Line of the Day

It was a disgrace that W. appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men.

Our desire to see these hearings expose liberal orthodoxy as hopelessly wed to identity politics needs no help from Sonia Sotomayor.

If MoDo is really that concerned with “balancing” the court, we’re confident that instead of merely another white male, she would be down with a good ol’-fashioned WASP. With RBG on the way out and Sotomayor on the way in, that leaves the high court packed with no fewer than 6 Roman Catholics. How’s that for some diversity?

We hesitated actually linking to the column titled “White Man’s Last Stand” as it was 2 minutes of our life we’ll never get back but did so out of professional obligation and the fact that it’s your life and we are in no position to tell you how best to waste it.

Ship of Fools (UPDATED...please scroll to bottom of post)

If you want it bad and you want it fast, that’s usually how you are going to get it.

House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled sweeping health-care legislation that would hit all but the smallest businesses with a penalty equal to 8% of payroll if they fail to provide health insurance to workers.

The House bill, which also would impose new taxes on the wealthy estimated to bring in more than $544 billion over a decade, came as lawmakers in the Senate raced against a self-imposed deadline of this week to introduce a bill in time for action this summer.

Senators face a tougher battle because they are striving for a bipartisan bill. Key senators are weighing a combination of several more-modest fund-raising provisions, including some new fees on health-care industries.

Under the House measure, employers with payrolls exceeding $400,000 a year would have to provide health insurance or pay the 8% penalty. Employers with payrolls between $250,000 and $400,000 a year would pay a smaller penalty, and those less than $250,000 would be exempt. Certain small firms would get tax credits to help buy coverage.

There are a few things that jump out at us immediately in reading through the article.

The health-care legislation, we were promised, would have to pay for itself. That $544 bil though covers only half of the $1 trillion price tag given to health care reform by the CBO (and as anyone involved with government acquisition, as we are, knows, the eventual price tag NEVER comes in under the initial estimate).

Also, there is the Atlas Shrugged factor. At a time when the government should be doing (or not doing, as applicable) everything they can to foster a positive climate for small and medium-sized businesses, they are doing precisely the opposite with this bill.

Where is the incentive to expand one’s business when it may possibly mean paying a higher punitive tax? There isn’t. In fact, there is the very real possibility that companies will be shedding payroll to avoid the tax penalty. Yes, health care reform = more unemployment. So, you now have a situation where that $544 billion is not being recovered because of a shrinking tax base combined with the benefit of higher unemployment at small and medium-size businesses. Hey, but at least everybody's covered...

...until they're not.

Let’s say a company that does provide health insurance for its employees crunches the numbers and decides that paying the tax penalty is actually cheaper than what it costs to cover its employees and the employees’ families.

Higher unemployment, a recession-deepening hostile business climate and more uninsured workers, all at the summer session lightning speed that could only be accomplished by the most ethical Congress, evah!

(UPDATE #1):

A group of Democrats on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday called for health insurers to pay fees worth up to $100 billion over a decade to help pay for the overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system.

You read that correctly. The government is forcing private insurers to fund the "competition". But at only a $100 bil, they would still be about $400 bil short of the CBO's most-likely-underestimated $1 trillion mark. Stand by to stand by.
H/T: KT

Programming Alert

Apollo 11's 1969 four-day journey to the moon will be re-created for online audiences this Thursday at the commemorative WeChooseTheMoon.org Web site from the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

Check it out here.

If it's July, it must be the silly season

Breathless panting all around regarding this secret plan hatched by former Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA to “deal” with the terrorists. With Congressional investigations pending, Nancy Pelosi thinks she will be getting her proverbial day in court with regard to her running feud with the CIA.

We predict, as with the torture kerkuffle a couple of months back, America will give a collective shrug or worse be thankful that someone had the foresight to confront the bad guys on their own terms, thus keeping America safe.

But if the term “secret” seems a little far-fetched to you, it should.

Here’s President Bush from his 2003 State of the Union address:

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.
And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

(italics, ours)

And here’s President Bush from a radio address back in January of 2005:

In the years since I first swore to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution, our nation has been tested. Our enemies have found America more than equal to the task. In response to attacks on our home soil, we have captured or killed terrorists across the Earth. We have taken unprecedented steps to secure our homeland from future attacks, and our troops have liberated millions from oppression.

(italics, ours)

Yep, definitely sounds like Cheney’s work to us.

B-Daddy has more on this “scandal” and what the President plans on doing about it, here.

And with respect to the above, Big Media is already hard at work providing cover for the precarious prospects of cap and trade and health care reform. CNN.com headline: Bush-era distractions may weigh down Obama’s agenda. Good grief.

H/T: The Corner

Business as usual

We apologize for not getting to this sooner but believe it or not, it kind of flew beneath our radar.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) called hearings last week to address the possibility that the BCS violates federal anti-trust laws because of its “exclusionary” method of selecting teams in which to play in the “fictitious national title game.”

The tipping point for setting up these hearings was the Utah Utes going undefeated last season and getting shut out of the title game, settling instead for the Sugar Bowl where they smacked by two touchdowns an Alabama team that was ranked #1 in the nation before going into their previous game.

Of course, we all know what you are saying: “Don’t these guys have better things to worry about than college football?” We’ll respond by saying that Hatch was the only member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to attend these hearings as the other Senators were busy concocting new ways of ruining the economy via cap and trade and health care reform so we’ll let you reconsider the answer to your own question.

This has all been rendered pretty much moot however as the two hold-out conferences that had not signed the new TV deal with ESPN (a defacto submission to BCS servitude), the WAC and the conference that Utah belongs to, the Mountain West, inked the deal that will have the Network broadcasting the BCS games through the 2014 season.

This came despite strong objections to the BCS power structure by the Mountain West who developed an 8-team playoff format earlier this spring that was, as expected, ignored by the BCS.

The roll-over by the two conferences was best summed up by Boise St. president, Bob Kustra.

"We have no choice," Boise State president Bob Kustra said after the WAC presidents voted unanimously to sign the deal. "The repercussions were just too dramatic and too costly."

How about “complete irrelevance” as well. That’s the power that the BCS now wields.

The BCS-haters (including ourselves) can bitch and moan all they want about the unfairness and overall lameness of the system but when Masada is girded for battle and its defenders, instead, conscript with the Roman army, there is not any more room for righteous indignation.

Real Hope and Change

"Where you have na tions that are oppressing their people, isn't there an international responsibility to intervene? I think the need for intervention becomes a moral imperative. . .

"There are going to be objections to just about any decision, because there are some in the international community who believe that state sovereignty is sacrosanct. . .

"But we also say we're not going to just wait indefinitely and allow for the development of a nuclear weapon, the breach of international treaties, and wake up one day and find ourselves in a much worse position and unable to act."

So, what happened to the non-meddling (except in Central America) foreign policy stance? Don’t get us wrong, we are certainly more agreeable to this hawkish, neo-con approach to foreign policy than the wait, wait, wait….. wait and see response we got with respect to Iran.

Is there a fundamental shift at work here or do we have a differing set of standards depending on the location on the globe?

Ralph Peters, no fan of Obama he, says the President’s speech was the finest on Africa made by an American President.

Yet there's hope. Obama's latest adore-me tour began badly, but ended on a powerful positive note. Following the debacle in Moscow and disappointment in Italy (where the G8 proved resistant to charisma), the president made a wise, useful and praiseworthy stop in Ghana...

It was a great speech (he should give a variant of it to several of our own domestic constituencies). I could not have been prouder of our president.

Read more, here.

Video clip of the day

Here’s the President throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star game this evening in St. Louis.



St. Louis fans have a reputation as being the most gracious fans in all of baseball so the boos were mildly surprising. Look, we’re not going to get preachy here but this sort of thing gets under our skin a bit.

Over six months ago, the American people spoke and chose Barack Obama to be the President of this country. He’s our President – deal with it. Perhaps because our formative experience at Seminary taught us that you are saluting the rank/uniform and not the man/women, this causes us more grief than it does others. Exercise your first amendment rights all you choose in public, with your friends or on a blog(?) but if you can’t respond in a courteous manner to the President of this country in a non-partisan public forum then shut the hell up!

Exit question: What’s up with the camera angle? Did Fox check out that rag-arm delivery of his in the warm-up tosses beforehand and figure they’d hedge their bets against him bouncing one?

P.S. In (booing) Cardinal fans’ defense, maybe they thought that going out to the ol’ ballpark was the only way they could escape the guy in the primetime.

Quote of the Week (UPDATED)

(please scroll down for update)

“In a little over one hundred days, this Recovery Act has worked as intended."

This was intended?



(UPDATE #1): Why it’s worse than advertised/you think:

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don't count on the unemployment roll.

(ed: It's bad enough that here in California even state workers have been ordered to take 3 furlough days/month)

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

(emphasis ours)

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone.

For the rest of the cheery news from Mort Zuckerman, go here.

Special Announcement

So, what were we saying about the incestuous and inbred nature of this country’s power structure that has been at the very core of the mess in which we now reside?

I guess for me there are two interesting aspects of the story. The first is how thorny it's been for Treasury to bring in people to help fix the financial mess. They've had to grant waivers over various lobbying restrictions, and they've been at pains to find people with the expertise to fix the mess that we're in but who were not themselves part of the mess. That's a small applicant pool. Leaving aside the merits of the Cuomo investigation, it's likely to make that pool even smaller.

That from Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic on the resignation of the Car Czar, Steve Rattner.

So, in order to get as far outside that proverbial little box as humanly possible, Beers with Demo officially endorses Iowahawk as the new Car Czar.

The Friday Evening Dump

(one in a weekly series intended to shine some light on unsavory news being jettisoned from the White House and Capitol Hill right before the weekend)

Hey, do you remember when they told us that if we voted for McCain, it would mean that our health care benefits would be taxed? Well, it looks like they may be right.

The campaign ad was ominous: "John McCain would make you pay income tax on your health insurance benefits. Taxing health benefits for the first time ever."

So warned candidate Barack Obama less than a year ago. In ads and speeches, Obama went on to predict the horrific fallout of McCain's proposal: financial hardship and millions dumped from employer-provided health plans.

Today(ed.: Friday, June 10), spokesmen for President Obama are saying a tax on employer-provided health benefits wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.

Roughly 163 million Americans receive health insurance through their employer. While actually a form of compensation, the value of the employer's contribution to that insurance is not taxed under the federal income or payroll taxes.

So, in addition to being a hypocrite, Obama is only being as nefarious as McCain in implementing this effective tax hike, which if executed on a wholesale basis would result in a tax increase of $2.3 trillion over 10 years for all Americans who receive employer-based health care, right?

Uhhh… not quite. The McCain taxing of health care benefits was to shift the overall health care obligation from the employers to more of a free-market approach whereby individuals and families would be given vouchers funded by the tax to shop around for health care.

The Congressional plan that is doing the heavy lifting for the President is in a mad scramble to raise the $1 to $2 trillion of jack that will be needed to fund his “public option”. Just a little different, wouldn’t you say?

But since a tax on everyone’s health insurance plan is most likely a political non-starter, Congress will probably focus their tax sights on just the most generous of benefit plans. We’re looking at you, middle class.

Unfortunately, this elimination of tax exemption for just the above-average value health plans won’t nearly raise the amount of money to fund the public option. Investor Business Daily surmises only $165 bil will be raised in this manner so Congress will be required to root around and about for additional, ahem, revenue streams. Anyone up for a payroll tax, a value-added tax… an income tax surcharge?

Such wonderful news in the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, we’re sure you would agree.

Oh, and dig this, courtesy Innocent Bystanders

Line of the Day (UPDATED...again)

(please scroll down for updates)

Meanwhile it is being reported that Mr. Jackson will be buried without his brain -- apparently in a move to stand in solidarity with all of the people who will watch the memorial service live on ABC, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC.

That from the New Editor.

And to put a nice neat bow on things, the Reverand Al Sharpton is calling for a U.S. Postage stamp honoring Michael Jackson and during Sunday services at the First A.M.E. Church in South-Central Los Angeles, Sharpton also called for nationwide "love vigils" in rememberance for a man who admitted to sleeping with 10 yr. old boys. Nice touch, Reverand.

(UPDATE #1): Laker G.M. Mitch Kupchak may want to rethink that 3-year deal he has offered to Ron Artest.

Soon to be L.A. Laker, Ron Artest (a pick up which we absolutely love, btw), proves he isn’t quite as far out of the wacky woods as we would like by laying down a tribute to Michael Jackson. No big deal there, but doesn’t he around the 1:53 mark say/sing: “I know you’re in Heaven, I hope to see you next year.”

(Strong language warning)





(UPDATE #2): We’re stoked about the Artest deal but it’s stuff like the above and now this that gives us pause:

Those of you wondering what number Ron Artest will be wearing can stop. Elliott Teaford of the Daily News reports a decision has been made:

Artest will wear uniform No. 37 in honor of the number of weeks that Michael Jackson's album "Thriller" was No. 1 on the charts.

And Artest himself: “I think more kids should start getting the #37 for a great human being, since Michael loved all people. I think I’m representing greatness in wearing #37."

It’s beginning to appear that there is at least one side benefit to Michael Jackson’s untimely demise: one less potential stalker in L.A.

Ron, knock it off and concentrate on hoops!