get grants to help the targeted population “develop a skilled American work force” that will someday join the USDA ranks

Now that’s Job creation! 🙂

After 3 years, you’d think they’d have gotten SOMETHING DONE!  (Not really, but the sentiment is right) 😦

Nope. And it’s unlikely they will anytime soon. So you’re on your own. 🙂

MSDNC UPDATE

Huffington Post writer Alex Wagner.on Real Time With Bill Maher and when asked about what should be changed in the Constitution, Wagner said we should get rid of the Second Amendment.

Bill Maher, HBO: “Let’s ask Alex. What would you change in the Constitution?”

Alex Wagner, Huffington Post: “Well, I’m going to be pilloried for this. I think get rid of the second Amendment, the right to bear arms. I just think in the grand scheme of the rights that we have; the right of assembly, free speech, I mean, owning a gun does not, it does not tally on the same level as those other Constitutional rights. And being more discreet about who gets to have a firearm and right to kill with a firearm, I think is something that would be in our national interest to revisit that.”

Thankfully, Rep. Darrell Issa was on the same panel and set her straight.

Issa: We have a problem in America which is we misunderstand quite frankly what the Second Amendment is for, it’s for law abiding citizens to have a right both to protect themselves and to be protected from living under tyranny.

But Government is hear to Help you! 🙂

And it’s all the Republicans Fault! The Tea Partiers Fault! Right Wingers! Corporate America (that hires people)!! The “rich” (who also hire people)!!

Vote Obama 2012 for More More Years! 🙂

 

Game Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Obama Administration has stepped up drone attacks in Somalia.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Insanity Awaits Inexperienced Drivers

The Definition of Insanity it is said is to be doing the exact same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

The <California> State Board of Equalization has estimated there are 25,000  affiliates in California about 10,000 of them making money through  Amazon.

Not anymore, though. The State passed an “internet sales tax” where e-tailers must collect money for the state.
Amazon and Overstock had canceled 10’s of thousand of business affiliates.
And others may follow.
So those small business men now have even LESS business and even LESS revenue. So less sales. Less sales taxes from them.
So they’ll undoubtedly have LESS jobs.

Good job, Democrats!

Just days after the president’s class warfare shot at corporate jet manufacturers (the same ones they praised last March and in the stimulus bill) comes this fact:

Aircraft manufacturers, fuel suppliers, repair services and other segments of the industry employ 1.2 million people and generate $150 billion in economic activity, according to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association.

Damn, that’s a lot of “rich” people. 🙂

So people buy less planes. There is less manufacturing and servicing, so people will be laid off…

“While such talk may appear to some as good politics, the reality is that it hurts one of the leading manufacturing and exporting industries in the United States,” Peter Bunce, president of the aviation manufacturers association, and Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said in a letter to Obama.

Obama is trying to demonize the private plane industry and engage in class warfare, Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., said.

“The reality is that good people lose jobs when we play politics with an entire industry,” he said. 

20,000 Jobs have been lost in recent years due to cutbacks in orders. This won’t help.

But at least we stuck it to those damn “rich” people!

“You go talk to your constituents and ask them, ‘Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?'”– Obama

The workers on the assembly lines, suppliers, maintenance and sales people, need not apply. 🙂

And he whipped up his “base” and fed the little raptors some  empty-calorie meat to devour.

And, of course, there is the chorus of  “but it’s fair!” 🙂

And we wouldn’t want to be unfair now would we….

The day before Obama’s remarks, the president praised Alcoa workers for making the wings of Air Force One during a trip to Iowa.

“Alcoa is showing us the future we can build here in eastern Iowa and across the country,” he proclaimed.

“The very next day he says he wants to kill any tax incentive to buy the business jets that have Alcoa products in them,” Aerospace Industries Association president Marion Blakey complained Thursday. “It’s baffling and disturbing.” She called Air Force One “the biggest corporate jet in America.”

Yeah, but that was yesterday. What can you do for him TODAY. That’s what matters.

The upshot: Obama says that Alcoa must lose business among American customers to repeal a tax break Obama and the Democrats supported because Republicans want to balance the budget.

Damn those evil Republicans! If only we could get rid of them, Utopia would reign on Earth and we could spend as much as we want, when we want, because we want, and where we want and everything would be fine!

But at least  all his hungry little apparatchiks will be fed by the no-calorie class warfare meat.

He has to throw them some meat, or they’ll devour him too!  (Greece anyone?)

Dems are faced with cutting back on the very programs that brought  them into power (gasp).  They have been buying votes with gimmee  programs for years and it’s caused a whole lot of unsustainable  addiction.  Now that the state is broke they have to cut loose the  addicts and those voters will be furious, as you might expect any addict  would be! 

So the monster they created to get where they are threatens to eat them too if they don’t supply their addicts. Problem is, the drugs will kill us all eventually.

So, the solution–Raise Taxes!!

The #1 Democrat solution for everything.

The only alternative to responsible cost cutting is, RAISE TAXES, and do it fast…because this is a political emergency!    Careers are at risk – their careers!  Control over State is at risk –  their control!  It doesn’t get any worse.  So they do what dems do best  – they tax! 

This time their plan is going severely damage the core working class  by beating up on businesses (employers) just struggling to survive in an  already business-unfriendly climate.  One more burden on them could  prove fatal and that would only add to the political disaster dems were  hoping to avoid.

For starters, Obama’s most recent budget calls for adding $9.5 trillion in new debt over the next decade. If you got rid of the “accelerated depreciation” of corporate jets, Reuters economics columnist James Pethokoukis calculates, it would save a whopping .03 percent of that total.

Sadly, the room was full of journalists who do not consider themselves novices but who nonetheless let Obama get away with this demagogic dishonesty. No one asked the president why he suddenly cares so much about getting rid of a tax break he himself was for before he was against it. Indeed, no one asked why, if it is such an affront to the liberal conscience, it was part of Obama’s stimulus bill, which was passed without any Republican votes in the House and only three in the Senate (which means Nancy Pelosi voted for special tax breaks for corporate jets and the GOP didn’t).

More broadly, no one threw a flag on his claim that “every single observer who’s not an elected official, who’s not a politician,” agrees with him on the burning need to raise taxes as part of any budget deal. This is a good example of Obama’s most grating tic, his need to claim that all reasonable and serious people agree with him and anyone who disagrees must be doing so for base or ideological motives.

But at least you stuck to “rich” people! 🙂

And your base is happy for another day. Until the monster awakens again and wants to be fed it’s largess drugs.

FEED ME!  FEED ME!  FEED ME!

Insanity awaits! 🙂

 

Ideological Blindness

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”

The administration’s plan to raise the tax rate on small businesses is part of its plan to raise taxes on all Americans who make more than $250,000 per year—including businesses that file taxes the same way individuals and families do.

Wasn’t it Obama and Company that said they weren’t raising taxes on small businesses? 🙂

And shrinking the size of government programs is the whole F*cking point these days, at the people believe.

But not in Washington. They are still trying to get around it. They don’t want to do it. They just want to look like they are.

Which is why I say, the nuclear hot potato they are playing with will go off in our faces before anyone does anything. Guaranteed though, that the liberal will blame it on anyone but themselves.

Geithner’s explanation of the administration’s small-business tax plan came in an exchange with first-term Rep. Renee Ellmers (R.-N.C.). Ellmers, a nurse, decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 after she became active in the grass-roots opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care reform plan in 2009.

“Overwhelmingly, the businesses back home and across the country continue to tell us that regulation, lack of access to capital, taxation, fear of taxation, and just the overwhelming uncertainties that our businesses face is keeping them from hiring,” Ellmers told Geithner. “They just simply cannot.”

She then challenged Geithner on the administration’s tax plan.

“Looking into the future, you are supporting the idea of taxation, increasing taxes on those who make $250,000 or more. Those are our business owners,” said Ellmers.

Geithner initially responded by saying that the administration’s planned tax increase would hit “three percent of your small businesses.”

Ellmers then said: “Sixty-four percent of jobs that are created in this country are for small business.”

Geithner conceded the point, but then suggested the administration’s planned tax increase on small businesses would be “good for growth.”

Just like the liberal who sight “15 months of private sector job growth” as their way of saying the economy is growing when it’s not. But they want to ignore the burning forest to focus on the one tree that isn’t burning yet and say, “see, I told you it wasn’t on fire!

Raising Taxes during a near-depression is always a good idea. Liberals just don’t get it, and more importantly, don’t WANT to get it. They just want to do what they want to do because they want to do. And they fantasize that it will all work out because in their heads it make so much sense to them. Reality is not their strong suit.

“No, that’s right. I agree with that,” said Geithner. “But just to put it in perspective, it’s important to recognize why are we doing this. You know, our deficits are 10 percent of GDP, higher than they’ve been since any time in the postwar period really. We have a big hole to dig out of, and we have to figure out how to do that in a way that’s balanced, good for growth, fair to people as a whole.”

Geithner, continuing, argued that if the administration did not extract a trillion dollars in new revenue from its plan to increase taxes on people earning more than $250,000, including small businesses, the government would in effect “finance” what he called a “tax benefit” for those people.

What they hell do you call ObamaCare for godsake?

“We’re not doing it because we want to do it, we’re doing it because if we don’t do it, then, again, I have to go out and borrow a trillion dollars over the next 10 years to finance those tax benefits for the top 2 percent, and I don’t think I can justify doing that,” said Geithner.

Ah, there’s the Class WarFare mantra. it always rears it’s ugly head because it’s at the heart of Liberalism.

By the way, the top 1% pay 40% of ALL TAXES. 47% of the American people pay NO TAXES AT ALL!

The top 5% pay 60% of all taxes! (which by the way is well below the $250,000 threshold).

So half the people who pay taxes would be taxed more and the half that doesn’t pay now anyhow wouldn’t. Gee, that sounds like a great idea! 😦

So let’s make them pay more because Liberals want to be “fair” and appease their burning desire for Class Warfare and ‘peasant’ resentment!

Hey, Mr Geithner GOVERNMENT DOES NOT HAVE A REVENUE PROBLEM IT HAS A SPENDING PROBLEM!!!!

And you’re it, buddy!

Not only that, he argued, but cutting spending by as much as the “modest change in revenue” (i.e. $1 trillion) the administration expects from raising taxes on small business would likely have more of a “negative economic impact” than the tax increases themselves would.

“And if we were to cut spending by that magnitude to do it, you’d be putting a huge additional burden on the economy, probably greater negative economic impact than that modest change in revenue,” said Geithner.

Yeah, Over $14,000,000,000,000 in debt is not a worry at all.

Tax and Spend!

Spend and Tax!

When Ellmers finally told Geithner that “the point is we need jobs,” he responded that the administration felt it had “no alternative” but to raise taxes on small businesses because otherwise “you have to shrink the overall size of government programs”—including federal education spending.

Ah, poor baby… 🙂 (This would be the education spending where 12% of students could pass a basic history test after 12 years of it, right?)

https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/are-you-smarter-than-a-12th-grader/

“We’re not doing it because we want to do it, we’re doing it because we see no alternative to a balanced approach to reduce our fiscal deficits,” said Geithner.

Yeah, like cutting spending. The myopic Liberal view only sees Keynesian economics and nothing else.

Tax and Spend. Spend and Tax. Class Warfare. That’s it.

“If you don’t touch revenues and you leave in place the tax cuts for the top 2 percent that were put in place by President Bush, if you leave those in place and you’re trying to bring our deficits down over time, then you have to do exceptionally deep cuts in benefits for middle-class Americans and you have to shrink the overall size of government programs, things like education, to levels that we could not accept as a country,” said Geithner.

So you have to grow the size and scope of government and taxes to shrink a deficit?

Elections have consequences people!

“So to do a balanced approach to reduce our deficits you have to make modest changes in revenues,” he said. “There’s no realistic opportunity to do alternatives to doing that.”(CNS)

What we need is a drastic CUT in SPENDING. The revenues will follow.

But since Liberals can’t even fathom that concept this is what you get.

Now that’s you’re Hope & Change! 🙂

More recently we’ve witnessed the creation of new historical narrative about the financial crisis of 2008. The perceived history, eagerly peddled by liberals and Democrats, is that the crash of 2008 was the result of Wall Street greed. It was unregulated capitalism that brought us to the brink of financial meltdown, the Democrats insisted. And they codified their manufactured history in a law, the Dodd-Frank Act, that completely avoided the true problem.

It’s both surprising and gratifying, therefore, to report that a great revisionist history has just been published by none other than a New York Times reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, and a financial analyst, Joshua Rosner.

In “Reckless Endangerment,” Morgenson and Rosner offer considerable censure for reckless bankers, lax rating agencies, captured regulators and unscrupulous businessmen. But the greatest responsibility for the collapse of the housing market and the near “Armageddon” of the American economy belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and to the politicians who created and protected them. With a couple of prominent exceptions, the politicians were Democrats claiming to do good for the poor. Along the way, they enriched themselves and their friends, stuffed their campaign coffers, and resisted all attempts to enforce market discipline. When the inevitable collapse arrived, the entire economy suffered, but no one more than the poor.

Jim Johnson, adviser to Walter Mondale and John Kerry, amassed a personal fortune estimated at $100 million during his nine years as CEO of Fannie Mae. “Under Johnson,” Morgenson and Rosner write, “Fannie Mae led the way in encouraging loose lending practices among the banks whose loans the company bought. A Pied Piper of the financial sector, Johnson led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the credit crisis of 2008.”

Fannie Mae lied about its profits, intimidated adversaries, bought off members of Congress with lavish contributions, hired (and thereby co-opted) academics, purchased political ads (through its foundation) and stacked congressional hearings with friendly bankers, community activists and advocacy groups (including ACORN). Fannie Mae also hired the friends and relations of key members of Congress (including Rep. Barney Frank’s partner).

“Reckless Endangerment” includes the Clinton administration’s contribution to the home-ownership catastrophe. Clinton had claimed that dramatically increasing homeownership would boost the economy, instead “in just a few short years, all of the venerable rules governing the relationship between borrower and lender went out the window, starting with … the requirement that a borrower put down a substantial amount of cash in a property, verify his income, and demonstrate an ability to service his debts.”

“Reckless Endangerment” utterly deflates the perceived history of the 2008 crash. Yes, there was greed — when is there not? But it was government distortions of markets — not “unregulated capitalism” — that led the economy to disaster. (Mona Charen)

But I’m sure the liberals will CUT that out of the education they are so desperate to preserve. 🙂

Just Spend More Money!

Keep ’em Down

Thomas Sowell: Those who regard government “entitlement” programs as sacrosanct, and regard those who want to cut them back as calloused or cruel, picture a world very different from the world of reality.

To listen to some of the defenders of entitlement programs, which are at the heart of the present financial crisis, you might think that anything the government fails to provide is something that people will be deprived of.

In other words, if you cut spending on school lunches, children will go hungry. If you fail to subsidize housing, people will be homeless. If you fail to subsidize prescription drugs, old people will have to eat dog food in order to be able to afford their meds.

This is the vision promoted by many politicians and much of the media. But, in the world of reality, it is not even true for most people who are living below the official poverty line.

Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck– and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air conditioning, color television and a microwave oven–and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs.

Cell phones and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight even more often than other Americans.

As for housing and homelessness, housing prices are higher and homelessness a bigger problem in places where there has been massive government intervention, such as liberal bastions like New York City and San Francisco. As for the elderly, 80 percent are homeowners. whose monthly housing costs are less than $400, including property taxes, utilities, and maintenance.

The desperately poor elderly conjured up in political and media rhetoric are– in the world of reality– the wealthiest segment of the American population. The average wealth of older households is nearly three times the wealth of households headed by people in the 35 to 44-year-old bracket, and more than 15 times the wealth of households headed by someone under 35 years of age.

If the wealthiest segment of the population cannot pay their own medical bills, who can? The country as a whole is not any richer because the government pays our medical bills– with money that it takes from us.

What about the truly poor, in whatever age brackets? First of all, even in low-income and high-crime neighborhoods, people are not stealing bread to feed their children. The fraction of the people in such neighborhoods who commit most of the crimes are far more likely to steal luxury products that they can either use or sell to get money to support their parasitic lifestyle.

As for the rest of the poor, Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University long ago showed that you could give the poor enough money to lift them all above the official poverty line for a fraction of what it costs to support a massive welfare state bureaucracy.

We don’t need to send the country into bankruptcy, in the name of the poor, by spending trillions of dollars on people who are not poor, and who could take care of themselves. The poor have been used as human shields behind which the expanding welfare state can advance.

The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency, because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus.

We have all heard the old saying about how giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, while teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians.

For politicians, giving a man a fish every day of his life is the way to keep getting his vote. “Entitlement” is just a fancy word for dependency.

As for the scary stories politicians tell, in order to keep the entitlement programs going, as long as we keep buying it, they will keep selling it.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

But give hima fish every day, maybe he will vote for you to give him more fish!

And after all, that’s what really matters. 🙂

An Inefficient Truth

May 13 (Bloomberg) — Medicare, the U.S. health insurance program for the elderly and disabled, and the Social Security trust for the disabled and retirees are running out of money sooner than the government had projected.

While Medicare won’t have sufficient funds to pay full benefits starting in 2024, five years earlier than last year’s estimate, Social Security’s cash to pay full benefits runs short in 2036, a year sooner than the 2010 projection, the U.S. government said today in an annual report.

Both forecasts were affected by a slower-than-anticipated economic recovery, the government said. The estimates for funding add urgency to talks between Democrats and Republicans on ways to cut spending to reduce the U.S. budget deficit.

“Projected long-run program costs for both Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable under currently scheduled financing, and will require legislative corrections if disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers are to be avoided,” according to the report summary.

When Medicare and Social Security funds run short, they will pay less in benefits rather than stop paying entirely. Social Security would have to cut payments by 23 percent, while Medicare would reduce by 10 percent what it pays hospitals and other inpatient care providers.

And if Obamanomics continues how much to you want to bet it will continue to get closer and closer…

Democrats, who have resisted changes to Social Security, said the trustees’ analysis shows there’s time to respond.

“The current situation does not necessitate rushed or severe action,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. “We must continue to protect the Social Security benefits our seniors count on.”

Yeah, lets wait at least until after the 2012 Presidential Election…Then if Obama wins we can still do what we want, and if a Republican wins we can start sounding like the Republicans now so as to scare people into voting for us in 2014. 🙂

It’s all about self-interest, after all.

We just need another panel to “study” the issue, issue a report that we can ignore but it wastes lots of time with “well let’s see what the panel comes back with” like Obama did in 2010 with the Debt Commission.

It’s been 744 days since a Democrat in Congress passed a Budget. So what’s another year+ 🙂

Let’s not do something that might hurt my re-election, after all…

Social Security law requires program spending to match revenue, so a lack of action by lawmakers by that time will mean benefits will have to be cut 23 percent — or the Social Security payroll tax increased to 16 percent, or a combination, the report said. Congress has never allowed the program’s two trust funds to be depleted.

Medicare, to stay solvent for the next 75 years, would have to immediately raise payroll taxes by 24 percent, or cut current benefit payments by 17 percent, Cori Uccello, a senior health fellow with the American Academy of Actuaries in Washington, said in a phone interview.

The longer the U.S. waits to address the coming shortages in Medicare and Social Security, the more painful it may be, said Uccello. A U.S. delay in extending Medicare’s fiscal life may force cuts for current beneficiaries rather than diminishing them for people who enter the program several years from now. (Bloomberg)

Democrats’ endless refrain is that the Ryan plan would “end Medicare as we know it.”

Let’s be clear: Maintaining the status quo would also “end Medicare as we know it.”  The program would go belly-up, resulting in involuntary European-style austerity measures, dramatically slashed benefits, and vastly higher taxes.  Which of these options is truly unacceptable? (townhall.com)

Long Before I began even a little bit political I knew Social Security was doomed to failure.

The people in charge of it are totally immune. Always a bad idea. Because then it’s all about THEIR self-interest. Not yours.

P.s.

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signed into law on Friday an immigration bill giving police authority to question suspects about their immigration status which is similar to a controversial measure passed in Arizona.

The law also requires many private employers to check the immigration status of newly hired workers on a federal database called E-Verify.

Deal said the law will take the burden off Georgia’s schools, hospitals and prisons by reducing the number of illegal immigrants in the state.

“This legislation is a responsible step forward in the absence of federal action,” Deal said during a signing ceremony in his office at the Capitol.
Cries of racism in 3…2…1…. 🙂  (Townhall.com)

Political Football

Bet you didn’t know those devastating Tornadoes were a political football did you?

Yes, folks, it is Football Season. (No NFL need apply).

You see, they were caused not only by global warming, but BY the Republicans! 🙂

Imagine that! What a revelation!!

In times of tragedy, there are always hucksters trying to use that tragedy to sell a position, a product, or a belief. In ancient times, tragedy was the impetus used to appease the gods and to embrace religion. In light of yesterday’s op-ed on The Center for American Progress’s Think Progress blog that essentially blames Republicans for last week’s devastating tornadoes, it seems some opportunists just can’t break the pattern of huckster behavior in the face of disaster.

The left-leaning Center for American Progress published a blog post Thursday blaming Republicans for the tornadoes that devastated the South earlier this week.

Even so-called “journalists” go in on the act:

On Thursday night, looking at the tornadoes across the South, ABC’s Sam Champion ridiculously claimed “everybody is asking if climate change played a role here.” Brian Williams blamed humans: “What’s going on here? Is this something we have done?”

On the NBC Nightly News,Williams prompted Greg Forbes of the Weather Channel:

Let’s be candid here. When you and I go home, you see friends and family, you get e-mail from people you know. People ask the same question: What’s going on here? Is this something we have done? What has happened to the climate because it seems so much of what we cover is relentless weather-related tragedy?

“The congressional delegations of these states – Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, and Kentucky – overwhelmingly voted to reject the science that polluting the climate is dangerous,” wrote CAP’s Brad Johnson. “They are deliberately ignoring the warning from scientists.”

Johnson’s justification is that climate scientist Kevin Trenberth warned the American Meteorological Society in January that “Given that global warming is unequivocal, the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warning rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.’”

Actually he said: “Given that global warming is unequivocal,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth cautioned the American Meteorological Society in January of this year, “the null hypothesis should be that all weather events are affected by global warming rather than the inane statements along the lines of ‘of course we cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming.”

At the last count, the tornadoes has claimed 297 lives – the greatest number of deaths by tornadoes since April of 1974 when 315 people were killed throughout the South and Midwest. President Obama traveled to Alabama – the hardest-hit state – Friday morning to survey the damage, after signing an Alabama Disaster Declaration.

Johnson has not yet returned The Daily Caller’s request for comment.

UPDATE: Despite attempts to link the tornadoes to climate change, many experts dismiss the theory. Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University said, “If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it’s agreed upon by the tornado community that it’s not a real increase.”

“It’s having to do with better (weather tracking) technology, more population, the fact that the population is better educated and more aware. So we’re seeing them more often,” he added.

And Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), appeared to dismiss the global warming connection Thursday when he said, “Actually what we’re seeing is springtime.”

CAP, however, released a report Friday, that also tried to link extreme weather to global warming.

According to the press release, the report “gathers, condenses, and synthesizes scientific data regarding extreme weather and its links to global warming to provide context to the recent surge in extreme weather events.”

UPDATE 2: Brad Johnson responds by telling TheDC, “I did not blame Republicans for the tornadoes.”

I guess he was misquoted saying exactly what he said, as most Liberals are when they get their hands caught in their ideologically rabid cookie jar.

And then there’s our Dear Leader:

Barack Obama is now in full campaign mode. He tried doing the governing thing for two years. It didn’t work out, and now he needs scapegoats for his failed policies.

The price of gasoline is currently more than $4 per gallon as oil has skyrocketed to more than $112 per barrel.

Barack Obama knows that flowing rhetoric about “hope,” “change,” and “yes we can” will fall hollow in 2012 if people look to him to bring down the price of oil and he concedes “no, I can’t.”

Since platitudes are long since worn out and solutions elude him, Obama’s path to reelection involves creating another conservative bogeyman to demonize. Oil “speculators” are the flavor of the week.

Attacking speculators is as boring as it is misguided. Any moment now everybody from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to the Koch brothers to British Petroleum will be blamed. Mr. Obama might as well blame Buddy Ebsen. After all, Jed Clampett and the rest of the Beverly Hillbillies made their money in oil. This may explain why Mr. Obama brought Los Angeles traffic to a standstill last week as thousands of cars idled away petrodollars. Somebody get Barnaby Jones to investigate.

Those wanting to blame speculators should buy a thesaurus and then look in the mirror. Somewhere in a nursing home there is a 90-year-old grandmother who has a mutual fund containing a few shares of stock in some oil company she bought back when the Charleston was the latest craze. Have this woman arrested now! She is a speculator.

Speculators play both sides of all markets, and phony politicians only complain when the market refuses to cooperate with the public. When speculators drive the stock market higher, there is happiness. When the speculators drive it down, there are calls for investigations. Commodities provide the reverse reaction. When oil skyrocketed to $147 a barrel in 2007, people screamed bloody murder. When it crashed down to $33 a barrel, nobody blamed speculators.

(Silver and gold hit all-time highs this week, but nobody is screaming at speculators for that. Mr. Obama cares about oil because it affects him.)

So to all of those crybabies and the president desperate to appease them, the laws of supply and demand cannot be repealed. They cannot be declared unconstitutional. Barack Obama cannot part the seas and make the markets cater to his reelection efforts.

Yet there is one thing Mr. Obama can do to help lower oil prices.

He can stop being himself.

He needs to wake up tomorrow and admit that his anti-oil policies are a major reason prices are so high.

During his 2008 campaign, he pointed out that under his plan oil prices would “necessarily” have to rise.

This is not complex. In the same way the war against tobacco companies led to higher cigarette prices, the Jihad against the oil industry is causing oil prices to rise.

In Mr. Obama’s mind, getting everybody off of oil is noble. He wants a green economy that operates on alternative energy sources. He wants Americans to give up their cars and rely on high-speed rail. His entire energy and environmental agenda is meant to end dependence on oil.

Supporters find this laudable while critics find it impractical. Yet what is truly ludicrous is for a man to deliberately try to destroy the oil industry while then wondering why this would affect prices.

There are so many ways to bring down the price of oil, from domestic drilling to turning Iran into a 50,000-hole golf course and seizing their oil.

Mr. Obama has telegraphed that his policies are meant to get us away from oil. Therefore, any sensible gambler would play oil to the upside. The gamblers did not create the trend. They jumped on the bandwagon. Anybody criticizing this investment strategy should deliberately try to defy trends and see how they enjoy losing money. Politicians are often irrational, but markets in the long run are as rational as can be.

Mr. Obama is right to want to make America less dependent on foreign oil. He is wrong to try and enact policies that have an adverse effect on ordinary Americans needing cheap oil today. He is even more wrong to blame those engaging in sensible actions when his own senseless actions led to the problem in the first place.

Mr. Obama should do one of two things. He could go on television and explain why higher oil prices are good for America. He could scold Americans and shame them into giving up oil and driving. It would be political suicide, but a courageous, integrity-based stand.

He could also get out of the way. He could stop hijacking the permit process while pretending to support drilling. He could allow domestic drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and other techniques involving oil shale.

If he chooses to remain a leftist anti-oil ideologue, then he needs to have the honor and decency to justify his position.

This will not happen. Mr. Obama knows that his fantasyland approach to energy has failed, and hopes that he can fool just enough people to slink into a second term.

Speculators everywhere should buy and sell legally whenever and wherever they please. Risk-takers built this nation. One obtuse and desperate politician should not be allowed to subvert centuries of global tradition and commerce.

Mr. Obama is the problem. The speculators are the solution.

So as people bet on 2012 oil prices, stock prices, and presidential prospects, Mr. Obama will continue to stew over what he cannot regulate, manipulate, or obfuscate.

It is called freedom. It existed long before leftist anti-capitalists, and will exist long after many more socialist models are discredited and reduced to the ash heap of history.

Based on historical trends, that is a very safe bet to play to the upside whether Mr. Obama likes it or not. (Eric Golub)

Ever notice how a football is shaped like a potato, and boy is this baby hot! 🙂

The Little Neros

“What we now have is a very stark choice,” Obama told a group of about 50 donors at a Chicago restaurant called MK. “Under their vision, we can’t invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail. I mean, we would be a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places that we thought — that we used to call– the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure.”  (That’s called spending…)

At an another appearance, Obama said: “The speech I gave yesterday [Wednesday] was not a partisan shot at the other side. It was an attempt to clarify the choice that we have as a country right now.”

“I think it’s fair to say that their vision is radical. No, I don’t think it’s particularly courageous.”

But raising taxes is courageous? That’s what Democrat desperately want to do. So they can spend EVEN more! 😦

Meanwhile, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service downgraded its outlook Monday on U.S. government debt, expressing unprecedented doubts over the ability of Washington to bring the massive federal budget deficits under control.

The agency lowered the long-term outlook to “Negative” from “Stable,” saying there is a one in three chance the United States could lose its top investment rating on its debt in the next two years.

The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.

For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.

The Obama deficit tour

The Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore critiques the president’s speeches attacking Republican budget plans.

And it’s a lot closer than you may think.

According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now.

Put that in your calendar.

And if Obama is re-elected, make it sooner I’d bet. He and the Democrats are incapable of cutting spending. They live to spend money.

It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.

According to the IMF forecast, whoever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy. (WSJ)

The Visigoths have sacked Rome and the little Nero’s are still fiddling! 😦

Astroturf 2011-2012

If video of angry constituents haranguing members of Congress over healthcare reform captured the tone of that policy debate, Democrats and their allies hope that similar clips will emerge in 2011 to define the coming battle over Medicare and entitlement reform.

Left-leaning groups pushed the idea last week that Americans all over the country are outraged at Republican legislators and have been confronting them at town halls to voice their opposition.

In emails and press statements, Democratic organizations have trumpeted examples of town-hall meetings where Republican legislators were criticized by constituents.

“Even Chairman Ryan’s constituents don’t approve of his plan to deliver tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while ending Medicare,” the email read. “At a recent town hall in Wisconsin, Chairman Ryan was booed as he defended his budget’s continuation of low taxes for the richest people in our country.” (DC)

The fact this is a lie doesn’t matter. Liberals will say anything to win. The truth is almost never included.

Say or do anything to win.

And the Republicans are still trying to be ‘gentlemanly’ while the Democrats will use doomsday weapons at the drop of a hat–Any Hat. It doesn’t even need to be a hat for them to go all out.

One attendee at a townhall already has the talking point down, “Did you not vote for Paul Ryan’s bill?” the attendee asked. “Well, that is to abolish Medicare and give people some money. It will not be the Medicare that we know.”

So when did you stop beating your wife?

In a town hall event on Wednesday held by Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.), an audience member was removed after she became loud and disruptive.

Moveon.org sent an email to residents in Barletta’s district asking them to attend the congressman’s town hall to “ask the congressman why he voted for a budget that that puts millions of seniors, children, and people with disabilities at risk of losing their health care, so we can give millionaires trillions in tax cuts.”

Meaning  let Rome burns and the Democrats will supply the Marshmellows.

It’s not like they care about anything but winning.

Astroturf sales are about to skyrocket!

Meanwhile, the end is nigh. Rejoice.

Liberals hate declaring victory, because “crisis” is the lifeblood of activist government. But when it comes to poverty among the elderly, they really should take a bow.

In 1965, about 30% of seniors lived in poverty. By 2000, that number had fallen to 10%, a two-thirds decline. By 2009, the poverty rate for seniors had risen somewhat (thanks to the recession and financial crisis), but it’s still half the poverty rate for children, and about 20% less than for adults 18-64.

This makes sense: We accumulate education, wealth and property as we age. For that reason, seniors have much higher net wealth than their younger counterparts. But while entitlement programs have undoubtedly helped alleviate poverty among the elderly, they are unsustainable as currently structured.

This is because current tax revenues (from working Americans) pay for today’s retirees, and far fewer working Americans exist relative to retirees than in the old days. In 1950 nearly 17 people worked for every Social Security recipient. In 2009 the number was three. In 2040 it’ll be two.

We’re also collecting benefits much longer than originally anticipated.

Life expectancy for seniors in 1965 was just under 70 years. Now it’s close to 80, meaning that instead of paying for five years of Medicare benefits, Americans pay for 15.

Baby boomers retiring today will receive far more in Medicare benefits than they ever paid in taxes. Researchers at the Urban Institute project that a married 66-year-old couple paid $110,000 in Medicare taxes, but will receive about $340,000 worth of benefits.

So what if paying out 3 times what you put in over the next 20 years is completely unsustainable Liberals don’t care.

Economics bores liberals.

“Armageddon” excites them.

Only when the true armageddon comes, they will not be to blame. They will be as pure as the driven snow, and the news media will say s so over and over again.

FEAR IS HOPE!

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Rejoice citizen, the politicians of both parties are looking out for you…. 🙂

The Tactical Budget IV

“To use an analogy that families are familiar with, we’re not going to be running up the credit card anymore,” Obama said.

Yeah, we cut our overspending from 1.6 trillion to 1.1 Trillion!!

Isn’t he magnificent!! 🙂 Everyone don’t hold your gushing and slobbering applause!! 🙂 Feel free to faint in the presence of his magnificence! 🙂

“We’ve taken a scalpel to the discretionary budget rather than a machete,”-Obama

Yeah, we have poodle nipping at government overspending when we need a pack of very hungry Raptors.

Recalling that his predecessor as New Jersey governor, Democrat Jon Corzine, slept on a cot in the office when the state government shut down, Republican Christie said he issued a warning to state legislators.

“I’m not moving any cot into this office,” the fast-talking governor said in his north Jersey dialect. “You close down the government, I’m gettin’ in those black SUVs with the troopers, I’m goin’ to the governor’s residence, gonna go upstairs, gonna open a beer, gonna order a pizza, I’m gonna watch the Mets. And when you decide to reopen the government, gimme a call and I’ll come back, but don’t think I’m sleepin’ on some cot. Take a look at me. You think I’m sleepin’ on a cot? Not happenin’.

I have a Chris Matthews’ “tingle up my leg” moment! 🙂

“The president’s not talking about it because he’s waiting for the Republicans to talk about it,” Christie said. “And our new, bold Republicans that we just sent to the House of Representatives? They’re not talking about it because they’re waiting for him to talk about it. Let me suggest to you that my children’s future and your children’s future is more important than some political strategy. Let me suggest to you that what game is being played down here is irresponsible and it is dangerous. We need to say these things and we need to say them out loud. ” (Fox)

Christie, however, is talking about it. “You’re going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security,” he said. “Whoa-ho! I just said it, and I’m still standing here. I did not vaporize into the carpeting, and I said it.”

He resumed: “We have to reform Medicare because it costs too much and it is going to bankrupt us. Once again, lightning did not come through the windows and strike me dead!”

🙂 🙂 🙂

“Because let me guarantee you something, if we don’t fix the big things, there ain’t going to be electric cars on the road. [There’s] gonna be no high speed internet access and if there is, you’re not going to be able to afford to get on it. We’re not going to be able to care about the niceties of life, the investments Washington wants to make.” (Fox)

“You just have to have the spine to say, ‘I’m going to take the risk,’ ” the governor coaxed. “I think that’s what we elect leaders for. Hence the name.” (WP)

“These problems and issues are not partisan. They are obvious. And they are long overdue to be solved.”

So what do the Left come back with: Fat Jokes.

Gotta keep it personal and childish in order to have that “adult” conversation on a “bi-partisan” and “civil” basis, after all!

On Chris Matthews: He even made a fat joke. That one was about the more than plump New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie not being able to balance a budget because what was he going to start with – supper? (Fishbowl DC)

And Personal attacks:

Connecticut Democratic Governor Dan Malloy, for one, told the New York Times on Tuesday, “Being bombastic for the sake of being bombastic has just never been my take on the world.”

Don’t you dare talk about the issues!

At a Michigan republican gathering, Governor Chris Christie took the opportunity to remind republicans that voters are not looking to vote for republicans just for the sake of being opponents to Democrats.

Amen!!

“Ladies and gentlemen, those are the candy of American politics,” he said of the Obama spending priorities. “Those aren’t the big things.”

Selfish political gains motivate Democrats and fear inhibits Republicans. (AEI)

AMEN!!

Now on to Obama’s Wile E. Coyote Budget.

President Barack Obama, Suuuuppper Genius! 🙂

In his Tuesday press conference, Obama was reduced to calling for “patience” and saying he wanted to have an “adult conversation” with Republicans on entitlement spending.

Condescend much, Mr. President?

In November 2010, the voters rejected the vast increase in the size and scope of government of the Obama Democrats. They had increased domestic discretionary spending by 24 percent, and by more than 80 percent if you count the stimulus package.

Now the president is trying to salvage most of what was intended to be a permanent increase of government’s share of the economy by calling for dribs and drabs of cuts and freezing total discretionary spending at a much higher level than ever before.

This may be a successful short-term political ploy, while being obviously long-term bad public policy. Conventional wisdom is that voters like spending cuts in the abstract but oppose any specific cuts except in foreign aid.

But conventional wisdom also said that the stimulus package and Obamacare would be popular. The Republicans, following where the voters led, are betting conventional wisdom is wrong again. (Townhall.com)

President Obama’s 2012 budget is not a serious governing document. It’s a political one, designed to boost his re-election chances.

By repeatedly saying that his budget reduces the deficit by $1 trillion over 10 years, he hopes the numbers make him sound fiscally conservative. But he puts off 95% of the deficit reduction until after his term ends in 2013. And he assumes that economic growth in the next few years will be at least 25% higher than credible economic forecasters estimate.

Mr. Obama’s budget includes $1.6 trillion in tax increases that are real enough—but most of the spending cuts are not. For example, as Rep. Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman pointed out to me, the administration projects war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan at surge levels for the next decade, and then conjures up about $1.3 trillion in defense savings by assuming drawdowns in each theater—drawdowns that were already in the cards. Outside of this sham transaction, according to Mr. Ryan, there are only $104 billion in real spending cuts over the next 10 years.

Mr. Obama’s budget includes $1.6 trillion in tax increases that are real enough—but most of the spending cuts are not.

Moreover, the administration simply ignores entitlements. This is a dereliction of duty, although it has a certain political logic: The budget is not meant to be taken seriously—it’s meant to be quickly forgotten so that the administration can turn attention to, and attack, what congressional Republicans do about federal spending.

Mr. Obama wants House Republicans to take the lead in cutting current spending and proposing future restraint in entitlement and other mandatory spending. He’s betting that letting Republicans take the lead will cripple them. This misreads public opinion. But it is plausible to believe that Republican mistakes can help revive Mr. Obama’s political fortunes. So it’s important that the GOP offers real budget cuts without coming across as angry and frenetic. Republicans need to patiently show what they are doing and why, and to express their sadness and disappointment over Mr. Obama’s failure of leadership.

Congressional Republicans need to make methodical and sensible recommendations for cutting discretionary outlays and restraining future entitlement spending. They must explain to the public why the Obama budget will lead to our nation suffering horrific tax increases, massive austerity cuts, and real human suffering. They need to show that the president’s fiscal path is, to use a favorite word of his, unsustainable.

Tactically, Republicans should respond to Mr. Obama’s agenda as they did to his infatuation with high-speed rail projects. Three days after Vice President Joe Biden touted the magical balm of high-speed trains, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers released the continuing resolution for the balance of fiscal year 2011.

It cut the rest of this fiscal year’s high-speed rail funds, rescinded $3.5 billion appropriated in previous fiscal years but still unspent, and rescinded $3.75 billion in unspent transportation money from the 2009 stimulus, almost all of it from Mr. Obama’s high-speed rail plan. Overall, nearly $8 billion was cut from transportation, but none from vital road projects that are real priorities for the states.

The result: Very few Americans believe the billions Mr. Obama wants for speedy trains from Milwaukee to Madison, or Columbus to Cincinnati, will spark economic recovery. This still leaves transportation spending higher than it was two years ago, when Mr. Obama came into office. Republicans can reasonably ask the public: Are we better off with all the spending and red ink Mr. Obama has added over the past two years?

There will be dozens of such confrontations in the months ahead. How Republicans handle these opportunities will go a long way toward determining how popular their agenda is. Politics involves optics as well as policy ideas.

The evidence of the federal government’s budget woes is so overwhelming that Americans are ready for tough actions. They understand that failing to make cuts now and to restrain entitlements in the years ahead will doom our children and grandchildren—indeed our country—to a future less prosperous and less free. (Karl Rove-WSJ)

So what’s the response of the LEFT?

They are now encouraging and inflating the “Birthers” (those nutbags who think Obama is not an American Citizen).

They even came out with their own self-fulfilling Talking Point Poll:  The survey found that 51% of respondents did not think President Obama was born in the United States, and another 21% were not sure. (it comes from the Leftist Union robo-calling people at Public Policy Polling in North Carolina). It’s gone viral amongst the leftists.

They love Divide and Conquer. Don’t actually address the real issues. God, no, never do that!

Make the Republicans propose so you can dispose of them.

But when it comes to the actual problems, Forgetttaboutit! Just be fat, dumb, and happy and sit on the couch watch Oprah collect your 3 years of unemployment, collect government hand-outs and don’t stress about debts and deficits and whether there will even be a country left for your children.

Who cares, that’s all too boring. And it’s not very nice.

I worked hard for my narcissism and my greed and you’re going to give it to me no matter what.

Unsustainable, you say?

I say I don’t care. It’s all about me!!!!

After all, the Left is so vastly superior to everyone they must be right. 🙂

“I’m prepared to work with Democrats and Republicans to start dealing with that in a serious way,” Obama said

Translation: Disagreeing with me is not “serious” or “adult”.

Now that’s Leadership and Vision.

Beep Beep!!! 🙂

The Tactical Budget II

Continuing yesterdays “Tactical Budget” theme of the President’s budget which is all politics and not designed to “solve” any problems other than making the Republicans look mean and heartless so the Democrats and the media can run with it 24/7 for the next 2 years.

Obama seems to be playing a political game of chicken with the Republicans — betting they won’t have the guts to make the cuts that he refuses to make. And if they do, he’ll blame them for the pain that results.

No doubt that’s why he totally ignored his own “bipartisan” deficit-cutting commission, which in December recommended big spending cuts and entitlement reform to reduce future budget shortfalls. Obviously, Obama took his copy of the report and shredded it.

As the budget debate heats up, Americans will hear that, as bad as Obama’s plan is, the GOP “hasn’t come up with an alternative.”

If though they have alternatives and said them, many times, that will be the Talking Point (that and how mean the republicans are wanting grandmas to be homeless, how they kick puppies and steal food from children yada yada yada…)

Why? because those “alternatives” are not favored by the Democrat elites,politicos, and the Media, so they don’t exist in their minds and so they should not exist in yours.

How Orwellian, as usual.

I Loved this analysis of the budget:

So let’s go through this and look at his “cuts.” Let’s look at Obama’s cuts.  “Community development block grants would be trimmed by $300 million.”  Forget the size here for a second.  I mean, if I wanted to I could smirk over a $300 million budget cut, but I’m not gonna do that.  “The community development block grants i the government’s program to help low-income people pay their heating bills.”

My friends, do you really this is going to happen?  Do you really believe that budget cuts to people “who can’t pay their heating bills” are actually going to happen? Do you think even the Republicans are gonna vote for that?  Okay, so there’s one budget cut that will never happen.  In a real world, Obama would be tarred and feathered for having no compassion, and there would be cartoons and pictures of huddled masses outside their homes with no heat freezing to death, with frostbite all over their noses and faces and fingers.  President Barack Obama has just suggested cutting aid to people who can’t afford to heat their homes.  “Oh ho- hum, a $300 million budget cut.”  You let George W. Bush try to sneak something like this in one of his budgets?

Okay, so that’s one budget cut that won’t happen.  Are we agreed on this?  It ain’t gonna happen.  Let’s see.  What else is next here?  Uh, let’s see.  Pell Grants.  Yes! We’re going to cut Pell Grants. You know what the Pell Grant is? It’s a college grant. It’s an educational grant to certain qualifiers for certain education aid.  “One hundred billion dollars will be cut over a decade,” that’s $10 billion a year, hee-hee-hee-hee, “from Pell Grants and other higher education programs through belt tightening, the savings used to keep the maximum college financial aid award at $5,550, this according to an administration official who spoke on a condition of anonymity in advance of the budget’s Monday release.”

Do we really believe that once we get down to voting and writing this budget, that education grants, Pell Grants are going to be cut?  No.  We don’t believe it just like we know for a fact that there will be no budget cuts, no… (laughing) We’re not gonna take heating oil money away from the poor.  Just isn’t gonna happen.  “Great Lakes Environmental Restoration Program cut by 25% to save $125 million.”  That might happen if nobody hears about it.  “The budget will propose $1 billion in cuts in grants for large airports, almost $1 billion in reduced support to states for water treatment plants.” Okay, so Oba… (laughing) Obama has proposed cutting clean water, he’s cutting clean air, he’s cutting safe airports, he’s cutting home heating oil, he’s cutting education.  Is any of this going to happen?  By the time this whole thing gets down to brass tacks and we vote on it, are any of these budget cuts going to survive?

Even the Republicans won’t go along with it. They’ll see this as a trap.  If they support it, look what the news will be. “Boehner and Tea Party Support Cutting off Heating Aid for the Poor!”  It will never be mentioned it was Obama’s idea.  Let’s see here. “Other infrastructure programs and savings from consolidating public health programs run by the Centers for Disease Control and various…” Oh!  So we’re gonna cut public health programs, too.  Right.  Okay.  So let’s add it up here.  We’re gonna cut home heating aid.  We’re gonna cut education aid.  We’re gonna cut environmental aid in the Great Lakes.  We’re gonna cut airport aid in the age of terrorism (potential security risks and all that) and we’re gonna cut public health programs under the CDC.  Yeah.  Home heating oil, clean water treatments, college grants, are just gonna sail through Congress.  There you have it.  Obama’s tough budget cuts.  (laughing) (sigh) Even when I get the snarky e-mails, “You just can’t bring yourself to support Obama, can you?”  Well, you know as well as I do, folks, these budget cuts are not gonna happen. (RL)

He’s proposing cuts is every area that his State of Union speech said we had to “invest” (aka spend) in. Curiousier and Curiousier…:)

So we have a political minefield. If you go along with the President’s cuts you will be portrayed as heartless assholes. If you don’t you’re not serious about cuts and have “no alternatives”.

Or if you go even farther than his “cuts” then your just vicious and cruel.

And if you blow off his cuts as meaningless and propose your own, then the media and Democrats will bash you in the media mercilessly.

Because cutting the deficit is not the Democrats plan. That is the smoke only.

It’s just politics. Not reality.

So let’s bring the President’s budget down to earth.

If the budget is 3.7 Trillion and that is 1.1 trillion in the red.

So that’s 2.6 trillion is “within means”.

So let’s say you make $26,000 a year. For the last 3 years you have spent $37,000 per yr and now you have “cut” that to $31,000 a year by “raising revenue” from a better economy.

And as a cost cutting measure you’ll cut $1000 every year for 10 years thus cutting 10,000 out by 2021. (Meaning $30,000 a year for 10 years- which is 1,000 less than previously).

That will most certainly get you out of debt!! 😦

That’s what the Democrats and the President are essentially proposing with their Trillion dollars OVER 10 YEARS crap.

Does this sound like sound economics to you?

Or just word games to trick you into thinking they are “doing something”.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are scared of being demonized, not realizing they will be NO MATTER WHAT!

So they just need to do it. But will they?

Mr. Obama‘s budget projects that 2011 will see the biggest one-year debt jump in history, or nearly $2 trillion, to reach $15.476 trillion by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. That would be 102.6 percent of GDP — the first time since World War II that dubious figure has been reached. (WT)

The plan calls for $8.7 trillion in new spending over the next 10 years, and $46 trillion in total spending.

And the budget projects the government will run a deficit of $1.645 trillion this year, topping 2009’s previous record by more than $230 billion. By contrast, 2007’s deficit was just $160 billion altogether.

Then there’s Obamacare! That “trillion” dollar boondoggle that if it acts like Medicare did it will cost 9 trillion dollars all by itself by 2020.

So by the time that Obama trims his Trillion dollars in 10 years Obamacare will eat up 9 times that!! (and 3 times the entire 2012 budget!!).

But don’t worry, ObamaCare will lower costs, according to the Democrats. They can’t say anything else politically. And the 300+ waiver will just grow.

Makes you hopeful doesn’t it! 😦

Oh, and on page 4 of the president’s budget: Ending the Mortgage Interest Deduction!

“It is not too late to right our ship,” said Rep. Paul Ryan. “If we keep punting like this budget does, there will come a moment when it is too late, and that’s why I’m disappointed.”

And I’m afraid that moment will HAVE TO come before anyone in Washington is truly serious, especially Democrats.

But I suspect even then, the Democrats and their Liberal Media allies will continue their party line and attacks. After, it’s just politics to them. And politics is an all-or-nothing game.

Reality is no game.

The White House pledge to “pay down these debts” is beyond absurd. The expected deficit this year alone — $1.6 trillion — is greater than all the “deficit cuts” Obama has in 10 years.

Obama’s “spending freeze” is likewise a gimmick. In just two years since he took office, discretionary spending has surged 24% — 84% if you count stimulus. “Freezing” spending at this elevated level is little more than numbers legerdemain, a kind of three-card monte played on sucker taxpayers.

Under Obama’s plan, federal tax revenues are forecast to rise from 15% of GDP — their current level — to 20% of GDP, a jump of 33% as a share of the economy. Spending, however, isn’t cut at all; it’s 25% of GDP today, and that’s exactly where it will be in 2020.

Even then, we’ll have a deficit of over $1.2 trillion. Indeed, over the next decade, thanks to persistent red ink, total debt nearly doubles, soaring from $13.5 trillion in 2010 to $26.3 trillion by 2021. At that level, we as a nation become insolvent. (IBD)

And the Democrats don’t care. And the Republicans are afraid to care because the mean, old Liberal Media will make them look bad…

The only question is, will Congress have the guts to pass it? And if so, will American voters be smart enough to embrace it?

“Now we’re faced with taking on something as complex and deeply emotional as entitlements and the president isn’t even in the game, doesn’t even suggest it should be done,” Sen. Jeff Sessions said. (DC)

But they will be on it 24/7 to demonize, shame, and rip you a new one if you dare.

Call out the Tactical Budget/ 2012 Re-election SWAT team!!

Investments

ObamaCare Waiver Update:

HHS gave a waiver to Local 25 SEIU in Chicago with 31,000 enrollees on Oct. 1, 2010; to Local 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund with 4,544 enrollees on Oct. 10, 2010; and to the SEIU Local 1 Cleveland Welfare Fund with 520 enrollees on Nov. 15, 2010.

So far, the Obama administration has issued waivers to 222 entities, including businesses, unions and charitable organizations. Of that total, 45 were labor organizations.

A total of 1,507,418 enrollees are now included in the waivers. More than one-third — 512,315 – of the enrollees affected were insured by union health plans.

SEIU Local 1199’s health plan put a $50,000 cap on medical expenses for its New Jersey nursing home workers, according to 1199 SEIU spokeswoman Leah Gonzalez. That’s $700,000 under the 2011 limit stipulated by HHS regulations.

I’ll say it again, if it’s so great why do they need waivers??

It’s the SEI FU!

The SEIU’s Committee on Political Education made $27,829,845.91 in independent expenditures on Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. (CNS)

And I’m sure this had nothing to do with it! It was just a return on their “Investment”.

And “investment” is the new Liberal buzzword. It will probably be in every sentence of the State of The Union speech tonight.

Obama/ Democrat “Investment” = SPENDING!

More Investment. More Spending.

So what if we are $14 Trillion in debt and are so broke our credit card company is threatening to cancel our card.

Liberals just can’t stop spending.

So they have to come up with a new Orwellian buzzword for it.

It’s an old trick, calling spending investments, one pioneered by Bill Clinton. As Obama said last month: “[C]utting the deficit by cutting investments in education [and] innovation [is] like trying to reduce the weight of an overloaded aircraft by removing its engine….It’s not a good idea.”

Keynesian economics argues that government spending comes with a beneficial “multiplier,” whereby a dollar spent on infrastructure causes many more dollars to be activated in the economy right away. When you plow a billion into a construction project, not only do the contractors’ employees and suppliers get paid that billion, they in turn spend it in local shops and such. More individuals than just construction workers see their livelihoods goosed.

The unemployment in construction these days is one of the highest of any profession out there, and is also rampant with Illegal Aliens who are cheaper than Union thugs.

The Unemployment rate last month in Construction was 20.7%.

Way to go on that “investment”.

THE REAL UNEMPLOYMENT “INVESTMENT”

The total non institutional civilian labor force (Americans 16 years and older who are not in a institution -criminal, mental, or other types of facilities- or an active military duty) is reported as 238.889 million. Of these, we see:

• Employed: 139.206 million people (58.3% of labor force)
• Unemployed: 14.485 million people (6.1% of labor force)

Obviously, that can’t be the total picture, we’re only at 64.4%. This is why:

• Part time employed for economic reasons: 8.931 million people. This concerns people who want a full-time job but can’t get one.
• Part time employed for non-economic reasons: 18.184 million people. Non-economic reasons include school or training, retirement or Social Security limits on earnings, but also childcare problems and family or personal obligations.

But the by far largest category “missing” from both the Employed and Unemployed statistics is the “Not In Labor Force”: 85.2 Million people.

The BLS definition states: “Not in the labor force (NILF). A person who did not work last week, was not temporarily absent from a job, did not actively look for work in the previous 4 weeks, or looked but was unavailable for work during the reference week; in other words, a person who was neither employed nor unemployed.” (Clearly, this does include lot of unemployed people).

To summarize: 108.616 million people in America are either unemployed, underemployed or “Not in the labor force”. This represents 45.5% of working age Americans.

If you count the “Part time employed for non-economic reasons”, you get 126.8 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, working part time or “Not in the labor force”. That represents 53% of working age Americans.

So only 47% of working age Americans have full time jobs. While the official unemployment rate is 9.4%. Something’s missing somewhere. (Business Insider)

So what we need is more “investment”. 🙂

Oh, here’s another Investment.

FOOD STAMPS OUTSOURCED TO INDIA

JP Morgan Chase who received Bailout money has outsourced their call center calls on Food Stamps (that they get taxpayer money for) to INDIA!

Jobs anyone?? “Investment” anyone?

JP Morgan is the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States. JP Morgan has contracted to provide food stamp debit cards in 26 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. JP Morgan is paid for each case that it handles, so that means that the more Americans that go on food stamps, the more profits JP Morgan makes. Yes, you read that correctly. When the number of Americans on food stamps goes up, JP Morgan makes more money.

So if unemployment goes down will this ruin JP Morgan’s food stamp business?

Well, apparently not. In the interview Paton says that 40% of food stamp recipients are currently working, and he seems convinced that there could be further “growth” in that segment.

It turns out that JP Morgan also provides child support debit cards in 15 U.S. states and they also provide unemployment insurance benefit debit cards in seven states.

Apparently states have found that they can save millions of dollars by “outsourcing” the provision of these benefits to big financial firms like JP Morgan.

So what happens if you have a problem with your food stamp debit card?

Well, you call up a JP Morgan service center. When you do this, there is a very good chance that you are going to be helped by a JP Morgan call center employee in India.

That’s right – it turns out that JP Morgan is saving money by “outsourcing” food stamp customer service calls to India.

Just try to imagine the irony – a formerly middle class American that has lost a job to outsourcing calls up to get help with food stamp benefits only to be answered by a call center employee in India.

So when you’re outsourced and on Food stamps you can be reminded where your job went every time you call. 🙂

The biggest Wall Street financial institutions had no trouble begging for bailouts from the U.S. government during the financial crisis, but when the American people have needed a little grace and mercy from them they have been less than helpful.

I guess we need more “Investment” 🙂

Rhetoric Uber Alles

“Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions,” Palin wrote in an early morning post on her Facebook account on Wednesday. “But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”

“There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently,” Palin wrote on Facebook. “But when was it less heated? Back in those ‘calm days’ when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols?”

The ‘calm days’ where when the Liberal were in complete control and could do anything they wanted and could ignore you’re ignorant, racist, moronic opinions to the contrary. 🙂

The fact that isn’t the reality anymore just makes them mad.

And they will never give up their hunt for what they perceive as political advantage.

“Whether [political rhetoric] caused what happened in Tucson or not, it’ll cause the next tragedy,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) predicts on FOX News.

So even if this one isn’t caused by heated political rhetoric (though that’s all we, the left, have been saying for 5 days now) it WILL cause the next one so we have to stamp out the hateful rhetoric of the right before it’s too late!!

Sadly, shamefully, within just minutes, a nasty political spin was kicking in without any brake for decency or evidence. Conservatives were to blame.

CNN broke in with this horrible news at about 1:30 Eastern time, and within an hour, CNN put on the local political cartoonist, David Fitzsimmons, who announced that the shooting was “inevitable” considering “The Right in Arizona, and I’m speaking very broadly, has been stoking the fires of a heated anger and rage successfully in this state.” The state also had a conservative “fetish” for guns that added to the inevitability, he claimed. (Brent Bozell)

Rep. Jim Clyburn wants to bring back the Fairness Doctrine – a move aimed directly at talk radio – while Media Matters CEO David Brock asked Rupert Murdoch to rein in or possibly even fire Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

There has been no shortage of individuals and institutions that have sought to capitalize on the shootings in Tucson. Add Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to that list.

This afternoon Sanders sent out a fundraising appeal, seeking to raise money to fight Republicans and other “right-wing reactionaries” responsible for the climate that led to the shooting.

NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE!!

Meanwhile, many proud liberals, not to mention dedicated journalists, see no problem with fueling a mass panic over our “political discourse.” The fact that liberal rhetoric and images are often just as “extreme” is irrelevant. Also irrelevant is any violence that might be linked to such rhetoric. And the fact that the shooting suspect’s motivations may lay in a reality of his own design? That’s irrelevant too.

These critics’ aim is simply to exploit this horror as an opportunity to yell “shut up” at their political opponents. (Jonah Goldberg)

“Every time you listen to them, they are furious. Furious at the left. With anger that just builds and builds in their voice and by the time they go to commercial they are just in some rage every night with some ugly talk. Ugly sounding talk and it never changes,”< MSNBC’s Chris> Matthews said.

So the vitriol and hatred 24/7 on his own show and his own network, MSDNC are exempted, of course. they are as pure and virtuous as the snow covering 49 states right now (go global warming!!)

I guess that was the “tingle” up his leg this time. 😦

And then there’s the hatefest called the Westboro Baptist Church:

WBC WILL PICKET THE FAG-INFESTED, PERVERT-RUN TUCSON HIGH MAGNET SCHOOL (aka 9 year old Christina Taylor Green’s School). KILLED FOR YOUR REBELLION WHEN GOD SENT THE SHOOTER TO DEAL WITH IDOLATROUS AMERICA. (directly from their website by the way)

You know, she was Catholic! Now that’s Just Evil!  And “better off dead”

And that’s hardly it. Just the most disgusting.

But don’t worry, it was FOX News and Talk Radio that cause the vitriolic political rhetoric! 🙂

This flood of slanderous sludge is designed for nakedly political benefit: to paint a permanent black mark on conservatives as accessories to murder, and criminalize any expression of conservatism as a dangerous anti-government conspiracy.

Then we need to ban Jodie Foster, after all she was the reason that President Reagan was shot in 1981.

And we need to ban Fan Club groupies because that who killed the Tejano superstar singer Selena.

Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon over “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger

And Trenchcoats, as in The “trenchcoat mafia” of the two sick kids who shot up Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

BUT NOT Major Hassan who shot up Fort Hood Army base yelling “Allah Ackbar!” as he kills people!

Oh no! That would be “jumping to conclusions”!!!! (according to the President, the media and the left for months afterwards)

A guy who is a radicalized muslim is just a lone nutjob but a marijuana-toking mentally unstable kid who shoots up a Tucson strip mall is doing it because of right winger extremists!

<<barf bag please>>

It’s apparent from evidence found by the authorities and from interviews with the alleged killer’s friends and acquaintances that Loughner has fixated on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords since 2007, long before anyone heard of the “tea parties” or, in most cases, Palin. Moreover, his grievance with Giffords appears to be unrelated to any coherent — or even incoherent — ideological platform. Rather, it drew on the bilious stew of resentments this young man cultivated as he lost his grip on reality. (Jonah Goldberg)

But that matters not a whit to the Left. It’s irrelevant.

NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE!

Then there’s the Pima County Sherriff:

The sheriff is widely known for calling Arizona’s tough immigration law “racist” because he said it required local law enforcement to engage in racial profiling. He refused to enforce it.

To date, there is no public evidence that accused shooter Jared Loughner was in any way motivated by the national rancor over illegal immigration and the Arizona law (though open-borders extremists from the Justice Department on down most certainly wish it were so). When he complained about non-English speakers, Loughner’s nonsensical diatribes were aimed at illiterates in general — not illegal aliens — and “grammar control” by the government.

No matter. Dupnik vehemently singled out “people in the radio business and some people in the TV business” like Rush Limbaugh for creating the New York Times-patented “Climate of Hate.” Sounding more like an MSNBC groupie (which, surprise, he confesses to be) than a responsible law enforcement official, Dupnik baselessly suggested that the shooting was part of a larger conspiracy and railed against “vitriol” from limited-government activists who are stoking “anger against elected officials.”

Dupnik’s mouth has done more to stoke self-inflicted ire against elected government clowns than anything the right could muster against him. Had the hyper-partisan Democrat been more in tune with his job than the media airwaves, the murderous, maniacal gunman might have been stopped.

As Dupnik himself has now admitted, Loughner leveled death threats against others that were investigated by law enforcement — and then apparently shrugged off. Locals note that Loughner’s mother worked for the county and may have had some pull. Pima County College campus police reported five serious confrontations with the mentally unstable young man before he was kicked out of the school, which he decried as an unconstitutional “torture facility.” Classmates said they feared for their lives. His friends say he was a pothead, a 9/11 Truther and a UFO conspiracist so kooky that even flying-objects adherents spurned him.

Dupnik is now following the same ill-gotten path. But decent Americans understand that he and his civilian counterparts have traveled a smear too far. Despite desperate attempts by the progressive left to pin the massacre on the “harsh tone” of its political opponents, a vast majority of Americans reject the cynical campaign to criminalize conservatism, suppress political free speech and capitalize on violent crime for electoral gain.

At the risk of being accused of inciting violence, you might say they’ve done gone and shot themselves in the foot. (Michelle Malkin)

The Left just doesn’t care. They are going to take their shots no matter what. Sensitivity, compassion, and intellectual honesty are far too low on their priority list for them to care.