Since I know 100% of my readers are inside the vast right wing conspiracy, and aren’t nearly as well connected to the machine as I am, I wanted to give all you brave soldiers an inside scoop on how it’s going.
Take a look at some of the hardest of the hard within our ranks. These are the top notch mobsters, those who don’t play around. You’ll be able to tell that they could care less about the cause, they’re just on the take from Big Insurance, or as I like to call it, My Provider.
I’d also like to show you what the other side has been reduced to. In this video you’ll see that they’ve been reduced to velvet rope tactics. The guys in blue shirts are SEIU union members at Russ Carnahan’s Townhall in St. Louis. There were 1000’s of angry, rioting, burning, looting conservative mobsters outside who weren’t allowed in, while the two peaceful calm blue shirts walked right through.
You’ll notice, later in the evening, those same blue shirts are involved in a nice peaceful conversation with some anti-obamacare mobsters.
So you see, your subversive conservative conspiracy is working. Those dollars that are flowing into all of our rich white pockets are having their desired effect. Stay strong, stay subversive, stay radical.
So the drooling Obamanaut Chris Matthews and his other statist mouth piece ”journalists” have taken to painting conservatives who want their voices heard on the debacle that is Obama-care are now: mobs (follow link to see the crazed lunatic fringe in Texas), unruly, radical, or fringe groups. When Congressmen dodge questions or spout platitudes at these townhalls and constituents get frustrated, they’re angry mobs.
It’s no surprise, really. Matthews and his ilk are taking their cues straight from Mayor Daly’s fair politics handbook which is currently S.O.P. at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Our current administration finds that these vile anti-American mobs are so dangerous, that if you hear anyone inciting a riot against,threatening to harm, talking bad about the Dear Leader,ruination, socialization, government take over health care’s public option in less than glowing terms, you should turn them in!
There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to… [emphasis mine]
So if you hear someone not spouting the party line in their casual conversation you must quickly tell the White House. Why? What’s going to happen? Am I going to get a strongly worded letter from the President? Is Rahm Emmanuel going to show up at my house for a little Chicago style thuggery? Why would they want to know?
Interestingly enough, wanting to know your name and that you’re a hater isn’t far enough. They’re going to be able to find out your IP address so if your e-mail gets forwarded by a brownshirt concerned citizen, they’ll know who you are and where you are.
What ever happened to the right to question government? What ever happened to the right to peaceably assemble (again, reference the Bryan, TX mob above)? Does that not exist any more? What would happen if George W. Bush had tried to gather information from the public like that? Surely those on the left would staunchly support the President’s right to do so… well, and this will shock you, that’s not the case at all. Post 9/11, President Bush created called Operation TIPS that would generate information about potential terrorist activities through a toll free hotline. How did the left react?
At no time did the Justice Department indicate how it planned to train this horde of amateur spies. Accordingly, as Leahy emphasized, “such a setup could have allowed unscrupulous participants to abuse their new status to place innocent neighbors under undue scrutiny.” Much worse yet, the names of these innocent suspects would be transferred by the Justice Department to FBI, CIA, and other government databases that are now permitted to exchange “intelligence” information under the Homeland Security Act. [emphasis mine]
What a difference an administration makes. If you’re trying to gather information on suspected terrorists, that’s ABSOLUTELY not allowed. But, if you’re turning in someone who disagrees with a Trillion dollar increase in spending that will ultimately completely socialize our health care industry, then you are a menace to society and should have your information on record.
And just to seal the deal, we have the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s thoughts on the right and responsibility for people to speak up, even if it’s in disagreement. (Note: I don’t know how to feel about the thought that just passed through my head that I would actually prefer Hillary over Obama bin Biden).
And finally, one last bit of wisdom:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Bill of Rights, Amendment 1.
Update: Great piece on The One’s thin skin at HotAir with a clip from Neil Cavuto.
I thought all of these numbers quit spinning when Obama took office?
What we need is a huge new entitlement program to get those numbers turning the other way! Or maybe we should throw some money at the shoe industry. We haven’t given them any money yet.
“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.”
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
In the slimiest possible sense, the President wasn’t lying. You can keep the insurance you currently have. You just can’t ever adjust it or get any new insurance once the law goes into effect.
Why haven’t these details been a part of the President’s ubiquitous health care stump speech? If it’s such a great option, why won’t he just say it, why play shifty? When the President says, “You can keep your current health care if you want to,” there are clear and obvious implications for anyone who isn’t a simple, staunch Presidential apologist. I want to give the President the benefit of the doubt here, I’m going to grant that he’s not lying. So, what’s going on here?
In a case like this, where so much is at stake for so many, playing games with words is beneath the dignity and honor of the President.
A parting video of Congressman Roy Blunt (R-MO) asking a straight forward question of the congress & the President, would you enroll in the plan you are promoting?
I loved Mark Sanford for his fiscal policy. That was, of course, before I realized that he felt fiscal restraint is making his aides fly coach while he flies first class to meet with his soul mate. Sanford, scratch.
I still love the idea of John Bolton, but that will never happen. He’s never been & never will be a candidate. I’ll give 1000 to 1 odds on him as my dark horse.
I’ve said it to people before, and I’ve obviously picked it up from people who are in the know, but so far (and it’s still early) the guy who seems to be rising to the top is Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana.
This article at Redstate is link laden and lays down some of the basics of this fiscal conservative…
Berry stood in front of charts Friday that show Indiana increased school funding, avoided a tax hike, and maintained a surplus of about 10%. [...]
“Measures that were taken early on by Governor Mitch Daniels to restrain spending have amounted for a large amount of these fiscal reserves,” Berry said.
The state had $1.33 billion in its main checking account and reserves when the fiscal year ended June 30. That’s roughly the same as one year ago, even though state taxes brought in $1.2 billion less than originally projected.
You can check out the draft Mitch page on Facebook.
Now, let’s just pray we don’t come to find out thathe’s been snorting cocaine off of a dead hookers high heel shoe.
Ladies & Gentlemen. The President of the United States. Don’t worry about truth, don’t worry about consistency, just keep saying whatever it is that you think needs to be said to run this country into a giant flaming pile of dung.
When you think financial system, what do you think of? Wikipedia says “the financial system is a set of complex and closely interconnected financial institutions, markets, instruments, services, practices, and transactions.”
Close your eyes for just a second and imagine the American financial system: the never ending network of overlapping and interlocking relationships and connections. Mind boggling, isn’t it?
Now, conceptualize “financial regulations.” Wikipedia says regulations “are a form of regulation or supervision, which subjects financial institutions to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, aiming to maintain the integrity of the financial system. This may be handled by either a government or non-government organization.” Regulations then, manage the relationships that make up the financial system in America. That sounds like a BIG, BIG deal, wouldn’t you say, managing all of those relationships? I wonder what kind of super computer they got to process all those transactions and all that information.
Wait, it’s just people? It’s not some super-computer recording transactions and predicting trends? Advocating regulations is advocating that PEOPLE, make the calls that manipulate the American Financial system for the good of the nation as a whole? That doesn’t make sense. It must be a pretty other worldly group of regulators then.
It’s not. It’s guys like Timmy Geithner who forgot to pay major chunks of his taxes because he (allegedly) couldn’t figure out Turbo Tax. He’s the one who is going to lead the charge to interpret all the data from these millions of inputs and keep this boat afloat?
To be fair to Timy, the regulator in chief and primary advocate for financial regulation at this moment is President Barack Obama. Howver, with two wars, an economy continuing to crumble under the increasing weight of his fiscal policy, you’d think he’d have plenty of other things to think about without trying to micro-manage the entire network of financial relationship in the whole country.
John Stossel’s opion piece in defense of a free market response to the financial hole that Obama keeps digging us deeper into is a welcome evaluation of the whole messy situation. Stossel quotes
F.A. Hayek [who] said… “[W]ith essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.” So when regulators set out to redesign an economy, they display not wisdom but a “pretence of knowledge.”
To be fair, President Obama may be the most intellectual President to occupy the Oval Office. Knowledge without wisdom, however, is dangerous like a Narc-anon convention at Neverland Ranch. While President Obama has paraded his bookish intellect to anyone who would listen, he has also, at every conceivable turn, flaunted his glaring lack of wisdom. This gaping lack is never more evident than his brain bending hubris which causes him to imagine that he can actually regulate the financial system, with a team of carefully selected minions, of course. The President says,
“[W]e will … coordinate and share information, to identify gaps in regulation, … solve problems in oversight before they can become crises … that will allow us to protect the economy.” [Stossel's emphasis ]
Imagine “Turbo Tax” Timmy, Larry Summers, and their choice of financial wizard women and men, sitting in a room out there, protecting the economy. How do you do that? In Obama-land, you arbitrarily tell some people they can only earn so much money. You then create stress tests to tell you which banks need more government money (which we don’t really have anyway) but usually just end up causing stress.
I don’t blame them for not getting it right though, these regulators are just regular, plain ol’ people. People with lots of degrees and plenty of experience to be sure, but they also have a history of making mistakes. Stossel says,
Regulators are human beings with the same shortcomings as everyone else. Even if we assume they have the best motives, on what basis do we believe they could possibly know what they need to know to manage a financial industry that is complex beyond conception – and changing every day in response to new conditions?
That seems like the most straight ahead, intuitive reality in the world: the financial industry is complex beyond comprehension, and changing every day. What to do then? Are we stuck? No. Stossel makes the free market point:
Contrary to the foes of free markets, the choice is not between regulated and unregulated markets. As the French economist Frederic Bastiat long ago pointed out, the free market is regulated by its own logic. If we have simple, easily understood rules against fraud, then people acting in their self-interest, without privileges or bailouts, generate market forces that create order and make our lives better. The key is market discipline, which government reduces whenever it intervenes.
The market isn’t perfect, but either are the current eco-goons. The difference is that the market, if left alone, will correct itself. Inserting heady guessers who imagine they are smarter than the system invariably leads to actions that prolong the problem and keep the market corrections from working.
Those who say that there are companies too big to fail have the burden of proof, and they have failed to make their case. Despite their stimulations, bailouts, and prognostications about upturns and upswings, the economy isn’t recovering. Obama’s intellect has become a hindrance to recovery, because he has supreme confidence in his intellect alone, so he reacts rather than responding based on principles. He believes he and his people can read and fix the market if only they have the right regulators and regulations in place. That’s where he and Bush make the same mistake: adding more government to fix the market problems. I leave you with Stossel’s conclusion:
Obama says the free market is “not a free license to ignore the consequences of our actions.” He’s right but doesn’t understand why. A genuine free market allows risk takers to fail and suffer “the consequences.” Only government can grant “license” to ignore consequences. Government caused the financial morass by doing just that – pushing banks to weaken mortgage lending standards, pressuring Freddie and Fannie to buy up dodgy mortgages and sell them as safe securities, bailing out big banks when they got into trouble and insuring bank deposits – thereby encouraging us not to care if banks are reckless. Government failed, not the market. Obama’s answer? Just like George W. Bush’s: more government. Give me a break.
Case-in-point update: Joe Biden today said that they misread how bad the economy was. Again, of course you did, that’s not your fault. The economy is a difficult thing to read, even if you’re The One. It would just be nice if they would give up on the idea that they’ve got all the answers, quit tinkering and let it work itself out.
Remember during the campaign where Barack Obama got great mileage out of John McCain’s proposition to tax employer health care benefits? With mock horror and a plea to good ol’ American values, he said McCain’s plan was “so radical, so out of touch with what you’re facing, and so out of line with our basic values.”
Guy Benson in yesterday’s National Review Online (”Obama is a big fat liar, illustrated”) quotes Jim Geraghty’s story called, “Barack Obama is a big fat liar.” Both are great reads, but one of the great quotes is,
Back in March, White House budget director Peter Orszag said taxing employer benefits was among several ideas that “most firmly should remain on the table,” and some congressional Democrats told the Washington Post that White House officials said Obama would accept such a tax “as long as he didn’t have to propose it himself.” [emphasis mine]
That’s authentic leadership, that’s being the first one on the field and the last one off for the troops. Oh wait, no it’s not. It’s sleazy. If it was a ridiculous option when McCain proposed it, then it should be a ridiculous idea now. If it’s not a ridiculous idea now, then he should propose it. Otherwise, he’s self promoting.
This is why I don’t trust Barack Obama. He’s slimy. He says what is politically expedient, and doesn’t mind turning away from those statements the next day. Worse still, he will pawn off the hard work to someone else, and use it when it serves his ultimate purpose and then distance himself when it doesn’t.
If Obama wanted to tax health care benefits, it wouldn’t surprise me. I expect him to tax everything he can see to pay for his harmful ideas. I could tolerate that (I wouldn’t like it, but I would understand) because I believe that elections have consequences, and he won the election (as Ed Koch said, “the people must be punished“). I just don’t believe it’s too much to ask that he stand up and take the lead and not pass the buck to some underling. If he changed his mind, stand up and tell me why, but take the heat.
Early in his administration I blasted him for his lack of hope & change. This is most definitely change. We’ve changed from a leader who faced seeming global criticism by himself and didn’t back down. To a politician who hides behind the polls and pundits and passes off the tough decisions as someone else. Now, we can only hope for a greater change in 2012.
Ed Morrissey at Hotair indicates that the Congressional Budget Office (the non-partisan office responsible for evaluating legislations impact on the overall economy) has revised its assessment about what’s wrong with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Previous CBO Director Peter Orszag (who is now, interestingly enough, President Obama’s budget director) supported President Obama’s push for a massive nationalization of the health care industry by repeating claims that the main problem with medicare & medicaid is the rising cost of health care. That claim supports a government option, because if cost of health care is the primary problem, the cheaper care at whatever cost is the best solution. The current CBO, however (with Orszag no longer at the helm) has reversed its previous claim, stating that the problem isn’t the rising cost of health care, but rather the rising numbers of people on the rolls. What’s causing the problems isn’t primarily that it costs too much money, but that there are too many people needing the care. So, let me ask, would the best solution to this problem to be make a bunch of new people eligible for care (since the problem is that too many people are already eligible) or to make fewer people eligible (as Morrissey indicates possibly by raising retirement age or by simply denying people). The numbers would seem to indicate that the government option, opening potentially and eventually millions of new people to the government rolls, would make the problem worse, not better. What’s probably more interesting is how this helpful bit of information was discovered only after Orszag left to take a higher position in The One’s administration. Was he cooking the books at the CBO, was he simply misinformed and wrong, or is the new CBO wrong in its assessment of the problem? If he’s cooking the books, he’ll be right at home with all the other tax cheats etc in the administration. If he was misinformed & wrong, is that the kind of incompetence you want handling your budget (although there’s precedent in “Turbo Tax” Timmy Geithner). If the new CBO is wrong, it casts all of their predictions and prognostications into the realm of doubt, even the ones that would support Obama’s financial raping of the generations. The holes just keep getting bigger in this fiasco. The House of Representatives narrowly squeaked out passage of this bill (and probably cost a few new and moderate Democrats their seats in the next election cycle), to make sure it doesn’t happen in the Senate, begin calling your Senators now to tell them to vote against the Obamacare.
Mark Sanford admitted that he’s been having an affair with ‘a dear dear friend’ in Argentina. As Allahpundit at Hot Air put it, “he could have been President, now he’s finished.”
Say goodnight, Governor Sanford. The Hot Air article above mentions that the legislature of South Carolina is going to move for impeachment. Like Allahpundit, I can’t imagine what the grounds would be, but it doesn’t matter.
Personally, this is a big deal. For all of the good things Sanford has stood for, especially over the past months (fiscal conservatism, primarily), I wouldn’t vote for him for President at this point. The very heart & guts of my political ideology, and hopefully the foundation of my life is that principles matter. Mark Sanford lied to his wife. He’d lie to the country. Just like the Monica Lewinsky scandal wasn’t primarily (although partially, to be certain) about Bill Clinton’s weird cigar fetishes, but rather about the fact that the President of the United States ought to be above reproach, trustworthy, model citizen.
Governor Sanford, thank you for you vocal stand for fiscal conservatism over the past months. Now, shut up and go fix your life.
