What we've been tweeting

.

.


Why should anyone be so surprised that a Chicago pol with a kill list and the power to indefinitely detain would use "revenge" when speaking about voting?


.

Radio KBwD is on the air: the covers edition

.

We're going to mix this up a bit. Normally we do the original versus a later cover but since we are not too familiar with Chuck Berry's original of the song we'll go with the two takes that we are.


.




First up: Johnny Rivers and his cover of Berry's "Memphis" that charted back in 1964:





.



And just over 20 years later, George Thorogood put his own touch on the classic in 1985:

... Information, please!...

.

Better healthcare via...

.

the IRS?


Top reason why you may want to vote out your current Senator or Congressman next Tuesday: There is the possibility he/she thought that putting the IRS in charge of compliance for the Affordable Care Act was a swell idea.



From Americans for Tax Reform:

When Obamacare's individual mandate takes effect in 2014, all Americans who file income tax returns must complete an additional IRS tax form. The new form will require disclosure of a taxpayer's personal identifying health information in order to determine compliance with the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate.

As confirmed by IRS testimony to the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, "taxpayers will file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and/or making a payment".

So why will the Obama IRS require your personal identifying health information?

Simply put, there is no way for the IRS to enforce Obamacare's individual mandate without such an invasive reporting scheme. Every January, health insurance companies across America will send out tax documents to each insured individual. This tax document-a copy of which will be furnished to the IRS-must contain sufficient information for taxpayers to prove that they purchased qualifying health insurance under Obamacare.

This new tax information document must, at a minimum, contain: the name and health insurance identification number of the taxpayer; the name and tax identification number of the health insurance company; the number of months the taxpayer was covered by this insurance plan; and whether or not the plan was purchased in one of Obamacare's "exchanges."

As there are 140 million families who file a tax return, this will mean that there will be at least 140 million more documents dumped onto the system in which to issue, receive back, evaluate and for which to take action against the filer should the IRS deem it necessary. Small wonder the IRS was looking for 16,000 more agents not too long ago.

Now, how will this improve the health of this nation? It won't because ObamaCare was never about that nor was it really about bending downward the healthcare cost curve as the President has repeated over and over. It's about control. How else do you explain the fact that the most feared and hated bureaucracy in the federal government will be in charge of policing participation in ObamaCare?

Go to link here, to see what the good folks at ATR think the ObamaCare compliance form will look like.

A big, fat, steaming pile of doo-doo as far as we're concerned.

.

Summing it up...

.

... as only Michael Ramirez can.

.


As a point of comparison, consider the freakout on the left and within the media at large that occurred in the wake of Abu Ghraib, a glorified frat hazing stunt where no one was killed.

Suffice to say, this all would have been handled a bit differently were it a Republican administration that left 4 ultimately dead Americans twisting in the wind and then couldn't get their story straight about it even one month after the incident.

.

Another day, another round of bad news for ObamaCare

.

So, why isn't the President campaigning on his signature piece of legislation, ObamaCare, the crown jewel of command and control statism? Because more and more bad news as represented by the chart below illustrate just what a disaster the (perhaps, not so) Affordable Care Act will be.



(click to enlarge)

The composite premium increases of 55%-85% above current market averages by 2017 as found by a study performed by Milliman, the prestigious actuarial consulting firm, which was retained by the Ohio Department of Insurance to perform that study.

55-85%!


As the first two lines of the chart show, Milliman blames the bulk of the increases on the fact that ObamaCare will mandate more coverage and benefits and that more people will be added to the risk pool to receive those additional bennies.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist or even an actuarian to figure out that if you going to provide more coverage and provide more coverage to more people, that is necessarily going to result in a net increase in costs to the healthcare system. No amount of budget gimmickry that was built into ObamaCare was going to dodge this stark mathematical reality.


Go to the linked article for more cheery news on cuts to Medicare and the growing number of doctors who will place "new or additional limits" on accepting Medicare patients.

.

Not so random thoughts of the day

.


Via Shane Atwell:

Check out this approx. 4-1/2 minute video on Chicago residents fed up with the Great Society welfare machine of Democrat pols, unions and failed liberal policies.

Community resident Paul McKinley says, “Everything in Chicago is controlled by the Democratic party. Everything in my community is controlled by Black Democrats. There is no Tea Party in my community. There is no Republicans. So they can’t blame the Tea Party.” Later, he says, “I tell you that the liberal agenda is not the black agenda, it is not the family agenda, and it is not the American agenda.”

This video and what these folks were saying reminded us of our experiences in the black community here in San Diego.

Our job on the waterfront has afforded us the opportunity to play in shipyard leagues over the years. In our first season, many, many moons ago, we played on a team of all white staff engineers in a predominately black and latino league. We did alright and held our own with ourselves and our boy, "Tommy Gun" leading the way (everyone hated playing us because "those white boys be shootin' that ball!"). We didn't get the team back together the following year, so we were, more or less, recruited to play on one of the other teams the following year.

From then on, we were pretty much the only white player on whatever team we happened to be playing on. It was an eye-opening experience, though, for reasons you may not have expected.

At least once or twice a year, our team would get together to cook out, most of the time at Mission Bay where we would pot-luck it. Perhaps some of whatever grilling prowess we possess stemmed from the fact that we did not want to get embarrassed in front our brothers when it came to grillin'.

We're getting to the point, trust us: the conversations we had were fascinating. Amid all the ribbing and smack-talk, there would be openings of somewhat serious discussion about our families and where we came from and how we were reared. Mild competition arose over who had it tougher as a kid. We mostly listened as who wants to hear about growing up in North Orange County whose family's idea of austerity was focusing on school, church, youth sports and Dad's Sunday evening home-cooked dinner extravaganzas at the expense of dining out, vacations to Hawai'i or trips to Disneyland, though that may have won the Riehm family some medals for our particular demographic there in Placentia because it seemed all our neighbors were having all that fun.

Shorter: if you had a transcript of those conversations and cleaned up the language, you'd've sworn it was a bunch of cranky old white men talking about who had it worse. These were not the conversations envisioned by rich white liberals rather, without the political rhetoric, they were conversations about family, commitment, fishing, of course, and "doing the right thing". Mind you, these guys weren't angels but, they knew. They knew. Amid their own self-inflicted wounds of perhaps fathering children out of wedlock and other indiscretions, these guys all knew what was expected of them as grown men and none of it ever involved getting help from some other entity. Though, perhaps, their actions did not always reflect it, they were grown-ass men and knew they had to produce... for their children, for their family and for their bosses at the yard

We think the word has been trivialized and cartoon-ized but we believe there is a simple honor in machismo. There is a singularity and dignity in that word that says, "No, I got this. Thanks for the offer but this one is mine".

All the above, of course, is at odds with the modern statist welfare complex which has succeeded in infantilizing and apologizing for two, maybe three now, generations of black males. My friends, my teammates are fighting against a near-irreversible tide of culture that is stacked against establishing functioning nuclear families, functioning schools and functioning communities.

If we were, say, a 70 year-old black male living in inner-city Chicago, we'd probably be in a blind rage at this point knowing that the welfare state of LBJ's Great Society, for whatever good it had intended, had transformed into a a self-sustaining monetary black hole that, in reality, preyed upon and thus profited from the misery of the very people it had set out to help.

.

Quote of the day

.

Here's the father of slain former SEAL, Tyrone Woods speaking out about his son's death in Benghazi this past September 11th. Listen to/read in the transcript below what he has to say and prepare to have your mind blown:


Via Hot Air:

“I was contacted by military personnel yesterday, who told me an interesting fact. And that is any consulate anywhere in the world is American soil,” Woods said. “Any attack on an American consulate is an attack on American soil. There were American citizens that were attacked for seven hours on American soil a couple thousand miles away from Washington, D.C.”

“My question of the president would be this: Your Honor, I respect your office as president. But if this attack on American citizens, on American soil, happened 2,000 miles away from Washington, D.C. — say in Los Angeles or in Seattle — would you have waited seven hours before you sent the first airplane? Would you have waited seven hours until the attack was over? Would you have waited a couple of days until you had all of the videos and all the information before you responded in a responsible military way?” …

“This is about honor, courage and about love for America. And remember this, Mr. President: My son and the others died heroes and it’s better to die the death of a hero than it is to live the life of a coward. If you are responsible for the death of my son, I forgive you, I love you. I also love America.

(italics, ours)


Dude.

Dude...

If you wondered from where Tyrone Woods received his courage, honor and sense of duty, your question has just been answered.


We don’t doubt Charles Wood’s sincerity, such is the forgiving power of agape’ love but there is also profound disappointment within Mr. Woods for the way the aftermath of this disaster was handled. When we watched it, we could not help but recall a famous scene from one of the greatest movies of all time that was also all about profound disappointment






.


Our prayers to the Woods family and to the families of the other 3 slain American heroes of Benghazi.

.

Photo image of the day and an observation or two

.

At last... we found the one Democrat willing to campaign on Obama's signature piece of legislation...

... in LaMesa Village yesterday...

The President is not making a mistake by not running on ObamaCare as he knows the sausage-making legislation of it and, indeed, the content of the law got completely bunged-up.

When that simpering idiot, Nancy Pelosi, told the world that they needed to pass the legislation in order to find out what's in it becomes the signature imagery of that legislation, you know you've got problems.



B-Daddy at The Liberator Today explains why it is that a second term, and specfically, ObamaCare are not good for the "liberal" brand.

ACA. The Affordable Care Act will continue to be an albatross around the Democratic party's collective neck. Time will reveal all of the sops to big insurance and big pharma that went into the bill. It will eat into the party's desired reputation as being against the excesses of big business. When your party is seen as the party of both Big Business and Big Government you are toast. Look at the 2006 Congressional elections and what happened to Republicans. Opinion polls had shifted and found the GOP to be seen as the party of big government in polls and they got shellacked.

ACA. Again, because you know in your heart that countless regulations embedded in the law will drive up the cost of health care and tarnish government with the same heartless image that is now enjoyed by the insurance companies. Being tied to the eventual demise of quality health care is not in the Democratic party's best interest. You would be better served by a repeal, after which you could propose a much simpler bill that prevented discrimination due to pre-existing conditions, guaranteed portability and subsidized insurance for those above the poverty line but still in lower income brackets. Even though I don't agree with this platform, it is guaranteed to be more popular than the ACA.

If not repealed, the Democrats will live with the negative impacts of ObamaCare for years to come.




Observation(s): We don't know how it is in your neighborhood but there has been an incredible dearth of front lawn political signage in this election cycle. We see a few state-wide proposition and San Diego mayoral lawn signs but have seen zero, repeat, zero presidential signage in a pretty solidly Democratic neighborhood which is quite a turnaround from the amount we saw in both the 2008 and even the 2004 campaign season.

What to make of the flap surrounding Madonna getting booed and being walked out on during a concert in which she encouraged fans to vote for Obama? Not much, we think. People go to concerts to listen to music and to escape the grind of everyday life, which at this time, every four years, means being bombarded with political ads and rhetoric. I'm sure the last thing even Democratic-leaning Madonna fans want to listen to is being preached at with respect to their vote of choice.

.

Political cartoon of the day

.

Plus this from the father of slain former SEAL and North County resident, Tyrone Woods:

“When [Obama] came over to our little area” at Andrew Air Force Base, says Woods, “he kind of just mumbled, you know, ‘I’m sorry.’ His face was looking at me, but his eyes were looking over my shoulder like he could not look me in the eye. And it was not a sincere, ‘I’m really sorry, you know, that your son died,’ but it was totally insincere, more of whining type, ‘I’m sorry.’”

Woods says that shaking President Obama’s hands at his son’s memorial service was “like shaking hands with a dead fish.”

“It just didn’t feel right,” he says of his encounter with the commander in chief. “And now that it’s coming out that apparently the White House situation room was watching our people die in real time, as this was happening,” Woods says, he wants answers on what happened—and why there was no apparent effort to save his son’s life.

Well over a month after the incident, the President says they are still working on getting all the facts. Color us skeptical but we don't think Mr. Woods will be getting any answers any time soon.

But, remember, it's all just a distraction, right?



H/T: Instapundit

Tribalism at its finest

.


A couple of days ago we noted that with a Romney election victory things like Obama's "kill list" and the National/American Defense Authorization Act would finally be getting the scrutiny they deserve.

For as these Obama supporters appear to concede, it's OK, when your guy has that kill list.






From "Psychopath" to "uhhh... healthcare" in a matter of minutes.


So, on November 7, we'll see if those stalwart civil libertarians that have been enjoying their little nappy-poo for the past 4 years will get out of the rack or simply hit the snooze bar for another 4 years.

.

Video clip of the day

.

For those of you in love with the auto bailouts as much as we are, this one is kind of a no-brainer.

Love that they patterned the music after the Bob Seeger "Like a Rock" Chevy ads from years gone by.

All you have to do is fail miserably...

.