iCount

Here’s a quick question. Suppose you run a business and you’re not terribly moral. Would you be in favor of legislation that:

(1) forces people or their employers to buy your product;

(2) forces people to buy the more expensive versions of your product;

(3) give them money to help buy your product; and

(4) creates a closed market so that they can only select from you and a few other companies?

Of course you would. Who wouldn’t want that? I mean, besides free market zealots.

Well, this is precisely what is happening with health insurance under Obamacare. As Jacob Sullum points out:

If Obama’s plan works as advertised, it will be a huge boon to insurers. As he himself notes, “they’re going to have 30 million new customers” thanks to the government’s mandates and subsidies.

To distract us from the favor he is doing for insurers, Obama claims to be getting tough with them by demanding that they take all comers and charge them all the same rates, without regard to health. While abolishing risk-based pricing contradicts a basic principle of the insurance business, the industry has to weigh the loss of that freedom against the gain of government-guaranteed revenue.

Despite his talk about reining in “excessive” premium hikes, Obama’s plan commits him to keeping insurers financially sound so they can provide the coverage he is promising. Federal regulators, like their state counterparts, will find that “you can’t separate the underlying solvency of companies from the rates they charge,” as Wisconsin’s insurance commissioner recently told The New York Times. “From a consumer protection standpoint,” Kansas’ insurance commissioner agreed, “the most important thing we do is ensure the solvency of companies.”

This is why I could never be a Democrat. This is why I sometimes get so angry listening to these jackasses on TV and the radio. They are completely selling out our healthcare to the insurance companies on the one hand. And then they turn around and say shit like this to established their liberal bona fides.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concedes that Democrats allowed the health care reform debate to be “hijacked” by insurance companies and other interests set on killing the bill.

Yes, Nancy. It’s the evil insurance companies you are beholden to that “hijacked” the bill, not your fractious dim-bulb party and the understandable nervousness Americans feel about government intrusion into any industry.

Of course, insurance companies, for all their demonization, are not the real problem with healthcare anyway, as Jeffrey Anderson points out:

According to the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, health insurers are not even among the top-30 United States industries in profit-margin. Health insurers rank 35th, with a profit-margin of just 2.2 percent — less than one-fifth the profit-margin of railroads. None of the ten largest American health insurers made profits of more than 4.5 percent, and two of them lost money. Health insurers’ collective profit-margin is less than one-eighth that of drug companies and less than one-seventh that of companies that sell medical products or equipment. It’s also less than that of medical facilities. Yet when was the last time you heard President Obama rail against greedy hospitals?

One thing at a time, my friend. Once the Democrats have control of the insurance companies (partly by delaying the Medicare SGR fix and buying off the AMA), they will then explain the inevitable cost over-runs as the result of greedy doctors and drug companies and reign them in. Divide and conquer.

In all, the combined profits of the 14 largest American health insurers (the ones who crack the Fortune 1000) are $8.7 billion. That’s less than 0.4 percent, or 1/250th, of overall U.S. health-care costs, which are $2.5 trillion.

The Democrat are like a football team run by morons. They really only have one play in the book—envy. Greedy rich insurance companies, greedy rich doctors and greedy rich Republicans are the enemies. Democrats are the nobel gallants standing between us and exploitation. And even as they climb into bed with insurance companies, unions and “green energy” interests, they continue to peddle this myth.

Whatever works, I guess.

(In other news, the Senate Parliamentarian has limited what the Dems can do with reconciliation. Expect outrage and bombast and demonization of man who’s just doing his job.)

March 12, 2010 11:04 PM

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- What Are They Teaching America?

By Thomas D. Segel -- There is a lot of noise being made these days about what is being printed in Texas textbooks. Reviews show a distinct secular and liberal bias in some of the writings. The concern is because the annual buy of the Lone Star State is in excess of 48 million books. This volume almost assuredly dictates what will be printed for the remaining 49 states.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- Crist-Rubio Battle Now the Bellwether for Direction of GOP in 2010

By Matt Towery -- I knew that I must have been off pretty badly when I casually wrote in this national column that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist would be a good example of a Republican that voters in critical swing states could accept in the upcoming elections for Senate and the U.S. House.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Deficient Cleaning Service

By MIchelle Malkin -- "Maybe it will take a woman to clean up the House," Nancy Pelosi boasted before the 2006 midterm elections. Looks like those XX chromosomes didn't give her much advantage over the old cleaning crew. The swamp she was supposed to drain is overflowing. And fewer than four years after a sordid sexual predation scandal involving a creepy congressman rocked the Republican Party, a sordid sexual predation scandal involving a creepy congressman is now rocking the Democratic Party.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- Whose Values?

By Linda Chavez -- Liz Cheney has stirred up a hornet's nest. The former vice president's daughter now runs a group called Keep America Safe, which last week released a video questioning the "values" of Obama Justice Department lawyers who once represented clients detained at Guantanamo for terrorist activities. Cheney's group claims that Attorney General Holder has hired nine such lawyers, including the principal deputy solicitor general, Neal Katyal, but has refused to identify most of them.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- Heads Liberals Win, Tails the Nation Loses

By David Limbaugh -- The left habitually distorts and exaggerates to demonize and discredit its opponents but squeals like a stuck pig when conservatives use colorful language to call the left out. Unfortunately, some on the right encourage the left's squealing. As for the liberals, it's hard to take them seriously when they register their indignation at, say, Sarah Palin for her "death panels" comment, other conservatives for describing Obama as a socialist or liberals as "liberals," or, most recently, Liz Cheney for calling seven Justice Department appointees the "al-Qaida Seven."

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Toyota 'mystified' by runaway Prius case in Calif.

JACUMBA, Calif. (AP) - A Toyota executive said Thursday the company is "mystified" by a report that a California man's Prius gas pedal became stuck and caused the car to speed out of control on a California freeway.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- GOP gets big help in race for Patrick Kennedy seat

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- The Republican candidate running to replace Rep. Patrick Kennedy in Congress says he's getting help in his bid from several former GOP presidential candidates.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Fed. appeals court upholds 'under God' in pledge

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A federal appeals court upheld the use of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" on U.S. currency, rejecting arguments Thursday that the phrases violate the separation of church and state.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Need for results drives Obama's domestic juggle

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama's intense juggling of domestic issues reflects all the realities he faces: a vast agenda, a smaller window for results this year and a need to keep promises to constituencies that will have a huge say in the fall congressional elections.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Obama says he's committed to immigration overhaul

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama on Thursday assured immigration advocates frustrated by the wait for a promised overhaul of U.S. immigration laws that he remains committed to fixing a system he has said is broken. What remains unclear is whether Congress will send him a bill this year.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Dems look to health vote without abortion foes

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Democratic leaders Thursday abandoned a long struggle to strike a compromise on abortion in their ranks, gambling that they can secure the support for President Barack Obama's sweeping health care legislation with showdown votes looming as early as next week.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Senators question $1 million pay for charity's CEO

WASHINGTON (AP) - A group of Republican senators is questioning high salaries and expensive travel bills for executives at the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, raising issues that could jeopardize millions in federal funding for the national charity.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- GOP loses bid for ethics probe of Dem leaders

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Democrats on Thursday stopped a Republican bid to force an investigation of Democratic leaders aimed at determining whether they covered up sexual harassment allegations against ex-Rep. Eric Massa.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Dodd to offer his own financial regulation bill

WASHINGTON (AP) - With one eye on the calendar and the other on elusive bipartisanship, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd plans to offer his own version of a sweeping overhaul of financial regulations without Republican support.

by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on March 12, 2010 11:30 AM

From Dissecting Leftism...

REDIRECT for "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH"

Response times on the site hosting "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH" have become so slow as to render the blog almost inaccessible.

I have therefore moved the blog back to its original home on blogspot. Go HERE to access all the recent postings.

I moved it off blogspot at a time when Google (the owner of blogspot) was having a severe bout of irrationality but they seem to have settled down since then so I am hoping that the move back can be permanent.

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Why Democrats Don't Care about $9.7 Trillion Debt

As reported by The Washington Post, "President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday." CNN adds, "Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone."

The Post continues: "The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) and the White House (are) ... both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year -- a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama's policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015. "Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said."

CNN adds that "By 2020 the (CBO) estimates debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90 percent of GDP. That's up from 53 percent of GDP in 2009."

I suspect that most Americans, if asked whether these numbers trouble the Democratic leadership and President Obama, would answer in the affirmative. They would be wrong.

They would be wrong not because the Democratic Party or the president are economically illiterate or bad individuals, but because the Democratic Party and the president are leftists. And most Americans, including most Democrats, do not understand the left. They may understand liberalism; but President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and most Democratic representatives and senators are not liberals; they are leftists. And most Americans do not understand the difference between liberal and left. They do not realize, for example, that there is no major difference between the American Democratic Party and the leftist social democratic parties of Western Europe. They do not know that from Karl Marx to Obama, the left (as opposed to liberals) has never created wealth because it has never been interested in creating wealth; it is interested in redistributing wealth.

Therefore, unprecedented and unsustainable debt, a debt that will negatively affect most Americans' quality of life, renders the dollar increasingly undesirable, and undermines America's prestige and power in the world -- these developments do not particularly disturb the left. They may trouble the president, the Democratic Party, and others on the left on some political level, but that pales in comparison to what the left really wants: a huge government overseeing a giant welfare state and a country with far fewer rich Americans.

Achieving those goals is far more important than preventing a decline in the American quality of life. The further left one goes, the more contempt one has for the present quality of American life in any event. The left regularly mocks many of the symbols of that life -- from the three-bedroom suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence to owning an SUV (or almost any car) because Americans should be traveling on public buses, trains and bicycles.

As for the dollar, I can bear personal testimony to the decline of the dollar's prestige. I am writing this column in Morocco. In Casablanca, my wife and I and another couple hired a Moroccan driver for the day. And when it came time to pay, the man refused to accept dollars; he wanted to be paid in either Euros or Moroccan dirhams. Yes, dirhams rather than dollars. But the demise of the dollar as the world's currency disturbs the left as much as does America's not getting a gold medal in curling at the Winter Olympics.

And as for America wielding less power in the world, that is a positive development for the American left. It is the world community as embodied in the United Nations that should wield power throughout the world, not an "overstretched," "imperialist" and "militarist" United States.

I used to believe that left and right have similar goals for America, that they just differed in the means they wanted used to get there. I was mistaken. The left has a very different vision of America than those who hold the founding values of America, most especially individualism and small government. And if the price of a once in a lifetime possibility of getting to a giant welfare state dominated by the left is America's steep financial decline, that is a price fully worth paying.

SOURCE

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The Roadmap Warrior

Paul Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future would drastically overhaul the American welfare state in a free-market direction. The Congressional Budget Office says it would solve the entitlements crisis through a series of changes to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. The Roadmap also includes a fundamental tax reform -- one that Ryan says, and the CBO assumes, would bring in revenues equivalent to the long-term historical average of 19-percent of GDP. Two new studies dispute that figure, however. I talked to Ryan this evening to get his response.

"We feel good about our numbers," Ryan told me. "You can tweak a plan to get it toward a historic trend." He's referring to a Brookings Institution's Tax Policy Center study that says the Roadmap would fall short of its 19-percent goal over the next 10 years, bringing in revenues of somewhere between 16.6 percent and 16.8 percent of GDP. In a statement last night, Ryan said that "the purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue -- not the other way around." He reiterated that argument in his conversation with me today. "The point is the spending."

Philip Klein made some salient observations in a post earlier today:

There's good reason to believe, based on economic theory and empirical experience, that at least some portion of that "lost" revenue would be recouped by higher GDP. But the overaching point is that the Ryan plan, as scored by the CBO, shows that there's a way to balance the long-term budget by keeping taxes at historical levels rather than raising them to levels that would cripple the economy. If critics acknowledge that Ryan's reforms to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the health care system can make our nation solvent as long as we maintain historical levels of tax revenue, and the only argument left is over how to maintain historical levels of taxation, then I'd say that's a major victory for Ryan.

The other charge critics make is that Ryan's tax changes would hurt the poor. That's the theme of a second report by the liberal Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), which concludes with this: "It's difficult to design a tax plan that will lose $2 trillion over a decade even while requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more. But Congressman Ryan has met that daunting challenge." It's impossible not to notice the snide tone. But sarcasm isn't always persuasive.

The $2 trillion figure is a reference to the Bush tax cuts, which Ryan's plan would make permanent for everyone. (One should note that by this measure, the Obama tax plan will also "lose" some revenue, since the president only wants the tax cuts to expire for upper-brackets.) But Ryan also cuts spending over time. Obama does not.

As for "requiring 90 percent of taxpayers to pay more," that's a swipe at Ryan's zeroing out the stimulus and replacing the corporate income tax with a business consumption tax. You see, Ryan says the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit in Obama's stimulus bill is spending, not tax cutting. He'd eliminate it. And CTJ counts a reduction in that spending as a tax hike.

The business consumption tax would be passed on to the consumer, making it regressive. But Ryan notes that Americans indirectly feel the consequences of the above-average U.S. corporate tax rate today, through lost wages and higher prices. And these effects are regressive, too. Unlike the current situation, Ryan goes on, the business consumption tax "is cleaner, simpler, and it's on paper." It would also make American exports more competitive than they are today. "I believe it's a better deal," he says. Most important: "It's more uniform. You can't play social engineering."

The dynamic effects of Ryan's reforms are impossible to predict. Over time, government would shrink, investment would expand, and America's credit rating would improve. America would become a haven for foreign capital. Her citizens would have more individual choice and, yes, more individual responsibility. "Policies such as these," Irving Kristol wrote decades ago in his essay "The Republican Future," "have the obvious advantage of reconciling the purposes of the welfare state with the maximum degree of individual independence and the least bureaucratic coercion." No wonder Paul Ryan is smack in the middle of liberal sights.

SOURCE

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Low-tax Texas beats big-government California

"Stop messing with Texas!" That was the message Gov. Rick Perry bellowed on election night as he celebrated his victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor. In his reference to Texas' anti-littering slogan, Perry was making a point applicable to national as well as Texas politics and addressed to Democratic politicians as well as Republicans.

His point was that the big-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders are resented and fiercely opposed not just because of their dire fiscal effects but also as an intrusion on voters' independence and ability to make decisions for themselves.

No one would include Perry on a list of serious presidential candidates, including himself, even in the flush of victory. But in his 10 years as governor, the longest in the state's history, Texas has been teaching some lessons to which the rest of the nation should pay heed.

They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the nation's second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.

But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress -- or lack of it -- over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold big margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.

Those Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget deficits. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to reduce the power of the Democratic-union combine with referenda was defeated in 2005 when public employee unions poured $100 million -- all originally extracted from taxpayers -- into effective TV ads.

Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California -- almost as many as the number of immigrants coming in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 census.

Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes -- and no state income taxes -- and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California's year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.

But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California's. But its test scores -- and with a demographically similar school population -- are higher. California's once fabled freeways are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In the meantime, Texas' economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small and large generate new jobs.

And Americans have been voting for Texas with their feet. From 2000 to 2009, some 848,000 people moved from other parts of the United States to Texas, about the same number as moved in from abroad. That inflow has continued in 2008-09, in which 143,000 Americans moved into Texas, more than double the number in any other state, at the same time as 98,000 were moving out of California. Texas is on the way to gain four additional House seats and electoral votes in the 2010 reapportionment.

This was not always so. In the two decades after World War II California, with its pleasant weather, was the Golden State, a promised land, for most Americans, while Texas seemed a provincial rural backwater. Many saw postwar California's expansion of universities, freeways and water systems a model for the nation. Few experts praised Texas' low-tax, low-services government.

Now it is California's ruinously expensive and increasingly incompetent government that seems dysfunctional, while Texas' approach has generated more creativity and opportunity. So it's not surprising that Texas voters preferred Perry over an opponent who has spent 16 years in Washington. What's surprising is that Democrats in Washington are still trying to impose policies like those that have ravaged California rather than those that have proved so successful in Texas.

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.co

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Traders cut supplies of petrol to Iran: "The world’s largest oil traders have quietly stopped supplying petrol to Iran in a clear sign that the threat of sanctions and Washington’s behind-the-scenes efforts to convince companies not to sell to Tehran are paying off. However, the decision by Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura is unlikely to cut Tehran off completely from the global petrol market as traders said Iran’s long-standing suppliers were being replaced by small Dubai-based and Chinese companies. Although Iran is one of the world’s biggest oil producers, its refineries are dilapidated and it suffers from runaway petrol demand because of generous subsidies. Energy executives said Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura, which have hitherto sold Iran half of its petrol imports of 130,000 barrels a day, stopped supplying Tehran because of mounting political risk. “The political and public relations problems more than outweigh the business rewards,” said one executive."

Five lies about the American economy: "The ongoing recession has raised a troubling question for otherwise resurgent Keynesian economists: How can the American economy keep getting worse under the intensive care of an interventionist economic team almost universally praised for its brilliance? The answer may be that the Obama administration is dealing with a fictional economy, one that bears little resemblance to the economy the rest of us inhabit. And when the difference between fact and fiction becomes too apparent, they just make stuff up. Herewith, five big lies the administration loves to tell and the mainstream media (with some notable exceptions) love to repeat …”

Chris Matthews claims Israel hates Obama because he is black‏: "Perhaps the first sign was when the administration agreed to bring along MSNBC's "Hardball" host Chris Matthews, whose penchant for gaffery rivals Biden's. The media guest of honor used his Monday programming to suggest, along with another reporter, that Israelis dislike President Obama because they're racist. "Who's more popular over here? Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden. Put them in order," Matthews asked New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner Monday on air. When Bronner put Obama at the bottom, Matthews inquired: "Okay, that tells you a lot. So tell me why the president of the United States is so far at the bottom? Is it his middle name? Hussein?" Bronner said "prejudice" about Obama's Islamic background was a factor, and then Matthews took it a step further, saying, "Yeah, because they see him as a black man."

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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From Right Thinking...

Virginia Government Soaks Their Beaks

by cjmac53@aol.com

Man, are they getting desperate, or what? via Mish:

A federally funded ticketing blitz in the state of Virginia landed a total of 6996 traffic tickets this weekend. The blitz, dubbed “Operation Air, Land & Speed” coincided with frantic efforts by state officials to close a $2.2 billion budget deficit. Supervisors ordered state troopers to saturate Interstates 81 and 95 to issue as many tickets as humanly possible over the space of two days.

Jesus--the state police actually treated this like a got-damn military operation, and all because the state government has a hole in their budget the size of Obama’s ears.

This is sheer desperation, plain and simple. When you have to resort to traffic tickets to shore up your budget, it’s game-fucking-over. And the most grotesque aspect of this whole mafia-style skim is that it was federally funded. In other words, our tax dollars went to pay for this.

Why are they resorting to measures like these? A quick reminder:

Watching these states try to grapple with their underwater budgets is like watching a car wreck in real time. You know it’s not going to turn out well, but you can’t look away. Ponzi government is coming home to roost, kids.

March 12, 2010 07:41 AM

From Dissecting Leftism...

by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on March 12, 2010 07:19 AM

From Right Thinking...

You May Have Already Been Counted

by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on March 12, 2010 01:58 AM

Yesterday, while the AE-35 was on the fritz, I went out to check my snail mail and found something most curious—a letter from the Census Bureau. I figured I’d take it in, write down “we got three here” with one of my daughter’s crayons and send it back. But it was not my census form. It was, instead, a stupid letter telling me to expect my census form soon.

Dear Resident,

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail. When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly.

Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Robert M. Groves

Director, U.S. Census Bureau

Emphasis mine.

This little letter probably cost the Feds about $42 million. That estimate is based on just postage, paper and labor. But the government can’t wipe it’s ass for less than six grand, so I’ll assume that’s a lower limit.

To be honest, the cost doesn’t me. $42 million is about what the government spends every five minutes. Obamacare will probably spend ten times that much designing their logo. The Census is already budgeted at ... holy shit ... $14 billion (three times the cost of the 2000 census) so complaining about the cost of this letter is like complaining about the font on the Stimulus Bill.

Moreover, the Bureau claims that these letters could save up to $500 million. The reason is that even a small increase in response rates will erase the need to send actual people out to chase up respondees, a process that is very expensive at government labor rates (they’re already hiring 750,000 people for it). We all know how reliable the estimates are for government money-saving efforts, but this actually doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me.

So, no, I’m not bothered by the cost. What got my boxers in a bunch was the phrase I’ve highlighted in bold. I’m not happy with the Census Bureau telling us to fill out the form because it’s the only way to get out “fair share” of government lucre. That is classic liberal redistributionist trope.

It’s also bullshit. As we have seen with the stimulus and with the buying of healthcare reform, government money gets out doled based on politics, not need and certainly not the damned Census. Did Louisiana get a $100 million payout in the healthcare bill because the filled out their Census forms? No, they got it because Mary Landrieu sold her healthcare vote. Are two-thirds of the stimulus jobs going to public education because of the census? No, they’re going there because education is the province of the nation’s most powerful unions.

Now this is my first time filling out a census form. I was living with my parents in 1990 and was a vagabond grad student in 2000. Perhaps the letter has always said this. But even if this is standard Census boilerplate, I don’t like it. We should not be encouraging people to think of government as giant bag of money from which you get your “fair share”.

March 12, 2010 03:48 AM

From Viking Pundit...

Let's go crazy, Senate-style - Roll Call "Senate liberals dissed on health bill": "Senate Democratic leaders are concerned about the amount of mischief their own Members could create if or when a health care reconciliation bill comes up for debate." Public option, Medicare cuts, donut holes - it could be nuts!

From Viking Pundit...

Virginia pushes back against HCR - It's largely symbolic move but a lopsided vote in the Virginia House of Delegates today stipulated that the federal government can't force Virginians to purchase health insurance. Thirty-four other states are planning similar legislation.Extra - Some interesting additional from Slate.

by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on March 12, 2010 01:21 AM

From Right Thinking...

Campaign promises, fiscal responsibility, debt, ethical scandals, and hope and change

by AlexinCT

Democrats ran and won in 2006, and then again in 2008, on the bad behavior of republicans. Republicans were successfully and correctly painted as having lost their fiscal sanity for the deficit spending prior to 2006, only to have democrats gain control of congress and the spending purse after the 2006 elections, and set new spending records they then blamed Bush for. The leftwing machine’s manipulations of the facts, with big-time help from a complicit media that didn’t point out democrats were always worse at that stuff anyway when in charge, allowed them to run on the lack of fiscal responsibility of the republicans in 2008 again, using the crisis of their own making that they then blamed on Bush yet again, to win big, only to then proceed to set new deficit spending records. Here is the graph for those of you that want to dispute the deficit spending facts, so spare us the bull:

As this projection showed Obama’s deficit spending in his first year ended up being more than all 8 years of Bush. Oh sure, as I already pointed out Obama is blaming Bush for having to do so. Democrats have successfully convinced so many that the financial crisis we are in isn’t tied to those idiotic collectivist economic lending practices they forced upon the market in the last 3 decades. Even worse, they successfully have covered up the rigged games Franks and Dodd set up with Fannie and Freddie to keep those faulty economic policies afloat, and how those trading scams then led to the implosion of the housing market and then the financial sector. But that “It’s Bush’s fault” excuse is wearing thin as people are slowly seeing the truth. Almost $2 trillion of the tax payer’s dollars has been funneled to democrats and their friends, through one collectivist economic scam or another promising salvation, but delivering nothing but a drastically growing government bureaucracy, while the private sector continues to bleed jobs and contract. And the WH remains focused on tacking on trillions more in new taxes and debt so they can give government control of healthcare moneys and decisions, with a scam which purports to reign in costs and be fiscally responsible by of all things taxing us for 10 years to provide 5 or 6 years of coverage, while ignoring the economic disaster they are leaving in their wake. And the one thing they should be addressing, the lack of jobs, gets nothing but some meaningless political play. In the mean time the hole is growing deeper and the spending of money we simply don’t have continues to rise. This year is looking like it will set even higher and wasteful deficit spending records as this February’s $220.9 billion single month record is showing. This seems to be our economic future thanks to the democrats and their economics. But the fact that democrats are destroying our economy, and are trying hard to destroy healthcare, is not the thing I want to address here. I want to talk a bit about one of the other lies they told to get themselves elected.

If you have been following the whole Eric Massa fiasco, you know this stuff has turned into a soap opera writ large. Frankly I do not know if Massa is telling the truth. He is a democrat after all, and lying is second nature for them. However, I do not put it past this WH to do what Massa has accused them of doing either. Based on what I have seen them do in just this first year, I have no doubt that this bunch is probably the most corrupt crew I have ever seen. We are dealing with Chicago politics here, and this – hope & change! - is SOP for these people. My bet is that since Obama wants this monster passed, his team is going to make it happen. Even if they have to do what Massa has accused them of. In fact I do not put it past them to resort to openly committing felonies to do so considering the vested interest they have in making this the law of the lad. After all, they control the levers of power and the press, so whose gonna be able to do anything about anything bad they do? If the stuff that has been going on so far hasn’t made the case yet, I doubt anything they do will.

And that brings me to my point about this whole Massa thing. If you don’t remember Nancy promising to drain the republican swamp and end the culture of corruption back in 2006, here is just one of the instances the sympathetic press gave her words play. Unfortunately, as case after case proves – Chris Dodd, Barney Franks, Charley Rangel, and a plethora of others – Nancy lied, and the corruption and criminal behavior, like the deficit spending and the fiscal irresponsibility I talked about before, is also setting new records. Don’t take my word for it. The case with Massa is more of the same. Even more important is the fact that while Pelosi is now claiming ignorance that’s a blatant lie because Nancy knew months ago about Massa’s behavior. And while Nancy is playing dumb, just a little research would have made it all obvious from records going back to Massa’s NAVY days showing that Massa was a time bomb waiting to explode.

As is the case in all these other stories of corruption that the MSM is ignoring or down playing, we are being lied to by these democrats that want to pretend real criminal activity and serious ethics violations, stuff that makes what happens when the republicans were in charge look tame, isn’t their modus operandi. And keep in mind that it is this scandal driven congress which is ignoring the will of the people and pushing forward with an unpopular government takeover of healthcare. Why isn’t the MSM up in arms about all this corruption and the will of the people being ignored? I guess that’s more of that hope and change for you.

March 12, 2010 12:59 AM

March 11, 2010

From Right Thinking...

Reconciliation

by Eric (noreply@blogger.com) on March 11, 2010 09:14 PM

I’ve not posted much of the reconciliation issue and whether Congress will use reconciliation to bypass the filibuster on healthcare reform. I’m not overly fond of fillibusters, but this seems like a sneaky way to get an unpopular bill through. I’m fully aware of the political games going on. The GOP wants a victory over the Democrats. The Democrats want a bill passed, no matter what’s in it. And if the roles were reversed, I’m sure the Republicans would be screaming about the minority “thwarting the will of the people” and the Democrats would be sobbing about our “sacred Senate traditions”. To me, the most important fight right now is in the House. If Pelosi can’t even muster a majority—and it’s iffy—this thing is deader than Michael Jackson.

Still, it’s nice to have some facts on the subject. And for all the Democrat screeching about how Republicans have used reconciliation “all the time”, the facts belie this claim:

Almost every act passed under reconciliation (8/15) has in fact been a budget bill. And most of those that weren’t (5/7) were tax bills. The two outliers: The 1996 welfare reform act and the 2007 student aid package. Why those were passed under reconciliation isn’t made clear.

What’s also interesting is that the vast majority of these bills were absolute slam dunks. Most (8/15) were passed by filibuster-proof supermajorities, meaning that reconciliation wasn’t used as an end-around to avoid a cloture vote.

There are only seven times in the last thirty years that reconciliation has been used to bypass the supermajority requirement and all seven were budget bills. Those bills were:

(1) Ronald Reagan’s 1982 budget, which raised taxes and cut Medicare spending.

(2) George Bush’s 1990 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending.

(3) Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget, which raised taxes and cut spending (passed on Gore’s tie-breaker).

(4) George Bush’s 2001 tax cut (which was supported 58-33).

(5) George Bush’s 2003 tax cut.

(6) George Bush’s 2005 spending cut bill.

(7) George Bush’s 2005 tax cut.

The Lefties are mad because reconciliation was used to pass tax cuts they didn’t like. And maybe ... perhaps ... they have a point on that. But Bush did not use reconciliation to pass Medicare Part D or to start the Iraq War or to reform Social Security or pass the Patriot Act or anything else. They have been crowing that welfare reform was passed by reconciliation. But welfare reform was supported 78-21 in the Senate and 328-101 in the House. It could easily have gotten cloture. The most likely reason reconciliation was used was to fix the Medicaid budget adjustments and get a bill through that Clinton wouldn’t veto.

March 11, 2010 09:54 PM

From Viking Pundit...

The Senate Parliamentarian just nixed Obamacare. Ruled that law must exist before it can be fixed in reconciliation. The 'Slaughter solution is a no-go.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- America's Security Put in Peril by Failing Schools

By Michael Reagan -- Today, Washington is so focused on expanding the size and influence of our federal government at the expense of taxpayers that they are overlooking one of the greatest security risks facing our nation -- our failing education system.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- Desperate Dems Cling to Human Kiddie Shield

By Michelle Malkin -- Have you noticed something about the audiences that President Obama has cherry-picked to cheer his government health care takeover roadshow? They're getting younger and younger. On Wednesday, Obama brings the traveling campaign to St. Charles High School in St. Louis, Mo., for a closed-door, invitation-only speech. If he doesn't end the endless "No More Time For Talk" talks soon, he'll be peddling Democratic reconciliation tactics on "Dora the Explorer" and "SpongeBob SquarePants."

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- Dems Are Stuck With a Mess of Their Own Making

By Michael Barone -- There's a lively debate going on in the blogosphere and the press about whether Democrats would be better off passing or not passing a health care bill. Some liberals claim that Democrats would be better off passing a bill, any bill, even if it's unpopular with the general electorate. The idea is to energize the Democratic base, currently demoralized by the prospects of failure. Current polls show Democrats far less enthusiastic and far less likely to vote -- passing a law might change that.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- How Shallow Can We Get?

By Harris R. Sherline -- Watching the latest T.V. promotions about some of the programs that seem to be among the most popular fare, I find myself wondering just how inane and shallow our society has become. For example, "The Bachelor" has been celebrating the final choice of this season's hero and his courtship of some 25 women, all salivating to become his bride.

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- Meg Whitman Can Run a Company, but Can She Govern?

By Debra Saunders -- It took me five months to get my first interview with former eBay CEO and California GOP gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman, and when I did, it was after a press event where the news reporters were not allowed to ask questions. Swell.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Analysis: US hamstrung on Israeli settlements

WASHINGTON (AP) - A year ago, President Barack Obama boldly, unequivocally demanded that Israel stop building settlements on the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Today he's left with little choice but to swallow a stinging and very public rebuke from America's closest Mideast ally.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Gates regrets Northrop withdrawal from tanker bid

A U.S. MILITARY BASE IN SOUTHWEST ASIA (AP) - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday he regrets that a major defense contractor has pulled out of the contest to build a badly needed new Air Force plane.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Pelosi: Dems close on health care agreement

ST. CHARLES, Mo. (AP) - Democrats claimed momentum Wednesday in their drive to enact the sweeping health care legislation sought by President Barack Obama, citing near agreement on crucial issues despite persistent Republican efforts to knock them off stride.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Success of lone gunmen may shift al-Qaida strategy

WASHINGTON (AP) - On Christmas Day, a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit tried to blow up the plane with plastic explosives in his underwear. He failed, yet the very attempt shook the U.S. government, set federal agencies against each other and triggered months of political second-guessing.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Kansas City, Mo., closing nearly half its schools

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - The Kansas City school board narrowly approved a plan Wednesday night to close nearly half the district's schools in a desperate bid to avoid a potential bankruptcy.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Fed recovers, gets new look as financial regulator

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Federal Reserve, still dusting itself off from a fight that threatened to trim its powers, could emerge from a congressional overhaul of banking rules as the top cop over the nation's largest financial institutions.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- House leader: Ethics panel ends Massa probe

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House Democratic campaign chief said Wednesday the ethics committee has ended an investigation of former Rep. Eric Massa, but the freshman's alleged harassment of his staff members -- with possible sexual overtones -- could spell continuing trouble for the party.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- House GOP leaders press earmark moratorium

WASHINGTON (AP) - House GOP leaders are pushing rank-and-file Republicans to break their addiction to pet projects by going cold turkey and giving up the long-cherished practice of directing federal dollars to their home districts.

From GOPUSA...

NEWS -- Democrat Rep. John Conyers' wife sentenced to 3 years

DETROIT (AP) -- A former Detroit city councilwoman was sentenced to more than three years in prison Wednesday for bribery after a federal judge refused to set aside her guilty plea during a stormy court hearing dominated by a dispute over evidence of other payoffs.

by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on March 11, 2010 08:34 AM

From GOPUSA...

COMMENTARY -- An American Obsession with Freedom

By Tony Blankley -- The publishing of the Declaration of Independence 233 years ago by our Founders was responded to in London by two of the 18th century's greatest minds: Dr. Samuel Johnson (after whom a literary age was named) and Edmund Burke (the intellectual father of modern Anglo-American conservatism).

March 11, 2010 02:05 PM

From Right Thinking...

To serve you better Part 2. The Department of Education

by HARLEY

Remember my little spastic post about the IRS getting new shotguns?

Well now it seems that the Department of Education has decided it needs 27 more Remington 870s’.

And before y ou ask what does the Depeatment of Fucking education needs with combat shotguns, read the requirements part of the solicitation.

LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

The required date of delivery is March 22, 2010.

Existing Shotgun inventory.

Certified armor

Combat training

WTF, i know some of the inner city schools are bad, but just WTF, do they need their own SWAT teams for?

I thought the purpose of the department of Education was to, you know educate?

March 11, 2010 10:44 AM

From Dissecting Leftism...

Some stray thoughts on Vorwärts! Vorwärts! (The song of the Hitler Youth)

While I have the work I did on the subject a couple of days ago still in mind: I see that British critics of the HJ (Hitler Jugend; Hitler Youth) during the war described it as "education for death". And there have been academic articles that identify Fascism/Nazism as a death cult too. And if you look at the last line of the first verse of Vorwärts! Vorwärts! (below) you can see why. HJ members were encouraged to give up their lives for Hitler if need be.

But is it really fair to condemn that? Consider two other well-known statements: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Is Christianity a death cult? Early Christians certain did often lay down their lives for their faith.

And what about: "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country"? (Originally said by Pericles and recycled by JFK in his first inaugural). Was JFK inaugurating a death cult?

Neither quote is an exact analogue of what the HJ asked of its members but throughout history it has normally been seen as heroism to give up one's life for others and I personally see the sadly misled young members of the HJ as walking in that tradition. The only pity is that their dedication was so badly abused.

They in fact thought that they were fighting for Freiheit und Brot (freedom and bread). We forget in our age of affluence that an abundance of food for all is a quite recent achievement. Hunger was just around the corner for most people throughout history. And Hitler did promise to banish that danger via his policy of Lebensraum. And hunger is an urgent need so fighting for "bread" was a much more important goal in the time of the HJ than it is today. Hence its prominence in their song.

But perhaps the most interesting bit in Vorwärts! Vorwärts! is that the HJ also thought they were fighting for "freedom". Freedom from what? Basically, freedom from Jewish oppressors, I think. It was a fantasy of course but one that was widely believed at the time. The prominence of Jews in all walks of life in prewar Germany certainly helped foster that illusion.

And the flag of the HJ heralded "the new time". I can remember the days in the 50's, 60s and even 70s when "new" was a Leftist catchword. The "new" theatre or the "new" school would be understood by politically aware people as being on the far Left. So, as far Leftists, the Nazis presented themselves that way too. That tyranny and collectivism are as old as the hills was somehow ignored. But for a long time people did think -- or hope -- that Fascism and Communism were something new, improved and positive. I think it was the obviously sclerotic state of the old Soviet union that eventually caused the Left to abandon their propaganda about being "new". Though I suppose that "hopey change" is just a variation on it.

Uns're Fahne flattert uns voran. Our flag flutters before us

In die Zukunft ziehen wir Mann für Mann We trek into the future as man for man

Wir marschieren für Hitler We march for Hitler

Durch Nacht und durch Not Through night and hardship

Mit der Fahne der Jugend With the flag of youth

Für Freiheit und Brot. For freedom and bread

Uns're Fahne flattert uns voran, Our flag flutters before us

Uns're Fahne ist die neue Zeit. Our flag is the new time

Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit! And the flag leads us into eternity

Ja die Fahne ist mehr als der Tod! Yes the flag is more to us than death

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Systems of government

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Iraq's new birth of freedom

RONALD REAGAN liked to say that there was no limit to what a man could accomplish if he didn't mind who gets the credit. The transformation of Iraq from a hellish tyranny into a functioning democracy will be recorded as a signal accomplishment of George W. Bush's presidency, and he probably doesn't mind in the least that the Obama administration would like to take the credit.

This week's parliamentary elections in Iraq brought 12 million voters to the polls -- a remarkable 62 percent turnout, notwithstanding a vicious wave of Election Day bombings that killed 38 people and destroyed several buildings in Baghdad.

"Iraqis are not afraid of bombs anymore," a middle-aged voter named Maliq Bedawi told a New York Times reporter as they stood amid the rubble of a Baghdad apartment building destroyed by a Katyusha rocket. If anything, the jihadists' violence succeeded only in intensifying the refusal of ordinary Iraqis to be intimidated. "Everyone went" to vote, Bedawi said. "Even people who didn't want to vote before, they went after this rocket."

Iraqis have paid a steep price for their burgeoning young democracy: Tens of thousands of lives were wiped out in the horrific insurgency that followed the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Perhaps that awful butcher's bill explains the fervor with which Iraqis have embraced democratic self-governance. In Sunday's elections, 6,200 candidates representing 86 political parties contended to fill 325 seats in parliament. (Would that our own congressional elections were so competitive.) Such democratic passion would be impressive anywhere. To see it flourish in one of the world's most dangerous and undemocratic neighborhood is downright heroic.

Of such heroism, a new Iraq is being fashioned -- the Iraq Bush foretold in an address to the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, when he declared that "Iraqi democracy will succeed" and predicted that "the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." Six years later -- six years in which Iraq was convulsed by the bloody agony of sectarian terror, and in which 4,000 US military personnel were killed -- that prophecy is coming to pass.

"Something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq," acknowledges Newsweek in a recent issue. "And . . . it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East." On the magazine's cover are the words "Victory At Last," and a photograph of Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where in May 2003 he appeared before a backdrop reading "Mission Accomplished" to proclaim that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

In 2006 and 2007, few Americans expected to ever see such a magazine cover. Over and over they were told that the war in Iraq was lost, that there was no military solution to the carnage there, and that invading Iraq had been the biggest mistake in US history. Bush's decision in January 2007 to change strategy and "surge" an additional 20,000 additional troops into Iraq was scathingly denounced. Such a "fantasy-based escalation of the war," wrote The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, "could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles." Senator John Kerry called the surge "a senseless decision." Barack Obama, gearing up to run for president, warned that doubling down in Iraq was not "going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."

But the critics were wrong. The surge turned the war around, giving Iraq a new lease on life. Where Saddam once ruled a ghastly "republic of fear," Iraqis live today in democratic freedom and relative peace, dispelling daily the canard that democracy and Arab culture cannot co-exist.

Of course there are no permanent guarantees, and it remains to be seen whether Iraq's nascent democracy can sustain itself. For now, though, the news is very good. So good that even Vice President Joe Biden -- who a few years ago was calling for Iraq to be partitioned, and who blasted Bush's surge as "a tragic mistake" and "not a solution" -- now takes credit for Iraq's rebirth. "I am very optimistic about Iraq," Biden recently told CNN's Larry King. "I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration."

Somewhere, Ronald Reagan must be chuckling.

SOURCE

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Obama's corrupt Justice Dept. not getting a free ride

Give credit for honorable persistence to Northern Virginia's veteran Republican congressman, Frank Wolf, and to Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith. For good reason, they refuse to let the Justice Department bury questions about a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party.

The case involves two Black Panthers who stood outside a Philadelphia polling place in November 2008 while wearing paramilitary garb and using racial epithets, while one of them brandished a nightstick. The Obama Justice Department dropped three out of four charges in the case last May after the cases, in effect, had already been won.

At every turn, the Justice Department has stonewalled the two lawmakers and others wanting an explanation for the dismissal. Since September, the department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) supposedly has been conducting an investigation into why the charges were dropped. To outside observers, that "investigation" has seemed lethargic at best. Meanwhile, OPR chief Mary Patrice Brown reportedly is on the verge of an Obama nomination for a federal judgeship, for which she is being vetted by some of the same people who presumably would be questioned in the Black Panther probe.

OPR also came under fire two weeks ago when the department's senior career officer, David Margolis, overruled the office and criticized its shoddy work on its review of the conduct of two George W. Bush-era lawyers who wrote memos on enhanced interrogation of suspected terrorists.

In light of OPR's own apparent or potential politicization, Mr. Wolf asked the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, to conduct his own inquiry into the mishandling of the Black Panther case. In early February, Mr. Fine declined, saying such an investigation is out of the scope of his responsibilities - although, he added, he had long told Congress that such questions should indeed be within his purview.

Enter Mr. Wolf again, this time joined by Mr. Smith. On March 2, they sent another letter to Mr. Fine, urging the IG to reconsider because of "the host of troubling questions about whether the Department's political appointees abused their power in this case for political purposes." They listed at least five major questions they think the IG, not OPR, can best answer, including "whether White House officials attempted for partisan political purposes to influence the [Black Panther] case [and] whether senior Department management officials and political appointees actually colluded for these purposes with White House officials to derail the [Black Panther] case or cases against minority defendants in general." They wrote that those "larger issues in this affair, whether for the pursuit of impartial justice, the pursuit of criminal justice for government officials or the credibility of the Department, lie within your jurisdiction, not OPR's."

This point is important. At some level, there needs to be some independent authority, untainted by political entanglements, who can investigate allegations of improper political entanglements. The congressmen note that Mr. Fine and OPR conducted simultaneous and complementary investigations into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration when some of the same considerations applied.

One way or another, the truth will get out. It doesn't take Inspector Clouseau to figure out that if the Justice Department has the image of springing Panthers from the penalty box, it looks mighty suspicious.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

Stimulus Dollars Buy Buses for Greyhound in Missouri: "I’m thinking about taking a ride on the commercial bus line soon. Why? Because, as a taxpayer, I’m paying for it. I came across this news after reading a release on the White House web site that listed the Missouri Department of Transportation as the recipient of $4.9 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a., “stimulus”) funds for use in “construction of two facilities and purchase of two intercity vehicles.”... The MoDOT spokesperson confirmed that, in order to meet the federal mandate that 15 percent of ARRA funds provided to states be spent on intercity bus transportation, the State of Missouri will use $945,210 of federal taxpayer monies to reimburse Greyhound Bus Lines for the addition of two new buses to the company’s fleet. In other words, Greyhound is getting a federal subsidy and the Show-Me State is acting as a laundromat of sorts."

Tolerating the intolerable: "What is a democracy without fair elections? Not a democracy, wouldn't you say? So why does America, the granddaddy of democracies, tolerate election systems that aren't free of fraud? OK, how rare is it? Can anyone put a number on it and tell us how much voter fraud is happening? Is voter fraud so rare in America that it can't affect an election? In a contest not finalized until nearly 8 months after Election Day, Democrat Al Franken won Minnesota's 2008 race for U.S. Senate by 312 votes. Out of the 2.9 million votes cast, that's a winning margin of just over .01%, or .0001075 of the total. Those 312 "votes" gave Democrats a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority, allowing them to enact legislation that could forever change America. With so much being decided by such a small margin, shouldn't we be more concerned about fraud, regardless of whether it's committed by voters or vote counters? Vote counters weighed heavily in the Coleman-Franken election. Matthew Vadum alleges: "The election was stolen at the precinct level, during the recount, and during the post-election litigation."

Poll: U.S. has lost global standing under Obama: "A majority of Americans say the United States is less respected in the world than two years ago and believe President Obama and other Democrats fall short of Republicans on the issue of national security, according to a poll by two left-leaning groups. The Democracy Corps-Third Way survey released Monday finds that by a 10-point margin — 51 percent to 41 percent — Americans think the standing of the United States has dropped during the first 13 months of Mr. Obama's presidency. The Democratic Party also plummeted on national security. A May survey by the pollsters found that the public saw the Democratic and Republican parties as equally able to handle national security (41 percent trusted Democrats more and 43 percent trusted Republicans more). On conducting the war on terrorism, the two parties were tied at 41 percent. But the latest poll shows a massive gap, with Democrats trailing by 17 points, 33 percent to 50 percent, on which party likely voters think would do a better job on national security."

Obama and the l-word: "Here’s how predictable the president’s slippery relationship with the truth has become: Hours before the State of the Union address, Washington Examiner reporter Timothy P. Carney posted a ‘pre-emptive fact check’ that, among other things, prebutted any presidential claim to have ’stopped the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying.’ As it happened, that night Barack Obama made an even bolder (read: less truthful) claim: that ‘we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.’ In fact, more than 40 former lobbyists work in the administration, including such policy makers as Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn (who was lobbying for Raytheon as recently as 2008), Office of the First Lady Director of Policy and Projects Jocelyn Frye (National Partnership for Women and Families), White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Munoz (National Council of La Raza), and Treasury Secretary Chief of Staff Mark Patterson (Goldman Sachs).”

The taxing-the-rich delusion: "Those who like to propose novel taxes usually propose that they should be levied on rich people and corporations, and one of their standard assumptions is that rich people and corporations will actually pay them. In their hypothetical world the banker or businessman says, ‘Oh dear. There’s a new tax. Darn it, I’m just going to have to be poorer.’ The same banker or businessman then hands over the cash to government and accepts the loss stoically. In the real world, of course, they work out ways of avoiding the tax if possible, or of making sure that someone else pays it if not.”

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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From Dissecting Leftism...

An interesting email from Jay Watts (lots_a_watts@yahoo.com) about some strange documents

Please read the following disclaimer: "This book is a product of it's time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work."

Now this sounds like you are getting ready to read something fairly bad, and pretty racy - does it not? This is printed on the copyright page of a pamphlet I just received from Amazon.com.

The Title - Are You Ready!

"The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, and The Articles of Confederacy"

I Kid You Not!

This is a link to the pamphlet at Amazon.com so you may see the actual pamphlet and look inside to see the copyright page for yourself. (Click "copyright" at the side)

You should know that there is not one line of commentary, definitions of meaning or anything thing else in this pamphlet. Just the full text of the Documents responsible for the creation of the Greatest Country on this Planet. Now what in these documents could possibly warrant a disclaimer like what I included above, and how in the world does it not fit the values of today? I have read these documents many times in my life and I can tell you there is not one item or statement that comes remotely close. This is purely "Political Correctness" run-amok.

People we must stand up against this stuff. Please People: Other than the Bible, these are the most Sacred Documents of our lands. Treatment of this kind, of these documents Must Not be Allowed.

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The Clarity of False Choices

"There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits…and investing in job creation and economic growth," President Obama said in December. "This is a false choice." During the same speech, he asked his audience to "let me just be clear" that, having racked up the biggest budget deficits ever, he is embracing fiscal responsibility, as reflected in his vow that "health insurance reform" will not increase the deficit "by one dime."

For connoisseurs of Obama-speak, the address featured a trifecta, combining three of his favorite rhetorical tropes: the vague reference to "those who" question his agenda, the "false choice" they use to deceive the public, and the determination to "be clear" and forthright, in contrast with those dishonest naysayers. These devices are useful as signals that the president is about to mislead us.

Obama says his opponents wrongly insist that we choose between "paying down our deficits" and "investing in job creation and economic growth." But that is not the way his real critics, as opposed to the imaginary, nameless ones who appear in his speeches, would frame the issue.

The real critics question the premise that the spending Obama supports, which he says ultimately will boost tax revenues and curtail outlays for public assistance programs, should be considered an investment at all—and, if so, whether it is a better use of this money than the market would have found. Copying his predecessor by throwing more money at schools, for example, is a dubious strategy for spurring economic growth, or even educational growth, since there is no clear relationship between spending and student achievement.

Likewise, Obama's promise that health insurance subsidies will not expand the deficit may be "clear," but it's not realistic, since it's based on accounting tricks and wishful thinking. Legislators avoided counting a $240 billion Medicare "fix" by putting it in a separate bill and assumed reimbursement cuts that probably will never materialize.

Here are some other things Obama has asked us to let him be clear about: "Earmarks have given legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects"; the U.S. government "has no interest in running GM"; Medicare cuts will be made "in a way that protects our senior citizens" from changes in benefits or costs; and a "public option" for health care, which would invite businesses to offload their medical costs onto taxpayers and could drive private insurers from the market, "would not impact those of you who already have insurance." From now on, when you hear Obama speak, replace "let me be clear" with "let me lie to you" and see if it makes more sense.

Speaking of making sense, some of the "false choices" Obama has identified in the last year are more puzzling than misleading. "I reject the false choice between securing this nation and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars," he declared in March. So according to Obama, we can secure this nation and waste billions of taxpayer dollars. Actually, that sounds about right.

Obama's depiction of his critics is further removed from reality. In the health care debate, he says, "there are those who simply don't believe Washington can bring about this change"; "there are those who will say that we do not go far enough"; "there are those who would have us try what has already failed, who would defend the status quo"; "there are those who will oppose reform no matter what"; and "there are those who want to seek political advantage."

What about those who do not like the status quo but have a different vision of reform, not because they want to go farther than Obama does but because they want to go in a different direction, toward more choice and less government involvement? In Obama's world they do not exist. Instead we have his bold yet achievable plan, pitted against socialist utopianism and blind partisan intransigence. Let me be clear: This is a false choice.

SOURCE

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Radicalizing Civil Rights

In his State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned the protections enshrined in the Constitution and said, “No matter who you are or what you look like, if you abide by the law, you should be protected by it.” Obama followed this lofty rhetoric with a claim that his Justice Department “has a Civil Rights Division that is once again prosecuting civil-rights violations and employment discrimination.”

As anyone familiar with the Division’s workings can tell you, this assertion is patently false. Obama’s Civil Rights Division will prosecute cases only depending on “what you look like.” If you are white and you are discriminated against in your job, at the polls, or in seeking equal access to federally funded institutions, the Division won’t lift a finger to make sure you’re “protected.”

Over the last year, I have written many articles about the politicization and outright misconduct of the Civil Rights Division under the Obama administration. I have pointed out the Division’s politically motivated dismissal of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, its highly dubious objection to the state of Georgia’s verifying the citizenship of newly registered voters, and its almost comedic effort to prevent the small town of Kinston, N.C., from changing its partisan town-council elections to nonpartisan because it might hurt Democratic candidates.

If you want to understand how the Civil Rights Division is being run in the Obama administration, imagine for just a moment what would happen if the most radical, ideologically left-wing advocacy organizations in Washington took control of it. Because that’s exactly what happened.

Much more HERE

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ACLU Prints Lies in the Times

The ACLU is trying to push President Obama to maintain the decision that he (not Attorney General Holder) made to try the 9/11 defendants in ordinary criminal court in New York City. Its method is a full-page ad printed in the New York Times. The ad contains several major statements which can best be described as deliberate lies.

Some of the facts for this article, but none of the legal conclusions, come from an ad that the ACLU published in the New York Times on 7 March, 2010. The point of the ad is that President Obama is morphing into President Bush because he is reconsidering Attorney General Holder's alleged decision to try the KSM 9/11 planners, in an ordinary criminal court, in New York City.

The ad says that Obama is "considering reversing his attorney general's decision." The ACLU does not explain what authority any Attorney General has over the American military. He has none. This is Obama's decision which he is now thinking of reversing.

The ad says that Obama can "keep us safe without violating the Constitution." The ACLU has apparently not read the leading Supreme Court decision on trials for terrorists seeking to blow up buildings and kill Americans. The case was Ex Parte Quirin, 1942, concerning eight German saboteurs who sneaked into the US from two German submarines. All eight were convicted in a military tribunal including the one who said he was American since he was born in Chicago. The Court held, unanimously, that this process was constitutional.

The ACLU is chock full of lawyers. Presumably, most of them can read. One must conclude therefore that the ACLU is deliberately lying to the American people by publishing this ad which ignores the operative law.

The ad continues that Obama should "keep his promise to restore our Constitution and due process." This statement contains another lie. As the Supreme Court clearly explains in the Quirin case, due process concerning the Law of War is met by a military tribunals which convicted and executed Colonel Nathan Hale (the American spy) and Major John Andre (the British spy). This article has labeled those two men who were convicted and executed as illegal combatants, for the benefit of the ACLU whose ignorance apparently extends to the history of the American Revolution.

SOURCE

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Who Poses the Greater Threat?

Bill Gates is the world’s richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person. Rich people can gain power over us, but to do so, they must get permission from our elected representatives at the federal, state or local levels. For example, I might wish to purchase sugar from a Caribbean producer, but America’s sugar lobby pays congressmen hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to impose sugar import tariffs and quotas, forcing me and every other American to purchase their more expensive sugar.

Politicians love pitting us against the rich. All by themselves, the rich have absolutely no power over us. To rip us off, they need the might of Congress to rig the economic game. It’s a slick political sleight-of-hand where politicians and their allies amongst the intellectuals, talking heads and the news media get us caught up in the politics of envy as part of their agenda for greater control over our lives.

The sugar lobby is just one example among thousands. Just ask yourself: Who were the major recipients of the billions of taxpayer bailout dollars, the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)? The top recipients of TARP handouts included companies such as Citibank, AIG, Goldman Sachs and General Motors. Their top management are paid tens of millions dollars to run companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy, were it not for billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Politicians preach the politics of envy whilst reaching into the ordinary man’s pockets, through the IRS, and handing it over to their favorite rich people and others who make large contributions to their election efforts.

The bottom line is that it is politicians first and their supporters amongst intellectuals who pose the greatest threat to liberty.

Dr. Thomas Sowell amply demonstrates this in his brand-new book, “Intellectuals and Society,” in which he points out that: “Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies … Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler all had their admirers, defenders and apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that these dictators each ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”

While American politicians and intellectuals have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision. Tyrants denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are the chief supporters of reduced private property rights, reduced rights to profits, and they are anti-competition and pro-monopoly. They are pro-control and coercion, by the state. These Americans who run Washington, and their intellectual supporters, believe they have superior wisdom and greater intelligence than the masses. They believe they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Like any other tyrant, they have what they consider good reasons for restricting the freedom of others. A tyrant’s primary agenda calls for the elimination or attenuation of the market. Why? Markets imply voluntary exchange and tyrants do not trust that people behaving voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. Therefore, they seek to replace the market with economic planning and regulation, which is little more than the forcible superseding of other people’s plans by the powerful elite.

We Americans have forgotten founder Thomas Paine’s warning that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

SOURCE

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BrookesNews Update

The state of the US economy is worse than it looks : Many are looking to the expansion of factory production and the rise in GDP as evidence of economic recovery, proving once again how ignorant of economic history the great majority of pundits and journalists really are.

Why capital gains taxes undermine economic growth : The Democrats are going to raise capital gains taxes significantly because Obama says that would be only fair. But what is fair about attacking economic growth, which amounts to an attack on future living standards?

Why 'saving' energy raises the demand for more energy : We have seemingly reached the absurd situation that someone who has spent four years at university studying economics can leave with a first class honours without a grasp of sound economic reasoning

There is no business cycle : The current economic situation has got members of the commentariat nattering about Australia's business cycle, Reserve policies, government borrowing, consumer spending, etc. Far be it from me to contradict our economic Solons but there is no business cycle

Cuban dissident murdered by Castro's thugs: On February 23 black human rights activist Orlando Zapata-Tamayo died after an 83-day hunger strike and a series of savage beatings by Castro's thugs. There were no headlines in the Western press nor were there any protests. Hollywood's Castro lovers like Oliver Stone and Chevy Chase and Sean Penn remained silent. As is always the case with the left, it is never the crime that matters but who commits it

Is Obama trying to bankrupt America? : Is Obama trying to bankrupt America? One short year ago, asking this this question would have guaranteed my inclusion among the ranks of right-wing nuts and/or conspiracy theorists. Today, it is a serious question being asked by a number of commentators

Scolding and the Biblical Law : Even committed Zionists have become indifferent and cynical due to the self-destructive policies and inaction of successive Israel governments. There is an atmosphere of despair among many staunch Zionists and supporters of the state of Israel

My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. My Facebook page is also accessible as jonjayray (In full: http://www.facebook.com/jonjayray). For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on March 11, 2010 08:32 AM

From Dissecting Leftism...

Political Correctness Watch

My "Political Correctness Watch" site has been a bit slow in coming up for a couple of days but the mirror sites have all the latest and should come up promptly. See here or here

by JR (jonjayray@gmail.com) on March 11, 2010 04:26 AM

From Right Thinking...

Free Sean Penn