The Best and Worst of 2015

Derek Hunter: As far as years go, 2015 certainly was one of them. The news was not wanting for content, and we columnists were not wanting for material. It was a year of tragedies and triumphs bookended by terrorist attacks in Paris. A reality TV star became the leading candidate of a major political party, “Star Wars” returned, and I got married. Yep, 2015 was quite a year.

I had a health scare that resulted in a pacemaker and a different view on mortality just months after my Dad died.

Not the best of times by far.

Politics:

The Best

Donald Trump. For all his problems, and they are legion, and the bluster, and it is constant, he’s done more than anyone in recent years to get people to pay attention to politics and just how corrupt the media and the Democrats have become. He’s been battering the media since the start, slamming his opponents since and changing how politics is done.

While, I’m still not a full on Trump guy I do like that he makes the Left and the RINOs crazy and just doesn’t give a damn. That really shakes them up.

Trump has been holding a clinic on how to run against Democrats and the media since his announcement. Aside from momentary flashes, none of the rest of the field appears to have learned a thing.

Because they are all stuck in their ways. They can’t see doing it any other way. Especially, Democrats, they have one playbook and they go to it every nanosecond of every day.

Expect all out nuclear war again on the Republicans. No atom will be lest un-nuked, no ethic or moral will not be cr0ssed in the quest for the Coronation of King Barack’s successor Queen Hillary.

The Republican RINOs are just plain lost.

If Trump is the nominee, Democrats may well win, but they will have been so battered and bruised they’d be hard-pressed to govern with any effectiveness. If he isn’t the nominee, whoever is will have learned how to be locked in a box with a rabid spider monkey and survive. The eventual nominee, whoever it ends up being, will be a much more devastating candidate thanks to Trump’s entry into the race.

The Media is still setting up the Coronation of Queen Hillary I like they have for 4 years now. I doubt they are going to change.

But maybe, just maybe, the sleeping stupid will recognize it for what it is.

That,and just maybe, the Republicans will actually run a campaign to WIN this time. Maybe.

 

The Worst

As awful as she is, Hillary Clinton is not the worst person on the national political stage. Until he leaves office, Barack Obama’s head wears the crown.

In a post-9/11, post-Paris, post-San Bernardino world, the president of the United States managed to go 12 months in which he used the words “radical Islamic terrorism” only to chastise others for saying them.

Well, you’re talking about his friends and mentors, the Muslims. They can’t be evil. That’s like Lule finding out Darth Vader is his Father…. 🙂

The economy continues to falter, our enemies are on the march, and the president has improved his short-game. The Obama presidency is a hilarious joke, but sadly it’s not the funny kind of joke.

But the Democrats continue to self-delude themselves that everything is awesome and we just need to get rid of those naybobs negativity.

One more year…

11 Months+ a few days. Don’t make it any longer than it has to be. Though if Queen Hillary wins we’re all doomed and you might as well close up shop and move to Fiji because it’s over.

Lie Of The Year

The “winner” of this category is obvious, which is why it hasn’t won any of these “awards” from the mainstream media: Hillary Clinton’s ever-evolving claims about classified material on her secret, unsecured email server.

Though I think her saying that the Benghazi families who have been ripping her for years about her You Tube cause of the incident are now lying because she never said it was pretty close.

“What Difference Does it Make?”

Her original statement at her press conference at the UN, was, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” High-stakes divorce settlements are less carefully worded.

Note how she specifically said she didn’t send any classified material, and how there “is” nothing classified on her server. She’d wiped it by then, though not thoroughly, so, in using present tense, she was telling her version of the truth.

After that original statement, Hillary’s story “evolved” at least two more times to she never “sent or received anything marked classified at the time.”

After that lie the media lost interest. Why wouldn’t they? Their candidate is ensnared in an FBI investigation that, were it anyone else, already would have led to an indictment and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees by now.

But we aren’t named Clinton; we haven’t been selling, or at least renting, our positions for sums of money that rival the worth of third-world economies, and a president of her party still controls the prosecutors.

No, we’re civilians, bound by truth, and she’s Hillary, utterly unburdened by such trivialities.

As we wind up 2015, I think we’ve dwelled enough on politics. So a few notes on a couple of other things.

Sports

The year started with a great Super Bowl. What a game! But it will be remembered as the game that gave us Deflategate. Tom Brady won – everything. He continues to live a charmed life, and good for him. Unless you bet against him.

And the Seahawks created a blunder for the ages that will be talked about until Liberals outlaw football altogether sometime later in the Century.

 

The Super Bowl was the highlight of the year for New England sports fans, but the rest of the world had to suffer until the World Series. After decades of miserable losing, New England (particularly in Boston) started winning. And their fans, both in baseball and football, became even more miserable to be around during a game. And I say that as someone with many friends who fit this description.

But the highlight of the year was the World Series.

The Kansas City Royals are a lot of fun to watch. They scrap and scrape together runs in a way no other team does.

Arizona Cardinals anyone? Anyone?? 🙂

Movies

I love “Star Wars,” saw it three times the weekend it opened. But it doesn’t win for movie of the year with me. There were a lot of great “art house” movies, and I’m sure one with $48 in box office receipts will win the Oscar. But “The Martian” was the most enjoyable movie of 2015. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor. Even if you don’t care for Matt Damon (and I wouldn’t blame you), you’ll enjoy this movie.

I love “Star Wars” but I still think either Jurassic World or Avengers 2. I never saw “The Martian”.

Television

“The Walking Dead” remains TV’s best drama.

DOCTOR WHO! 🙂

The zombie aspect might turn your off, but it’s much more than that. Moreover, it’s a show that generates true suspense, in which no one knows what’s going to happen from week to week and no character, no matter who they are, is safe.

DOCTOR WHO! 🙂

If you’re a comic book nerd, or if you don’t mind super hero movies, might I also suggest checking out “Jessica Jones” on Netflix. It’s a surprisingly good series with humor, action and a great anti-hero. And, unlike “The Walking Dead,” you can binge-watch it over a weekend.

Haven’t got around to it yet. And that shows you how technology has changed so much.

I’m not sad to see 2015 go, though it does seem like it went fast. With 2016 being an election year, it will fly by as well. While I work and play in the first half of this column, life happens in the rest. Hope you had a great 2015, and I hope you have as much fun as possible in 2016. 

Here’s to 2016. The Hope of the future of our Country rests on your shoulders.

No pressure. 🙂

If you Like your Job…

Please enjoy the latest installment of the “it’s working” chronicles. Sorry, American workers (via The Hill):

ObamaCare will force a reduction in American work hours — the equivalent of 2 million jobs over the next decade, Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper said Monday. The total workforce will shrink by just under 1 percent as a result of changes in worker participation because of the new coverage expansions, mandates and changes in tax rates, according to a 22-page report released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). “Some people would choose to work fewer hours; others would leave the labor force entirely or remain unemployed for longer than they otherwise would,” the agency said in its latest analysis of the now five-year-old law.

This assessment largely confirms the bombshell February 2014 analysis from the nonpartisan entity, which also projected that Democrats’ $2 trillion healthcare scheme would slow economic growth and slow job creation.  Take it away, 2011 Nancy Pelosi:

“Four million jobs will be created by the legislation when it is fully in effect.”

In 2010, she said Obamacare would create 400,000 new jobs “almost immediately.”  Last year, the law’s defenders were reduced to arguing that the reduction in worker hours was a positive development, offering Americans more time to spend with their families, and freeing them from “job lock.”  CBO’s findings determined that Obamacare disincentivizes work, shifting the burden of subsidizing health coverage for people who choose to work less or leave the workforce altogether onto the backs of middle class taxpayers.  Democrats’ frantic “liberation from job lock” spin worked out…about as well as one might have expected.  Obamacare’s cheerleaders have been wrong about virtually everything: Their law was not a job creator.  Their law has not bent the national health spending “cost curve” down.  Their law has not even approached lowering rates across the board.  Their law has not made healthcare more affordable.  Their law has not secured access to care.  Their law has not reduced emergency room visits, or decreased uncompensated care. Their law did not guarantee that satisfied consumers could keep their preferred doctors and plans. And their law has not attracted nearly as many enrollees as they expected, largely due to lack of affordability.  Their law has not signed up as many young and healthy consumer as they’d anticipated, raising new fears of an adverse selection spiral.

Gee, How many times have I said that very thing? 🙂

And their law has not become popular post-implementation.  Meanwhile, the string of high-profile failures among Obamacare co-ops is inflicting more chaos onto an already-strained system:

Health care providers could get stuck with unpaid bills in a half dozen states where co-op plans have collapsed. That’s because there’s no financial backstop in those states if the failed nonprofit startups backed by Obamacare loans run out of money before paying off all of their medical claims. That messy scenario is already playing out in New York, where the state’s co-op shut down at the end of November after its financial situation proved direr than originally known. The Greater New York Hospital Association estimates the co-op, Health Republic Insurance of New York, owes its members at least $165 million. And the Medical Society of the State of New York found that of more than 900 doctors surveyed, 64 percent reported being owed money by the co-op plan. For most insurers, a state’s guaranty fund – bankrolled by the industry – will cover unpaid medical claims if they become insolvent. But in some states, like New York, that fund doesn’t support plans that are licensed as health maintenance organizations, which is typically how the co-ops were set up. The other five states where providers could end up with unpaid bills if the failed co-ops run out of money: Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Oregon and Utah…Just over half of the 23 co-ops seeded with $2.4 billion in loans have collapsed, with most set to cease operations at the end of this year. That’s left roughly 600,000 individuals scrambling to find new coverage.

On Capitol Hill this week, Republican lawmakers are demanding answers about how the government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on state-level Obamacare exchanges that ultimately collapsed, and have since been abandoned.  Here’s Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) grilling acting CMS administrator Andy Slavitt about whether or not he agrees with the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) recently-announced verdict that zero of the remaining state-level exchanges are “fully operational,” after five years and $1.45 billion in IT spending, courtesy of taxpayers:

Senate Republicans used a budget maneuver called reconciliation to vote to repeal vast swaths of Obamacare last week, approving a bill that would gut the law.  Once it passes the House, President Obama is expected to veto the legislation in order to protect his unpopular, harmful law. Hillary Clinton, who invented Obamacare, asserted last week that the law is working.

And The Ministry of Truth assures us that it’s all just a plot by dissidents and Thought Criminals and that they just want poor people to die. 🙂

THE AGENDA IS THE AGENDA. They fight for it to very last drop of YOUR blood. 🙂

 

The Chicken Little Hypocrisy Rebuke

Ragnarok will come someday, tomorrow, come someday,tomorrow,come someday. Ragnarok will come someday and we’ll all be killed.

Unless you give all your rights, freedoms, and your money and do exactly as we say when we say it because we say it!

DO as we Say, not as we Do and Do It Yesterday!

“This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can,” said U.S. President Barack Obama on his recent trip to Alaska. Miguel Cañete, the EU’s chief negotiator, has warned there is “no Plan B — nothing to follow. This is not just ongoing UN discussions. Paris is final.”

The Apocalypse is here. Never Let a Crisis, even one you make up, go to waste.

The world is doomed if you don’t submit!

Conventional wisdom holds that negotiators are hashing out a fair allocation of the deep emissions cuts all countries would need to make to limit warming. That image bears little resemblance to reality.

In fact, emissions reductions are barely on the table at all. Instead, the talks are rigged to ensure an agreement is reached regardless of how little action countries plan to take. The developing world, projected to account for four-fifths of all carbon-dioxide emissions this century, will earn applause for what amounts to a promise to stay on their pre-existing trajectory of emissions-intensive growth.

Here’s how the game works: The negotiating framework established at a 2014 conference in Lima, Peru, requires each country to submit a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, called an “Intended Nationally Determined Contribution” (INDC). Each submission is at the discretion of the individual country; there is no objective standard it must meet or emissions reduction it must achieve.

Beyond that, it’s nearly impossible even to evaluate or compare them. Developing countries actually blocked a requirement that the plans use a common format and metrics, so an INDC need not even mention emissions levels. Or a country can propose to reduce emissions off a self-defined “business-as-usual” trajectory, essentially deciding how much it wants to emit and then declaring it an “improvement” from the alternative. To prevent such submissions from being challenged, a group of developing countries led by China and India has rejected “any obligatory review mechanism for increasing individual efforts of developing countries.” And lest pressure nevertheless build on the intransigent, no developing country except Mexico submitted an INDC by the initial deadline of March 31 — and most either submitted no plan or submitted one only as the final September 30 cut-off approached.

After all this, the final submissions are not enforceable, and carry no consequences beyond “shame” for noncompliance — a fact bizarrely taken for granted by all involved.

So it’s just The Agenda is The Agenda, and my don’t we look wonderful for “doing something” when in fact it’s all just a gigantic redistribution con.

But MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change calculates the improvement by century’s end to be only 0.2 degrees Celsius. Comparing projected emissions to the baseline established by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2000 shows no improvement at all.

And therein lies the sticking point on which negotiations actually center: “climate finance.” Climate finance is the term for wealth transferred from developed to developing nations based on a vague and shifting set of rationales including repayment of the “ecological debt” created by past emissions, “reparations” for natural disasters, and funding of renewable energy initiatives.

The issue will dominate the Paris talks. The INDCs covering actual emissions reductions are subjective, discretionary, and thus essentially unnegotiable. Not so the cash. Developing countries are expecting more than $100 billion in annual funds from this agreement or they will walk away. (For scale, that’s roughly equivalent to the entire OECD budget for foreign development assistance.)

Somehow, the international process for addressing climate change has become one where addressing climate change is optional and apparently beside the point. Rich countries are bidding against themselves to purchase the developing world’s signature on an agreement so they can declare victory — even though the agreement itself will be the only progress achieved. (Politico.eu)

The climate change summit in Paris that aims to tackle global warming will itself pump an estimated 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it was claimed today.

Around 50,000 people including world leaders, businesses and activists are expected to travel from across the globe for the two-week conference in Paris which started today.

Most will arrive by plane from as far afield as New Zealand, Sydney and Bermuda, while others will arrive by train and car.

According to calculations by Wired and Steven Stoft of climateParis.org, the average round trip per attendee will be around 9,000 miles.

Taking the fuel consumption of a Boeing 747 – around 16.5 miles per gallon – which the website describes as a ‘happy medium between private jets and bullet trains’, it is estimated around 27 million gallons of fuel will be used by travellers attending the conference. 

This figure was arrived at by multiplying the number of attendees by the average round-trip mileage to get 450million miles then multiplying that by 16.5miles per gallon.

With each gallon of fuel producing around 21 pounds of carbon dioxide, the total released by planes flying to and from Paris is thought to be about 575million pounds (290,000 tons), according to rough calculations.

But given that some planes will very likely carry more than one attendee, this figure is likely to be at the very highest end. 

The total still pales in comparison with the annual global output of 80 quadrillion pounds, meaning the Paris conference equates to around 22 seconds of the world’s production. 

In an opening speech at the summit, Prince Charles warned world leaders that ‘we are becoming the architects of our own destruction’ as he called for immediate action to halt global warming.

The heads of 151 nations have kicked off 12 days of talks in Paris in search of an elusive pact that would wean the world off fossil fuels, making it the largest gathering of global leaders in history.

The Prince of Wales urged them to ‘think of your grandchildren, as I think of mine’ as well as the billions of people without a voice and the youngest generation as they try to secure a new global deal. 

He said: ‘If the planet were a patient, we would have treated her long ago. 

‘You, ladies and gentlemen, have the power to put her on life support and you must surely start the emergency procedures without further procrastination.

‘Humanity faces many threats but none is greater than climate change. In damaging our climate we are becoming the architects of our own destruction. 

‘We have the knowledge, the tools and the money (to solve the crisis).’

Over the next fortnight negotiators from 195 countries will attempt to hammer out a deal that will put the world on a path to prevent temperatures rising by more than 2C above pre-industrial levels and avoid dangerous climate change. 

French President Francois Hollande later echoed his statement by telling leaders that ‘the hope of all of humanity’ rested on their shoulders.

And anyone who stands in their way is evil and wants to destroy mankind, naturally. 🙂 No hyperbole there.

In an opening speech at the conference centre in Paris, the French President said: ‘Never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high because it concerns the future of the planet, the future of life. The hope of all of humanity rests on all of your shoulders.’  

Barack Obama also painted a dire picture of the future without aggressive action to curb carbon emissions, describing submerged countries, abandoned cities and fields that won’t grow.

In a speech, he said: ‘As the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second largest (greenhouse gas) emitter… the United States of America not only recognises our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.’

The U.S. President also called the climate talks an ‘act of defiance’ by the world community following the Islamic State-linked attacks two weeks ago. 

The Islamic Radicals who want to kill you don’t care about your green defiance. Not one bit. As a matter of fact they are making an estimated $5 million dollars a day off of the profits from the oil fields you refuse to bomb because of your environmentalist radicalism. 🙂

Chinese President Xi Jinping said an eventual global climate deal must include aid for poor countries and acknowledge differences between developing and established economies. 

Xi, speaking at U.N.-led climate talks near Paris on Monday, said an agreement should also include transfer of climate technology to developing countries.

He said a deal should accommodate national interests, adding: ‘It’s imperative to respect differences’ among countries, especially developing ones.

‘Addressing climate change should not deny the legitimate needs of developing countries to reduce poverty and improve living standards,’ he said.

World leaders had earlier held a moment of silence in honor of people killed in recent attacks in Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Tunisia and Mali.

The U.N. climate conference in Paris is most likely humanity’s last chance to thwart global environmental disaster, Pope Francis said on Monday, warning the world was “at the limits of suicide”.

The pope, who wrote a major document on the environment last June, made the comment in an hour-long news conference aboard the plane returning him to Rome at the end of a six-day trip to Africa.

The freewheeling conversations have become a trademark of his papacy and the few times he takes direct questions from journalists.

Francis, who visited Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic, also said the continent was “a martyr of exploitation” by wealthy countries who lust after its natural resources and try to impose Western values instead of concentrating on development.

The pope was asked if the U.N. climate summit in Paris would mark a turnaround in the fight against global warming.

“I am not sure, but I can say to you ‘now or never’,” he said. “Every year the problems are getting worse. We are at the limits. If I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the limits of suicide.”

He spoke of retreating glaciers in Greenland and low-lying countries at risk from rising sea levels.

“I am sure that the (Paris delegates) have goodwill to do something. I hope it turns out this way and I am praying that it will,” he said. (Daily Mail)

An echo chamber of activist groups and media outlets stands ready to rubber-stamp the final agreement as “historic,” validating the vast reservoirs of political capital spent on the exercise.

It’s a redistribution shell game to make Leftists and Socialists “feel good” about “doing something” thus validating their superiority.

And you get to pay for the privilege of being a serf under their rule.

Worry, they are happy. Don’t worry, they don’t care if you suffer.

It’s all about their power over you and their superiority in their own minds.

They are, after all, Homo Superior Liberalis, and you’re not, SERF.

May Day +1

The Following has not been approved by The Ministry of Truth…

UPDATE – The Left is already moving to discredit Toensing and other lawyers working to expose the Benghazi cover-up.  These attorneys have publicly alleged that their clients were bullied and intimidated into silence over the last seven months.

FYI: You might remember Victoria Toensing. She;s the one who wrote the Covert Agent Statutes that were alleged to have been violated in the Valerie Plaime case.

🙂
UPDATE II – Wow.  White House Spokesman downplayed a Benghazi question today, sniffing that the attack “happened a long time ago:” (townhall)

The Following has been approved by The Ministry of Truth:

So erase all traces of  “Benghazi” from your mind so as to not cause a Thought Crime. We Now we rejoin our Big Brother Broadcast already in progress…

“For the 85% to 90% of Americans who already have health insurance … they don’t have to worry about anything else.”

Really? The Congressional Budget Office expects 7 million workers — and possibly as many as 20 million — will lose their employer coverage because of ObamaCare. That’s plenty to worry about.

Obama’s own health care number crunchers say ObamaCare will force national health spending up 7.4% in 2014, and add billions in costs over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office says it will add massively to federal health spending. (IBD)

Everything’s Fine. Nothing to see here…Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!

Employer spending on benefits rose at the slowest pace on record in the first quarter, as companies began bracing for higher health costs with next year’s launch of ObamaCare.

Total benefits, such as insurance and pension contributions, rose just 0.1% vs. the end of last year, the smallest gain in Labor Department data going back to 2001. By comparison, payroll employment grew by a half-million, or 0.4%, in Q1. So benefits-per-worker declined.

Total employee benefits provided outside of government jobs declined outright.

The 2010 health law is expected to have its biggest impact on modest-wage service-sector industries, where coverage that meets ObamaCare requirements is less common. Not surprisingly, the abrupt change toward stingier employee benefits was even more evident here.

Total benefits in service occupations shrank 0.3% in Q1, the first decline in data going back to 2002.

Given that service-sector benefit costs rose throughout the past decade, even in much-weaker economic conditions than now, the evidence points to ObamaCare as the culprit.

Total benefits provided by private-sector employers also shrank 0.3%, though the government noted missing data for white-collar office and sales jobs, which made the reading less reliable.

Over the last year, relatively paltry service-sector wage growth of 1.5% has outpaced the 1.4% increase in benefits, reversing a long-standing trend.

Slower health-cost growth may be a contributing factor but wouldn’t explain outright declines in per-person benefits.

A possible explanation for the sudden shift could be that a smaller share of workers are being provided health care and other benefits due to part-time status — less than 30 hours per week under ObamaCare.

Under ObamaCare regulations issued in January, the fines employers face in 2014 for failing to provide minimum-required coverage will be based on employment levels starting this July.

In the past six months or so, a parade of service-sector companies has said they’re mulling changes to worker hours and health benefits to reduce the cost of complying with ObamaCare.

For example, Krispy Kreme (KKD) said in an SEC filing that it has 1,300 workers without coverage who may be entitled to it under ObamaCare at a potential cost of up to $5 million — before actions it might take “to reduce the number of employees subject to the new requirements.”

Fiesta Restaurant Group (FRGI), which operates 251 restaurants in four states, said it is “reviewing our strategy for employing part-time vs. full-time employees” in managing compliance costs.

Fewer firms have been upfront in saying they’ll actually reduce full-time employment, which isn’t surprising given a backlash faced by Darden Restaurants (DRI) last year for acknowledging such a plan.

But in recent weeks, movie theater operator Regal Entertainment Group (RGC) said it would cut hours for nonsalaried employees and AAA Parking said it would move half of full-time employees to part-time, both citing efforts to lower the costs of complying with ObamaCare.

Thus, the decline in per-person employee benefits doesn’t appear to reflect a lower cost of benefits so much as a coming shift in the burden of benefits to the government.

Most part-time workers are likely to qualify for ObamaCare subsidies, which are available to those who earn up to 400% of the poverty level.

ObamaCare exempts firms with fewer than 50 full-time equivalent employees from providing health care coverage. Firms with at least 50 workers face fines based on the number of employees who receive ObamaCare subsidies, which are only available to people who lack affordable coverage from an employer.

But those fines — up to $3,000 per ObamaCare subsidized worker — won’t apply for part-time workers. (IBD)

PREV

 

Doleling Out the Jobs

The Democrats are spinning away that adding 80,000 Jobs last much is “going in the right direction”. And we’ve “created private sector job growth” every month, yada yada…Just at a snails pace. And the snails are winning.

And that’s Congress’s fault. 🙂

Not the over regulation and overtaxing and a Democrat Senate that hasn’t passed it’s own budget in 3 1/2 years and refusing to even debate anything the “obstructionist” Republicans pass.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) projects 1,781,000 students at the bachelor’s degree level will graduate as the college Class of 2012.

Joblessness among new entrants to the workforce is 300,000 higher than three years ago.

And That’s on top of the Millions still out of work, some for years at a time.

Unemployment topped 8% for the 41st month in a row.

And even though the current unemployment rate of 8.2% is officially below the level three years ago, that’s because millions have given up looking for work and so aren’t counted as unemployed. If you adjust for that change, today’s unemployment rate would be 10.9%.

This is already the longest jobs recession since the Great Depression at 53 months. Payrolls aren’t on track to reach the old highs until June 2015, assuming the sluggish economic expansion lasts that long. (IBD)

So does it sound like a celebration to you?

Only if you a liberal. Only if you’re trying desperately to sell sand to man dying of thirst in a desert.

But that’s Bush’s Fault too. 🙂

To explain away the ongoing jobs debacle, <Chief Economic Advisor Alan> Krueger claims “there are no quick fixes to the problems we face that were more than a decade in the making.” Translation: Cut your griping and be thankful Obama has been able to do so well, given the terrible hand he was dealt.

It’s all Bush’s Fault! 🙂

According to American Enterprise Institute researcher (and former IBD staffer) James Pethokoukis, it will take 219,000 net new jobs each month to bring the unemployment rate below 8% by Nov. 6’s Election Day. 

VP Joe Biden: Romney, he said, believes “somehow that those so-called job creators will make everything OK for the rest of us.”

And that’s a bad thing. After all, Romney to the left is a mustache twirling Monopoly board/cartoon Millionaire villain tying grandma to the railroad tracks as the steam train is bearing down her!

Government central planning and doling out of union jobs and more government sector union jobs is the way to go! Federal jobs (ex post office) are up 10.7%.

Establishments less than a year old, including those belonging to the same firm, totaled 556,553 in 2010, according to the latest Commerce Department data. That’s down 26% from the peak of 747,278 in 2006. Meanwhile, the number of employees at startups has plunged, with a greater share of new firms with no employees — one-man shops. Very small startups are less likely to invest or to grow, a bad sign for future hiring. (IBD)

New York Times: It is increasingly apparent what the economy will look like when President Obama faces voters in November: pretty much what it looks like today.

So that’s the “right direction” and everything is “fine”. 🙂

Then There’s:

More workers joined the federal government’s disability program in June than got new jobs, according to two new government reports, a clear indicator of how bleak the nation’s jobs picture is after three full years of economic recovery.

The economy created just 80,000 jobs in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. But that same month, 85,000 workers left the workforce entirely to enroll in the Social Security Disability Insurance program, according to the Social Security Administration.

The disability ranks have outpaced job growth throughout President Obama’s recovery. While the economy has created 2.6 million jobs since June 2009, fully 3.1 million workers signed up for disability benefits.

In other words, the number of new disability enrollees has climbed 19% faster than the number of jobs created during the sluggish recovery. (Even after accounting for people who left the disability program because they died or aged into retirement, disability ranks have climbed more than 1.1 million in the past three years.)

And the disability ranks will continue to swell. In just the last month, almost 275,000 put in applications for disability benefits. Experts say that more people try to get on disability when jobs are scarce, and changes to eligibility rules enacted back in 1984 have made it far easier to qualify.

In addition, while hiring has been very weak during the recovery, the number of people who have dropped out of the labor force entirely has exploded by 7.3 million since June 2009, an IBD analysis of BLS data show. Some aged into retirement, but most either signed up for disability, stayed in school, moved back in with parents, or just quit looking for a job.

As a result, the “labor force participation rate” — the number of people who have jobs or are actively looking for one compared with the entire working-age population — is now 63.8%, down from 65.7% in June 2009. This participation rate is at the lowest levels in 30 years. In previous recoveries, the participation rate has almost always risen, not fallen.

Other indicators show that the three-year-old economic recovery isn’t producing jobs in adequate numbers:

The unemployment rate has been above 8% for 41 consecutive months. In the previous 60 years, the jobless topped 8% in a total of only 39 months.

The number of people with jobs is still nearly 5 million below its pre-recession peak.

The number of long-term unemployed — those out of work 27 weeks or more — is still 5.4 million — almost 1 million higher than when the recovery began, and almost twice the level it ever reached prior to Obama’s recovery.

The median length of unemployment is 19.8 weeks. Throughout Obama’s recovery, it has averaged 20.6 weeks. Prior to Obama, that number had had never exceeded 10.5 weeks.

So, say it with me because you can here screaming in your LEFT ear, “But that’s Bush’s Fault!” , he left us a ‘mess’ ad nauseum.

The poor recovery has also driven people to sign up for food stamps in record numbers. From June 2009 to April 2012, food stamp enrollment surged 11.3 million, or 32%, according to the Department of Agriculture.

In addition, the soft jobs market has driven median household incomes down more after the recession ended than during the recession itself, according to Sentier Research, which tracks monthly household income.

After adjusting for inflation, median annual household income tumbled 5.3% from June 2009 to May 2012. In contrast, median incomes dropped 2.6% during the 18-month recession, Sentier found.

“The recession was bad enough,” said Sentier’s Gordon Green, “but what’s extraordinary is the even larger decline during this so-called economic recovery.”

It shows, Green said, “how much ground we have to make up just to get back to where we were.” (IBD)

But the Private sector is “doing fine”.

More people on the government dole, less people working a whole new crop of unemployed college grads…

Now that’s “moving in the right direction” Mr. President!

NOVEMBER IS COMING!

Fair & Balanced

“I’d like to see his house burn, one of his millions of houses burning down.”

During an interview with the liberal website Mediaite, Joy Behar added, “Who’s he going to call, the Mormon fire patrol?”

JOY BEHAR: I would ask him plenty of questions about, is he planning to endorse the Ryan budget? And I think that would be a terrible mistake. I don’t want to see people on the streets begging for food, thank you.

BEHAR: Oh, less government? That is an idiotic statement. Can I just say that?

Now substitute, conservative and black/minority/gay  and see what would happen. 🙂

And you there you have the “New Tone” of “Civility” folks.

Oh, and she just replaced Keith Olbermann on Al Gore’s Current TV.

Enjoy! 🙂

*********

The news that the House Oversight Committee will vote next week on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents in the Fast and Furious investigation, was met with silence from the Big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS) network news shows. There was no mention of the Holder hearings on Monday’s evening news shows or Tuesday’s morning shows.

The blackout of the Holder hearings continues a stunning trend. Since December 2010, when the Fast and Furious scandal first broke, there have been zero stories about the gunwalking scandal on NBC Nightly News and Today show. On ABC there was only one brief aired on Good Morning America. Only CBS has truly covered the story, mainly due to the work of one reporter, Sharyl Attkisson. Since Attkisson broke the gunwalking story, there have been a total of 30 full stories and 1 brief aired on CBS’s Evening News and This Morning programs.

Curiously, Attkisson’s stories on the gunwalking scandal have screeched to a halt.

From February 4 through this morning’s news there has been only one report (An Erica Hill brief on the May 3 This Morning) on the Fast and Furious controversy. It’s not as if Attkisson stopped paying attention, as she authored a story for CBSNews.com on Tuesday, but oddly her reporting did not make the air on that night’s CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley.  

The following brief, aired on the May 3, 2012 CBS This Morning, represents the sum total of stories by the Big 3 on the Fast and Furious scandal in over a month:
ERICA HILL: There is new information this morning in the Fast and Furious gunwalking operation, first exposed last year by our own Sharyl Attkisson. Sources tell CBS News that today lawmakers will take the first formal step toward charging Attorney General Eric Holder with contempt of Congress. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee accused Holder of obstructing their investigation. In Fast and Furious, U.S. officials allowed thousands of guns to flow from the U.S. into Mexico. Two of those guns were later found at the scene where a U.S. border patrol agent was murdered.

But don’t worry, they aren’t biased propagandists for the Liberal cause. They are “journalists” and they are “fair” and “balanced”. Just ask them…. 🙂

*******

‘Obama has an ambitious second-term agenda,” wrote Ryan Lizza in this week’s New Yorker. “The President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change,” supposedly to “improve the world.”

So forget about the abysmal jobless numbers above 8% for over three years, or the $15 trillion deficit that threatens to turn the U.S. into Greece. No, amid those very real calamities, climate change is more important.

If this isn’t a sign of a president out of touch with reality, what is? If climate change is Obama’s “most important” policy issue, then neither the Tea-Party-led victories around fiscal discipline — such as the Wisconsin vote, nor the West Virginia primary, here 40% of Democrats chose a jailbird to protest Obama’s anti-coal agenda, made a dent on him.

Like a madman doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, it can only mean Obama intends to double-down on his green agenda if re-elected.

It’s the Agenda Stupid! He’ll be more “flexible”. 🙂

Has Obama learned nothing? The economy topped the voters’ list of concerns in 2009, but Obama bulled ahead with health care reform anyway.

Poll after poll since 2009 shows the public considers climate change dead last in importance. In 2012, Pew Research Center reported that 86% of the public considered the economy a top priority, and 82% considered jobs in that slot. Global warming ranked dead last at 25% — and that represented a 13% decline from 2007.(IBD)

The Agenda is the The Agenda!

The Voters and the American People be Damned!

So why do you wanna vote for this twit again?

*******

contrary to claims by the nation’s top elected duffer, private sector jobs are down 4.6 million in the last 52 months.While the number of federal government employees increased nearly a quarter-million paychecks, 11.4%, in the same period. This despite the Democrat candidate’s vow four years ago to go through every budget line-by-line. You betcha.

Private-sector jobs are still down by 4.6 million, or 4%, from January 2008, when overall employment peaked. Meanwhile government jobs are down just 407,000, or 1.8%. Federal employment actually is 225,000 jobs above its January 2008 level, an 11.4% increase. That’s right, up 11.4%.

Private payrolls have been trending higher in the last couple of years while government has been shedding staff. But that’s because governments did not cut jobs right away. Overall government employment didn’t peak until April 2009, 16 months after the recession started. It didn’t fall below their January 2008 level until September 2010.

Fewer than three in 10 American teenagers now hold jobs such as running cash registers, mowing lawns or busing restaurant tables from June to August. The decline has been particularly sharp since 2000, with employment for 16-to-19-year olds falling to the lowest level since World War II. (Townhall)

One largely overlooked aspect of Obama’s Friday remarks was his plea that the nation needs to grow state and local governments to provide more jobs. Obama displayed his keen grasp of the Acme School of Economics by making his top stimulus spending idea increasing the size of governments. It isn’t working on the federal level, so maybe it will now in the states.

It’s easy to argue that Obama’s tunnel vision on government employment reflects his complete lack of experience in the business world. But it’s also mainstream Democratic thinking.

Just look at Joy Behar. 🙂

This increasingly desperate president’s election year economic policies are like deer-hunting with an AK-47 on automatic. Who knows? You might hit something.

After all,  Why does Obama think the private sector is “doing fine”? “We’ve seen record profits in the corporate sector.” And high corporate profits are good for tax revenues to pay for government programs and government jobs. That’s the main reason Obama cares about the private sector. (IBD)

And Democrats all want to tax (sorry “revenue”) you to death because after all, all we need to do is Spend Even More and Utopia awaits!

“People are poor and people are left behind because they do not have access to the free enterprise system.”–Senator Marco Rubio.

But don’t worry, everything is “fine”. Just ask the Media and the President. 🙂

 

I Got Me a Fever!

Welcome to Recovery Summer III: The Same Old Bovine Fecal Matter!

Employers added a paltry 69,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the least since May of last year, and 49,000 fewer jobs were created in the previous two months than had been thought, the Labor Department said on Friday.

The jobless rate rose to 8.2 percent in May from 8.1 percent in April.

But don’t worry, the Media and the President have their spin already to go, after all they are perfect and everything’s fine. 🙂

“We’ve got responsibilities that are bigger than an election,” he said. “My message to Congress is now is not the time to play politics. Now is not the time to sit on your hands.”

Because it’s Congress’s Fault that every jobs bill that has been proposed by the republicans has been killed by the Democrats and the Democrats haven’t passed a Budget in over 3+ years!!

The average unemployment is now 40 weeks instead of 19 when Obama came into office and the sky was falling.

The economy “is growing again but it’s not growing as fast as we want,” -Obama.

This has been his soundbite for over 3 years now!

The White House says this economy isn’t really the president’s responsibility.

(But the Previous President is solely to blame for not only his administration but mine too!- Orwell Loves you Mr. President!)

On his way to a big-money fundraiser in Minnesota, President Obama told the employees of Honeywell, “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” like the “crisis in Europe’s economy” that’s “starting to cast a shadow on our own as well.”

Last year it was Tsunami and Earthquake, Oil Spills, etc etc. ad nauseum.

Its take on what the Washington Post called a “dismal U.S. jobs report” as “businesses dramatically scaled back hiring,” was this from Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger:

“Today we learned that the economy has added private sector jobs for 27 straight months” — as if lukewarm net job growth that’s actually slower than the growth in the labor force should be a cause to break out the champagne in the biggest economy in the world.

Instead of blaming its failed trillion-dollar Keynesian stimulus, plus at least another trillion taking over the country’s health-insurance system, the White House disgracefully points a finger at its predecessor.

Rattling off job losses during the end of Bush’s second term, Krueger tells us, “We are still fighting back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” (IBD)

We are the victims of the evil Bush and you should cheer that we have done as much as we have against such great odds. After all, the Republicans are fighting us tooth-and-nail and “obstructing” everything  and we have to contend with those “racist” tea-baggers and all we we want to do is to save you from yourself and show how we are perfection incarnate! 🙂

The jobs report came a day after the government downgraded its estimate of economic growth in the first quarter to a 1.9% annual rate, down from 3% in the fourth quarter of 2011. Some analysts said they planned to lower expectations for growth in the current quarter. (WSJ)

“It’s quite possible this could just be the norm now for several months,” T.D. Bank economist Beata Caranci said. “We are in a cycle that is not built on strong foundations.”

And it’s all those Damn Republicans/Corporations/Rich/White people’s fault!! 🙂

“I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

“I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

Obama said he expects that after his reelection, Congress will pass a balanced deficit reduction plan, a highway bill, immigration reform.

“My expectation is that if we can break this fever, that we can invest in clean energy and energy efficiency because that’s not a partisan issue.” (Buzzfeed pool report)

<<Barf Bag Overload!>>

President Obama has shelled out more in federal spending than the five presidents that came before him.-US News

So Mr “I’ve spent less than everyone else in 60 years” is as always full of himself and his bovine fecal matter. But don’t expect that to matter to him or the Media. They have there poll-tested meme and they’ll run with it.

So what if it’s a lie.

Like they care.

Then end justifies the means.

And the end is to win.

Period.

But don’t worry, Obama’s “all-in” Energy policies will save us.

Get your candles and horse-and-buggy, and solar egg warmer ready.

DISENFRANCHISING FUTURE DEMOCRATS

Previously on DOJ: The Illegal Voter Campaign Season 3

Florida election authorities are examining about 180,000 people who they say may not be U.S. citizens but are registered to vote in the state, an official said on Friday.

State officials are updating Florida’s voter rolls ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. Florida is home to a large Latino population and is expected to be a critical swing state in the contest between Democratic President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Officials in Florida have so far identified more than 2,600 potential voters who may not be U.S. citizens and sent their information to local election authorities, Cate said.

Now:

The Justice Department sent a letter to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner Thursday evening demanding the state cease purging its voting rolls because the process it is using has not been cleared under the Voting Rights Act, TPM has learned.

DOJ also said that Florida’s voter roll purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, which stipulates that voter roll maintenance should have ceased 90 days before an election, which given Florida’s August 14 primary, meant May 16.

Five of Florida’s counties are subject to the Voting Rights Act, but the state never sought permission from either the Justice Department or a federal court to implement its voter roll maintenance program.

The person behind it:

Elise Shore. Ms. Shore came to the Voting Section by way of the “Southern Coalition for Social Justice,” where she worked as a legal consultant focusing on “voting rights, immigrant rights, and other civil rights and social justice issues.” The far left-wing positions of this group are nicely summarized on its website. Ms. Shore also made a $1,000 contribution to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

    Before joining the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, she worked for more than two years as a Regional Counsel for MALDEF [Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund]. There, she was an outspoken critic of Georgia’s voter ID law and well as its proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration (which, incidentally, have been found to be non-discriminatory by a federal court) and described how heartened she was that the Civil Rights Division had objected to the registration law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. But her joy must have been fleeting: the Division later capitulated and withdrew its objection after Georgia filed a federal declaratory judgment action. It will be interesting to see if Shore can put her politics to the side in her role as the Voting Section’s point of contact for all redistricting submissions in the state of Florida.

Not a trace of bias anywhere no is there… 🙂

No Cheating, dishonesty intended either… 🙂

Everything is perfect and straight forward….Exactly…. 🙂

 

A Year In Review

Here’s a look at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s year in review.

– Jan. 14: Kansas announces its intention to become the 26th state to file suit against the federal government to stop implementation of the health care overhaul.

– Jan. 19: The House of Representatives votes to repeal the health care law.

– Jan. 26: Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Abbott Labs cuts 1,900 jobs “in response to changes in the health-care industry, including U.S. health-care reform and the challenging regulatory environment.”

– Jan. 31: A second federal district judge rules that the law is unconstitutional.

– Feb. 2: All 47 Republican senators vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but the measure fails.

– Feb. 16: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies before the Senate Finance Committee and admits that the CLASS Act, a key portion of the law that was touted as a $70 billion savings, is “totally unsustainable.” But not to worry: Sebelius says her department has the authority to rework the legislation to make CLASS tenable.

– Feb. 18: The House votes to block federal funding to implement the Affordable Care Act. The Congressional Budget Office also estimates that repealing the law would add $210 billion to the combined federal deficits from 2012 to 2021.

– Feb. 22: A federal judge tosses a lawsuit claiming that the Affordable Care Act violates the liberties of those who choose to rely on God to protect and heal them instead of buying health insurance.

– March 3: The House votes to end an unpopular tax paperwork-filing requirement for businesses tucked into the health care law.

– March 23: The law turns one year old. On the same day, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce finds that the temporary Early Retirement Reinsurance Program will spend its allotted $5 billion far earlier than its Jan. 1, 2014 expiration date.

– March 30: The CBO estimates that health care reform will cost $1.1 trillion, an increase of $90 billion from its February estimate.

– May 17: The Daily Caller reports that 20 percent of new waivers from the law have gone to gourmet restaurants, nightclubs and fancy hotels in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district.

– June 8: A McKinsey & Company survey of over 1,300 private sector employers found that 30 percent of employers would definitely or probably stop offering insurance to their employees after the law is implemented in 2014.

– June 18: HHS announces that it is axing waivers from the law. After over 1700 of them, 24% of them are for Public and private sector UNIONS and “small” employers like McDonalds. And they only stopping kissing up because of too much bad press.

– June 21: A glitch in the law, discovered after Obama signed it, would allow middle-class Americans to get subsidized health care intended for poor people, the Associated Press reports. Medicare’s chief actuary says the policy “doesn’t make sense.”

– June 29: In the face of a constitutional challenge, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rules in favor of the law.

– July 18: An Employment Policies Institute report finds that the Affordable Care Act would incentivize employees to switch to a government-subsidized insurance exchange even if employers were to continue their health care coverage, costing taxpayers “significant[ly].”

– July 19: The bipartisan “gang of six” puts forward a debt-reduction plan that would repeal the CLASS Act.

– Aug. 1: HHS issues a regulation requiring all group health insurance plans to cover FDA-approved “contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.” Even if you are morally opposed to Planned Parenthood. 🙂

Now that’s “Pro-Choice” !!!!

– Aug. 12: The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rules that the law’s individual health insurance mandate is unconstitutional.

– Sept. 8: The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rejects a pair of challenges to the law on procedural grounds. It does not rule on the law’s constitutionality.

– Sept. 15: A bicameral Republican report accuses Democratic supporters of the health care law of recklessness for promoting the CLASS Act despite knowing that the program would eventually blow up the budget.

– Oct. 5: The signatures of about 1.6 million petitioners pressing for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act are delivered to Capitol Hill at a press conference.

– Oct. 13: A federal inspector general finds that the IRS is having trouble collecting the 10-percent federal tanning tax established by the law.

– Oct. 14: HHS completes its 19-month review of the CLASS Act, determining that “we do not have a path to move forward,” Sebelius says. CLASS remains on the books, but the administration essentially gives up on it.

– Nov. 4: Tennessee Rep. Phil Roe and 23 Republican colleagues send a letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman objecting to a new IRS rule authorizing subsidies for participants in the yet-to-be-created federal health care exchange program. They argue that the agency is seeking to rewrite legislation, something it is not allowed to do.
Conservative experts say the IRS rules are covering up a glitch in the original law that provides subsidies for people enrolled in state exchanges, but not federal exchanges. Shulman does not agree with their analysis.

– Nov. 9: The National Federation of Independent Business releases a report saying that in 2012 the law’s new health insurance tax will reduce private sector jobs by between 125,000 and 249,000.

– Nov. 10: The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty announces it is suing HHS on behalf of Belmont Abbey College, a Catholic educational institution. The lawsuit claims the Aug. 1 regulation violates the college’s teaching on contraception, sterilization and abortion.

– Nov. 14: The Supreme Court agrees to hear arguments on the Affordable Care Act.

– Nov. 16: Forty-seven percent of Americans favor repeal of the law, Gallup finds.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 55% of Likely U.S. Voters at least somewhat favor repeal of the health care law passed by Congress in March 2010, while 35% at least somewhat oppose repeal. The intensity remains on the side of the law’s opponents since these findings include 42% who Strongly Favor repeal versus 26% who are Strongly Opposed.

– Nov. 29: Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank joins the effort to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a key portion of the law that would “recommend levels at which Medicare recipients, including seniors, can
be reimbursed for health care expenses.”

– Nov. 30: The House energy committee votes to repeal the CLASS Act.

– Dec. 15: The Obama administration announces that the number of young uninsured Americans has fallen by 2.5 million, attributing it to his law’s provision permitting young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plans
until age 26. (yeah and their parents are not underemployed) 🙂

– Dec 16: Seeking to defuse a potential showdown over a key part of the new healthcare law, the Obama administration moved Friday to let states, rather than the federal government, define which medical benefits insurance companies will have to offer consumers starting in 2014. That allows state leaders to retain more control of health insurance even as the law extends a new federal guarantee that all Americans can get coverage, even if they are sick.

But it’s just a “pre-rule”.

By giving states authority to define the scope of covered benefits, the Obama administration potentially sidestepped an ugly showdown between consumer and business groups in the run-up to the presidential election. Administration officials also may have undercut a charge from opponents of the law that the federal government is usurping state authority. (aka The 10th Amendment argument)

That’s tricky territory for the administration, which is trying to avoid the “big brother” label on health care.

“However, flexibility must yield to reliable, comprehensive coverage of benefits for consumers.… It is essential that HHS provide strong oversight and enforcement.”

The proposed rules, which will take months to finalize. What do you want to bet it will right up to the March arguments in the Supreme Court. 🙂

Gee, I’m not a little cynical. I’m nothing BUT cynical. 🙂

That means that some states may require insurers to cover services such as chiropractic therapy or in vitro fertilization, while others may not. The rules will not affect co-payments, cost sharing and deductibles, which play a major role in determining premiums.
– Dec. 18: Health care experts doubt that the federal insurance exchange program will be fully operational by the Jan. 1, 2014 deadline, since many states have refused to implement the state exchange program, the Washington Post  reports.

– Dec. 19: The Supreme Court announces it will hear an unprecedented week’s worth of arguments in March 2012 to determine whether the health care overhaul law is constitutional.

So it’s all politics and chaos. They passed the buck so that them not sawing off the finger on your right hand would also you to not notice they want to or have sawed over your legs.

But don’t worry, when the IRS comes knocking on your wallet, it’s only a “penalty” nothing to be concerned about. 🙂

 

Greece-ing the Skids Too

“We all have a set of mutual obligations towards each other — we are our brother’s keeper, we are our sister’s keeper — and that those mutual obligations have to express themselves through government policies,” – US Senate Candidate Barack Obama in 2004

Although many hope members of the super committee will reach an 11^th hour deal on spending cuts before the November 23 deadline, New York Times columnist David Brooks doubts that any deal will ever be reached, now or in the future. Brooks suspects that the United States is headed toward a fiscal crisis much like that of Greece.

On Friday night’s broadcast of PBS’s “NewsHour,” Brooks said that despite the best possible groundwork being laid to reach a deal, a deal still couldn’t be made.

“Yes, I mean, I’m hearing the exact same thing,” Brooks said. “I think the tragedy of it is, if it was ever going to work, it was going to work under these circumstances. The rules were rigged to make a deal as possible as possible as possible, which is to say there was going to be a clean vote on the House. They were going to meet in private. They had this sword of Damocles hanging over them. And they still couldn’t reach a deal.”

According to Brooks, with this missed opportunity and other missed opportunities over the years – it doesn’t bode well for any deal in the future. And that he says means the United States will eventually face a Greek-like situation.

“And still – and so it’s a history of really 10 or 15 years of potential moments where we could have – somebody could have made a deal with doing some spending cuts, some tax increases, jam it all together in whatever form you want to do,” he continued. “And every think tank has their own version. But the two sides are just too far apart. And as Mark [Shields] says, there is no center. And so, you know, they hope the election will solve it. That is what everybody is saying on the Hill. I’m a little dubious the election – why should this election solve it, when all the other elections haven’t solved hit. So the short answer is, welcome, Greece. We’re going to be Greece.”

And we all know the punchline here: “It’s the Republican’s Fault!!”

Not both of them. Entrenched in their ideological warfare. Democrats unable to cut spending and wanting to raise taxes on “the rich”. The Republicans not wanting to raise taxes and wanting to cut spending (but not nearly enough).

So we have fire and water and all we get is a lot of heated steam.

Neither will give an inch because of the 2012 campaign. Compromise is what the other guy does to let you do whatever YOU WANT to do.

Rock Meet Hard Place.

It’s not like it wasn’t predictable.

From a blog I wrote May 10, 2010: https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/greece-ing-the-skids/

In Greece:

They are angry because for years they have been encouraged to live beyond their means, taking advantage of the cheap credit on offer since Greece joined the euro in 2001. Now, the rug is being pulled from under their feet. People who have taken out mortgages to buy homes, loans to purchase cars and credit cards to pay for overpriced basic goods are being asked to meet all these commitments with a much lower income than they had budgeted for.

Fannie and Freddie anyone??

UK Guardian: Saddled with burgeoning public sectors (which help sustain muscular trade unions)– SEIU, UAW, NEA anyone?

This is not what angers Greeks most, though. What you will hear time after time, both at the protests and at workplaces and cafes, is that this crisis confirms the failure of the country’s political system. In other words, that for years politicians have been bleeding the country dry, looking after themselves and their friends and failing to build a robust economy and a country equipped to deal with the challenges of the 21st century.

There is anger at the pervasive, high-level corruption for which no politician is ever punished. People are also furious that no government has ever tackled influence-peddling in the public sector. The Greek branch of Transparency International estimated that Greeks paid almost euro800 million ($1 billion) in bribes last year. This is another drain on household budgets but more importantly it creates a sense of injustice, a sense that to get anything done you have to play by the system’s warped rules.

Sound familiar??

This feeling of unfairness is compounded when tax evasion also goes unpunished.

“Turbo Tax” Geithner anyone? Barney Frank? Charlie Rangel?? Jeffrey Imhelt?

Salaried professionals and civil servants have their wages taxed at source but many Greeks do not. And, what they declare often bears no resemblance to what they actually earn. The government believes that tax evasion could be worth up to euro30 billion ($38 billion) a year, or 12 percent of the country’s GDP. Allowing one part of the population to consistently get away without paying while Greece’s public finances are propped up by the same people all the time creates incredible resentment. That’s why you hear many Greeks say they will put up with the austerity measures if the government ensures that everybody pays their fair share. If people believe that the usual suspects, who in many cases are wealthy businessmen, doctors and lawyers, are allowed to get away with it, then the level of anger will go up several notches.

47% of all Americans pay NO TAXES whatsover!

Union workers and civil servant can make more in retirement than on the job.

But we aren’t going down that road…oh no…the Nazi, Racist, Violent Tea Baggers are just wrong.

Some of the measures imposed on Greece by the EU in order to bail them out (BBC):

The plans hope to achieve budget cuts of 30bn euros over three years – with the goal of cutting Greece’s public deficit to less than 3% of GDP by 2014. It currently stands at 13.6%. (in 2010)

PAY CUTS

The government is planning a freeze pay for all public sector workers.

Some pay cuts will also be implemented, and public sector contract workers are set to lose their jobs.

This follows several years of continuous increases in pay, with salaries rising by an average of 30% since 2006.

Annual bonus payments – paid as 13th and 14th month salaries – will also be scrapped for high earners and capped for lower earners.

Other bonuses will be scrapped.

In the private sector, the legal maximum number of people companies can lay off each month will be doubled from 2% of personnel to 4%.

PENSIONS

The reforms seek to prevent early retirement. Currently the average age of retirement in Greece is 61, though it is not uncommon for public sector workers to retire in their 50s.

Under the planned changes, the retirement age, which is currently 65 years for men and 60 years for women, will be linked to average life expectancy.

In addition, the minimum number of years someone will have had to have worked to qualify for a full pension will rise to 40 years from 37.

Pensions will also be reduced so that they reflect a worker’s average working pay rather than their final salary.
TAX REFORM

VAT will be increased to 23% from 21% – just the latest in a series of recent increases.

Indirect taxes – including those on alcohol, fuel and cigarettes – will see a 10% rise.

There will also be a clamp-down on tax evasion – widely regarded as a big problem in Greece – and on untaxed illegal construction.

Tax-evasion alone is estimated to cost the Greek government at least 20bn euros a year.
PRIVATISATION

In the longer-term, the government will look to reduce the reliance of the Greek economy on the public sector, reducing the number of people on the public payroll.

This will require growth in the private sector, and possible privatisation of some industries.

Getting eerily uncomfortable I hope.

See our future if  Obama and The Democrats (and Republicans too) are not stopped.

According to a December report from the BLS, state and local government employers spent an average of $39.83 per hour worked ($26.24 for wages and $13.60 for benefits) for total employee compensation in September 2009. Total employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $27.49 per hour ($19.45 for wages and $8.05 for benefits), see chart above. In other words, government employees make 45% more on average than private sector employees.

According to an analysis by USAToday (thanks to Michael Jahr for the pointer), “The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to an analysis of federal salary data.” For example, the number of federal employees making $100,000 or more has increased by 120,595, from 262,163 employees in December 2007 to 382,758 in June 2009, for a 46% increase. The number of federal workers making $150,000 or more has more than doubled since the recession started, from about 30,000 to more than 66,000 (see chart above).

The fire rate for government employees is .0055%. Their unemployment rate is 3%.

And do the Democrats look concerned?

Do the Republicans?

Do they?

Now: And if want a perfect Greece model look at California sometime. It’s Greece, trust me.

Josh Barro writes for the Manhattan Institute about the “Two Americas” and the “sharp difference between two classes of employees: those who work in the private sector and those who work for the government. Workers in the public sector have experienced a very different recession from those in the private sector.”

So is this Greece-ing the skids for what the government knows is coming if things don’t change?

I think so.

“I firmly believe that. I think, in 10 years – I don’t know when it will happen, but I’m very pessimistic that we will actually have the sort of deal we need,” Brooks said. “And at some point, what is happening in the Europe will happen here.”(DC)

It’s Party Politics over the good of the country. On BOTH SIDES.

“It’s less than a week until the deadline, and no language has been made public, and the American people should be able to make their voice heard before the committee votes. Because the truth is, once that vote happens, there’ll be no opportunity to change their product,” <Senator> Sessions said.

“People will make many promises about what this deal will be about if it passes … hopefully they’ll reach an agreement that’s one that can be honestly defended and that we’ll all be happy to vote for,” he added.

“But what we’ve seen so far indicates that secret deals, while they remain secret, are promoted to be far better than they are when you begin to see what’s really in them. The devil will always be in the details,” Sessions said.

He pointed, for instance, to the budget plan proposed by President Barack Obama, which was advertised as not adding to the national debt, but, he said, would in fact double the debt over the next decase.

He picked out several gimmicks in particular for which congressmen should be on the look out.

For instance, he said, the super committee could set a cap on war spending that was less than the baseline set by the Congressional Budget Office, and in that way claim they were making spending cuts. But since it would be less than the CBO baseline, that money would never have been spent in the first place.

Another possible gimmick by which the super committee could claim money was saved, he said, would be a proposal of tax increases now, to be balanced by spending cuts in future years.

“The pattern around here is, that once a tax increase is passed, it’s there,” Sessions said. “But a promise of a spending cut in the future very often does not become a reality.”

He warned that the super committee could direct standing committees to make cuts in future years, for instance, reduce entitlement spending or find a way to raise revenue.

“These committees have not followed through on that in the past,” Sessions warned, “and the super committee’s directions to them, we have to know, are not likely to occur based on history around here.”

At times, Sessions cautioned, cuts to programs have been proposed that are “unrealistic” because they do not come along with the reform necessary to actually cut costs for that program. For instance, cuts to health care providers’ reimbursements are supposed to made each year, but that fact is consistently ignored, Sessions said.

Another possible gimmick would be to claim spending cuts based on assumptions that the CBO baseline will change in a way that is “unrealistic,” for instance, by being “overly optimistic” about future economic growth.

“More and more, we’re hearing that coming out of this recession is going to be a long, tough, slow slog,” Sessions said. To claim cuts based on an alternative vision, Sessions said, would be “phony accounting.”

Lastly, he warned of calling savings on interest, as a result of a debt lessened by tax increases, a spending cut, as no money would actually be saved — money would still be paid out, just less than the year before. (DC)

As if 1.5 Trillion over 10 years wasn’t a gimmick to begin with… Because it was.

Be Prepared to be GREECE-d.

But be comforted in the knowledge that when you are paying $400 hyper-inflated dollars for that loaf of bread and you can’t afford to drive your car, heat your home or watch “America’s Got Talent” because you can’t afford it…. it was  the other guy’s fault! 

Doing it The Left Way

More Government Wonderfulness:

With a record number of Americans out of work, the government agency responsible for advancing employment in the United States just doled out $1.5 million http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/ilab/ILAB20111490.htm to promote collective bargaining and improve labor relations in Vietnam.

The senseless allocation comes after a series of equally questionable moves by the Department of Labor (DOL) on behalf of illegal immigrants, juvenile delinquents and “high-risk” adults. Last year the agency launched a nationwide initiative to protect illegal immigrant workers in the U.S. and a few months ago it entered formal agreements with Guatemala and Nicaragua <http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2011/jun/labor-dept-protects-central-american-migrants>vowing to preserve the rights of their migrants.

It’s a worthy investment, according to the DOL, because it’s designed to improve Vietnam’s labor relations policies and initiatives by strengthening labor law enforcement and labor inspection and increasing the capacity for a more effective dispute resolution system for workers and employers. Here is the kicker; it will also improve “worker organizations’ (can you say unions?) ability to represent employees and engage in collective bargaining. (KFYI)

Well, you have to have your priorities. 🙂

Speaking of Priorities:

Lady Gaga, a “persona derived from her unique, androgynous, vintage-themed fashion sense”; “celebrated” cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who is famous for “Dykes To Watch Out For”; and Rita Mae Brown, author of the “lesbian-themed novel “Rubyfruit Jungle,” soon could become role models in California schools.

That means SB48 will take effect on Jan. 1, 2012, as was scheduled by the Democrats who approved it in the state Legislature. The law requires that schools uphold people with alternative sexual lifestyles as positive role models.

The law requires schools to teach “gay” and “lesbian” involvement in history but only from a positive perspective. It bans any statement, fact or information that would reflect “adversely” on those who choose an alternative sexual lifestyle. (There’s that Liberal Freedom of speech and need to teach objective history without their own agenda!) 🙂

But you can run down White Christians over and over again, then backup and do it again. But saying bad about the LGBT crowd you’re in deep crapola!

No bias or social enginerring (or agenda) here. Move along….

An unofficial gauge of human misery in the United States rose last month to a 28-year high as Americans struggled with rising inflation and high unemployment.

The misery index — which is simply the sum of the country’s inflation and unemployment rates — rose to 13.0, pushed up by higher price data the government reported on Wednesday.

The data underscores the extent that Americans continue to suffer even two years after a deep recession ended.

Consumer prices rose 3.9 percent in the 12 months through September, the fastest pace in three years.

 But what’s really important is union and public sector jobs. Private sector jobs are doing fine (according too VP Biden).

And we all know this Bush’s Fault. The Republicans. The “rich”. And the Tea Party. 🙂

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama this week will announce a series of actions to help the economy that will not require congressional approval, including an initiative to make it easier for homeowners to refinance their mortgages, according to a White House official.

Damn those Republicans. I guess I will just have to everything I want by Fiat. But that doesn’t make me a dictator.

And when it fails miserably, it will still be the Republicans fault because they forced him to go around them. If they had only passed the bill like I demanded…

Think about that for a moment… 🙂

He will discuss the changes in mortgage rules at a stop in Nevada, which has one of the hardest-hit housing markets in the country. (and the home of Harry “The private sector is fine” Reid).

The FHFA intends to loosen the terms of the two-year-old Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP), which helps borrowers who have been making mortgage payments on time but who have not been able to refinance as their home values have dropped.

This would be the program that has so much bureaucracy that your chance of getting the modification was 7%.

And, didn’t the government monkeying with the housing market in the 1990s when they wanted to make home ownership easier and that caused it to crashed the entire economy — YES!

So in typical Liberal fashion, if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again! 🙂

But don’t worry, it won’t be their fault.

“The only way we can truly attack our economic challenges is with bold, bipartisan action in Congress,” White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told The New York Times.

That’s why I’m going around them!!

Remember, bi-partisan to a liberal is “You agree with everything I want and sit down and shut up”.

Speaking of Zombies

Occupy Wall Street protesters are undergoing collectivist zombie training in Atlanta, where a large group was caught on film engaging in a weird sort of “one voice” hypnotic chanting ritual that characterizes the key principles of both Communism and Socialism.

Watch the video at:
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=8B371…

Having an extensive background in studying linguistics and human psychology, I recognize mass hypnosis when I see it.

The mind-numbing call-and-return vocalizations captured in this video reflect the same kind of mind control techniques used in cults, sporting events and even some church revival events.

The whole point of this experience is to eliminate the individual mind and train everyone to think, and say, and do exactly what they are told to do by a “leaderless leader” who is really a mind control manipulator.

Free-thinking individuals do not engage in this kind of behavior! If I had witnessed this in person, I would have shouted out, “You are all zombies!” at which point I’m sure I would probably need my zombie defender flamethrower to roast the mindless masses as they tried to swarm over me with their “one mind” attack.

The only path to true freedom is found in protecting individual liberty which necessarily involves protecting the individual right to speak your mind without seeking permission from some kind of weird collectivist groupthink.

If you thought George Bush and his secret prisons were bad, just imagine Nancy Pelosi leading a national zombie chant, declaring that anyone earning over $125,000 a year should have their wealth confiscated; that Free Speech is now subject to government approval; that everyone except the government should be completely disarmed; and that individual liberty must be sacrificed for the “common good of the People.”

These are all code words for outright government tyranny.

Remember: Just because our current system is headed for collapse doesn’t mean we’re automatically going to get something better in its place. If we want a truly free and just society, we will have to fight for it.

If you thought George Bush and his secret prisons were bad, just imagine Nancy Pelosi leading a national zombie chant, declaring that anyone earning over $125,000 a year should have their wealth confiscated; that Free Speech is now subject to government approval; that everyone except the government should be completely disarmed; and that individual liberty must be sacrificed for the “common good of the People.”

These are all code words for outright government tyranny.

Remember: Just because our current system is headed for collapse doesn’t mean we’re automatically going to get something better in its place. If we want a truly free and just society, we will have to fight for it. (intelhub)

But then you’ll be branded as a heartless racist who wants to protect “the rich”. 🙂

Enjoy.

The Frightful Left

From my Sept 10th, 2010 blog: The 4th Precept

We all should be familiar with Orwell’s 3 main Thought control precepts as put forward in in his book, 1984.

If you have never read it. Do so. Immediately.

It can change your life. I know it did mine.

But those precepts used by the Ministry of Truth were:

“”War is Peace”

“Freedom is Slavery”

“Ignorance is Strength”

And I think the Democrats and especially Obama have come up with a new one.

FEAR IS HOPE

Because they are constantly talking about hope. But all they do is spread fear.

So Fear must therefore be Hope.

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”-Orwell.

And since the liberals view of the past decade is one of total evil and you should fear that evil coming back, and you should have hope for a brighter, more vibrant America than letting that evil back in, Fear is Hope.

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act”-Orwell

And there can’t be more deceit going on now than in recent memory.

“It’s still fear versus hope; the past versus the future,” Obama said from Cleveland, Ohio Sept 8th 2010, “It’s still a choice between sliding backward and moving forward.  That’s what this election is about.  That’s the choice you’ll face in November.”

“There were no new ideas.  There was just the same philosophy we already tried for the last decade – the same philosophy that led to this mess in the first place.”

Sound familiar?

NOW: “The Republican plan says that what’s been standing in the way between us and full employment are laws that keep companies from polluting as much as they want,” Obama said in a speech at the regional airport in Asheville, N.C., on Monday. “On the other hand, our plan [Obama’s plan] puts teachers, construction workers, firefighters and police officers back on the job.” (you non-union type- 88% of the populace, especially can go f*ck yourself)

“My plan says we’re going to put teachers back in the classroom, construction workers back to work rebuilding America, rebuilding our schools, tax cuts for small businesses, tax cuts for hiring veterans, tax cuts if you give your worker a raise,” said Obama. “That’s my plan. Then you’ve got their plan, which is, let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance. So far at least, I feel better about my plan.”

VP Biden in his infinite capacity for sageness said that if you don’t pass the Jobs Bill (that the Senate Democrats have voted down twice by the way) you’ll increase rapes and murders!

“Do you regret using the rape reference to describe Senate opposition” to the bill, Jason Mattera asked Biden as he left a rally with police unions and others who have faced the budget ax in recent months.

“I didn’t use … no, no, no,” Biden responded. “Let’s get it straight, guy. Don’t screw around with me. Let’s get it straight.”

“You didn’t use a rape reference,” said Mattera, of the conservative news organization Human Events.
“No, let me explain,” Biden said, pointing toward Mattera. “I said rape was up three times in Flint. Those are the numbers. Go look at the numbers. Murder is up; rape is up; burglary is up. That’s what I said.”

“And if the Republicans don’t pass this bill, then rape will continue to rise?” the reporter asked.
“Murder will continue to rise; rape will continue to rise; all crime will continue to rise,” Biden said.
Asked by Mattera whether it was appropriate to use such language, Biden scoffed and walked away (actually you can hear one of his handlers say “that’s enough” and obviously pull him away).

Beside the grossness of the comments the facts are HE’S LYING! Flat out. Bold-Faced 100% LYING.

But does he care? Does the Liberal Media Care?  Nope.

Because if you don’t vote for them, you’re a racist and now you want women raped and people murdered.

But they aren’t fearmongering.

Biden: “In 2008, when Flint had 265 sworn officers on their police force, there were 35 murders and 91 rapes in this city. In 2010, when Flint had only 144 police officers, the murder rate climbed to 65 and rapes – just to pick two categories – climbed to 229. In 2011, you now only have 125 shields. God only knows what the numbers will be this year for Flint if we don’t rectify it…And God only knows what that number would have been had we not been able to get a little bit of help.”

Actually, FBI data reports there were just 201 officers in Flint in 2008, not 265. But that aside, if Biden’s hypothesis that more police = less crime is accurate, then the years Flint had more cops on the street should also be the years it had lower crime rates.

But the statistics show it’s not that simple. FBI data shows Flint had 258 police officers in 2006, and 261 in 2007. But according to CityData.com, which compiles crime rate data from across the country, the city of Flint had a higher “crime index” in 2006 and 2007 than it did in 2008 –despite the fact the number of police officers dropped significantly in 2008.

When you compare 2006 to 2008, you find the city had more murders (54 compared to 32), more rapes (143 compared to 103), more assaults (2,246 compared to 1,476) and more auto thefts (1,521 to 909). In other words, the crime rate in Flint isn’t necessarily linked to the number of police in the city. Based on the numbers, Biden’s argument falls flat. (commentary)

I also grew up there in the 1970’s when the population was twice as large as it is now. So Joe, you’re full of fearmongering crap as usual.

Facts never matter to Liberals if they can scare you into doing what they want you to do, which let them run your life for you.

Oh, and Harry, what kind of Jobs were we talking about anyhow?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday indicated Congress needs to worry about government jobs more than private-sector jobs, and that this is why Senate Democrats are pushing a bill aimed at shoring up teachers and first-responders.

“It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine (yeah, 8% unemployment or higher for nearly 3 years is “fine”); it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Reid said on the Senate floor.

Because those are union loyalists and apparatchiks they need more of so that they can vote for them. More Government bureaucrats is good. After all, Washington DC is the richest metropolitan area in America now and crony capitalism/socialism is “fine” as long as it’s the right people, government union people. 🙂

CNBC’s John Harwood: “Yesterday at a press conference one of my colleagues asked the president to respond to something Mitt Romney said. The president said, ‘I didn’t realize you were a spokesman for Mitt Romney.’ Is the White House — you feeling — the president feeling under siege from events right now?”

Daley didn’t deal with the question, so Harwood pressed him a bit. “Why would the president respond that way to a reporter, though?” Harwood asked.

“I don’t think it was a colleague from your network,”  (it was Satan itself- FOX) Daley said, “but a colleague from another network.” (they who shall not be named!) And then Daley added this: “And — sometimes  as you — I know it may surprise people, some people that there are certain people in the media who do seem at times to carry the water for certain — piece of the political spectrum.” (Other than Liberals, imagine that! How evil! :))

Obama, it seems, is under the impression he deserves veneration and reverence from all quarters and all institutions. He hasn’t received that, including from professionals like ABC’s Jake Tapper, and Obama seems to delight in critiquing the press, perhaps secretly wishing he was Howard Kurtz instead of the commander-in-chief. But it is Fox News for whom Obama and his team have special contempt. For them, Fox is clearly “the enemy,” to be hated and beaten. For those who doubt this verdict, it’s worth recalling the extraordinary campaign against Fox News carried about by Obama’s then communications director, Anita Dunn, which even Sam Stein of the Huffington Post characterized as a “brutal denunciation.” One can only imagine the howls of protest we would have heard from the fourth estate if, say, Karen Hughes had so explicitly and publicly targeted a news network during the Bush presidency. But in this instance, Dunn’s “War on Fox” was met mostly by silence and a shrug of the shoulders.

What we have seen exposed in the Obama White House is a vein of vengeance antithetical to the image put forward by Obama in 2008 – but fully consistent with what one would expect from a man well-versed in the Chicago Way. (commentary)

And after all, it’s Not his Fault! :0

And giving into FEAR is your ONLY HOPE.

Fear is THEIR ONLY HOPE.

So Be prepared for Fright Night 2012 to get much, much scarier.

Harry Reid said Republicans are calling the bill a “failure” because they are “using a different benchmark for success than we are.”

Yeah, they’re using the private sector where jobs generate revenue for taxes to pay for all the nonsense Reid spouts. 

Government workers are not producers in the sense of the production we need to get the economy going.   But they are voters.   This is an attempt to keep them in the Democratic corral long enough to get Democrats re-elected.  Then Harry probably won’t care very much again.

Remember, when Obama was calling for his jobs bill to be given priority, Harry Reid was on the Senate floor expounding on the virtue of  … bike paths (and, naturally, calling for government to pay for them).

Ever get the idea that we’re all now serfs on a huge plantation paying for the whims of our “leaders”. (Bruce McQuain)

The Democrats sure think so, and they want 4 more years or else!

Same old, Same old

After receiving the president’s jobs proposal politely after he unveiled it before Congress last week, Boehner and other Republicans grew notably more skeptical Monday once the White House announced plans to pay for the costly measure entirely with tax increases on the rich and corporations that the GOP has already rejected.

Yeah, that’ll make them want to create more jobs. So much for “tax cuts”. 🙂

The bulk of the payment comes from nearly $400 billion from limiting the deductions on charitable contributions and other items that wealthy people can take. There’s also $40 billion from closing oil and gas loopholes, $18 billion from hiking taxes on certain income made by fund managers, and $3 billion from changing the tax treatment of corporate jets.

Obama has said he’s asking the wealthy to pay their fair share, and he called on Congress to pass the bill without delay.

“The only thing that’s stopping it is politics,” Obama said Monday. “And we can’t afford these same political games. Not now.”

Yeah, just ignore HIS POLITICS!!! Just ignore HIS POLITICAL GAMES!

I know the Ministry of Truth Media will. They will be too busy Cheerleading.

“We remain eager to work together on ways to support job growth, but this proposal doesn’t appear to have been offered in that bipartisan spirit,” said Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck.

It’s the Democrats BY-Partisan bi-partisanship where you do everything they want and if you don’t then you’re just being a partisan. 🙂

Obama’s top campaign strategist, David Axelrod, said Tuesday that the White House wants Congress to act on the entire bill rather than approaching it piecemeal. “We’re not in a negotiation to break up the package,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It’s not an a la carte menu.”

It’s ALL or Nothing. Do it now or else!. That’s your bi-partisan, no games, no politics, STIMULUS Tax and Spend Package. (Did any mention cutting spending?- NOPE and neither will they…)

Rejoice!

And if you don’t agree, you’re a partisan extremist, racist “terrorist”. Now don’t you feel better? 🙂

The White House, which has gotten burned in the past by making overly optimistic job-creation predictions, has avoided estimating how many jobs the package would create. But in an interview Monday on NBC News, Obama embraced an estimate from an outside economist, Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, and said the bill “could mean an additional 2 million jobs.”

So if they aren’t “saved of created” they didn’t say it. So don’t blame them when it falls flat and bombs spectacularly.

With 14 Million unemployed, he’s really shooting for greatness! Gee, didn’t they say that ObamaCare would create millions of Jobs AND lower the deficit…why yes, they did…

Of Course they’ll largely be short term jobs (just enough to get him to 2013 perhaps??) and union jobs (more slush money for his re-election).

But no Games. No Politics. No narcissism involved. 🙂

But if you don’t do EXACTLY as THEY SAY with NO DEVIATIONS you’re just a partisan who wants to hurt people and be an obstructionist! 🙂

Thomas Sowell: Are we to continue doing the same kinds of things that have failed again and again, just because Obama delivers clever words with style and energy?

Once we get past the glowing rhetoric, what is the president proposing? More spending! Only the words have changed — from “stimulus” to “jobs” and from “shovel-ready projects” to “jobs for construction workers.”

If government spending were the answer, we would by now have a booming economy with plenty of jobs, after all the record trillions of dollars that have been poured down a bottomless pit. Are we to keep on doing the same things, just because those things have been repackaged in different words?

Or just because Obama now assures us that “everything in this bill will be paid for”? This is the same man who told us that he could provide health insurance to millions more people without increasing the cost.

When it comes to specific proposals, President Obama repeats the same kinds of things that have marked his past policies — more government spending for the benefit of his political allies, the construction unions and the teachers’ unions, and “thousands of transportation projects.”

The fundamental fallacy in all of this is the notion that politicians can “grow the economy” by taking money out of the private sector and spending it wherever it is politically expedient to spend it — so long as they call spending “investment.”

Has Obama ever grown even a potted plant, much less a business, a bank, a hospital or any of the numerous other institutions whose decisions he wants to control and override? But he can talk glibly about growing the economy.

Arrogance is no substitute for experience. That is why the country is in the mess it is in now.

Obama says he wants “federal housing agencies” to “help more people refinance their mortgages.” What does that amount to in practice, except having the taxpayers be forced to bail out people who bought homes they could not afford?

No doubt that is good politics, but it is lousy economics. When people pay the price of their own mistakes, that is when there is the greatest pressure to correct those mistakes. But when taxpayers who had nothing to do with those mistakes are forced to pay the costs, that is when those and other mistakes can continue to flourish — and to mess up the economy.

Whatever his deficiencies in economics, Barack Obama is a master of politics — including the great political game of “Heads I win and tails you lose.”

Any policy that shows any sign of achieving its goals will of course be trumpeted across the land as a success. But, in the far more frequent cases where the policy fails or turns out to be counterproductive, the political response is: “Things would have been even worse without this policy.”

It’s heads I win and tails you lose.

Thus, when unemployment went up after the massive spending that was supposed to bring it down, we were told that unemployment would have been far worse if it had not been for that spending.

Are we really supposed to fall for ploys like this? The answer is clearly “yes,” as far as Obama and his allies in the media are concerned.

Our intelligence was insulted even further in President Obama’s speech to Congress, when he set up this straw man as what his critics believe — that “the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.”

Have you heard anybody in any part of the political spectrum advocate that? If not, then why was the President of the United States saying such things, unless he thought we were fools enough to buy it — and that the media would never call him on it?

Bravo!

ROTFL!

But I still have to wonder why the Republicans keep having Liberals doing the questions so they throw “gotcha”-laden questions at them?

Oh well, since virtually all of the media is liberal it’s the cross you have to bear.

But at least if you do everything they want, you won’t be an obstructionist, extremist, racist, “terrorist” who just wants to get grandma out into the cold off a cliff and let her starve and freeze!!

Don’t you feel better now… 🙂

Wouldn’t want to offend the Muslims, after all…. 😦

They might get mad and attack us… AGAIN!  🙂

 

Blink

Jedidiah Bila: Are you feeling principled today? How about gutsy? Are the wishes of voters — the same voters that afforded you a 2010 landslide victory — at the forefront of your minds?

I certainly hope so.

As conservatives across the country await a decision as to whether or not there will be an increase in the debt ceiling, we can’t help but wonder if you will dig in your heels and stand for something.

Will you prioritize significant — and I mean significant — spending reductions?

Will you refuse to accept tax hikes and stand firm against class warfare?

Will you fight for a balanced budget amendment?

Will you call out the left’s precious “shared sacrifice” talking point for what it is, a class-warfare driven divisive tool that aims to pit one American against another and demonize our country’s job creators?

Will you articulate that in America, we don’t take from one person to give to another? We unleash a booming private sector where people have the opportunity to build their own successes.

Will you draw a clear line of demarcation between the big-government, tax-and-spend agenda of the left and what should be a limited-government, pro-growth agenda on the right?

Will you only embrace “compromise” when it’s in the best interest of the country to do so?

Americans are tired of phoniness. We’re tired of false promises. We’re tired of tax deals that inject no long-term certainty in the economy, accomplish nothing in the way of spending reductions and reflect a profound lack of gravitas on your part. We’re tired of weak cuts disguised as something greater. We’re tired of lies.

And we’re not stupid. We’re attuned to business as usual, to closed-door meetings and to what appears to be a disturbing inability on your part to stick to your guns.

So, what’s it going to be? Are you going to stand firm, to let President Obama, Harry Reid and their allies know that the buck stops here? Are you going to lead a Republican Party that stands for strict fiscal discipline, constitutional integrity and a commitment to protecting all that makes America exceptional for future generations? Are you going to be the bold contrast to the left that you should be?

The choice is yours. We’ll be watching — ready to stand by you if you do what’s right and to hold you accountable if you don’t.

There’s no time for nonsense. This country deserves real leadership. And as we head into another election season, Americans aren’t about to settle for anything less.

AMEN!

Speaker Boehner has already decide to go for a nibble rather than a bite anyhow.

Maybe the Democrats can con him into another deal like last year’s Lame Duck Goose egg. He does seem to fold under pressure.

In a statement, Boehner said: “Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes.”

So I’ll cave first. So grab your wallet and what’s left in it, here come Barack The Savior! 😦

White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said Obama intended to continue to push for as big a deficit reduction number as possible and that tax revenue be part of the mix.

“The president believes that solving our fiscal problems is an economic imperative. But in order to do that, we cannot ask the middle-class and seniors to bear all the burden of higher costs and budget cuts,” Pfeiffer said. “We need a balanced approach that asks the very wealthiest and special interests to pay their fair share as well, and we believe the American people agree.”

The middle class and senior are ALREADY burdened by your oppressiveness Mr. President, or hadn’t you noticed? 🙂

After all, as White Adviser Plouffe said last week, unemployment is not a factor.

With unemployment now at 9.2% and job growth at a standstill, is there anyone not blinded by ideology or rank partisanship who can’t see that Obama’s spend-and-regulate economic plan has been an utter failure?

On the Left or the Leftist Media: NO. There is not. Simple.

When Obama was running for office, he likened himself to Ronald Reagan. Not because he liked Reagan’s policies — he despised them — but because he saw Reagan as a transformative figure worthy of emulation.

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he said during the campaign. He’s since talked endlessly about the need to “remake” the economy, and “do big things.”

Well, Obama’s been transformative all right. While Reagan rescued a country mired in hopelessness, stagflation and fear, Obama has managed, by reversing Rea-ganomics, to bring it all back again. Consider:

• The unemployment rate has never been under 8% since Obama took office, and it has dipped below 9% in only five of Obama’s 29 months in the White House. No president since the Great Depression can match that record of failure.

• At 40 weeks, the average length of unemployment is almost twice the previous post-World War II peak.

• Inflation is once again on the rise — climbing in each of the past six months.

• And by almost every measure available, including GDP growth, the Obama recovery is the worst since the Great Depression.

Now, thanks to Obama’s grand economic failures, hopelessness is again sweeping the land. An astounding four in 10 say the economy is in a “permanent decline,” according to a New York Times/CBS poll, and an equally eye-opening 48% told CNN that another Great Depression is likely to occur in the next year, the highest level ever in the CNN survey.

More than half — 54% — say their personal finances are getting worse, according to a Rasmussen survey.

Yet, rather than admit failure, Obama’s only response is to try to shift blame and convince us to lower our expectations. “The economic challenges that we face weren’t created overnight,” he said on Friday, “and they’re not going to be solved overnight.”

Translation: How can you expect anything more, when everything was so messed up when I got into town? Poppycock.

After the long, painful and equally deep recession in the early 1980s, the economy roared back to life, powered by Reagan’s mix of tax cuts and deregulation. By this point in the Reagan recovery, growth was so fast and furious it slashed unemployment by a third.

Obama also expects us to believe that “head winds” are to blame for the economy’s lousy performance. But the only head winds holding the economy back are his own “transformative” policies — massive new government spending and debt, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, endless talk of tax hikes on the “rich” and corporations, and a job-killing regulatory beast unleashed against every productive corner of the economy.

Obamanomics has been weighed, measured and found wanting. Time now to get back on course.(IBD)

Stand up with a Back bone.

The Democrats are Coo-Coo For their Coco Puffs!

Proof of the old saying was evidenced this week.

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

Welcome, to the Democrat Party.

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

The Chinese are divesting themselves of our Treasury Bills.

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

Inflation is crushing the average American.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, he has that backwards. Typical delusional Liberal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh God…not that…please make them stop! 😦

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Good to be the King!

The Washington area’s affluence and education levels make it the wealthiest and most educated region in the nation, according to census data released Tuesday that reflect five years of relative prosperity compared with the rest of the country. (Washington Post)

Bureau of Labor Statistics: State and local government employers spent an average of $26.25 per hour worked for employee wages and salaries in September 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.  Wages and salaries accounted for 65.5 percent of compensation costs while benefits averaged $13.85 per hour worked and accounted for the remaining 34.5 percent.

That’s $40.10 per hour for government employees. It’s good to be the kings minions.

Health benefit employer costs in September 2010 were $4.65 per hour worked for state and local government and $2.10 in private industry.  Defined benefit retirement plan costs for state and local government employers were $2.94 per hour worked, significantly higher than 44 cents for private industry employers.

Their health care costs are twice that of the private sector and retirement plans (aka the fat Union pensions most likely) are nearly 7 Times higher than the private sector.

No wonder they want bailouts and ObamaCare, we the little people’s costs have to be controlled so that we can afford to pay the King’s minions their due tribute.

Among state and local government employees, average hourly compensation costs were higher for management, professional, and related occupations ($48.73) than for service occupations ($30.17) and sales and office occupations ($27.87).

No wonder they want everyone else to pay for them and why so many states are going bankrupt.

And why so many unions are viciously protective of their Golden Goose Parachutes.

Now this is GREED. Real, honest to God, GREED.

And guess what, they are mostly DEMOCRATS!

Fascinating isn’t. 😦

So when the boo-hoo acts and whining and crying and nashing of teeth continues and government spending is cut (hopefully)  just remember who’s been the dragon hoarding all the Gold.

Your Government.

And especially, the Government Unions and Government employees which are almost exclusively, Democrats.

So is this the reason for the Class Warfare?

To pay for their lavish greed they have to wage war on Private Industry and YOU.

You get the privilege of paying for their Golden Goose.

And if you don’t want to, well, you’re just a nasty, evil scrooge-like greedy capitalist pig. You want to screw poor people!

Meanwhile, they are counting their $40.01 per hour.

So who’s the victim in this war. Certainly not the Warriors. 🙂

And the War Dead, well, you’re just a bunch of dumb, ignorant, hacks who want the Greed-addicted drug addicts to spend less on themselves.

How Dare you!

It’s good to be the King!

But sire, the peasants are revolting!

Yes, they stink on ice! 🙂

(with thanks to Mel Brooks)

DREAM ACT Update

UCLA Professor Kent Wong (director of UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education) said: “We will win the dream act soon — very soon,” he exclaimed. “When that day comes, we will celebrate with millions and millions of people of people across this country who are standing with you tonight. Who stand for justice, who stand for democracy and equal opportunities for all.”

“When that day happens, the young people of the DREAM Act movement, will go on to accomplish and do great things with your lives,” he said. “You will go on to become lawyers, teachers, doctors and members of the US congress to replace those old white men… You are the hope and future of this country. You are hope and future of your generation.”

So there you have it, the DREAM Act is to  “replace” white people (with Hispanic Democrats mind you).

But that’s not racist, because a radical leftist said it, mind you. 🙂

Just like, cutting government spending will hurt the poor.

Orwell would be proud of you, my leftist sons.

 

 

Cynical Ploy

Stimulus: President Obama’s new plan to cut taxes on all but those most likely to create jobs is little more than an exercise in class warfare to divide Americans and win votes — not to get the economy growing again.

Much was made of Obama’s “compromise” on taxes, including his plan to keep lower rates on the 98% of Americans who earn less than $250,000, and spend $180 billion or more to cut some business taxes and invest in more infrastructure repair.

The president’s supporters say this is a good plan — giving Republicans the tax cuts they want while letting average Americans keep their current tax rates. Only the “rich” get hit.

This plan is actually quite cynical, as even the New York Times tacitly admits, saying Obama “intends to cast the issue as a choice between supporting the middle class or giving breaks to the wealthy.” In short, it’s not really about jobs at all. It’s about politics.

Obama, though himself wealthy, seems to truly hate the private-sector rich — believing the neo-Marxist pap that as a “class” they create nothing, but rather exploit the rest of us.

When he told Joe the Plumber during the 2008 campaign that he wanted to “spread the wealth,” he was at least telling the truth.

In fact, the wealthy are the nation’s creators, innovators and job makers. The small businesses they run account for more than four of every five new jobs. Obama’s tax hikes target them — and you.

As economists Kevin Hassett and Alan Viard recently noted, “Fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations reported on tax returns went to households with incomes above $200,000 in 2007.”

A recent National Federation of Independent Business survey found that 50% of the small-business owners who employ 20 to 249 workers fall in the top two income brackets. They’re the “rich.”

So half of all small-business profits — maybe more — will be hit by Obama’s tax hikes. And guess what? They’ll respond predictably by not expanding their businesses or doing more hiring. If Obama’s plan is passed, expect no meaningful job growth for years.

For two years, we’ve heard repeated verbal assaults leveled at successful people to make the rest of us resent their success — like the canard that the rich don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes.

Well, as the National Taxpayers Union recently reported, the richest 1% of Americans earn 23% of all income and pay almost twice that — 40% — toward income taxes. Meantime, the bottom 50% take home 12% of the income and pay only 2.9% of the taxes.

Fair? Since 2002, the year before President Bush’s 2003 across-the-board tax cut went into effect, the share of taxes paid by the wealthy has risen every year. As for Democrats’ claim that the tax cuts “benefited only the wealthy,” 7 million new U.S. jobs were created from 2003 to 2008. How’s that stack up to Obama’s record of 4 million lost and counting?

Instead of emulating past success, Obama continues to push policies that scapegoat the rich while using “stimulus” spending to enlarge government, enrich unions and subsidize favored industries.

To their credit, Republicans have countered with a far better plan — one that freezes tax rates at the Bush levels and rolls back spending to the pre-stimulus levels of 2008. This would have a truly stimulative effect on the economy. It would be even better if the tax changes were made permanent and future spending were cut.

Until something is done to convince businesses that Washington is capable of fiscal sanity, few companies will willingly commit huge amounts of capital to new investments and jobs.

Like the rest of us, they want tax and regulatory relief, entitlement reform and smaller government. Until they get it, they’ll sit on the sidelines waiting for the craziness to end.

As the New York Times last weekend described the new Democratic “firewall” approach, “A national campaign trumpeting Democratic accomplishments on health care, education and Wall Street regulation has given way to a race-by-race defensive strategy.”

Joe Sixpack’s inevitable reaction to such a change in tack is simple: If ObamaCare, more money for teachers unions and preserving too-big-to-fail on Wall Street are so great, why not run on these things?

Instead, the party whose theme song used to be “Happy Days Are Here Again” is battening down the hatches.

“Small businesses drive economic growth, not government,” he added, “but ObamaCare and a slew of upcoming tax hikes are going to make it harder for our district’s small businesses to stay afloat.”

The hyperspending that was supposed to provide jobs has failed — yet those in power plan more of it.

But don’t worry, Obama’s new stimulus-that-isn’t-a-stimulus will solve everything.

After all, Obama was on the TV yesterday touting that “3 Million people had jobs” because of him.

Isn’t he amazing! 😦

The fact that they are union and government union apparatchiks kind of got lost in the ra-ra speech. 🙂

That and the millions of people who have lost their jobs SINCE he came to power. They don’t matter.

Obama characterized Republicans as pandering to corporations, millionaires, special interests, and credit card and insurance companies. He asserted they did “not having a plan to govern” and praised the values that “we Democrats believe in.”

The president recalled the principles upon which America was founded — “values of self-reliance and individual responsibility” and “a country that rewards hard work. A country built upon the promise of opportunity and upward mobility” — and contrasted them with his characterization of the Republican attitude in Washington. “They’re asking us to settle for a status quo of stagnant growth, eroding competitiveness, and a shrinking middle class.”

Said Obama, “This country is greater than the sum of its parts — America is not about the ambitions of any one individual, but the aspirations of an entire people and an entire nation.”(Politics Daily)

<<BARF BAG ALERT!!!>>

We also hoped for a chance to get beyond some of the old political divides -– between Democrats and Republicans, red states and blue states -– that had prevented us from making progress. Because although we are proud to be Democrats, we are prouder to be Americans -– (applause) — and we believed then and we believe now that no single party has a monopoly on wisdom.

We’re just way smarter than you and if we just explain why 2000+ page government takeover bills that we never even read are great then you’ll just love us!

“I ran because I had a different idea about how America was built.”

“Yes, our families believed in the American values of self-reliance and individual responsibility, and they instilled those values in their children. But they also believed in a country that rewards responsibility; a country that rewards hard work; a country built on the promise of opportunity and upward mobility.”

Just don’t be too upwardly mobile or successful or you’ll be an evil “rich” person!! And you’ll cross over to the Dark Side! 🙂

It’s amazing he can say this with a straight face. But then again, he is so much better than you.

It was an America where you didn’t buy things you couldn’t afford (They just expect government handouts to do it for them because they are entitled); where we didn’t just think about today -– we thought about tomorrow. An America that took pride in the goods that we made, not just the things we consumed. An America where a rising tide really did lift all boats, from the company CEO to the guy on the assembly line.

That’s the America I believe in.

<<<BARF>>>

He’s other deeply, deeply cynical and manipulative and/or delusional and  just thinks his soaring charms and rhetoric will override the reality of what he and democrats have actually been doing.

What matters is scoring cheap,soaringly cynical, disingenuous, arrogant and deeply divisive political rhetoric that sounds good and makes you feel good.

I just feel sick. 😦

The Buck Stops

One of the best, Thomas Sowell:

President Barack Obama boldly proclaims, “The buck stops here!” But, whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush.

The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama “inherited” the big federal budget deficits and that he has to “clean up the mess” left in the economy by the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced, but it will not stand up under scrutiny.

No President of the United States can create either a budget deficit or a budget surplus. All spending bills originate in the House of Representatives and all taxes are voted into law by Congress.

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress before Barack Obama became president (January 2007 to be precise). The deficit he inherited was created by the Congressional Democrats, including Senator Barack Obama, who did absolutely nothing to oppose the runaway spending. He was one of the biggest of the big spenders.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so it was called “the Clinton surplus.” But Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, for the first time in 40 years. It was also the first budget surplus in more than a quarter of a century.

The only direct power that any president has that can affect deficits and surpluses is the power to veto spending bills. President Bush did not veto enough spending bills but Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress were the ones who passed the spending bills.

Today, with Barack Obama in the White House, allied with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in charge in Congress, the national debt is a bigger share of the national output than it has been in more than half a century. And its share is projected to continue going up for years to come, becoming larger than national output in 2012.

Having created this scary situation, President Obama now says, “Don’t give in to fear. Let’s reach for hope.” The voters reached for hope when they elected Obama. The fear comes from what he has done since taking office.

“The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place,” he said recently. “In November, you’re going to have that choice.”

These risky loans, and the defaults that followed, were what set off a chain reaction of massive financial losses that brought down the whole economy.

Was this due to George W. Bush and the Republicans? Only partly. Most of those who pushed the lowering of mortgage lending standards were Democrats– notably Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd, though too many Republicans went along.

At the heart of these policies were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who bought huge amounts of risky mortgages, passing the risk on from the banks that lent the money (and made the profits) to the taxpayers who were not even aware that they would end up paying in the end.

When President Bush said in 2004 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be reined in, 76 members of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the contrary. These included Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel.

If we are going to talk about “the policies that created this mess in the first place,” let’s at least get the facts straight and the names right.

The current policies of the Obama administration are a continuation of the same reckless policies that brought on the current economic problems– all in the name of “change.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still sacred cows in Washington, even though they have already required the biggest bailouts of all.

Why? Because they allow politicians to direct vast sums of money where it will do politicians the most good, either personally or in terms of buying votes in the next election.

Another political fable is that the current economic downturn is due to not enough government regulation of the housing and financial markets. But it was precisely the government regulators, under pressure from politicians, who forced banks and other lending institutions to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.

Amen! And those were Democrats by and large.

The RINOs still have to learn that getting along with Socialist Democrats is not possible and that even if they win Obama will be ideologically opposed to them on everything.

But at least it can’t get any worse and there is some hope, especially from the Tea Party Candidates.

Now that’s real “Hope and Change”. 🙂

25 Reasons to “jaws” the Democrats…

But first, I would add #26: “Though the job losses we were experiencing earlier this year have slowed dramatically, we’re still not creating enough new jobs each month to make up for the ones we’re losing,” Obama said last week. “For families and communities across the country, this recession will not end until we completely turn that tide.”

Was this last week?

No.

It was December 2009.

Sounds like last week doesn’t it?

“We all know that there are limits to what government can and should do, even during such difficult times,” he said, alluding to the concerns about the soaring budget deficit. “But we have an obligation to consider every additional, responsible step that we can to encourage and accelerate job creation in this country.”

This week?

No.

November 2009.

“Democrats have to reassure voters we are not being reckless,” said a Democratic official involved in the planning. “The White House knows this and that’s why we’ll be hearing a lot about reducing the deficit early next year. Democrats owned this issue for the past four years and cannot afford to cede it to Republicans now.”

You got it. November 2009!

You be the Judge, Jury and hopefully executioner.

1) Remember the stimulus bill? Republicans strongly opposed it and said it wouldn’t work. Democrats said it would revive the economy and keep unemployment under 8 percent. So, what happened? Democrats shoved through a bill that cost $1.1 trillion when you add in the interest. It cost more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase (the real one not the Health Care one 🙂 ), and putting a man on the moon — combined. The result? The economy didn’t take off, the unemployment rate is still at 9.6 percent, and Democrats are calling for…you guessed it, another stimulus bill.

2) Perhaps the biggest problem with the economy right now is that businesses are so afraid of what the government will do that they’re stockpiling cash instead of spending it. Having a pro-market, Republican Congress that will oppose tax hikes, red tape, and damaging new legislation will reduce uncertainty and help give businesses the confidence they need to start hiring and expanding again.

3) While he was campaigning, Barack Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, but in his first 100 days alone, he quadrupled the deficit. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his budget blueprint adds more, “debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined.” No civilization in human history has spent like America has over the last two years of Democratic rule and unless we can get more Republicans in office, this country’s economic future is going to be deader than King Tut and uglier than a 7 day old chunk of roadkill.

4)The Democrats seem hellbent on taking over as much of the private sector as possible. In a relatively short period of time, our government has taken over much of the banking industry, auto industry, health care industry, and student loans. There are currently no viable plans to get out of any of these industries either. This sort of Sovietization of the American economy can only end badly. After all, look what similar policies did to the Soviet Union.

5) In the middle of a recession, the Democrats in Congress still seem to be on track to enact the largest tax increase in American history by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire. Here we are with a struggling economy and businesses that are afraid to move because they can’t be sure of what the Democrats will do, and Pelosi, Reid, and Obama still haven’t addressed this massive tax hike. How incompetent. How short-sighted. How foolish.

I would add (#27): In the middle of a recession, with joblessness hovering around the 10% mark, the Obama administration made a deliberate decision to impose a drilling moratorium knowing it would cost at least 23,000 jobs. Why?

Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Never mind the fact that an event like this had never happened before in deep water.   Never mind there were hundreds of deepwater wells functioning properly and well.  Never mind that those jobs were well paying jobs  and that through their elimination would cause ripple-effect unemployment down the supply chain.

Instead, deliberately trash the lives of 23,000 workers – and their families – because of unfounded fears.

And a deep seated radical environmentalist “green” agenda. They weren’t the right kind of jobs, after all.

Yeah, that’s leadership, isn’t it?

6) “Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.” — Joe Biden

7) Our economy is no longer suffering from the recession. At this point, the economy is suffering from the policies the Democrats put in place that were supposed to create a “recovery.”

So how was the “summer of recovery” for you?

8) I don’t mind a President taking a vacation now and then or playing a little golf, but Barack Obama has taken it to a ridiculous extreme. The man has already played more golf in two years than George W. Bush did in his whole presidency. Is he planning to try out for the PGA after he gets out of office? And what’s with the never ending vacationinh? It’s like the presidency is a distraction from taking time off for this guy. Wait, is that the phone ringing? Oh, it’s Marie Antoinette. She is just calling to say that Obama needs to show more sensitivity to the people during tough economic times.

9) “I wouldn’t dignify you by peeing on your leg. It wouldn’t be worth wasting the urine.” — Democratic Congressman Pete Stark to a constituent at a Townhall.

10) “But I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.” — Barack Obama explains his views on bipartisanship.

11) The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home… What I think we know — separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact. — President Barack Obama explains that racism was behind the arrest of his friend, Bill Gates

12) “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” — Attorney General Eric Holder

12a) Suing Arizona. Period.

13) Iran, a nation that’s known for supporting terrorism and chanting “Death to America,” is about to get nukes and Barack Obama’s reaction has been…well, pretty much nothing.

14) On the other hand Israel, a nation that’s known for being a bastion of freedom in a backwards region and for supporting America, is just trying to survive and Obama’s reaction has been cold and hostile. Maybe if Benjamin Netanyahu started leading “Death to America” chants in the Knesset, Obama might become a little friendlier.

15) The President of the United States should not bow to foreign leaders.

16) Nancy Pelosi once promised to run the most “ethical and honest Congress in history.” She wasn’t alone. Yet, how have the Democrats been doing on that front? Perhaps we could ask Eric Massa, Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, Roland Burris, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Alan Mollohan, Laura Richardson, Pete Visclosky, and William Jefferson among others. Sorry that all the charges aren’t laid out, but covering all the Democratic corruption that has occurred would be a double sized article in and of itself.

17) In one of the most corrupt deals in American history, Barack Obama broke existing contracts and tossed away billions in taxpayer dollars to give his union pals an outsized ownership stake in Chrysler and General Motors. Now, every time you buy a car from one of those companies, you’re essentially contributing to the Democratic Party. Calling that sleazy is like calling the ocean “wet.”

18) “The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” — Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the public’s lack of concern over greenhouse gasses

19) “How about just tracking down every single person who said drill baby drill and putting them all in prison. Why don’t we do that? Starting with Michael Steele.” — Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson

19a) By Grayson himself on the floor during the Health care debate: Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) warned Americans that “Republicans want you to die quickly” during an after-hours House floor speech Tuesday night, highlighted by a sign reading “The Republican Health Care Plan: Die Quickly.”

Then the apology for this hyper-partisan rhetoric: “I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America,” he said on the House floor Wednesday afternoon.

Now that’s your Obama Post-Partisan Congress for you.

20) “There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the (Ground Zero) mosque being funded. How is this being ginned up that here we are talking about Treasure Island, something we’ve been working on for decades, something of great interest to our community as we go forward to an election about the future of our country and two of the first three questions are about a zoning issue in New York City — Nancy Pelosi

20a) If you disagree with a Democrat you’re a racist, a bigot, or a terrorist. Or all three. Isn’t that enough right there? 😦

21) “When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.” — NASA Administrator Charles Bolden explaining that Democrats no longer view space as one of NASA’s top priorities

22) The Democrats in the House actually managed to pass a cap and trade bill that’s supported by Barack Obama. This bill would impose massive new energy costs on American consumers. Estimates range from $1600 to $4000 in new costs per family. Although the Senate hasn’t passed this legislation yet, in an almost unbelievable show of arrogance, they’re considering trying to push it through during the lame duck session. If they try that, the American people should rise up as one and proclaim that it will be a “cooked duck session” for anybody who tries to shove significant legislation through before the next Congress arrives.

22a) The massive, seismically so, tax increases that the Democrats want to see on 1/01/11  when the Bush Tax Cuts expire. They actually think it’s a good idea to raise taxes on everyone during a recession. But they will be dishonest and say “it’s only the rich” we want to target. This kind of Class Warfare has never worked out in the past and won’t now.

23) How about Obama’s big, oily Katrina? Know what the difference was between the oil spill in the Gulf and the other programs Obama has pushed? With most of the other programs, it’ll take years for people to see how bad they are. With the oil spill, the country could see the complete and utter incompetence of the Obama Administration in real time.

24) It’s bad enough that the federal government ignored the law, isn’t trying to finish the fence, and refuses to secure our southern border. But now, not only are they still talking up amnesty, they’re actually harassing and suing Arizona because that state has decided to do the job that the federal government is refusing to do. If only the trial lawyers, unions, or ACORN were demanding that the border be secured, we might get some action.

25) You’d have to go all the way back to the days when the British were bossing around American colonists at the point of a bayonet to find the sort of government arrogance that led to Obamacare being shoved through in Congress. No matter how loudly the American people said they didn’t want the bill, Democrats insisted that they knew best. So now, the quality of American health care will be destroyed, private health insurance will end, rationing will occur, death panels will be instituted, the deficit will soar, and taxpayer dollars will be used to fund abortion — but on the upside, Democrats think over the long-term, it will be good for their political prospects. However, there is an alternative. The GOP House Leadership has pledged to defund and repeal Obamacare. If we can get them into power, we can start putting the brakes on now and start working on health care reform that will actually improve what we have now instead of destroying it utterly and replacing it with an inferior system. (John Hawkins- Townhall.com)

So when the Democrats trot out their bribes in the next few months, don’t buy it. It’s just more Marxist Snake Oil.

We don’t need anymore Snake Oil. That buck has to stop.

Uncle Sam Getting Fat

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter. And those who matter don’t mind. ~Dr. Seuss

Government’s role in the economy has reached an unprecedented scale by at least one measure.

A record 30 cents of every dollar in personal income comes directly from government, Commerce Department data show.

And since government produces nothing and gets it money from you and me (the private sector) and there is now 47% of the people who don’t pay taxes at all and One in six Americans receives some form of government aid because of effects of the recession that started in 2007, a review of data indicates.

More than 50 million people are on Medicaid, a program principally designed to help the poor, and nearly 10 million Americans receive unemployment benefits, USA Today said Monday in a report based on data from state officials.

“Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record,” said Vernon Smith of Health Management Associates, a company that compiles data for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

More than 40 million people now receive food stamps, a jump of nearly 50 percent since the recession began, the report said. The unemployment rate in the United States remains above 9 percent.

You have more people dependent on less people for more money! 😦

But don’t worry, this was the “Summer of Recovery” and everything is fine. It just needs more time , according to our Harvard Educated Academic Elites — aka the Obama boys and girls.

And they just need to explain it better and suddenly you’ll have an epiphany and see how wonderful they are! 🙂
Including transfer payments (income support and health insurance benefits) and compensation to public employees, government paid out $3.8 trillion of $12.5 trillion in total personal income in July on an annualized basis.

And remember their “urgent” August bailout of state workers for  $26 billion was supposed to be partially paid by cuts in Food Stamps in 2014 (when the Health Care Mandate is set to kick in).

So if they just explain better how their Wimpy “I’ll bailout you today for a payment in 4 years” economics work for you, you’ll suddenly fall madly in love with them and bask in their greatness. 🙂

That 30.3% share of personal income compares to 25.5% before the recession and 23.5% in 2000. The level topped 27% in the wake of the 1991 recession and hit a prior peak of 28% in 1975.

So government workers personal income has risen 7.5 % SINCE the recession started (and Congress was taken over by Democrats in 2007). And you’re on the hook for it. Doesn’t that make you happy?

The government’s record share reflects the dismal state of private wages and the ramping of federal transfer payments from a historically high base.

“The private economy has been put through the wringer and thus policymakers have been working hard to fill the hole,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Real private wages remain 8.4% below their December 2007 level and just 1.3% above their February bottom. That low was a level first reached in March 2001.

The weakness in private wages reflects deep layoffs and shorter workweeks due to the recession, and the “not terribly robust” prior economic expansion, said Josh Feinman, chief economist at Deutsche Asset Management in the Americas.

Meanwhile, government income payments are up 17% in real terms since the start of the recession. The real mover has been transfer payments, which accounted for a record 18.4% of personal income in July. That’s up by nearly half from 12.7% in 2000 and more than a quarter from 14.4% in 2007.

The growth is a combination of the inexorable rise of spending on Social Security and health care entitlement programs, as well as a spike in unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid due to weak labor markets and expanded benefits included in the Recovery Act.

Real personal income less government transfer payments remains 5.5% below its December 2007 peak, yet real disposable income is up 2.7% since the start of the recession. That’s due to increases in government income payments and lower tax payments.

Too Much To Get Out?

The government’s role in supporting the recovery is already raising questions about how the economy will fare as the crutches are removed.

“Given how significant its role has become, it does make it more difficult for the government to exit out in a graceful way,” Zandi said.
The stimulus has already begun to fade, with more than a million unemployed exhausting jobless benefits of up to 99 weeks.

Zandi says even further government stimulus would be prudent, given the current slowdown.

In addition to tax cuts and spending hikes, another option would be a government-led mortgage refinancing push to make low-rate loans available to those with insufficient equity in their homes to qualify.

“To have a meaningful recovery, the private sector has to step back up to the plate,” Feinman said.

In prior recoveries, policy stimulus and inventory building eventually allowed for a handoff to a healing private sector, he says.

That handoff “is just not happening” said Feinman. He expects “a long climb back.”

The one area of private compensation that is growing, nonsalary benefits, is not as helpful as wage growth, which puts cash in people’s pockets, Zandi notes.

Real nonsalary compensation (private and government) is up 4.1%, likely reflecting rising health care costs and perhaps some catchup pension contributions.

During the Great Depression, when fiscal stabilizers and safety nets were in their infancy, the government’s share of personal income peaked at just over 16%. Even in World War II, when the government payroll ballooned, its share only briefly neared 25%, falling back below 20% until the 1960s.

The share of personal income is an incomplete gauge of government’s economic role because it doesn’t include direct spending. A better, though imperfect, measure would be the combined federal, state and local government budgets as a share of gross domestic product.

By this score, government was far bigger during World War II, when the federal budget alone topped 43% of GDP. While state and local figures are out of date, total government spending probably will be around 40% of GDP this year. (IBD)

And Obama & Co’s solution, they want to spend more money and still raise taxes on 1/1/11.

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

But that’s what happens when you’re in an ideological ditch and you can’t get out.

So bring out the talking points:

“In the month I took office, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month,” the president said. “This morning, new figures show the economy produced 67,000 private sector jobs in August, the eighth consecutive month of private job growth.  Additionally, the numbers for July were revised upward to 107,000. Now that’s positive news, and it reflects the steps we’ve already taken to break the back of this recession.”

The net job loss for August is largely because of the layoffs of 114,000 Census temporary workers.

When May’s job numbers showed a net increase of 431,000 jobs – 411,000 of which were Census jobs — the president did note that “most of these jobs this month that we’re seeing in the statistics represent workers who’ve been hired to complete the 2010 census.” But in those June 4 remarks the president didn’t detail just how many of the 431,000 jobs were Census jobs – 95% of them — and he cited the overall report, and its deceptively large number as evidence that businesses are “starting to hire again. Workers who were laid off, they’re starting to get their jobs back. Companies that were almost forced to close their doors are making plans to expand and invest in new equipment.” (ABC)

So you can have you’re cake and eat it too! So Let them Eat Cake! 🙂

…and said he would “in the weeks ahead” be detailing “further steps to create jobs and keep the economy growing, including extending tax cuts for the middle class and investing in the areas of our economy where the potential for job growth is greatest.”

And judging from past performance that means more government jobs and more bailouts for states and unions.

Yeah, that’s the ticket…:(

Asked to what degree he regrets his administration’s decision to call this Recovery Summer, the president stammered then said, “I don’t regret the notion that we are moving forward, but because of the steps that we’ve taken.  And I’m going to have a press conference next week, where, after you guys are able to hear where we’re at, we’ll be able to answer some specific questions.” (ABC)

Oh god, he’s going to EXPLAIN IT AGAIN! Just in case you were too stupid to understand it every other time he’s said it! 😦

If he just explains it repeatedly enough you’ll get it. 🙂

And it could have been so much worse. 🙂

“This is what change looks like,” Obama said on signing into law the Health Care Cram down Bill.

So in November, we have to show HIM what change looks like then we have change ourselves too because they are the pimps, and we are the ho’s.  So we have to take them out of the drug dealing business and we have to stop using them.

Transparent Steal

No that title was not meant to say “steel”.

I have maintained all along that Obama is very transparent, in his radical socialist ways and the Ministry of Truth is very transparent. If you’re willing to look at it from the jaundiced eye of a cynic.

But the illusion of transparency at least is no more. But it will be transparent that the media won’t talk about it. So I will, along with sources.

President Obama has abolished the position in his White House dedicated to transparency and shunted those duties into the portfolio of a partisan ex-lobbyist who is openly antagonistic to the notion of disclosure by government and politicians.

Obama transferred “ethics czar” Norm Eisen to the Czech Republic to serve as U.S. ambassador. Some of Eisen’s duties will be handed to Domestic Policy Council member Steven Croley, but most of them, it appears, will shift over to the already-full docket of White House Counsel Bob Bauer ( his previous job as the president’s personal lawyer, as well as counsel to the Democratic National Committee).

With Mr. Eisen headed to Europe as an ambassador, his move from the White House “is the biggest lobbying success we’ve had all year,” Tony Podesta, one of the most influential lobbyists in Washington, said with a laugh.(NYT)

Bauer is renowned as a “lawyer’s lawyer” and a legal expert. His resume, however, reads more “partisan advocate” than “good-government crusader.” Bauer came to the White House from the law firm Perkins Coie, where he represented John Kerry in 2004 and Obama during his campaign.

Bauer has served as the top lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, which is the most prolific fundraising entity in the country. Then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., the caricature of a cutthroat Chicago political fixer, hired Bauer to represent the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In the White House, Bauer is tight with Emanuel, having defended Emanuel’s offer of a job to Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., whom Emanuel wanted out of the Senate race.

Another Bauer client was New Jersey Sen. Robert “Torch” Torricelli back in 2001. When one Torricelli donor admitted he had reimbursed employees for their contributions to the Torch — thus circumventing contribution limits — Bauer explained, “All candidates ask their supporters to help raise money from friends, family members and professional associates.”

Bauer’s own words — gathered by the diligent folks at the Sunlight Foundation — show disdain for openness and far greater belief in the good intentions of those in power than of those trying to check the powerful. In December 2006, when the Federal Election Commission proposed more precise disclosure requirements for parties, Bauer took aim at the practice of muckraking enabled by such disclosure.

On his blog, Bauer derided the notion “that politicians and parties are pictured as forever trying to get away with something,” saying this was an idea for which “there is a market, its product cheaply manufactured and cheaply sold.” In other words — we keep too close an eye on our leaders.

In August 2006 Bauer blogged, “disclosure is a mostly unquestioned virtue deserving to be questioned.” This is the man the White House has put in charge of making this the most open White House ever.

Most telling might have been Bauer’s statements about proposed regulations of 527 organizations: “If it’s not done with 527 activity as we have seen, it will be done in other ways,” he told the Senate rules committee.

“There are other directions, to be sure, that people are actively considering as we speak. Without tipping my hand or those of others who are professionally creative, the money will find an outlet.”

This perfectly captures the Obama White House’s attitude toward disclosure. Sure, the administration publish the names of all White House visitors, but, as the New York Times reported a few weeks back, White House folks just meet their lobbyists at Caribou Coffee across the street. Sure, they restrict the work of ex-lobbyists in the administration, but lobbyists who de-list aren’t questioned.

And we’ve seen just a few of the e-mails former Google lobbyist, now Obama tech policy guru, Andrew McLaughlin traded with current Google lobbyists using his Gmail account, but who knows what else the White House whiz kids are doing to avoid the Presidential Records Act — Facebook messages? Twitter direct messages?

Did I mention Bauer was a lobbyist? At Perkins Coie, Bauer lobbied on behalf of America Votes Inc., a Democratic 527 funded by the likes of the AFL-CIO and ACORN.

As with his other reformer rhetoric, Obama’s transparency is mostly smoke and mirrors. (Washington Examiner)

I would argue he is very transparent in his disdain for anyone who isn’t the Harvard elitist liberal socialist that and his apparatchiks are. He’s so open about it that it’s nearly invisible. 🙂

And he gets all the help he needs from his socialist friends in the media.

When the open-government activist group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the Bush administration to get the records of White House visitors from Secret Service logs, media outlets practically fell over themselves to join the effort.  Newspapers like the Washington Post and USA Today and wire services like AP and Reuters filed amicus briefs with the court, and the Obama administration eventually agreed to start releasing the records.  Now, however, the same news organizations have discovered a new sense of privacy when it comes to their attendance in an off-the-record event with Barack Obama:

White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who’ve advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors.

And guess who filed briefs supporting that argument? Virtually every newspaper that covers the White House.

Through July 20, Ms. Kumar counted 36 press conferences since Mr. Obama took office. That compares with the same number for the second President Bush, 66 for President Clinton and 54 for the elder President Bush the same amount of time into their presidencies.

But that leaves out some context.  Obama was holding press conferences every week or two in his first months in office, which is why he got to 35 by the end of July 2009, when it became clear that Obama was a gaffe machine when off of the Teleprompter.  Since then, he’s held a grand total of one, and it doesn’t look like the White House has any more planned after the late May Gulf spill presser.

When media outlets participate in off-the-record events, they give Obama a chance to spin coverage without doing so on the record.  It wouldn’t be a problem if Obama made himself regularly available in an open Q&A setting to the press corps, which complained when Obama’s predecessor would go a couple of months between pressers.  With the White House butting up Obama and keeping him off the record, participation in the luncheon is really just enabling the silence.  If media outlets felt so strongly about transparency as to demand the White House visitor logs, the least they can do is to acknowledge their own roles in letting this President off the hook for accountability and transparency. (hot air.com)

Just reinforces the fact that he is not a public servant, he is a public parent. This is the mommy-state way of saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.” (comment on hot air.com).

Well, they are the Insufferably Superior Left,after all. And remember if you agree with them you are intelligent, tolerant and well mannered.

If you disagree with them you are barking mad loonie who foams at the mouth and has the IQ of a dead light bulb. You’re “stupid”, “racist”,”ignorant” a “moron”, etc. ad nauseum.

So why should anyone take a raving loonie seriously? 🙂

In fact, according to a March 2010 Associated Press analysis of FOIA responses at 17 major agencies, 466,872 FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) denials were issued during the Obama administration’s first year in office – a 50 percent increase over the previous year.

In addition to denying more FOIA requests, Obama has refused to call for an audit of the secret Federal Reserve Bank and rescinded Bush-era disclosure requirements for labor union leaders –† the same union bosses who provided over $100 million (and nearly half a million volunteers) for Obama and Democratic Congressional candidates in 2008.

The hypocrisy on transparency doesn’t end there, though.

As part of the draconian new financial regulations Obama and his Congressional allies are imposing on the private sector, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now virtually exempt from FOIA law.† Under a little-known provision of the new law, the SEC would not have to release any information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities” – a purposefully broad definition that encompasses virtually everything the SEC does.

You know the SEC, the ones who were too busy wanting porn 24/7 to watch either Wall Street or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to care. And now, by law they don’t have to care. More Porn for the SEC, please….

“It allows the SEC to block the public’s access to virtually all SEC records,” former agency attorney turned whistleblower Gary Aguirre told FOX News. “It permits the SEC to promulgate its own rules and regulations regarding the disclosure of records without getting the approval of the Office of Management and Budget, which typically applies to all federal agencies.”

In fact, within days of the new law being signed, the SEC was already turning down FOIA requests from media outlets citing the new exemption.

But don’t worry, Big Brother will not lie to you… 🙂

The Ministry of Truth is involved with news media, entertainment, the fine arts and educational books. Its purpose is to rewrite history and change the facts to fit Party doctrine for propaganda effect. For example, if Big Brother makes a prediction that turns out to be wrong, the employees of the Ministry of Truth go back and rewrite the prediction so that any prediction Big Brother previously made is accurate. This is the “how” of the Ministry of Truth’s existence. Within the novel Orwell elaborates that the deeper reason for its existence is to maintain the illusion that the Party is absolute. It cannot ever seem to change its mind (if, for instance, they perform one of their constant changes regarding enemies during war) or make a mistake (firing an official or making a grossly misjudged supply prediction), for that would imply weakness and to maintain power the Party must seem eternally right and strong. (1984)

It’s transparent in it’s complete lack of transparency or even it’s appearance therein. 🙂

doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink..    ”
“     The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words or constructions.–George Orwell

The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce the total dominance of the State.

How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. ⁽¹⁹⁸⁴⁾

The phrase “two plus two equals five” (“2 + 2 = 5“) is a slogan used in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as an example of an obviously false dogma one must believe, similar to other obviously false slogans by the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is contrasted with the phrase “two plus two makes four”, the obvious – but politically inexpedient – truth. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, uses the phrase to wonder if the State might declare “two plus two equals five” as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes in it, does that make it true? Smith writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Now that’s transparent and on MSNBC,CBS,NBC,ABC,CNN,Their websites, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, et al. that 2+2=5. Now you just have to believe it. 🙂

It’s so transparent it’s nearly invisible. 🙂

Criminal Crisis

“The Arizona law is in compliance with federal law,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at Numbers USA. “The Justice Department should stay out of it. They should be encouraging Arizona to be enforcing the laws. Secondly, they should be enforcing federal immigration law, which means challenging cities and states that have sanctuary policies.”

The Justice Department sees it differently, saying Arizona is unconstitutionally interfering with the federal government’s role in immigration control.

“There is a big difference between a state or locality saying they are not going to use their resources to enforce a federal law, as so-called sanctuary cities have done, and a state passing its own immigration policy that actively interferes with federal law,” Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.

So if you want to ignore the Federal law and set up a Sanctuary City that’s ok with us. Do something else and you’re “interfering” with our power.

The Empire has spoken! 🙂

If, in fact, any entity is actively “interfering” with the enforcement of federal immigration laws, it is these cities, which refuse cooperation with federal enforcement authorities. What Schmaler is doing, and what many legal experts claim, is willfully misrepresenting both the law in question and the role adopted by sanctuary cities.

If there is a “big difference” to be had here it is the sanctuary city is actively refusing to enforce the law while Arizona is actively attempting to enforce it.

And which is it our chief law enforcement agency decides to sue?  Of course, the entity trying to enforce our laws…

Just as a side Note, our cough-cough “esteemed” ex-gov Janet was on Greta Van Sustreen last night from Laredo, TX and asked about SB1070 and “racial profiling” and she dropped back and punted!

She refused to answer the question directly and even used Obama’s “misquided” and toted how much great stuff she has done and will be doing.

It was a real barf fest. Not that I excepted anything less from her. When she was Governor she only wanted to look tough on the border issue because of re-election campaign in 2006 and it was a poke in the eye of a Republican President.

But soon enough she bailed on the state just as everything went to hell. She drove it into the iceberg and then stole the life raft for herself.

Of course, ignored in all of this is the state of Rhode Island which has, for years, essentially had and enforced a state law that is almost a mirror of the Arizona law.

But since suing a Northeastern Liberal state not on the border which doesn’t have the vote potential is not politically advantageous we’ll just ignore it. They aren’t a big enough score.

We want spectacle. We want intimidation. We want FEAR! 🙂

The Empire has Spoken!

They have, in a very short time, turned the Department of Justice into the Department of Agendas, injecting an agenda driven politics into an area where it should never, ever be allowed. The result is a perversion of law and the breaking of a centuries old promise in our social contract.(examiner)

But if the end justifies the means, go for it! 🙂

And you have groups and the Attorney General just waiting for any whiff or any atom of any angstrom of “racial profiling” at 12:01am July 29th.

The attorney general, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week in an interview aired on CBS on Sunday, said the pre-emption argument was the stronger attack against the law. But he said if the law does go into effect despite the suit, the Justice Department will watch and see whether profiling is taking place.

“If that was the case, we would have the tools, and we would bring suit on that basis,” he said.

So do I think that by 12:02am on July 29th there will be a lawsuit alledging “racial profiling”?

Yes.

But I’m a cynic of the highest order.

I think that the ACLU, LA Raza, and other groups will try there darnedest to set-up the police and then scream “racial profiling” even if it doesn’t exist. And they will do it each and every day.

Because, that’s what liberals do.

They lawyer you to death.

They beat you into submission with Lawyers.

That’s why we so many problems caused by lawyers.

Former U.S. Attorney General and Heritage Distinguished Fellow Edwin Meese addressed overcriminalization in his introduction to “One Nation Under Arrest.”  Meese writes:

America is in the throes of overcriminalization: We are making and enforcing far too many criminal laws that create traps for the innocent, but unwary, and that threaten to make criminals out of those who are doing their best to be respectable, law-abiding citizens

Last night on Fox Business, reporter John Stossel had a program about this problem:

The show focuses on the destruction that over-criminalization caused to average Americans Krister Evertson and George and Kathy Norris.

Krister, an Eagle Scout with no criminal record – not even a single traffic ticket, was initially arrested by four FBI agents wearing black SWAT gear and pointing automatic rifles at him because he didn’t know that obscure federal regulations required him to put a certain sticker on his otherwise lawful UPS package.  After spending 21 months in an Oregon federal prison, Krister today lives by himself in a ramshackle aluminum trailer sitting on the fenced-in grounds of a construction company’s equipment yard.  Because he is on parole, he is not allowed even to move to Alaska – where he was arrested – to live with his 80-year-old mother whom he used to care for.

George Norris, a 63-year-old retiree with diabetes and heart problems, had no criminal record the day armed agents with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (?!) ransacked his house looking for evidence that he had imported endangered orchids for his home-based business. Although the feds found no evidence of illegal orchids, Norris spent 17 months in prison – including over 10 weeks in solitary confinement – because a small percentage of his paperwork was inaccurate.

And he went to prison because after spending his entire life savings, $100,000, he was advised to plead guilty so he could be sentenced to probation. Instead, he spent 17 months in a Federal Prison!

Imagine: A Gang member with tatooes on his eyeballs comes up to him, “whatcha in for?”

“I sold legal orchids without the proper paperwork”

“Man, you’re one dangerous dude!” 🙂

And there’s the food police, you know, the people who want to ban salt, fat, and pop, etc. because they are bad for you and you’re too incompetent to be responsible for yourself.

The Video: http://overcriminalized.com/Video.aspx

Also: “The Food Police” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZZgLmmtwRk

There shall be no cupcakes. No chocolate cake and no carrot cake. According to New York City’s latest regulations, not even zucchini bread makes the cut.

In an effort to limit how much sugar and fat students put in their bellies at school, the Education Department has effectively banned most bake sales, the lucrative if not quite healthy fund-raising tool for generations of teams and clubs.

The change is part of a new wellness policy that also limits what can be sold in vending machines and student-run stores, which use profits to help finance activities like pep rallies and proms.

Did you know that Girl Scouts are evil perveyers of obese-creating cookies??

They are pushers!

They are evil crack dealers of fat!!

Warning  Labels on Fast Food. A Skull and Cross Bones on your Big Mac perhaps?

A HazMat sticker on that Little Debbie Snack Cake?

A Heart attack sign on that plate of Nachos?

If you refuse to do what is right, then the government will be forced to come in and make you do it.

It’s in your best interest.

All those who believe they are born with free choice, need to take a few classes in marketing psychology to understand how limited their scope of personal freedom really is in today’s America. In fact, our free choice is really the freedom to choose between Pepsi and Coke, not freedom to choose a healthy lifestyle. There are too many psychological cues pushing the average Joe and Jane towards obesity – mostly cheap unhealthy fare available anywhere anytime. (fooducate blog)

Part of being free is being free to make bad choices, to take risks, and to bear the consequences. Part of being free is that you, personally, may decide what you eat or drink. It’s a liberty so elementary that our founders never even imagined that it would need protection, but today, it does.

To be sure, there are many costs associated with socialized health care, and some of the choices we make will certainly raise those costs. That’s one big reason why the nanny state is suddenly in the food business. But if we absolutely must have socialized health care — a point I don’t for a moment concede — then I’d prefer to pay a little bit extra and keep all my other liberties, thanks.(Cato Institute)

But liberals and their pit bull lawyers never give up that easily.

They are, after all, vastly superior in every way to you. You just don’t know it. And if you want disagree, well, meet Mr and Mrs Lawsuit!

San Francisco is banning pop in vending machines, but not Starbucks, as bad for you.

Much like the Financial Reform that just passed that heaps tons of regulations on the private sector, but says absolutely nothing about federally-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the real problem that is still out there.

But it make it look like they are “doing something” and it’s for “your own good”.

And if you want to complain that the government is not doing it’s job, and you want to do it or help them do it, shut up and sit down, they know better.

We’ll sue you for trying to do our job too.

So if you step on a federal law land mine or are arrested by the food police, it’s for your own good, citizen.

Want to take responsibility for yourself, NOT ALLOWED.

That’s the government’s job.

We are are from the government and we are here to protect your from yourself!

Bow to your Masters or else!

Rejoice Citizen. 🙂