Flashback March 2010: Sen. Max Baucus Forgot To Mention Income Redistribution Was FROM The Middle Class, Not To It, Or Did He Just Lie Like Obama Did?

Reward for his service to the State: ambassadorship to China

 

 

 

 

Actually, ObamaCare, which is the handiwork of Sen. Max Baucus, will transfer income from the middle class to the lower class and wipe out the middle.

Here, March 25, 2010:

Sen. Max Baucus (D): "Too often, much of late, the last couple three years the mal-distribution of income in America is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind. Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America."

Meanwhile, income inequality has never been worse, reaching its all time high under just four years of Obama.

Flashback to HuffPo, here in 2012:

In the 2009-2010 period, a time of modest economic growth, the top 1 percent of U.S. earners captured 93 percent of all the income growth in the country.

Got that? Now compare it to how the mega-rich made out during the Bush upswing years of 2002 to 2007. During that time, the top 1 percent of earners captured just 65 percent of all the income growth.

The numbers don't lie. Income inequality has grown at a rate 4.75 TIMES faster under Obama compared to Bush (perfect equality is 0 on the scale, perfect inequality is 1). Inequality has never been higher than under Obama. The nomenklatura gets richer.

income inequality under 8 years of Bush up 0.4%

income inequality under 4 years of Obama up 1.9%

American Killer Obama Shakes Hands With Cuban Killer Castro

The outrage is that Obama's still our president, not that he shook hands with a fellow murderer.

Story here.

Turley Says Obama Is Becoming The Very Danger The Constitution Was Designed To Avoid

Here:

The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. ... [W]e have had the radical expansion of presidential powers under both President Bush and President Obama. We have what many once called an imperial presidency model of largely unchecked authority.

Democrat Leader In Senate Makes Unprecedented Change To Centuries-Old Filibuster Rule

Senate majority leader Democrat Harry Reid has just thrown out the rule book for filibusters in the Senate.

Story here:

By a vote of 52-48, the Senate invoked the so-called “nuclear option” to change the historic filibuster rules of the upper chamber. As a result, the minority party will be prevented from filibustering any nominations other than those to the Supreme Court.

"It's time to change the Senate before the institution becomes obsolete,” Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday morning on the Senate floor ahead of the unprecedented alteration to centuries-old rules regarding the power of the minority party to contest Senate business.

“The need for change is so, so very obvious,” he said. “It’s manifest [that] we have to do something to change things.”

... lawmakers lamented that if the party in power can change the rules, then rules are meaningless. 

"The only way ObamaCare pain stops for Democrats is if they repeal it."

So says John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics, just now on the Larry Kudlow Radio Show.

Obama Job Approval At Real Clear Politics Hits A New Low Today

The previous low, shown on the graph, was 42.1. Today Obama falls to 42.0 in Real Clear Politic's composite data.

Deb Saunders Helpfully Assembles The Blame-Republicans-For-ObamaCare Charges Made By Democrats

Here, concluding:

Now, I won't deny that two decades ago, some conservative think tank swell came up with the term "individual mandate" -- which allowed other wonks to try to pin the tail on the elephant. But if liberals have to fish for a 1989 Heritage Foundation policy paper that had no Republican support in 2008, 2009 or 2012 to establish Republican paternity for the Affordable Care Act, that tells you one thing: They think Obamacare won't work.

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That's right. If it works it's a Democrat idea.

Hypocrite Hillary Tells Heckler The Future Doesn't Include Yelling

Here, even though her past sure did, and even her very recent past.

2013:

"We have to be willing to come together as citizens to focus on the kind of future we want, which doesn't include yelling. It includes sitting down and talking with one another," Clinton said in response to the heckler to huge applause from the audience.

2003: 

HILLARY 2003 (screeching): I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, "WE ARE AMERICANS AND WE HAVE A RIGHT TO DEBATE AND DISAGREE WITH ANY ADMINISTRATION!"

Early 2013:

What difference does it make?!

Old Yellen To Continue To Save The Banking System, And Screw The Rest Of Us.

Here comes Yellen. Woof.

The AP announces tonight that The New Bernank is Janet Yellen:

Under Bernanke's leadership, the Fed created extraordinary programs after the financial crisis erupted in 2008. It lent money to banks after credit markets froze, cut its key short-term interest rate to near zero and bought trillions in bonds to lower long-term borrowing rates.

Those programs are credited with helping save the U.S. banking system.

Yellen emerged as the leading candidate after Lawrence Summers, a former Treasury secretary whom Obama was thought to favor, withdrew from consideration last month in the face of rising opposition.

Yellen, 67, would likely continue steering Fed policy in the same direction as Bernanke.

First Black President Brings Record High Poverty And Inequality As The New Normal

You talkin' to me?

Hm. Imagine that.

From the Associated Press story, here:

The nation's poverty rate remained stuck at 15 percent last year despite America's slowly reviving economy, a discouraging lack of improvement for the record 46.5 million poor and an unwelcome benchmark for President Barack Obama's recovery plans.

More than 1 in 7 Americans were living in poverty, not statistically different from the 46.2 million of 2011 and the sixth straight year the rate had failed to improve, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Median income for the nation's households was $51,017, also unchanged from the previous year after two consecutive annual declines, while the share of people without health insurance did improve but only a bit, from 15.7 percent to 15.4 percent.

"We're in the doldrums, with high poverty and inequality as the new normal for the foreseeable future," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality. "The fact we've seen no real recovery in employment and wages means we've just flatlined." ... 

"This lack of improvement in poverty is disappointing and discouraging," said John Iceland, a former Census Bureau chief of the poverty and health statistics branch who is now a Penn State sociology professor. "This lack of progress in poverty indicates that these small improvements in the economy are not yet being equally shared by all."

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in poverty, agreed.

"Everything's on hold, but at a bad level; poverty and income did not change much in 2012," he said. "So child poverty is still too high and family income is still too low. The recession may be over, but try to tell that to these struggling families. Don't expect things to change until the American economy begins to generate more jobs."

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Way to go, Brownie!

The Real Fascist Threat To America Comes From The Left, But Only Because It Won

 

Dennis Prager, here:

[I]f there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left, whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited. But because the left has so long dominated American intellectual, academic, artistic, and media life, it has succeeded in implanting fear of the right. ... First, it does not mean, or have anything in common with, Nazism. Nazism may have been a form of fascism. But Nazism was a unique form of fascism and a unique evil. It was race-based and it was genocidal. No other expression of fascism was race-based. And not all fascism is genocidal. So my fear that the American left is moving America toward an expression of fascism in no way implies anything Nazi-like or genocidal. ... Second, it is not liberals or liberalism that presents a threat of fascism. It is the left. Liberals of the 1940s to 1970s such as John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so many others were not leftists. They were liberals.

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I beg to differ in most of the particulars while seconding the main point.

The advent of fascist elements in American life specifically as a phenomenon of the left has gone hand in glove with the advance of liberalism under Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, in addition to the fact that the left won World War II, not the "right", whatever that is. One can hardly explain the growth of the state to its current proportions nor its growing oppressive reach without that liberalism and its spokesmen's early admiration for people like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Nor can one explain our alliance with left socialism in joining the war on the side of Stalin apart from a natural affinity for that form of it as opposed to the other. "Fear of the right" is an artifact of the victory of Stalin and FDR over Hitler and Mussolini, but should more correctly be styled "fear of right socialism". 

Nor is it conceivable to imagine the rise of liberalism in America without the revolution in theology which immanentized the eschaton in the social gospel movement. For Marx religion may have been the opiate of the people, but to Spengler it was the very grandmother of Bolshevism. Russia and Germany went to war as developed rival socialisms while the majority of Americans resisted becoming involved in a fight where they had not yet a dog. They were still children in the classroom of The State. But now that we have grown up we routinely invade in the name of "freedom" because we have come to believe it is our destiny to impose it everywhere we can while ensuring cradle to grave security for one and all at home.

That's not to say America hasn't been fertile ground for fascism from the beginning, quite apart from the dominating influence of a psychology derived from Christianity and its tendency toward totalitarian-like moral conformity. But that involves the economic history, which Prager doesn't address. The contemporary corporatist model lauded by Wall Street has its roots planted comfortably deep in our origins in English colonialism, going all the way back to the crown's banking operations on behalf of the sea-trading companies. Many of the original American colonial charters were patterned on this model of state sponsorship and were first and foremost state-capitalist business ventures. So it should come as no surprise that American capitalism after independence has become more crony than capitalist as it has gotten so very long in the tooth. You can take the Tory out of England, but you can't take the England out of the Tory. Jeffrey Immelt of GE in his admiration for the Chicoms is no different than Henry Ford in his for Hitler.

Lastly, it is troubling to me that a person such as Dennis Prager, who is a student of communism, doesn't mention the fundamental bloodthirstiness inherent in all socialisms, whether communist or fascist. The "unique" evil of Nazism shouldn't blind us to Stalin's anti-German crimes anymore than it should blind us to Stalin's crimes against Ukraine and the millions "disappeared" during his purges. And where is the serious reflection on left socialism's responsibility for the many millions of Chinese who perished at the hands of Mao, who specifically imitated Stalin? And perhaps more to the point for us, the fact that as fascist socialism advances in America millions of unborn children have paid and continue to pay everyday the price for it, all in the name of "freedom"?

So, George Zimmerman Was The Victim Of A Hate Crime . . .

. . . because Trayvon Martin picked a fight with what he thought was a homosexual rapist.

Video here.

Krauthammer On Big Sis' Resignation: "Her Record Was The Underwear Didn't Explode"

Here.

Obama Calls His Eavesdropping On 100 Million Americans "Modest"

Making 47 million people on food stamps just chopped liver, huh?

Here:

"And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net, it was worth us doing." 

Barack Obama: The Social-Democratic Philistine Who Embraces The State . . .

"WE GOT YOUR MONEY!"

. . . and fears the people.

Barack Obama, disappointment to true believers everywhere, here at Ohio State University, May 5, 2013:

"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny [is] always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted."

Friedrich Engels, March 18, 1891, here:

"And people think they have taken quite an extraordinary bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat . . . cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap. Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat."

Imagine A World Without Balloons? How About One Without Idiots?

Another remove-all-doubt moment from the irrepressible Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia, here, on "helium", one of America's "real concerns".

Margaret Thatcher Was No Libertarian, Moving Leftward To Adapt Like Sen. Rand Paul

Marco Rubio, are you listening?

Ben Domenech, here:

Thatcher was originally seen as a Heath acolyte within the Tory wing, given a cabinet position in Education – but the distance between them grew, and she became closer to fellow Cabinet member Keith Joseph, forming a tiny band of back benchers disagreeing with the aims of the party leadership. ...

Heath’s approach failed at the ballot box. After losing the election in 1974 and failing to form a coalition government with the Liberal Party (a No Labels-esque Government of National Unity), he took it as a sign that the Tories had to move leftward in order to adapt to the opinions of the nation. Thatcher disagreed, and that made all the difference. When Joseph announced that he would challenge Heath for party leadership, Thatcher was the only Cabinet member to endorse him; when Joseph was forced to withdraw (thanks to demography comments implying the working class really ought to consider using birth control more regularly – the speech is here), he was forced to withdraw. So Thatcher insisted she would run. ...

The dominant assumption was that [Thatcher] would have to moderate to become acceptable to the British people. She did not. Instead, she repackaged conservative principles with a message of common sense and optimism, attacking nonsensical regulation, union dominance, and high taxes with verve. She promised hope and growth, not dour austerity, and insisted that acceptance of a nation in decline was a choice, not an inevitability.

Warren Buffett, Amoral Crony Capitalist, Bought An Indulgence From The Left

So says Daniel Mitchell of The Cato Institute, here:

"If you’re an amoral person with political connections, it’s possible to make a lot of money.

"Warren Buffett lined his pockets by making a government-subsidized investment in Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis.

"The rest of us suffered and he got richer, but the left seems to be okay with that perverse form of redistribution because he supports class-warfare tax hikes. Sort of like buying an indulgence in the Middle Ages."

I really like that analogy with the church because it speaks to the failure of all idealist conceptions to deliver on what they promise. This is as true of socialism as it is of capitalism, of fascism as it is of Christianity. All offer a promised land which never seems to arrive, but you have to ask yourself who thought this stuff up.

Like beer to Homer Simpson, it is we who are the cause of and the solution to all of life's problems.

Even In September 2009 Obama Showed He Didn't Understand The Size Of The Country

From his speech to Congress, here:

"First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have."

Well, what if you are not among those "hundreds of millions", eh? Then you are out of luck in his mind, evidently. Who could he possibly be referring to?

It is customary to speak of tens of millions when speaking of up to 100 million.

It is customary to speak of a couple hundred million when speaking of up to 200 million.

It is customary to speak of a few hundred million when speaking of up to 300 million.

But "hundreds of millions" refers to far more than 300 million, especially if you are not lucky enough to be among them. By analogy with 100 million, you could be speaking of up to 1,000 million. That's 1 billion for those of you in Rio Linda.

Anyway, all those extra people in the "hundreds of millions" category must be those people you didn't know about from the 57 states Obama says he visited during the campaign "with one left to go", not counting Alaska and Hawaii! Densely populated states, those in excess of the 50 states, they must have been, too, which begs the question why he hadn't visited them yet!

The US population at the time of the speech was about 307 million. So by September of 2009, seven months after having been sworn in, Obama had had plenty of time to figure out the size of the country, but he hadn't.

The guy's a moron, and you know it. He wasn't even "learning on the job". Toking on the job is more like it.

They Don't Actually READ The Stories At Real Clear Politics