Saturday, April 10, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Tiger Woods and Barack Obama, Compared
"I THINK IT IS REMARKABLE THAT WITHIN A WEEK OF TIGER WOODS CRASHING HIS ESCALADE, THE PRESS FOUND EVERY WOMAN WITH WHOM TIGER HAS HAD AN AFFAIR IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, WITH PHOTOS, TEXT MESSAGES, RECORDED PHONE CALLS, ETC.
AND, THEY NOT ONLY KNOW THE CAUSE OF THE FAMILY FIGHT, BUT THEY EVEN KNOW IT WAS A WEDGE FROM HIS GOLF BAG THAT HIS WIFE USED TO BREAK OUT THE WINDOWS IN THE ESCALADE. NOT ONLY THAT, THEY KNOW WHICH WEDGE!
AND EACH AND EVERY DAY, THEY GIVE AMERICA MORE UPDATES ON HIS SEX-REHAB STAY, HIS WIFE’S PLANS FOR DIVORCE, AND HIS PLANS TO RETURN TO THE PRO-GOLF CIRCUIT.
OBAMA HAS BEEN IN OFFICE FOR OVER A YEAR NOW, AND THIS SAME PRESS STILL CANNOT LOCATE OBAMA'S OFFICIAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE, OR ANY OF HIS PAPERS WHILE IN COLLEGE, OR HOW HE PAID FOR A HARVARD EDUCATION, OR WHICH COUNTRY ISSUED HIS VISA TO TRAVEL TO PAKISTAN IN THE 1980'S AS BARRY SOETORO. EVEN MICHELLE OBAMA’S PRINCETON THESIS ON RACISM. IT JUST CAN’T BE FOUND.
YET THE PUBLIC STILL TRUSTS THAT SAME PRESS TO GIVE THEM . . .
THE WHOLE TRUTH . . . TRULY REMARKABLE!"
h/t Scott
Facts Are Stupid Things
At the end of 2009, nearly eight million households, or 15% of those with mortgages, were behind on mortgage payments or in the foreclosure process;
Why So Glum? Numbers Point to a Recovery: . . . Firms have begun to hire and consumer spending seems to be accelerating.
At a median home price of $165,000, eight million mortgages going belly up represent assets of $1.32 trillion of an undercapitalized, indeed, insolvent banking system whose insured deposits total something in the neighborhood of $4.6 trillion but whose cash on hand is presently $1.2958 trillion, nearly the equivalent of those troubled assets.
How the banks have managed to increase their cash so dramatically from the less than $300 billion on hand just two years ago is another question. Are they counting increases to the base money supply provided by the Federal Reserve in the wake of the financial meltdown, which went from $800 billion to over $2 trillion? Almost overnight? Talk about monopoly money.
With over 700 banks on the FDIC "troubled" list and the FDIC openly stating it expects bank failures over the next few years to cost $100 billion on top of last year's $30 billion, does any of this sound like a reason to be happy? Like the worst is over?
I don't think so.
The Inflammatory Rhetoric Of The Left
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie isn't laughing about a teachers union's memo that hints of his death.
The memo is the latest salvo in a war of words between Christie and the union over wage and benefits concessions.
The Record of Bergen County obtained the Bergen County Education Association memo that includes a closing prayer:
"Dear Lord this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor."
The Bungler Resurrects Mutually Assured Destruction
Russian leaders have repeatedly rejected America’s offers to cooperate and share technology for strategic missile defenses. They have remained determined instead to hold American and allied populations at risk as the guarantee of Russian security. With the New START treaty, they have prevailed on that point, placing America’s missile-defense program under limitations both implicit and explicit. Obama is effectively returning us to the MAD regime.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Obama Allocates A Drop In The Bucket For A Critical $100 Billion Problem
But while it may have been a technical wonder at the time of construction, the nation's power grid has become dangerously antiquated over the past few decades. If technology in the home is racing ahead at broadband speed, the power grid is stuck back in the days of rotary-dial phones. According to industry statistics, the dog food industry spends more on research and development than the electrical sector does. Aging technology means more frequent blackouts, a greater vulnerability to computer hackers, and, perhaps most insidious, colossal inefficiency. As part of the economic stimulus package, the Obama administration has pledged $3.4 billion toward "smart grid" technology—the next generation of infrastructure, meant to stabilize the grid in the event of a failure, incorporate green technology, and vastly improve efficiency. But those billions are a drop in the bucket toward bringing the entire national grid into the 21st century, which could take decades and cost upwards of $100 billion, some experts estimate.
Meanwhile the nearly $800 billion stimulus package gets spent preserving government sector votes, I mean jobs.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
"Obamalateral Disarmament"
Investors.com weighs in with an opinion piece here on Obama's dangerous weakening of America's nuclear deterrent, saying:
There used to be a policy called mutual assured destruction, or MAD, by which war among the superpowers would be deterred by the ability of each to survive and still devastate each other.
This new policy is just plain mad, without the deterrence, making conflict likelier.
Obama's Liberal Death Wish On Display In New Nuke Policy
Religious doctrines such as "resist not evil" endanger the lives of countless innocents when presidents recklessly apply them as government policy, as Obama has just done in forswearing the right of the U.S. to use nuclear weapons in self-defense. It represents a failure to fulfill his constitutional duty as commander in chief. And in doing so, he has more certainly veered off into combining church and state than George Bush or Ronald Reagan ever dreamed of doing, another injury, in this case to the establishment clause.
Obama is a menace who must be stopped before he gets us all killed.
Ralph Peters in "The Bad Nukes Myth," which appeared here, has this to say about Obama's crazy policy revolution:
Idealism has devolved into madness.
The left has never been willing to accept that deterrence works. In the left's world-view, hostile foreign actors aren't the problem. We are. If we disarm, surely they will . . .
Follow the link to read the rest.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Latest Load Of BS From John McCain Is A Steaming Pile
Reported in Newsweek, April 3:
"I never considered myself a maverick," he told me. "I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities." Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.
And now Sarah Palin is a first class chump who cannot be taken seriously by anyone except a fanatic.
Obama Has Violated The Public Trust
Norm Coleman recites a veritable litany of grievances against what Obama has done since taking office, in an article posted here at Politico, with healthcare reform taking center stage:
[Americans] are justifiably angry at the massive bait-and-switch on health care reform, the most important public policy debate in our lifetime. Obama has violated their trust, especially devastating with the long list of challenges we need unity to tackle, like jobs, energy and the deficit.
Health care is an emotional issue for everyone. In my years in government I learned that the deeper an issue, the more carefully leaders have to listen; and the greater the need for consensus-building rather than using raw political power.
Reading the rest is time well spent.
Doctors Own Their Minds, Labor, Years Of Study, And Their Skills, Not Obama
The following appeared here:
April 6, 2010
Dr. Galt Goes On Strike
By Investor's Business Daily
On Strike: A Florida doctor has told patients who voted for Barack Obama that they should seek care elsewhere. His is a noble one-man fight against the soft tyranny of the federal takeover of the health care sector.
The message taped to the entrance of Dr. Jack Cassell's practice is clear: "If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your health care begin right now, not in four years."
Cassell is not refusing to treat patients, according to an Orlando Sentinel story. In his words, "that would be unethical." He's simply asking those who helped the Democratic leadership inflict its health care overhaul on the country to find another physician because the regime that's been created threatens his ability to do good.
"If they read the sign and turn the other way," he says, "so be it."
The Orlando-area urologist sees a "real problem" in ObamaCare, believes it "fatally compromises my ability or any doctor's ability to uphold the Hippocratic Oath" and "can't believe that more people aren't standing up."
He adds: "I think all the doctors in the United States need to take a stand on this, because pretty soon it's going to be too late."
In return for expressing his opposition to a government gone too far, Cassell has been labeled a racist by the man who represents him in Congress, Rep. Alan Grayson, the apparently daft Democrat who has said Republicans want sick Americans to "die quickly."
Grayson is filing a complaint against his constituent, a scare tactic that tells every doctor who might follow Cassell's lead that he or she will be met by government intimidation.
The point that Grayson and other critics of Cassell are missing - ignorantly or willingly - is that the doctor is peacefully protesting a government that will dictate how he practices medicine.
Cassell seems to understand that unless partisan ambition to turn all health care into a government program is stopped, Washington will eventually treat him and other doctors as vassals of the state.
They will no longer be the owners of their minds and their labor, their years of study and the development of their skills. All those instead will be owned by their masters on the Potomac.
Because Cassell is still taking patients, he's not gone fully Galt. But if he did, he wouldn't be alone: 45% of doctors in our IBD/TIPP poll (a result since duplicated by at least one other poll) said they'd consider leaving their practices if a federal health care takeover passed.
While even a brief doctors' strike might cause some immediate harm, the long-term benefits would be worth the pain if they brought the right kind of change.
Monday, April 5, 2010
I'll Bet You Didn't Know Kentucky Repealed ObamaCare in 2003
I didn't know either. It took about ten years.
The article appeared here:
www.nationalreview.com
STEPHEN SPRUIELL
APRIL 5, 2010
Bluegrass Bummer
Does Kentucky’s experience with health-insurance overregulation hold lessons for repealing Obamacare?
In the mid-1990s, Kentucky was one of eight state governments that boldly went where the rest of the country refused to go: The commonwealth imposed Clintoncare’s restrictions on its insurance companies, even though Clintoncare had been vanquished from the national stage. In Kentucky and the other seven states, insurance premiums skyrocketed, healthy people stopped buying insurance, and insurance companies exited the market in droves. Only three of the eight were able to untangle themselves from the harmful provisions; only one, Kentucky, was able to pull off a full repeal.
Trey Grayson was elected Kentucky secretary of state in 2003, the year before Gov. Ernie Fletcher was able to finalize the repeal — you’ll note it took ten years to accomplish. Grayson, who is currently running for the Republican nomination to replace Jim Bunning in the U.S. Senate, says that those pushing to repeal Obamacare can take a few lessons from the Kentucky experience. “On the one hand it gives you some hope, because in Kentucky we were able to gradually repeal the elements that were driving up the number of uninsured, that were increasing premiums at a rate higher than the national average, that were driving insurance companies out of the state,” Grayson says. “But unfortunately it took ten years, caused rates to be higher, hurt our economy and hurt our state government from a revenue standpoint. So a lot of damage was done.”
In 1994, Democratic governor Brereton Jones strong-armed a version of Clintoncare through the Democratic-controlled state legislature over the reservations of Republicans and some conservative Democrats. Much like Obamacare, Kentucky’s House Bill 250 forbade insurance companies to deny coverage or charge higher rates based on pre-existing conditions, thus negating the point of insurance — which, properly understood, involves paying premiums to hedge against risk. Under Kentucky’s laws, as under Obamacare, you could wait until you got sick to buy coverage and still obtain it at the same rates as everyone else. (Obamacare includes a requirement that healthy people have insurance, which its proponents say will prevent the premium hikes and insurance-company flight that Kentucky experienced. But the penalty for evading this requirement is relatively small; its constitutionality is suspect; and it might not even be enforceable.)
The problem with such regulations is that healthy people make the rational decision to drop their coverage and wait until they get sick to renew it. As healthy people stop paying into the risk pool, premiums for those who remain skyrocket. If insurance companies are forbidden from increasing premiums to keep up with costs, they leave town or close down. Unsurprisingly, average premiums in Kentucky increased between 36 and 165 percent in the wake of the reforms. Within four years, over 40 insurance companies had stopped offering individual insurance coverage. The two remaining providers, Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield and a state-run plan called Kentucky Kare, teetered on the brink of insolvency (Kentucky Kare went under in 1999).
By the late 1990s, Grayson says, “If you said House Bill 250, it was a four-letter word.”
In 1998, the Kentucky legislature, still controlled by Democrats, started repairing the damage by passing a reform package that modified the insurance requirements but didn’t repeal them. In 1999, party switches gave Republicans control of the state senate, and the legislature repealed most of the harmful provisions. Finally, in 2003, Kentucky elected a Republican governor for the first time since 1967, and one of his first acts was to sign a moratorium on new insurance mandates. These reforms slowed the rise of premiums and started bringing insurance companies back to the state.
“What was interesting,” Grayson notes, “is that the repeals were done in a bipartisan manner. Democrats, many of whom voted for House Bill 250, saw the negative impact.” Rising premiums and fleeing insurance companies gave opponents of the bill a compelling story to tell. “When we had evidence, we used it,” Grayson says. “That was what convinced Kentucky voters.” The bill’s opponents armed themselves with facts, and the case against House Bill 250 grew too overwhelming to resist.
This is the first lesson proponents of repeal should take from Kentucky: Construct a narrative around all of the bill’s negative consequences. “So, for example, we’ve already had John Deere and Verizon and some other companies take charges for the next quarter,” Grayson says. “As we learn about businesses choosing to drop insurance or delay expansion plans or whatever they have to do to avoid this, I think we have to take those real-life consequences and tell the public.”
The second lesson, he says, “is that you don’t have to do a full repeal right off the bat. If you can start getting rid of some of the bad elements, try that.” Repealing the most unpopular parts of the bill — new taxes on investment, on income, on medical devices — can pave the way for repealing the spending provisions: “If those taxes have to be repealed or phased out,” Grayson says, “then you start to have a financial concern: How you are going to pay for all this stuff as the subsidies are phased in?”
Liberals are much more influential in Washington than in Kentucky’s statehouse in Frankfort: When the big problems with Obamacare start surfacing, they will push, not for repealing the bill, but for nationalizing even more of the health-care industry. They will call for a stronger penalty for not purchasing insurance or, if the Supreme Court invalidates that provision, they might push for a “public option” to offer a taxpayer-subsidized alternative to the private insurance companies they have broken. When the public option doesn’t work (and we know it won’t, thanks to another failed state experiment in Maine), liberals will argue that the only way to fix the broken system is to make the government the “single payer” for all medical costs.
Opponents of Obamacare must be prepared to make the opposite case, starting with this election cycle. The strongest lesson from Kentucky is that the longer Obamacare stays on the books, the more damage it will inflict on the economy. Conservative candidates such as Grayson can and should run on this issue. Health-care reform “is clearly on the minds of voters,” he says — it’s the second thing people want to talk to him about, after the University of Kentucky’s performance in the NCAA tournament — “and most folks I talk to are not real pleased. I think voters want us to do something about it — hopefully before the damage gets done.”
— Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter.
Michelle Obama Said Barack's Home Country is Kenya
"When we took our trip to Africa and visited his home country in Kenya we took a public HIV test."
What's your "home" country?
Sunday, April 4, 2010
On "Regime"
"Never in my life have I seen a regime like this, governing against the will of the people, purposely."
--Rush Limbaugh, Friday, April 2, 2010
"I've never seen language like this in the American press referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election -- we will have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years -- fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country…. We know that word, 'regime.' It was used by George Bush, 'regime change.' You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus to stop using it. I never heard the word 'regime,' before, have you? I don't even think Joe McCarthy ever called this government a 'regime.'"
-- Chris Matthews, Friday, April 2, 2010, MSNBC
"Seventy-five days into the Bush regime and I'm a wreck."
-- Maureen Dowd, April 4, 2001, New York Times
Marshall Wittmann was "a Health and Human Services deputy assistant secretary in the first Bush regime."
-- Howard Kurtz, January 22, 2001, The Washington Post
"In George Bush's regime, only one million jobs had been created…"
--Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak, January 8, 2010, MSNBC
In 2006 when "the Bush regime was still in power."
-- Ed Schultz, August 21, 2009, MSNBC
"The middle class has not fared quite as well under [the] Bush regime."
-- Steve McMahon, October 8, 2007, MSNBC
"The people of Iraq and Afghanistan that have been tragically harmed by the Bush regime."
-- Cindy Sheehan, August 10, 2007, MSNBC
I'll "take apart the Bush regime."
-- Ralph Nader to Chris Matthews, July 7, 2004, on his "Hardball" program, MSNBC
"Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?"
--Chris Matthews, June 14, 2002
h/t Byron York
The Densest Element Yet Has Been Discovered
It's called Pelosium:
A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the densest element yet known to science. The new element has been named Pelosium. Pelosium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311.
These particles are held together by dark forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
The symbol of Pelosium is PU.
Pelosium's mass actually increases over time, as morons randomly interact with various elements in the atmosphere and become assistant deputy neutrons within the Pelosium molecule, leading to the formation of isodopes.
This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Pelosium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Morass.
When catalyzed with money, Pelosium activates CNNadnausium, an element that radiates orders of magnitude more energy, albeit as incoherent noise, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons as Pelosium.
h/t Theo
Equal Division of Unequal Earnings
The title summarizes one inspiration for this blog's existence, which dates to last September, and illustrates what is more and more becoming the open description from Democrats of their own, and Obama's, political philosophy: equal division of unequal earnings.
Many in the center and on the right have shrunk from calling Obama a communist out of fear of being labeled McCarthyites, despite the fact that with the fall of the Soviet Union it has become clear that the senator from Wisconsin underestimated the depth of pro-Soviet penetration of the U.S. government at the time. The task has been left to our court jesters instead.
Even our most unsympathetic critics on the right today shrink from calling Obama a communist because Obama's mentor, Saul Alinsky, would not identify himself as such, even though that duck walked and quacked like one. We remind our contemporaries, however, that it was at Antioch that the followers of The Way were first called Christians. It was an outsider's estimation, and later an accusation, not a term of self-identification. So it is here.
It is not necessary to link communists to a no-longer extant political entity for them to be such now anymore than it was then, in the Victorian age. Communists already existed in the popular British imagination of the time because they existed in fact, long before the philosophy found political expression in a national government in Russia.
That Democrats today, like Max Baucus, Howard Dean, and Barack Obama readily and openly identify with communist ideas should make the blood boil in every American patriot's heart. These ideas mean death to our way of life, and death to us who hold to the immemorial rights of Englishmen in America. Not a dime's worth of difference between the two political parties? More than ten times the difference, and a world: "Idler or bungler or both he is willing to fork over his penny and pocket your shilling."
In "Obamacare Was Mainly Aimed At Redistributing Wealth," which appeared here, Byron York points out:
It hasn't attracted much notice, but recently some prominent advocates of Obamacare have spoken more frankly than ever before about why they supported a national health care makeover. It wasn't just about making insurance more affordable. It wasn't just about bending the cost curve. It wasn't just about cutting the federal deficit. It was about redistributing wealth.
Health reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March 25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans." ...
At about the same time, Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate, said the health bill was needed to correct economic inequities. "The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top ... and those at the bottom?" Dean said during an appearance on CNBC. "When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution."
You'll want to read the rest, at the link.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
The Dodd Bill Makes Moral Hazard Government Policy
Run against Wall Street
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
04/01/10
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, after spending some time negotiating with committee Republicans Bob Corker and Richard Shelby, has decided to advance major financial regulation legislation without bipartisan support. Democratic spin doctors will try to portray the fight over this legislation as a battle between Republicans favoring lax regulation of Wall Street and Democrats favoring tough regulation.
But is the Dodd bill really tough legislation, particularly in its treatment of the major financial entities? My American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison argues that it is not, because it gives Too Big To Fail status to the big entities—Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. This is done by setting up a resolution process for a failing firm which protects creditors more than ordinary bankruptcy proceedings would. Wallison writes:
“From the perspective of its effect on the economy, it does not matter what happens to the company, or to its shareholders and management. The only thing that matters in a government resolution of a failing company is what happens to the creditors--because it's the creditors that will provide the funds preferentially and at favorable rates to large companies rather than small ones.
"In this respect, the Dodd bill does it again--it signals to creditors that they will get a better deal if they lend to the big regulated firms rather than their smaller competitors, and it does this by making it possible for creditors to be fully paid when a too-big-to-fail financial firm is liquidated, even though this would not happen in bankruptcy. There are a number of ways that this can be done, including through a simple merger with a healthy firm. As a prescription for moral hazard, this can hardly be surpassed. The creditors will line up to provide cheap money to the too-big-to-fail firms the Fed will be regulating.”
“You do not deal with ‘too big to fail’ by keeping a list of systemically significant institutions: By itself, that makes things worse. You do not deal with it by promising to let most failing financial firms, including those on your list, go bankrupt: Nobody will believe that promise. You deal with it by combining early FDIC-like resolution for all financial firms, banks and nonbanks alike, with stricter and smarter requirements on their capital, liquidity, and leverage.”
Libertarian economist Arnold Kling suggests an even tougher approach, though he doesn’t say how to put it into effect: break up the big banks.
I think as a matter of both policy and politics, Republicans ought to oppose the Dodd bill’s provisions that effectively grant Too Big To Fail status to a handful of financial institutions (and perhaps to other companies, Wallison has argued). They should oppose giving preferred status to the very largest firms as compared to smaller competitors. They should be prepared to argue that the Democratic bill gives vast advantages to firms whose employees have gotten huge compensation (and who, as it happens, tend to give more money to Democrats than Republicans). The cry should be, no favor to the big Wall Street fat cats. Mainstream media is unlikely to transmit this message but, as we have seen in the health care debate, messages can get through without them.
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