Wasting Time With Alex
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Guess again…
The other day I pointed out in this post that with the collectivist government takeover agenda was going the way of the Titanic as people finally woke up and realize that the Obama healthcare reform movement was nothing but the usual politicians trying to grab the trillions of healthcare dollars and the healthcare decision making process to create a new bureaucracy that would drastically increase their power and control of our lives, not to mention lay the ground work for these crooked politicians to stay in power perpetually, and that that the WH was looking to distract us all from their disastrous policies by throwing some red meat to the nutroots. That post came on the heels of this one in which I was arguing that Obama and his people were trying to convince us that they were doing something different than what was done under Bush, by doing even more. Of course, the usual people came forth and attacked on both posts me for daring to say this kind of stuff and pointing out that all this posturing had nothing to do with either a desire to either enforce law or correct a problem - let’s face it, actions speak louder than words, and democrats can not really care much for the law, despite what they claim, when both the Congressional Ethics Committee and the Justice Department keep dropping a slew of cases where the crimes are clear cut and the crooks are democrats - and eventually the topic got to the whole “they were tortured” and “torture never works” ordeal.
I have gotten tired arguing with people that want us all to believe such weak ass thing as sleep deprivation, second hand smoke, playing loud music, threatening someone with bodily harm, pretending to torture or kill someone else to scare a vile terrorist, or even the use of the weak water boarding method in question, are torture. I know why they need it to be torture, but that’s for all intents or purposes irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. The point is that I pointed out that in the few instances that the harshest interrogation methods – the ones that drive the left batshit – were use, they worked. I was immediately attacked and ridiculed for daring to say so. They carried the usual water for the WH, the Pelosi Congress, the MSM propagandists, and the nutty BSD infected left and accused me of lying for pointing out that the WH had cravenly only declassified documentation that would allow them to pretend that there was criminal activity and it had not done much. When I pointed out that this could all be settled by declassifying the documents Cheney had asked for because there was proof it had worked, I was made fun off and compared to a soothsayer. Well, read them and weep:
“KSM almost immediately following his capture in March 2003 elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow airport,” according to a document released by the CIA on Monday that summarizes the intelligence provided by Mohammed. The agency thinks he assumed that Ramzi Binalshibh, a Sept. 11 conspirator captured in September 2002, had already divulged the plan.
One former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said Mohammed, like several other detainees, seemed to have decided that it was okay to stop resisting after he had endured a certain amount of pressure.
“Once the harsher techniques were used on [detainees], they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more of them,” said the former official, who requested anonymity because the events are still classified. “After that point, they became compliant. Obviously, there was also an interest in being able to later say, ‘I was tortured into cooperating.’ “
Read the story. KSM literally spilled the beans. Heck, he even detailed his childhood for the CIA interrogators! Don’t take my word for it. Over the next few days I see this whole thing turning ugly for the WH, as the American people find out that democrats are not only politicizing our security – for the umpteenth time – again, but actively trying to revert from fighting the GWoT as a war, which has literally prevented another attack against us on our soil, to treating terrorism as a make-work program for lawyers and courts. I don’t think I need to remind anyone how well that worked for us before and how that ended up, right?
The left has a need to stick it to Bush. To demonize the GWoT. To make the US the bad guy in this whole affair. They want it to go away or at a minimum disappear from people’s conscious minds. But the one thing I think this inquisition by Holder and the WH will succeed in doing, is reminding the American public which party did its best to try and make us lose a war, and is still trying to help the people that want to kill us all out. They might have thought this whole thing would work in their favor, but it will be their poison pill in the end.
Blogging • Insane Stuff • Conflicts & Wars • War on Terror • Homeland Security • All Things Government • Healthcare Reform • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Saturday, August 29, 2009
DA PLAN!
Blogging • Insane Stuff • All Things Government • Economics • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Obama’s “Read my lips!” moment in the making?
Who can forget George Bush Sr.’s promise “Read my lips, no new taxes!”, and how the democrats turned that against him back in 1989? With democrats in charge of congress and able to ram through the taxes, he was set up and taken down by their shrewd manipulations and machinations. Not making excuses for the guy: I was always lukewarm about him personally. But the fact is that he was had by democrats that used deficit spending to force an unbalanced budget and a economic slump to make him eat crow. Fast forward a couple of decades and now we have a democrat that won the WH on what I am certain was the most effective and deceptive campaign of distorted facts, vague promises of positive changes and hope, fiscal responsibility, and a hard promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250K.
We already know that the distorted facts continue to be passed off as truths, and that the promise of fiscal responsibility must have been a joke. Only moonbats will argue the fact that Obama and his people plan to outright double our debt - at this pace, my guess is that it will be tripled - and are set to break all imaginable records of deficit spending, totally directed at expanding their power, and nothing else. Oh, the usual people blame Bush, defense spending, the GWoT, and everything but these democrats, but people that prefer facts over bull know Obama’s people have taken what they got from Bush and have exponentially made it worse, defense and GWoT war money is a drop in the bucket when you are about to flush away a projected $9 to $15 trillion plus, and that there is nobody to blame for this fiscal meltdown but the democrats. Not much “Hope” these days for the future, and many people are now certain that when these democrats talk about change, what they are referring to is what they plan to leave in our wallets after they rob us of all they can.
Our taxes are going up, even though it is done by hiding them in such disgusting “Rob Peter to pay Paul – after taking a hefty commission for themselves, of course – scams” as the ridiculous and criminal “Cap & Tax” schemes. Let us not forget the massive taxes around the government takeover of the healthcare dollars, a full 1/6th of our current economy, based on lies about first healthcare, and now insurance reform - a patent and blatant attempt to garner support for their scam by tapping into a manufactured public dissatisfaction with insurance, is also vanishing fast – and sold as a measure to fix a crisis of the collectivist’s in government’s own making. Thank the powers that be this is also imploding fast as people figure out the scam. But the one thing that might be the nail in Obama and these collectivist’s coffins, is the fact that they have made things so bad that they will not be able to avoid people figuring out that they are going to have to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for their disastrous policies, as this article in the WaPo lays the ground work for.
During last year’s campaign, President Obama vowed to enact a bold agenda without raising taxes for the middle class, a pledge budget experts viewed with skepticism. Since then, a severe recession, massive deficits and a national debt that is swelling toward a 50-year high have only made his promise harder to keep. The Obama administration has insisted that the pledge will stand. But the president’s top economic advisers have refused to rule out broad-based tax increases to close the yawning gap between federal revenue and government spending and are warning of tough choices ahead.That’s because these democrats lied and planned to raise the taxes from the beginning, just like they lied about being fiscally disciplined. The middle class is about to get socked hard by the “party of the little guy” to pay for their government expansion. There simply are not enough rich people, well rich people that are not democrats with friends in congress and the WH to help them keep their huge piles of cash, to pay for even a fraction of their wasteful spending. The middle class is about to get shafted by the people that constantly tell them a tax cut is only great for the rich, not the. And Obama is going to have to deal with that consequences. I wonder if they will try to postpone this until after the 2012 elections though.
One more thing while we are on the subject of taxes. Speaking of rich democrat fat cats: how much will the Ted Kennedy estate pay in “death taxes”? That will be some story to cover. My guess is that Ted had already made preparations to shelter his family’s wealth from government confiscation of more than half of it at his passing. I doubt the MSM people will fulminate over the billions in taxes that the Feds will not collect from good old Teddy. I think this would make for one hot blog topic of its own as well. Guess I should research that story.
All Things Government • Elections • Economics • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Friday, August 28, 2009
DC Madam bites the dust?
Wierd Science? No, Real Science…
Looks like the Journal of Science has a new international study dealing with the impact of solar cycles on climate. You need to sign up to read the study. But I think the AGW crowd that always dismisses solar activity will not like the study’s observations and conclusions which are, and can also be found in this article in the Science Daily, referring to the Journal of Science article in question, and appropriately titled “Small Fluctuations In Solar Activity, Large Influence On Climate”, much. As people like me have been saying for the longest time: solar activity and the impact of all that energy and its fluctuations on our oceans, is the most, if not paramount and only non-marginal effect that affect climate and creates changes. But don’t take my word for it. Here is the study’s conclusion:
An international team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) used more than a century of weather observations and three powerful computer models to tackle one of the more difficult questions in meteorology: if the total energy that reaches Earth from the Sun varies by only 0.1 percent across the approximately 11-year solar cycle, how can such a small variation drive major changes in weather patterns on Earth?
The answer, according to the new study, has to do with the Sun’s impact on two seemingly unrelated regions. Chemicals in the stratosphere and sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean respond during solar maximum in a way that amplifies the Sun’s influence on some aspects of air movement. This can intensify winds and rainfall, change sea surface temperatures and cloud cover over certain tropical and subtropical regions, and ultimately influence global weather.
“The Sun, the stratosphere, and the oceans are connected in ways that can influence events such as winter rainfall in North America,” says NCAR scientist Gerald Meehl, the lead author. “Understanding the role of the solar cycle can provide added insight as scientists work toward predicting regional weather patterns for the next couple of decades.”
And before the usual cultists decide to denigrate the study by claiming it is the work of evil oil companies or their stooges, let me point out what this article says on that..
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor, and by the Department of Energy. It builds on several recent papers by Meehl and colleagues exploring the link between the peaks in the solar cycle and events on Earth that resemble some aspects of La Nina events, but are distinct from them. The larger amplitude La Nina and El Nino patterns are associated with changes in surface pressure that together are known as the Southern Oscillation.
Now granted this is not consensus science, so some people will pretend it doesn’t exist, and with language like the quote below, dissing the existing consensus science models, I can see that some people will not like this study much,if at all.
With the help of increased computing power and improved models, as well as observational discoveries, we are uncovering more of how the mechanisms combine to connect solar variability to our weather and climate,” Meehl says.
And doubly so when people that want real science to influence the decision making process, are asking for a chance to debate the cultists. I know this is a direct response to the “Cap & Tax” bill in congress, but the fact is that this bill and what it does – not what the left pretends it does, but what it really accomplishes – proves the agenda is a government effort to steal even more money from the private sector, while giving itself even more arbitrary authority and power to decide which businesses, technologies, and future changes should be allowed to happen. We all know how well this government driven planning works. If you have doubts, I recommend you have a chat with Kim Jong Il, whose country still practices this kind of top down government controlled economic and social planning. Ask them how well it is going for them.
When asked for a comment, the high priest of the AGW cult, Al Gore, had this to say:
HERETICS! OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!
OK, it was not Al Gore saying this stuff, but the message is the same. There is still time to kill that “Cap & Tax” bill, and we should “encourage” our politicians to do so. Wonder if we will see the findings of this study reported in the media like we constantly see when one of the AGW cultists claims the sky is falling…
All Things Government • Economics • News • Liberal Media • The Left • Science & Technology • Global Warming • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Meet Obama’s healthcare advisor…
The democrats in this government’s plan to get their grubby hands on all the healthcare dollars - trillions of extra dollars for politicians to use in their vote buying schemes and the power over life & death decisions in the hands of bureaucrats that enhance these same politician’s power - will result in healthcare rationing. And the scary thing is the guy advising Obama on this stuff is one frightening bastard:
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.
The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House’s health initiative.
Dr. Emanuel says that health reform will not be pain free, and that the usual recommendations for cutting medical spending (often urged by the president) are mere window dressing. As he wrote in the Feb. 27, 2008, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA): “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.”
True reform, he argues, must include redefining doctors’ ethical obligations. In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the “overuse” of medical care: “Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness,” he writes. “This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition to ‘use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment’ as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.”
In numerous writings, Dr. Emanuel chastises physicians for thinking only about their own patient’s needs. He describes it as an intractable problem: “Patients were to receive whatever services they needed, regardless of its cost. Reasoning based on cost has been strenuously resisted; it violated the Hippocratic Oath, was associated with rationing, and derided as putting a price on life. . . . Indeed, many physicians were willing to lie to get patients what they needed from insurance companies that were trying to hold down costs.” (JAMA, May 16, 2007).
So there you have it. Doctors will be re-educated so that their priority is no longer to provide the best possible care to those in need, but to know when not to provide care. Looks to me like Sarah Palin’s call that we where dealing with “death panels”, is dead on. You can’t make this shit up, I tell you.
Here are some more pearls of wisdom from the guy advising Obama on what needs to happen:
Dr. Emanuel’s assessment of American medical care is summed up in a Nov. 23, 2008, Washington Post op-ed he co-authored: “The United States is No. 1 in only one sense: the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag behind many developed nations on virtually every health statistic you can name.”
This is untrue, though sadly it’s parroted at town-hall meetings across the country. Moreover, it’s an odd factual error coming from an oncologist. According to an August 2009 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, patients diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. have a better chance of surviving the disease than anywhere else. The World Health Organization also rates the U.S. No. 1 out of 191 countries for responsiveness to the needs and choices of the individual patient. That attention to the individual is imperiled by Dr. Emanuel’s views.
Dr. Emanuel has fought for a government takeover of health care for over a decade. In 1993, he urged that President Bill Clinton impose a wage and price freeze on health care to force parties to the table. “The desire to be rid of the freeze will do much to concentrate the mind,” he wrote with another author in a Feb. 8, 1993, Washington Post op-ed. Now he recommends arm-twisting Chicago style. “Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda,” he wrote last Nov. 16 in the Health Care Watch Blog. “If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration’s health-reform effort.”
When these leftists tell you the goal is not a complete government take over and single payer system in the hands of government employed bureaucrats - with the power to decide life & death, not on a contract you have with them like most of us with private healthcare have with our insurance companies, but based on who you are, if they like you, and how much it costs - know that they are shamelessly lying to you. Even if they rename it or try to shove this turd down our throat for Ted Kennedy, it remains a nasty turd of a deal. One that needs to be killed dead, and especially not to be passed piecemeal. Because the end goal for the left will forever and always be this system for us peasants. The elite – government employees, congress, and unions – will of course be exempt. Like you get in collectivist paradises, Cuba for example, they will have their own special care where they will not need to mingle with, or deal with mediocre to bad care, like us peasants. Party of the little people indeed…
All Things Government • Healthcare Reform • Economics • News • Liberal Media • The Left • Science & Technology • Medicine • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Here come the Carter years again..
Woo hoo! The economy is getting better!!1!!1!! Oh crap, if you go look at the news from somewhere other than the DNC propagandists in the MSM that’s not the case. In fact, and even though it is the opinion of a single person, which happens to also be Atlanta’s Fed chief, real unemployment is now at 16%, and climbing, and that’s not getting better at all. Of course this stuff would have been front page news if it was a republican in charge, even one with some 4% unemployment. Anyway, here is the important stuff.
The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday. “If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking—so-called discouraged workers—and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart. He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did “do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee,” the policy-setting body of the central bank.
In fact, while the CBO released their Mid-Session Review, and everyone is focused on the drastic increase in projected deficit spending by the Obamanauts - and I still think that $9 trillion number will fall far short from the burden these collectivists will really slam everyone in this country with before it is all said and done - the real kicker was that in the CBO forecast for the average unemployment rate in calendar year 2010, the number projected in January will go up by an additional 2.3 million people. That’s right, another 2.3 million people are expected to lose jobs because of this government’s hostility to the private sector in the coming year. Call me crazy for thinking that there is either an agenda to destroy America or that the idiots in charge have no idea what so ever how to fix things and are falling back on idiotic collectivist economics that have never, ever, worked anywhere but in the minds of the usual collectivist elite and academia.
But is all this bad news making these leftist go back to the drawing board? Sure does looks like it, except, instead of saying we can’t afford any more of this disastrous stuff, they are now going to milk the death of a murderer, to make it worse. It’s not like when government takes over 1/6th of the economy we will see more things like this, which happened to occur in the solid democrat strong hold of the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, or that the healthcare bill will allow big brother’s agents to get any and all your financial data. It is not a fluke that we voters know more about how bad the healthcare bill is than these scum politicians.
After all, no matter how inefficient and bad government is, government employee pay goes up, and these people, unlike their more effective counterparts in the private sector, get bonuses too. And no, it is not military pay going up, these same people are gutting military spending because collectivists seem to feel that is the only kind of bad spending. But the narrative must continue. Blame Bush! Can’t have the American people realizing that the democrats running the show are now making the Carter years look great..
All Things Government • Healthcare Reform • Economics • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Strike two!
Its seems that the page one Denver Post article insinuating evil & racists conservatives/republicans against Obamacare destroyed democrat headquarter property yesterday has been trumped by a back page articlepointing out that the perp was a hard core democrat operative. Even more unbelievable is the attempt by the democrat chairwoman that was all ready to lambaste Obama-haters on Tuesday and called a hate crime, to now pretend this is no big deal, or that both sides are at fault!
One of two people suspected of shattering 11 windows Tuesday morning at the state Democratic Party headquarters has an arrest record and a history of helping a Democratic political candidate, public records show. Police said that about 2:20 a.m., 24-year-old Maurice Schwenkler, now in custody, and an at-large accomplice took a hammer to the picture windows displaying posters touting President Barack Obama and his health care reform efforts.
Early Tuesday, Democratic Party chairwoman Pat Waak said the damage to her building in Denver’s art district was a consequence of “an effort on the other side to stir up hate.” She tempered her statement after Schwenkler’s political history was revealed. “What I’ve been saying is there is a lot of rhetoric out there from both sides of the spectrum,” Waak said. “That’s what’s been disturbing to me. People are saying a lot of things not appropriate for civil discourse.” For weeks, people on both sides of the health care debate have rallied across the country.
Schwenkler is charged with criminal mischief and is to make his first appearance in Denver County Court today. He is accused of doing an estimated $11,000 in damage and could face a felony conviction.
So when you could label it a hate crime by the opposition, then it was a vile act. Now that one of your people has been fingered, and while I doubt this will be investigated now that we might actually find out that this agitator was paid by higher up democrats to pull this stunt off, I sure hope they do investigate this crime, its just lack of civil discourse. WTF??? From hero to zero? It gets better though!
On the last day of the 2008 Republican National Convention, he was charged with misdemeanor unlawful assembly in St. Paul, Minn. Court records provided through the St. Paul Pioneer Press show he was jailed about 2 a.m. Schwenkler received $500 in November 2008 to walk door-to-door in support of Democrat Mollie Cullom, who lost her race to Republican state Rep. David Balmer of Centennial.
Waak, who was not involved with the group that paid Schwenkler, said she’s never heard of the suspect and pointed out that just because he canvassed “doesn’t mean he’s a good Democrat.”
Schwenkler was one of dozens of paid canvassers bankrolled by the Colorado Citizens’ Coalition, a political 527 committee Schwenkler has worked for Democratic causes funded by labor groups and well-known, wealthy liberal donors.
So this tool has a history as a democrat operative but now he is no longer a good democrat? Is it because he got caught in the act? Would he have been a good, nay great, democrat if he had pulled it off and the MSM was now 24/7 complaining of evil republican operatives? I mean we are talking about a 24 year old tool that rides a bike: it was at the crime scene. He likely lives at home with momma too. If that’s not the portrait of a democrat loser good democrat, I don’t know what is.
Schwenkler allegedly tried to conceal his identity while committing the crime by wearing a shirt over his face, a hooded sweat shirt and latex gloves, according to police descriptions.
NINJA!!!!!1!1!!
First the SEIU beats up a guy, now this. What’s going to be strike three?
Blogging • Insane Stuff • All Things Government • Healthcare Reform • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Why now? Really…
Not surprised. Already figured the focus shift to this was political and craven:
Why is Mr. Obama all of a sudden switching gears from health care to this issue? Could it be that he was saving this little nugget for a time he found himself and his agenda sinking in the polls? This is quite the gamble, as the American people are outraged over the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the first thing on their minds is how to pay the bills not CIA interrogators facing down dangerous terrorists immediately after 9/11.
Obama is playing with fire. While this is simply a distraction intended to fire up the BDS infected base up again, he is going to need to make sure nothing much comes from all this fuss. If this investigational actually does happen, it will set up some real bad precedent that can come back to bite Obama himself in the rear. Once it becomes fait accompli that the political party in charge can drum up charges against their opponent, what’s to stop republicans from investigating Obama for his actions when they take over the reigns of power the next time around? And there are a lot of these iffy issues they could claim are worthy of such an investigation, all things considered. I just can’t believe Obama is really that stupid that he doesn’t think democrats will one day no longer be in power and that this pendulum swings both ways.
But one has to wonder if the WH understands the real damage this attempt to deflect from their imploding campaign of lies intended to hand government control of the healthcare dollars will cause. Going after the people asked to take risks to gather the intel needed to protect us for purely political reasons has consequences. This interrogation issue might be a hot topic for the leftist moonbats, for all the wrong reasons I might add too, but for real people that want their government to protect them from terrorists hell bent on killing them and destroying their way of life, this is more proof democrats should not be trusted on matters of national security.
Contrast AG Eric Holder’s actions just a few weeks ago where he felt obligated to drop charges against Black Panther members that were clearly breaking the law by intimidating voters at the polling place in PA, with this move to drum up charges against members of our intelligence community tasked, by law no less, to gather information from terrorists hell bent on killing us. So the left can vindicate their BDS and Bush hatred, no less! This seems to be a recurring problem with team Obama – and I do not mean the new unit of interrogators that circumvent congressional oversight by reporting directly to the WH, which the MSM propagandists is a fresh break with the Bush days, but the Obama administration members and the democrat controlled congress – and their backward leaning priorities. One thing is certain: intelligence gathering has been compromised by the Obamanauts. Without consistency and the lack of the constant specter of politically motivated persecutions, it is almost a given that the people taking the risk will worry they could face charges a few years down the line when these craven politicians change what’s acceptable and what’s not again. The damage is done. And we the American people lose, again, so democrats can do their thing.
What with Ted Kennedy’s death and all, I hope the WH decides to just use that - like Clinton did with the death of Paul Wellstone - to rekindle their government takeover of the healthcare dollars insurance reform debate, and drop this idiotic distraction already. Then again, they have not been very smart at figuring out when public opinion turns against them, and might just keep pressing this to feed the moonbats some red meat. Of course, and as seems to always be the case, Americans end up being the ones put in the line of fire for this stuff.
Blogging • Insane Stuff • Conflicts & Wars • War on Terror • Homeland Security • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Obamacare Death Panel
All Things Government • Healthcare Reform • Economics • Science & Technology • Medicine • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Monday, August 24, 2009
Change you can believe in.. I guess..
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive! Well, this isn’t the first time at all. It is more likely one huge whopper in a campaign of untruths and another in the ample and ever growing chain of rampant displays of liberal stupidity. I am serious, how low can these people go? Read the tortured language in that Steven R. Hurst and Devlin Barrett AP piece, and tell me if you just don’t end up feeling like they offered the proof against their obvious premise as proof of their premise.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has moved more forcefully than ever to abandon Bush administration interrogation policies, approving creation of a special White House unit for questioning terrorism suspects, as Attorney General Eric Holder weighs a Justice Department recommendation to reopen and pursue prisoner abuse cases.
A senior administration official told The Associated Press Monday that Obama has approved establishment of the new unit, to be known as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which will be overseen by the Naitonal Security Council. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the program has not yet been officially announced.
Aside from the fact that these AP reporters seem to be unable to spell “National” correctly – go figure that – this convoluted logic leaves my brain hurting. So Obama is “forcefully abandoning” Bush administration interrogation policies by, you know, taking them to the next level and actually creating a special unit to question the terrorists. WTF? Are these people just shameless? How would they have reported this story if evil Bush’s people had come up with such a “special unit”? Dumb question, I know, because the answer is right in the article:
Obama campaigned vigorously against President George W. Bush’s interrogation policies in his successful run for the presidency. He has said more recently he didn’t particularly favor prosecuting Bush administration officials in connection with instances of prisoner abuse. But the issue now before Holder for consideration would have the new administration do precisely that: reopen several such cases with an eye toward possible criminal prosecution.
What was done under Bush was criminal. Obama expanding what was done under Bush is not just great - he is abandoning the Bush policies don’t you know – but grounds to, and proof that, we now should hold politically motivated persecution circuses against the people that stopped other terrorists attacks against us after 9-11! Again: WTF? In the mean time, real criminals – democrats in our congress – get passes from the MSM propagandists.
I am all for this administration to go after the CIA people for abuse! No, really. They can then also take the full and complete blame when nobody in the CIA, or for that matter anywhere, including this special unit, decides that they will not take any risks, whether told to do so by law or not, because of partisan democrats playing like they have morals for pure political gain. I am often left wondering why these democrats and their liberal base only have an attack of “morals” when said morals hurt either US interests, Americans in general, the opposition party in particular, or preferably, all three. Seriously, what do these libtards think this special unit’s purpose and role will be?
The structure of the new unit the White House is creating would depart significantly from such work under the previous administration, when the CIA had the lead and sometimes exclusive role in questioning al-Qaida suspects.
So what’s the difference between the CIA interrogating the terrorists and the members of the new unit interrogating them? Are they, because they are part of this new unit, above the same laws that the democrats are now rewriting so they can score cheap political points against the other side? Or are they going to be just another bunch of ineffective unionized bureaucrats the WH plans to blame when the next attack, almost guaranteed to happen with these morons in charge, happens? I certainly want to know.
One thing is certain. These moonbats are twisting themselves into pretzels to throw red meat out to their demented zombie followers. They are not even concerned about the obvious disconnects and illogic in their poorly constructed narrative which seems to be twisting the underlying facts to allow them to have it both ways. I wonder how these democrats are going to keep operating when the effectiveness of their propaganda outlets keeps getting eroded. Sane people have to be turning away from them and looking elsewhere for the truth as the MSM sets a new record at destroying whatever shred of credibility they might have left, as they continue to shill for these democrats.
UPDATE: Looks like the Obama people did not think their distraction campaign through, because the CIA people are not playing along. Panetta is a kool-aid drinker. A hard core lib. And he is balking at this freak show because now that he is the one in charge at the CIA, he has to deal with the mess being made. He knows that destroying the CIA’s ability to operate for political purposes will hurt, and especially hurt him as the big boss. I guess the ideologues and idiots at the WH are so desperate to get back to Bush bashing, that they are willing to risk our lives. Nothing new there, they did it when they were in the minority for some 7 years. Just surprised to see them keep it up when they will be blamed. Maybe they think they can still blame Bush for the next attack? Who knows. At this point it is obvious, again, that they have no clue what they are doing. Amatuer hour gone wild.
UPDATE2: The why of Panetta’s anger. Let me point out the obvious paragraph:
…I make no judgments on the accuracy of the 2004 IG report or the various views expressed about it. Nor am I eager to enter the debate, already politicized, over the ultimate utility of the Agency’s past detention and interrogation effort. But this much is clear: The CIA obtained intelligence from high-value detainees when inside information on al-Qa’ida was in short supply. Whether this was the only way to obtain that information will remain a legitimate area of dispute, with Americans holding a range of views on the methods used. The CIA requested and received legal guidance and referred allegations of abuse to the Department of Justice. President Obama has established new policies for interrogation.
The interrogation techniques used worked. And it produced valuable and actionable intel. Even Panetta, whom had been on of those voices that had worked as hard as possible to “politicize” this whole affair before he was put in charge of the CIA, sees the danger in carrying on with this crap. The WH should ask Pelosi how well her pissing contest against the CIA - based on lies on her part - worked out for her. Now the WH is using politics to distract from a failed healthcare takeover.
Obama has painted himself in a corner. Healthcare is probably one of the least toxic issues left for him to deal with, and supposedly the hallmark of the left’s ideology. He can’t put it on the back burner and come back to it later, because if he does so then congress has to address such toxic and killer issues as the “Cap & Tax” bill, illegal immigration and the naturalization of some 12 to 20 million illegals, card check, and the tax issue. None of these items will have positive results on the Obama presidency. So he will try to distract from healthcare with this whole interrogation scheme, while not allowing congress to move past healthcare. In short we have bread & circuses for the forseeable future.
Blogging • Insane Stuff • Conflicts & Wars • War on Terror • Homeland Security • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Here is what happens when government helps you.. Part Deux
I am worried that everyone here, including myself got way too focused on the first part dealing with the credit card issue, in my post below, and either ignored or missed the real big point in my post: that the collectivists screwed our economy up, even worse than usual, policy wise, and that it is going to get worse if they keep at it.
I used the example of how they rammed through the stimulus patronage bill, but everyone of their big policy pushed through was disastrous for the economy. Let me enumerate them for you. I hope for the day that we do not need to go into the details and the consequences of the left’s response to the economic crisis of their own making either, but the truth, facts, and logic, never seem to be things the left cares for, so I guess I need to quantify that again. Despite their best efforts, the truth has come out. Those that want to know the facts know that we are where we are today because of ideological policy. It was ideology that drove these politicians to legislate the conditions that resulted in the economic collapse we experienced. Lending institutions were forced by law into giving money to seriously unqualified people. Then when this still was not working the same politicians legislated a hokey and completely opaque trading scheme for those securities based on toxic assets, and used Freddie and Fannie to showcase government backing of these dangerous schemes and legitimize them. Finally they decided to bring down the house of cards, right before an election – so they could score on the political perception, one I never quite understood, that democrats are better for the economy – to win the presidency and big gains. Now their solution to an economic slump that I am certain they did not predict or expect to be this big, is for them to meddle even more but keep the underlying fundamental and illogical problem in place. That’s going to work well.
That above brings us to the government takeover of the banking and lending industry, and the consequences of that. While they demonized the TARP program as corporate bailouts with tax payer money, these leftists not only saw the $700 billion that the Bush people put up, but raised it to over $3 trillion, and are even floating the idea government might have to buy out the entire system fro some $29 trillion. Many of those institutions that lined up to drink at the trough of public cash, now regret the deal, but the real and frightening danger is this concept that government should micromanage the private sector and directly work against market influences collectivists don’t like or approve of. The same ideologues in control of government that created the problem in the first place, I should add. As I already said: this is going to work out well.
I won’t waste too much time on the government take over of two out of three American car manufacturing companies. There is no way of defending the tax payer funded takeover of these companies. Even more disgraceful is how that tax payer money was not used to pay off those people that put their own money on the line as investments in GM or Chrysler, but to prop up unions as majority stake holders. Yes, the same unions that are the fundamental underlying problem which made these companies unable to compete and cranked out the low quality wares that turned people off. Talk about your mob style pay-offs. And now the politicians in DC can tell both Chrysler and GM to make cars nobody really wants too. I am sure that once other companies, but especially Ford, all start running circles around these two, that the politicians will use the power of government to rig the system in favor of their new holdings. At the tax payer’s expense, of course. What do you think the “Cash for Clunkers” program was all about anyway? How well has that worked?
We also got graced by the watermelons – the collectivists masquerading as environmentalists – with the “Cap & Tax” bill: the largest and most massive single tax increase passed ever by our politicians. The average American family of four will now get to pay anywhere from $1000 to $4000, depending at whom is talking and how they come up with their umbers, in extra costs and fees tied to their energy use every year. Since they are “costs and fees” I guess we could all tongue in cheek try to defend Obama’s blatant lie that he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250K. Don’t worry this going back on his promises, especially about taxes and who will pay them, is going to happen so often we will soon be numb to it. It is all going to work out well!
Every one of these moves was intended to bring in some huge section of the private sector, and more importantly the money in it, under control of the federal government. But no plan was as ambitious, or deceptive, as the healthcare insurance
The only place that these leftists have felt spending needs to be cut is in defense. I am sure that it will be these same people telling us the next time that we need to send our troops into harms way that we should not because they lack equipment. Kind of like when we had to go deal with Iraq and they tried to blame Bush for the defense cuts of the Clinton years. Defense jobs I guess are the types of jobs collectivists think are bad, I guess. How long before the democrats undo the sacrifices of the last 7 years and guarantee us a future war in the ME that will cost us 10 times as much as what we already paid? That’s coming. That’s coming, and I can’t wait to see how well it works for us.
There are many more examples of this. It has not been more than what, 9 months, since they have taken over, and foreign and economic policy decisions have all been disastrous. While the rest of the world looks to be moving out of the recession, we are going deeper into it. Don’t believe the constant MSM propaganda saying otherwise. These people are covering for the incompetent ideologues in DC because they have a vested interest. About the only thing that the Obama people have gotten right is the Bush GWoT policies the left used – notice I say used to – get totally crazy about. Funny that huh? I think Obama’s actions are working well to vindicate Bush.
Blogging • Insane Stuff • Conflicts & Wars • Old & New Empires • War on Terror • Homeland Security • All Things Government • Elections • Healthcare Reform • Tort Reform • Economics • News • Liberal Media • The Left • Science & Technology • Energy • Global Warming • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Here is what happens when government helps you..
One of the big things the collectivists in power did when they got control of all three branches of government after the last election cycle, was to pass new and sweeping credit card legislation to prevent the greedy credit card companies from screwing irresponsible and stupid people that spent beyond their means and got themselves in deep debt. As usual government meddling has had the exact opposite effect as they wanted, and it is hurting those of us that are not complete and total idiots.
If your credit is good, or your credit card balance is low, you may soon pay more on every credit card bill. Why? Congress passed a misguided new credit card law, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. As a result of it, you may end up paying an annual fee. And you may end up losing your percentage rebates, your cash back, or your rewards program.
The new law arbitrarily limits credit card companies’ ability to increase rates on credit card balances, even when a cardholder’s balance has been rapidly increasing —meaning that a sensible bank might raise the interest rate, because a rising balance drives up the risk that the credit card company won’t get paid what it’s owed. (Increasing numbers of credit cardholders have run up big balances in recent years, then failed to pay them off).
In response to the new law, some credit card companies are starting to charge annual fees on their credit cards to protect themselves against potential losses. Others will likely drop their rewards programs, or stop giving customers’ percentage rebates on credit card purchases. For example, I and my wife get 3% to 5% back on most of our credit card purchases.
One of my co-workers just emailed me that since the new law, he will now be charged an annual fee on what he calls “the best reward card I ever found.” It’s the same card I use for many of my purchases. The new law is supposed to “protect” cardholders. But what it really does is transfer wealth from people who pay off their credit card bills at the end of every month, (or have good enough credit that the credit card company would not likely have increased their interest rate anyway) to people with bad credit who have run up big balances.
So again, government is subsidizing bad behavior at the expense of those of us that avoid it. That’s collectivism in a nut shell for you: in the name of helping those that chronically do stupid things and hence find themselves in “the sh*t”, politicians help those idiots by creating programs that punish those that do the right things. And then people wonder why destructive behavior becomes the norm. Yeah, I am one of those idiots that pays my credit card every month and never spends more than I can afford or pay off. So now I get to help pay for those other people. I am ecstatic as you can tell.
But this stuff with the credit cards isn’t the worse government has done for us yet. That honor goes, for now, and until they pass healthcare insurance reform and basically have these collectivist government bureaucrats take over 1/5th of our annual economy – trillions of more dollars and life & death decisions in the hands of uncaring unionized government thugs - to the stimulus patronage bill. Mark Steyn as usual has an awesome piece showing how well that $800 billion of our tax payer cash that the democrats in power have funneled to their operatives, partners, lobbyists, and donors so they could flood their campaign coffers with slush funds for the 2010 elections has worked for us: it has kept our economy down.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.
Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted — and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.
There you have it in a nutshell. Obama whom ran on the exaggerated lie of lack of fiscal responsibility by republicans, whom had been far from fiscally responsible, but nowhere as irresponsible as democrats had been those last 2 years they had control of congress during the Bush years, is now literally destroying our future and projected – and I think this number is way on the low side – to add another $9 trillion to our deficit in the next few years. This collectivist government has crippled our private sector and all but guaranteed no chance for an economic recovery here when other countries are already making moves in the right direction. And it is not even close to being done screwing us. Now under the guise of fixing a crisis of their own making, they are trying to get their hands of 1/5th of our economy by taking over healthcare. We are getting screwed by everything this government is doing.
That’s why the “stimulus” flopped. It didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.
For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about — and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that. Apropos a new poll, the Associated Press reports that Americans “are losing faith in Barack Obama.”
Yeah, again those of us that did not make the bad choices or actually did the smart things, are going to be left paying for those that chronically make bad choices and decisions. And that’s why in a nutshell I believe collectivism’s goodness is simply paving the road to hell for us. These people are doing what no enemy has ever been able to do: bring America down. And they are doing it from within, and under the guise of doing it for noble and good reasons. Those dumb Islamists should have just waited another decade or two for the left to truly and totally emasculate us before they had made their move, and they would have crushed us by now.
Blogging • Insane Stuff • Conflicts & Wars • War on Terror • All Things Government • Elections • Healthcare Reform • Economics • Social Security • News • Liberal Media • The Left • Science & Technology • Energy • Global Warming • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Friday, August 21, 2009
Things are not getting better at all
The usual MSM DNC propagandists have been real hard at work spinning for the WH on healthcare, unsuccessfully - thank the lord! - I might add, but there is a lot more. If you hear the press these days, smaller than predicted job losses and any other such bad news, is all a sign of economic recovery and how good things are getting. Of course back when the guy in the WH had a (R) next to his name, having a low 4% jobless rate was a sign of doom. Now 9.6% is still a sign of good times because supposedly some other stuff when looked at just the right way, indicates growth. There are constant stories parading prominent people that are willing to tell us that recovery is right around the corner! New home sales are up, so the crisis government meddling in the homeowner mortgage industry and the security trading tied to that caused, has to be coming to an end! The DOW Jones is even going up! After all, job creation is the last thing that happens when an economy bounces back from a down turn.
But the truth is that there is no rebound at all. The hostility towards the private sector by the current collectivists has served to actually create another condition that drives down the market. While reported on the back pages, as our government sets new deficit spending records, tax revenue is down big time. For the slow people, that means that when the real calculations come in the deficit spending will be even higher. And it gets worse. Here are some words of wisdom for you:
More than one in every eight homeowners with a mortgage was behind on home loan payments or in some stage of foreclosure at the end of the second quarter, as mounting unemployment aggravated the housing crisis, the Mortgage Bankers Association said on Thursday. The percentage of loans that were in foreclosure or at least one payment past due rose to 13.16 per cent, the highest increase since the MBA began keeping records in 1972 and a jump of more than a percentage point since the first quarter.
Jay Brinkmann, chief economist at the MBA, said signs were growing that mortgage performance is being affected more by unemployment than by the structure of risky home loans, indicating a new stage in the foreclosure crisis that may not be easily addressed by government loan modification programmes. While the proportion of foreclosures started on borrowers with subprime adjustable-rate mortgages fell dramatically in the second quarter, foreclosure starts on traditional prime fixed-rate loans saw a dramatic increase. Prime fixed-rate loans accounted for one in three foreclosure starts at the end of the second quarter. A year ago they accounted for one in five. “There has been a shift in the problem from one driven by the types of loans to one driven by macro problems in the economy and drops in house prices,” said Mr Brinkmann.
But wait a minute, the collectivists will tell you, Obama and the donkey congress are doing things to help us. They passed that stimulus bill didn’t they? Well, check out this example of what the stimulus money is actually doing:
CHICAGO, Aug 20 (Reuters) - While businesses across the United States slash jobs, state and local governments have actually increased employment slightly since the economic recession began in December 2007, according to a report released on Thursday. “As is the typical pattern in recessions, overall state and local government employment continued to grow after the start of the recession, although there has been a small decline since the August 2008 peak,” said Donald J. Boyd, author of the report by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, in a statement.
Total employment in state and local government rose in 30 states, fell in 16 and was unchanged in four during the last year, the report found. Governments have added about 110,000 jobs since the recession began, according to the report by the Rockefeller Institute, which is the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. The recession’s impact on government employment typically lags that of the private sector, Boyd said. “Further employment reductions are almost certainly on the way,” he said
Get that? The stimulus money is disproportionately propping up government - this example is at the state level, but it is no coincidence that in this down economy DC is the city with top job opportunities in the nation, practically all of them government or government related jobs - and by default the democrat’s constituencies, while doing nothing for the private market. It is a giant joke and has had negligible impact on the private sector – the one that actually gets things done – if any. In fact, these collectivists have used close to a trillion of our dollars to help prop up their fiefdom. That’s why this thing is really a patronage bill. And the disgusting thing is that these leftists are not giving up on piling up even more debt on us citizens. To buy votes. But this behavior has consequences. And idiotic lies like this by the left, can’t cover the truth up. We are still heading down, and these leftists are just speeding that downfall up.
UPDATE: Check out how much worse things are going to get:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to approximately $9 trillion from $7.108 trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday. The higher deficit figure, based on updated economic data, brings the White House budget office into line with outside estimates and gives further fuel to President Barack Obama’s opponents, who say his spending plans are too expensive in light of budget shortfalls. The White House took heat for sticking with its $7.108 trillion forecast earlier this year after the Congressional Budget Office forecast that deficits between 2010 and 2019 would total $9.1 trillion.
Get that? Obama plans to add another $9+ trillion dollars to the debt. Many like me scoffed at the idiotic idea democrats whom demonized Bush for it, would do a better job with government spending. I could not believe so many people did not realize that it was the democrat controlled congress, which they held a majority in after the 2006 elections, and which by law decides government spending, that actually allocated all that spending to those budgets in the last 2 years of the Bush administration. Even worse, the media helped the democrats whom had drastically raised deficit spending, on purpose and precisely so they could paint the republicans - which I must say are not without blame - as fiscally irresponsible, create the illusion that they, the democrats, would be more fiscally responsible. What hogwash. Now they project that the democrats will add another $9 trillion, and my belief is that this is still the low end because if they get their way on healthcare that number will likely double, to our deficit! The American people better wake up and hammer these fools, or we will soon be as shitty and broke as those banana collectivist republics that the left so adores and admires.
Blogging • Insane Stuff • All Things Government • Healthcare Reform • Economics • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Thursday, August 20, 2009
How the democrats paint the protesters…
Blogging • Insane Stuff • News • Liberal Media • The Left • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink