Democrats Lied About Obamacare

Congressman Paul Ryan Throws the BS Flag On Obamacare!

It didn't take an accounting degree to know that the Pelosi-rammed, Demo-scam known as Obamacare was a money wasting fraud.  Common sense Americans never bought the fairy tales about how everybody's going to get more and better care while saving money.

While they were at it, why didn't Harry and the Pelosicrats also promise they'd rid the world of unicorn poop and capture that leprechaun and take his pot o' gold hidden at the end of the rainbow? 

Only the willfully ignorant hopium smokers on the left believed this colossal Obamacare lie.  "But it was scored by the CBO!" Cry the Obama-langa-ding-dongs.  The CBO is a non-partisan organization that scores what is presented to them,  regardless of how pie-in-the-sky its assumptions are and regardless of the transparency of the tricks.  CBO scores it as presented.

Ryan resubmitted this travesty of lawmaking to the CBO, minus the tricks and hidden costs, and we now see it will cost almost a trillion dollars.  Here are the highlights...

Claims of deficit reduction exclude the $115 billion needed to implement the law. 

The score double-counts $521 billion from Social Security payroll taxes, CLASS Act premiums, and Medicare cuts.

It strips a costly doc-fix provision that was included in initial score. ($208 billion)

It measures 10 years of revenues to offset 6 years of new spending. 

There is no question that the creation of a trillion dollar open-ended entitlement is a fiscal train wreck.

Not only should this stinking pile of statist lies be repealed in its entirety, the perpetrators should be brought up on charges of fraud.

Go Congressman Ryan!  Keep up the excellent work!

http://budget.house.gov/healthcare/

Palin - Bachmann! GOP 2012 Field

They're already talking GOP presidential field for 2012.  Here's my take...

Since any giddy follower can sing the praises of even the most failed politician (Look at how many still defend Obama), I thought I'd focus more on the negatives.  I'll start with unfinished business from the 2008 debacle...

FAILED CLASS OF 2008 - Don't go away mad, just go away

This failed class of 2008 has less than 5 minutes foreign policy experience between them, and their records are either thin or spotty.  What I wrote about this trio back in November 2008 still stands.

Palin entering the primaries will rend the party, because her loyalists cannot bear any criticism of her whatsoever.  And Huckabee and Romney are like matches and gunpowder.  The constant sniping, bitching and smearing their two camps engaged in produced John McCain and poisoned the waters.
  
Sarah Palin - She did great things in a sparsely populated state, but she needs to be a senator or cabinet member first.  The comparisons to Reagan are ill-informed.  Reagan was Screen Actor's Guild president for over 10 years, served two full terms as governor of America's largest state (and the world's 10th largest economy).  He had been studying, writing and speaking about serious issues from a conservative perspective for a full 20 years before he became president.

Mitt Romney - Romneycare.  If that's not enough, he's a political shape shifter (even more than most)

Mike Huckabee - Like Romney, a big government type.  He released a rapist-murderer who used this misplaced mercy to go rape and murder some more.  Huck needs to read Adam Smith, "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."


The Short List - My Favorites
Here is a list of my favorites, each followed by a negative or knock against him.

Tim Pawlenty - Conservative governor from a blue state.  I like his style, but many hardcore types will call him a RINO because he made compromises

Mitch Daniels - He's short and balding.  He's also put Indiana on sound fiscal footing, has cabinet-level experience, and is a common sense conservative who lives his values.  Can substance overcome style?

Mike Pence - Mike Who?  A serious man for a serious time.  I think he's ready, but most of America doesn't know who he is.

Jim DeMint - He's a senator.  A conservative superstar, he has a lot of chips he could cash in on the way to winning the nomination.

Herman Cain - Herman who?  We've never had a president named Herman, but this man needs to be the first.  Former CEO of Godfather's Pizza and tea party hero, this is a no-nonsense, call it like it is conservative.

NOT YET
Marco Rubio - Our first Hispanic president*, but not in 2012.  If he runs now, he's just an Obama on the right.  He needs to get some foreign policy cred and show us what he's made of on the national scene.

Bobby Jindal - Our first Indian-American president*, but not in 2012.  He's brilliant, extremely accomplished, but he's too young and he need some foreign policy cred. 

Paul Ryan - Like Jindal, he's young, brilliant and knows how to break it down for us common folk

Chris Christie - He's only been governor two years, and the situation on the ground in New Jersey is still fluid.  He's a wonderful guy, doing great things, but we need to see if his efforts bear fruit.

David Petraeus - He's said he's not running and he'd have to leave the battlefield to do it.  I don't see it happening.

Jeb Bush - His name is Bush

* - Please excuse my very un-conservative descent into liberal identity politics!

NO WAY
Judd Gregg - Judd Who?  This is the Republican that almost joined Obama's cabinet.  Someone needs to tell Senator Gregg that East Coast country club republicanism is dead.  The Bushes drove the final nails in the coffin.

Gary Johnson - He smokes pot

Ron Paul - Too old.

Newt Gingrich - Poor old Newtie shows a little leg every four years, but nobody's buyin'.  He's yesterday's  news.  He flirted with the Clintons, he flirts with big government ideas, he adulterously flirted while his ex-wife was on her deathbed.  The left has permanently demonized him.  What has he done besides being Speaker of the House and doing a whole lotta talking?  I could go on, but you get the picture.   

John Bolton - He's intelligent, he's experienced, but he's too blunt and polarizing.  The left has demonized him.  Being a heroic UN-attacking rottweiler requires a different skill set than being president.

Bob McDonnell - Name recognition.  He's a conservative hero who contributed to rescuing Virginia from the blue column, but he just hasn't had the national exposure and I don't know what his foreign policy credentials are.

John Thune - He's a Senator.  What else has he done?

Rick Santorum - Great guy and conservative hero, but he couldn't even get reelected in his own state. 

Haley Barbour - He's a loquacious southerner.  They'll dig up some racist stuff on him and it'll be all over

Rick Perry - He's said he's not running, and he's also said he's hell-bent on riding with the governors in the states rights gunfight.

Jonah Goldberg is much better at this than I.  Go read his analysis, Sorting out the 2012 GOP Pack

Also check out Howard Kurtz's The GOP's 2012 Fantasies

Will the GOP Cover Freddie's Fannie?

Today the GOP Takes control of the House of Representatives, and Harry returns a shriveled man with a shrunken majority.  

Some conservatives have already begun attacking the GOP before they even get started.  Blogger buddy Andrew 33 over at Allied Liberty News, is preparing a boiling cauldron of tar and collecting burlap bags of feathers. 

I'm keeping my powder dry and I encourage others to give them some room.  Still, there are some disturbing rumblings...

Republicans are already backing off of earlier threats to dismantle Fannie and Freddie. These pie-in-the-sky programs that encourage irresponsible financial dealings have cost us $134 billion in the last two years alone.

Republicans cheered on Jeb Hensarling, Representative from Texas, as he crafted legislation last year to kill the ghastly twins:

"Of all the dumb regulation that caused our economic crisis, none was dumber than that which created the (Fannie and Freddie) monopolies," Mr. Hensarling said in March. (WSJ - GOP Shifts on Fannie, Freddie)

Alas, government largesse dies hard, and for some GOP statists, parting is such sweet sorrow…

A hasty end to the government's support of Fannie and Freddie would mean fewer Americans could get home loans, causing home sales and prices to drop even further and pushing taxpayers' cost for rescuing the mortgage giants even higher, said Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R., Texas), a former banker and housing developer who serves on the House Financial Services Committee.

"You'd cause Freddie and Fannie to have even larger losses than they'd already have," Mr. Neugebauer said.  (WSJ - GOP Shifts on Fannie, Freddie)

A Banker and a housing developer, eh? 
Don’t suppose that would have anything to do with how Rep. Neugebauer comes down on this, do you? He concedes that home prices are still too high, but he supports keeping them artificially propped up.  Spoken like a true crony crapitalist that is afraid of the free market.

He also reveals the truth that “fewer Americans would get home loans” as a result of ending this homebuyer-corporate welfare program. How is that bad? Too many people getting home loans is what got us into this mess. Stop Digging! Representative Neugebauer, Republican from Texas, is now officially part of the problem.

Next come the homebuilders, realtors, and mortgage lenders, hat in hand, begging a bankrupt government for special treatment...

"We don't believe that the private market — right now — is willing or able to provide the liquidity that's necessary to get us out of this," said Joe Stanton, chief lobbyist for the National Association of Home Builders. "To erode that support right now would be a disaster," said Vince Malta, a real estate agent in San Francisco and a vice president of the National Association of Realtors. (WSJ - GOP Shifts on Fannie, Freddie)

... So let’s keep the bubble inflated.

They are all wrong. 
If houses were being traded at market prices right now, and if only those who could establish financial credibility could buy them, the market would be on solid footing. It would be smaller and less active, but it would be financially sound. And that’s the problem for these crony crapitalists. The bankers, builders and realtors want turnover. Who cares if people can afford it or not? These industries that suckle at mama government’s ample teats won’t get stuck when irresponsible people get forclosed. Uncle Sam will pick up the tab! And they continue making their millions in transaction fees. This crap needs to stop now.

Like anything, Fannie and Freddie can be sold in the marketplace, maybe for a loss. At this point I don’t care. We stepped in dog doo and it’s time to scrape it off our shoe. Nothing will inject sanity back into the housing market like removing taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Progressives Hate the US Constitution

Progressives hate the tea parties and they hate the constitution.  These are the two principle impediments preventing them from finishing what Woodrow Wilson and FDR started.

"The Constitution was not made to fit us like a straitjacket. In its elasticity lies its chief greatness."

-- Woodrow Wilson

Liberal Propaganda Deconstructed

The liberal propagandists in the press tried branding us racists, but such blatant attacks don't work anymore, so they have adopted more subtle tactics.  EJ Dionne is the latest to deploy a deft combination I call the non-sequitur straw man.  Follow me as I deconstruct a piece of progressive propaganda.

Unlike God, the founders left us an amendment process

Dionne's neat rhetorical trick asserts that we tea partiers equate the US Constitution with the Holy Bible.  This is a neat trick because yes, we believe the constitution must be followed just as The Bible must be.  His unstated non-sequitur avers that since we equate the constitution with The Bible, we must also equate the founders with God Almighty.  This sets up the straw man argument that we worship the constitution and the founders.  It's a straw man because unlike God, the founders left us an amendment process.

Dionne starts out with an innocuous statement...

I offer the Republicans two cheers for their fealty to their professed ideals. We badly need a full-scale debate over what the Constitution is, means and allows -- and how Americans have argued about these questions since the beginning of the republic. This provision should be the springboard for a discussion all of us should join.

He plants a few little seeds of doubt there, but so far so good.  Next comes the premise for the non-sequitur straw man...

From its inception, the tea party movement has treated the nation's great founding document not as the collection of shrewd political compromises that it is, but as the equivalent of sacred scripture.

Note that this statement contains two elements, the first is plainly stated, the second one tacitly follows:  1) The constitution is a document like The Bible that government must obey; 2) Unstated:  If the constitution is the equivalent of sacred scripture, then the founders are the equivalent of an infallible God. 

Number 2 is the strawman that does not follow from the first statement.  Since EJ cannot argue with statement #1, he invents the non-sequitur strawman, statement #2, and then knocks it down: 

Yet as Gordon Wood, the widely admired historian of the Revolutionary era has noted, we "can recognize the extraordinary character of the Founding Fathers while also knowing that those 18th-century political leaders were not outside history. ... They were as enmeshed in historical circumstances as we are, they had no special divine insight into politics, and their thinking was certainly not free of passion, ignorance, and foolishness."

See how he sets up the straw man so he can knock down those crazy rightwingers who want to tea party like it's 1776?  EJ Dionne is too smart to really believe that we deify the founders, so all I can conclude is that he is engaging in a deliberate propaganda smear.   

Progressives are not out to destroy the tea parties; they have bigger fish to fry:

An examination of the Constitution that views it as something other than the books of Genesis or Leviticus would be good for the country.

Yes, let's knock that dusty bit of outmoded parchment off its pedestal.  Good progressives like EJ Dionne and Ezra Klein are just following in the footsteps of Progressivism's great grand daddy, Woodrow Wilson.  They can’t quite muster the intellectual starch of this racist scholar and failed statesman, but it’s just the right pitch for the MSNBC crowd.  It's neo-progressivism reduced to valley girl vapidity:

"The constitution is, like, so old, and full of, like, so many old words that are, like, spelled funny.  Bogus!  It's like totally irrelevant, totally!"

They want a living, breathing constitution, to which Dr. Walter E. Williams has the perfect riposte:

How many people would like to play me poker and have the rules be "living"? Depending on "evolving standards," maybe my two pair could beat your flush.

Indeed.  Those who crave power and control must have "living rules."  Oh, and they also want to hold the book, because some animals are more equal than others.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/01/03/celebrating_the_new_gop_majority_108404.html

Death of Common Sense is Killing America

Why is common sense so uncommon in government?

Candy Crowly, one of the few serious jouralists left in America besides Jake Tapper, pressed Janet Napoleonitano about the naked porn scanners in a recent interview.  Big Sis admitted that they have no idea what impact the contraptions have on potential terrorists.

“What we know is that you can’t measure [how] the devices … are deterring [terrorists] from going on a plane,” Napolitano said.

“Just people who just are discouraged, thinking they’d be found out,” said Crowley.

“Exactly,” said Napolitano. (Politico)

How convenient. A multimillion dollar scheme whose effectiveness cannot be measured.  How can I get a job like that?  No way to tell if I'm doing my job, so you just have to keep paying me!  This borders on criminal.  Roger Simon at politico puts the icing on the cake…

In which case, we do not need machines that cost upward of $130,000 each.

All we need are archways made out of $30 or $40 worth of sheet metal that are labeled: “Official Destructo Machine — If You Are a Terrorist, This Machine Will Not Only Zap You, but Put a Picture of Your Private Parts on YouTube.”

That ought to do it. (Politico)

You know the government stench is growing foul when even the press begins making remarks about it.

Union Leaches Kept NY City Buried in Snow

The NY Post says the New York City Sanitation Department’s slow cleanup was a budget protest. Businesses lost millions and people died as a result.

The solution to this one is easy. Fire every last one of those selfish bastards and contract it out.

Write into the contract that if the incumbent company tries this crap they will be immediately terminated and replaced by a company that actually wants to do the work.

New Year Resolutions for the Federal Government

Government Resolutions for the New Year:  Flatten taxes and spread them out among more taxpayers, simplify government regulations, and relinquish every extra-constitutional responsibility back to the states

Job 1 should be to simplify the tax code

No more favored groups or exemptions for any person, business, or corporation.

The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard - incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.(George Will)

The same goes for business and corporations who escape taxation.  Our tax code encourages people to hide their money instead of investing it in the marketplace.  It chases money overseas in search of more fertile markets.  It favors industries like homebuilding and mortgage lending over other productive activities.  This creates market inefficiencies and bubbles.  Tear it all down and let the capital flow to the projects proved worthy on the merits of the free marketplace.

The Crushing Weight of the Federal Code

The next step would be to burn down the warehouses full of the hopelessly impenetrable and exemption-riddled federal code. You can go explore it for yourself Here.  It's searchable!  The word 'feces' returns 91 hits, "candle" returns 120.  Yikes!  "Saudi" is mentioned in the federal code 119 times, and not once related to terrorism or spreading virulent hatred disguised as religion...

The federal code is an abomination.  Burn it down to the constitutional foundation!  It is a mockery of the law and a standing, stinking violation of the very concept of the rule of law.

Restore the 9th and 10th Amendments

The federal government should turn everything back to the states that is not mentioned in the constitution.

The states should then restore the sovereignty of the individual by relinquishing those tasks better left to free men and women.

To see where this rant comes from, go read Toqueville's "Democracy in America," Part 1, Chapter 4:  The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America, and Chapter 8: Aspects of the Federal Constitution.

Happy New Year!

Wondering why your head hurts even though you didn't drink much last night?  Tax season approaches...

"The tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news." 
-- Congressman Dave Camp (R-Michigan), as quoted by George Will


"I used to do my own taxes," Camp says, "until I got on Ways and Means." No more. The tax code is so complex that the chairman of the tax-writing committee, like many millions of Americans, cannot be confident he can properly perform, unassisted, the duty of paying taxes.(George Will)

The W-2's will be rolling in with the new year and tax season will soon be upon us.  It is estimated that 7.6 billion hours are dedicated to tax compliance in America.  Can government resolve to make our taxes flatter and simpler?

The Answer is:  0.  What is the question?

By now we've all heard of the pilot's home that was raided.  He had the temerity to point out that pilots are screened, but baggage handlers and other workers have unimpeded access to the tarmac.  This is a problem.  It is much easier for a prospective bomber to get hired as a baggage handler than as a pilot or air crew member.

There's also the story of rape victim Claire Hirschkind panicking at a TSA checkpoint and being dragged off in handcuffs.  There was very little sympathy from the baaing sheep being herded through the airport...

"I understand her side of it, and their side as well, but it is for our protection so I have no problems with it," said Gwen Washington, who lives in Killeen.

"It's unfortunate that that happened and she didn't get to fly home, but it makes me feel a little safer," said Emily Protine.

It doesn't matter to these mindless subjects that government lies to them, so long as the TSA fairy tales make them "feel better."  

Answer:  0
Question:  How many terrorist attacks has the TSA thwarted in its 9-year history?

http://www.news10.net/news/story.aspx?storyid=114138&catid=2