Was it a bug or a feature?

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We’ve often railed about the completely illiberal notion of forcing people, under the threat of a rectal exam by the IRS, to part with their hard-earned scratch to line the pockets of for-profit entities, in ObamaCare’s case, the health insurance industry.


We may not be railing for too much longer if the following case of AETNA becomes a larger trend and Big Health simply drops out of ObamaCare.


Hello, single payer!


From CNBC:

Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini told CNBC on Wednesday that Obamacare has failed to attract the uninsured, and he offered a scenario in which the insurance company could be forced to pull out of program.

He said that so far, Obamacare has just shifted people who were insured in the individual market to the public exchanges where they could get a better deal on a subsidy for coverage. "We see only 11 percent of the population is actually people that were firmly uninsured that are now insured. So [it] didn't really eat into the uninsured population."

Add to that it’s not the right type of uninsured. Indications are that there are simply not enough young healthy people signing up, the so-called young invincibles, who won’t be a drag on the healthcare system but whose money is needed to offset the cost of the old and sick. This is the adverse selection we have been talking about for years now.


So what’s going to happen? Back to the article:

The company will be submitting Obamacare rates for 2015 on May 15.

"Are they going to be double-digit [increases] or are we going to get beat up because they're double-digit or are we just going to have to pull out of the program?" Bertolini asked in a "Squawk Box" interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "Those questions can't be answered until we see the population we have today. And we really don't have a good view on that."

Let us help out with that answer: Yes.

We simply cannot wait until that May date and the shrieks of protestation and threatening language that will emanate from the White House and from the offices of Health and Human Services, and, in particular, the HMFIC of HHS, Kathleen Sebelius. This will be fun.


More from AETNA’s honcho:

For Obamacare to work better, it needs more flexibility and choice of insurance programs, Bertolini said. "We need to make it a lot more simpler for people. There needs to be more choice. When you get more choice, you make it more of a market and you get more people in the program."

You know, if only some people were around to warn that top-down, centralized planning would actually restrict choice and flexibility. Yes, Bertolini is certainly correct: getting the government out of the equation will greatly improve the situation but that horse is out of the barn with scant chance of corralling and returning it to its original locale. We will forthwith refrain from the use of any other tortured analogies.




Years from now, when we look back at how it is we got to a single-payer system, we will ponder this: was it all part of the grand plan to design a federal healthcare system that after a few years or even a decade or two, simply imploded unable to hold up under its own weight or was it simply due to monumental incompetence and hubris thinking that the strings of 1/6th of the nation’s economy could effectively be pulled by the smartest kids in the room?



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Programming note: we will be out of pocket for a few days but hope to be back up and running by Thursday or Friday.

We hope this guy would have approved of the following message

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We were doing some quality control of our blog post archives when we ran across the post below from over two years ago. It concerned the increase in scope and breadth of our entitlement society and the deleterious effects it has on the individual which then is passed along to our society as a whole.

Look at what has happened in Europe, particularly southern Europe, where even talk of relatively modest austerity measures to their massive social safety net is cause for rioting in the streets. The rioters haven't figured out or refuse to acknowledge basic economics: you may vote for free stuff but in reality, that stuff is not free; the cost has to be picked up somewhere and by someone and with an aging population, someone is becoming an increasingly smaller number paying out benefits to a growing population of pensioners. The math dictates that this is an unsustainable situation and math wins, math always wins.

From April of 2011:

Give us a chance so we can dicover the most valuable ways to serve one another.





Dennis Prager from NRO on entitlements vs. rights and free markets vs. the welfare state:

What handouts do, and what the transformation of handouts into rights does, is create a citizenry that increasingly lacks the most important character trait - gratitude. Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent. That is why we teach our children to say "thank you." But the welfare state undoes that. One does not express thanks for a right. So, instead of "thank you," the citizen of the welfare state is taught to say, "What more can I get?"

Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the Left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people.

John Stossel was on O'Reilly the other night and claimed that private charity would step in and replace the broader government-sponsored and managed social safety net were it ever dismantled. We tend to agree with him but we wonder if we've passed the point of no return in that our desire and incentive to voluntarily give our time, talent and treasure to helping those less fortunate than us has been blunted to the point that our belief is no longer true.

When one starts claiming that a job, a house and health care are "rights", how is anything then not on the table to be provided and which results in the involuntary confiscation of those that create, build and provide those assumed rights?

We're seeing some positive signs particularly at the state level where steps are being taken to curtail the collective bargaining "rights" of government employee unions and also to prevent the automatic deduction (see also, confiscation) of tax-payer-funded salaries which go directly to political causes, most notably those that involve the further expansion of union "rights".

Rights supported by the confiscation of goods and services are not right at all and that's why we love that quote above that was taken from the Keynes v Hayek smackdown in the previous post.



Give us a chance = Free will not top down/command and control decision-making will allow...

So we can discover = our God-given talents, intellect and ability to figure out...

the most valuable ways = achieving the most efficient means...

to serve one another = of being a positive force in society whether in the market place or charity.

Back to real time:

Dull, listless, yet ever-more selfish and ungrateful wards of the state or vibrant, giving, independent and grateful members of society. It seems like a no-brainer but our voting habits would also seem to indicate otherwise.


We've probably been doing a piss-poor job of it but we will continue to make the case for the ultimate morality and decency of free market socio-economics over the ultimate enslavement of statism/collectivism.

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Some people just can't quit digging

Last week, we blogged about MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry and her updating of the collectivist Hillary Clinton "It takes a village" meme and which can be found here.

We had some fun with it on Twitter wondering if when MH-P dropped off her kid with us on Friday evening, she was prepared to pick up a Dodger, Laker, Charger and Milton Friedman fan on Sunday afternoon. And we believe it was Sarah Palin who asked if MH-P would be cool if the Palin family took her tyke hunting after church in their big pick-up.

Funny stuff but it's something the bubble people of the establishment media don't ask themselves: If you're in the It takes a village set, are you willing to expose your children to opinions and possibly even indoctrination of which you vehemently disagree?



Well, not to be outdone, Melissa Harris-Perry doubled down on her collectivism, this time going wondering if people's freedom can be impinged upon for the greater common good.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"This isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property. This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good. And that is exactly the fight that we have been having for a couple hundred years.”

Since we know her track record and since she's even asking the question, we don't think we're going out on a limb by saying she has no problem with what it is she is postulating. A few points/questions: We would like MH-P to give us an operational definition of "common good". We've got a pretty good idea that our idea of "common good" doesn't jive with hers. Well, we're just assuming that because given the context of impinging on our freedom, we're not quite sure what "common good" even means, ourselves. It's Orwellian Newspeak. Also, by institutions, we're assuming she doesn't mean the Christian Church. Of course, she doesn't. Again, the establishment-left who live in their echo-chamber and who come up with this non-sense don't think through their half-baked theorizations. They automatically assume their correct thinking will be the coin of the realm as they move us all towards this utopic "common good". So much for diversity and more importantly, diversity of thought. With collectivists like MH-P, there is no such thing. It's their way or the highway as they are obviously superior moral and intellectual betters to the rest of us and the quicker we accept that fact, the quicker they can achieve their collectivist goals. Freedom and liberty are fine for her and her socio-poltical set, but the rest of us are not to be trusted with it, especially as it may run afoul of the "common good." In the words of a World War II general: Nuts! If no one else will say it, we will: Melissa Harris-Perry is a fascist thug and she only confirms this notion each time she opens her yap.

Video clip of the day

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MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry updating Hillary Clinton's "It Takes a Village" meme from the 90s.

"We always had this private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of 'these are our children.' So, part of it is we have to break through this private idea that kids belong to their parents... (rather) recognize that kids belong to whole communities.

So, what's your personal "creep factor" on this one? We give it a solid 8 (out of 10). Points for the earnestness that comes with this strain of lefty down for the struggle packaging.

In the past we've been shamed into parting with our scratch to lavish upon a broken public education system on the simple "it's for the children" sales pitch with the implied accusation that you are a heartless bastard if you don't vote for that particular school bond in November.

We've entered new territory here as the "it's for the children" angle is topped off with a healthy dose of getting onboard and being a team player in the new collective vision of the future as a means to grab more of our money. To believe or act otherwise would be anti-social behaviour at its most unacceptable.


Looks as if transformation of MSNBC from an opinion and news outfit to a megaphone for statist collective group-think is complete. Congrats, gang.

What we've been Tweeting

So, the President got himself into a little hot water this past week while he was out here in California when he called California's Attorney General Kamala Harris the "best looking" AG. She is indeed a good-looking woman and we don't feel the President did anything necessarily wrong here. But we all know the drill, don't we?: if we are we are going to be held to politically correct, modern liberal standards with respect how it is we address and refer to women then we sure as hell are going to hold others to it as well.


And this isn't the first, nor even second or third time there has been some borderline sexist-appearing improprieties with this President and his administration.

freebeacon.com/sexist-in-chie…Face it, lib ladies, your hero is a bit of a sexist #creeper.

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

But who knows? Maybe this objectification of a high-ranking state official may cause a sea change in people's attitudes. It won't be the first time the President has led the way in changing people's opinion on things.

abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?sect…Like #drones and #SSM, can we assume how it is that #Obama addresses women in the workplace is evolving?#creeper

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

Nope. The politically correct-thinking crowd won the day as the President apologized for a justifiable compliment to a woman.

abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?sect…What makes one look like a bigger horse's ass than saying a woman is "best looking..."?Apologizing for it.

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

And here is another heart-warming story involving our country's public education system and specifically to teachers bullying a young conservative student:

radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/to…Wisconsin public schools:making the case for school choice.

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/to…WI teachers wouldn't bully gay, atheist or Muslim students and rightly so but conservatives r apparently fair game.

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/to…"I took a stand because it's not about me."Right on, kid.

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

We're growing weary of the "isolated incident" defense as a) the high schooler in question, Benji Backer, has been repeatedly harrassed and bullied by multiple faculty members at this school and b) there is very much a culture, it appears, in our schools that is openly and vigorously hostile to anti-statist thinking.

The thin pro-union veneer during the Wisconsin public-employee pension reform debate that was scratched off revealing a virulent and often un-hinged anti-capitalist, class warfare mentality is evidence of this.






And like foreign aid to folks like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, there are othere things that will not be effected by sequester cuts as our buddy JD points out:

Federal kickbacks to be raised 5% across the board effective immediately.

— JD (@Psudrozz) April 4, 2013

Master satirist/humoruist Iowahawk gets in a dig at the food-stamps-are-an-economic-stimulus crowd:

Keep holy the Sacred Multiplier RT @exjon Keynesians are the new flat-earthers.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 2, 2013

Fisker is about to go belly-up? Of course, Fisker is about to go belly-up:

m.us.wsj.com/articles/a/SB1…U.S. tax-payer subsidized EV firm that builds it's $100K cars in Finland going bankrupt.#ThisIsMyShockFace

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

m.us.wsj.com/articles/a/SB1…Another slow clap for the economic illiterates in the #Obama administration.#Fisker#A123

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

And the hits just keep coming for the Department of Energy's green loan program.

freebeacon.com/the-solar-pane…Another day, another corrupt, cronyistic #DOE loan #FAIL

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

We used to follow baseball a lot more closely when we were younger and football (see: NFL) had not yet become a 12-month sport over which we could obssess. Having said that, there is a rhythm to things in life and it's good to see baseball back this week and it's also good to see MLB dropped the ridiculous idea of having two West Coast teams open up in Japan for a two game set a full week and a half before the rest of the teams' openers on the first Monday in April as happened last year.

@corey0brien@mad_maxamillionGlad to see #MLB has resorted to NOT making hash of Opening Day/Fortnight like they did last year.

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 1, 2013

Another RT for Iowahawk.

"Go to college" is to education what "swallow things" is to nutrition.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 1, 2013

So true. So true. Yes, education is important but so is examining our national obsession with going to college, particularly, when going to college means "exploring", "finding yourself", "celebrating diversity" and evidently running up $80,000 in student loan debt with a sociology degree that lands you a plumb unpaid internship after 5 years at good ol' State U.

Look at it this way: we can never get ahold of our plumber as dude always seems to be in Hawai'i or Acupulco with his third wife. College isn't for everybody. Deal with it.






Plenty of people were pretty chapped that Google's home page decided to honor Cesar Chavez instead of the Son of God last Sunday. Peeps, be careful what you ask for...

twitchy.com/2013/03/31/goo…To look on the bright side of things:Do #Christians really want #Google interpreting #Easter for them?

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) March 31, 2013

The White House and its water-carriers in the press were furiously spinning Friday's horrible jobs news.

hotair.com/archives/2013/…Faith-based community: Unemployment (7.6) at lowest in 4 yrs. Reality-based comm: labor part. @ lowest since '78.

— Dean R. Riehm (@deanriehm) April 5, 2013

We realize there is politics to be played with this stuff but this is no longer politics rather, what planet are these people from?





OK, gang, that's it for now. We'll catch up with you later. Probably related to some good news related for some monks down in Louisiana.

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Statists say (and do) the darndest things

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We've said it before and recent events warrant saying it again: the (gun) controllers* had better get their act together because this seeming gaffe-a-day from their camp is killing them in the PR battle with the gun rights crowd.

Let's take a look at some examples:

Nanny Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, is spending a whopping $12 million of his own money on a anti-gun campaign that isn't actually shilling for any particular (gun) control legislation. Here's one of his sponsored ads "Responsible":





Pro-tip: When advocating for stricter gun control, it's always important to make sure the actor you hired who owns his own flannel shirt, rifle and southern drawl has his gun pointed in some indiscriminate direction where there may or may not be people and has his index finger on the trigger of the gun.





Next up, here's Jim Carrey's (gun) control video from Funny or Die and which he teased in a tweet the day before it came out:

'Cold Dead Hand' is abt u heartless motherf%ckers unwilling 2 bend 4 the safety of our kids.Sorry if you're offended…

Cold Dead Hand with Jim Carrey from Jim Carrey

Full disclosure: We've never been Jim Carrey fans. His brand of physical humor had the shelf life of his last episode of "In Living Color". "Ace Ventura" had its moments but the rest of his cinematic endeavors did not impress. Sorry.

It's just not funny. For his expletive-laden tease, we expected something a little more edgy. Something a bit more provocative. And this is what we waited around for? Another lecture from an un-funny Hollywood liberal hack?






Lastly, you'll never guess who is a sponsor of Rev. Al Sharpton's MSNBC show? We'll let NewsBusters take it away:

Don't tell us that Al Sharpton and MSNBC are hypocrites? Noooo!! The Reverend Al opened his show by praising President Obama's efforts to promote tougher gun control laws. But 28 minutes into the show, a commercial appeared for, of all things . . . Henry Repeating Rifles.

Go to Henry Rifle's website and you'll find one rifle described as "big, brutal and beautiful" and noting that it fires ammunition "said to have killed more game, big and small, and more men, good and bad, than any other in existence." Another model offered for sale, the AR-7, is based on a military rifle, Henry emphasizing that given its lightweight design "you can carry a large quantity of ammunition." Oh the horror!

You can view the video at NewsBusters, here.



We think our admonition of our (gun) control friends and their continued gaffe-tasticness is causal from the following: the degree by which you push for stricter gun control is inversely proportional to how much you know about guns and gun laws.

But don't listen to us, guys - we're enjoying our schadenfreude-fueled sugar rush.




* As you might imagine from the parenthetical, we're of the firm belief that the (gun) control crowd, while perhaps claiming to be all about public safety and not infringing on U.S. citizens' 2nd amendment rights, betray themselves with overreaching and overbearing tactics and poorly thought-out legislation that suggests "freedom" and "liberty" are fine, fine concepts but not to be entrusted to the unwashed masses.


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Old and busted?

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Oh yeah. Leave it to the New York Times to wait for the last day of the year to come up with the worst Op-Ed of the year. The title tells you all you need to know:

Let’s Give Up on the Constitution



Right?

Our own alternative headline: Constitutional law professor really frustrated with a document that isn’t hip to the times.


We won’t do a paragraph by paragraph fisking but we will point out one particular portion:

The deep-seated fear that such disobedience [to the Constitution] would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity. And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.

(italics, ours)

There’s a couple of problems with that: yes, we could and did draw upon British common law but we were a new nation. It was incumbent that we hammer-out something iron-clad that would propel our nation forward as a nation of law rather than that from which we revolted and claimed independence; the very Great Britain and its tyranny which he cites as an example of how things were done better.

Besides, as it turned out, our nation going forward did not enjoy the homogeneity of Great Britain nor New Zealand from which these longstanding traditions could be drawn. As we are constantly reminded, we are nation of immigrants and, as such, many of this nation’s new citizens came from parts of the world where concepts like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and property rights were totally, no pun intended, foreign. Yes, we attracted those foreigners and continue to do so precisely because of enshrined concepts laid down by those dead white men over 220 years ago.

We needed and continue to need a stable document that established the institutions we depend upon that rose up out of the Constitution. Scrapping the constitution is only an invitation for tyranny.

And merely surviving as a country from all the past abuses to the Constitution… how does that excuse those abuses and how does that make the Constitution any less relevant? The struggle over interpretation of the Constitution doesn’t mean you scrap it. That’s the whole idea. We all have our different interpretations and just because you believe all these different interpretations have led to all the acrimony and vitriol in politics these days, is far from any legitimate reason to scrap the Constitution.

And please try telling my parents who were rearing a young family about acrimony and vitriol as they were doing it amid protests, upheaval and assassinations in the late 60s and early 70s. What we are currently experiencing is nothing compared to what this country went through 40-45 years ago.

That column was just a thinly-veiled whine because this supposed Constitutional law professor wasn’t getting what he wanted out of politics.




And just kicking it around BwD headquarters today allowed us ample opportunity to Tweet our reaction to this wretched article:

#NYTimes doesn’t like the #Constitution, except for the parts it likes. Got it.

If you don’t like the #Constitution then garner support, consensus and votes to change it. It’s been done before. #Amendments

Newspaper that endorsed a man who granted himself the powers of indefinite detention w/o cause thinks we are too obsessed w/the #Constitution.

Political set of people who ripped previous President for shredding the Constitution now say we have an unhealthy obsession with it.

With President set too extend/expand warrantless surveillance, NYTimes thinks it’s time to scrap the Constitution. This is not a coincidence.

Those that question the individual right to bear arms also claim #healthcare is a universal right. This is what passes as statist logic.

Please feel free to expound upon those parts of the Constitution you no likey. Seriously. Give some specifics.

And our boy JD @Psudrozz replied thusly:

The font selection was horrible. 225 years ago the framers couldn’t envision the proper font. Should be scrapped.

And this from @hale_razor:

We’re at the point where liberals say the constitution is optional but Obamacare is mandatory

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Sorry to wrap this up this so curtly but a hearfelt congratulations to the New York Times for sneaking in just under the wire and offering up the worst op-ed column of the year.

Quickies

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A round-up of news items, articles, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.






More news from the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin debacle down in Florida:

On Friday George Zimmerman Sues NBC Over Edited 911 Tape Report was a top story. Here is the recap: (TMZ) Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman has filed a lawsuit against NBC over the way it edited his 911 call -- placed moments before Martin was shot -- claiming the network falsely made Zimmerman look like a "hostile racist."
You'll recall, NBC launched an internal investigation over the tape after it aired the edited recording -- which made it sound like Zimmerman immediately told police that Martin was black, without being prompted.

In actuality, the full 911 tape reveals Zimmerman only referred to Martin as "black" when responding to a question from the dispatcher about Trayvon's race.

Zimmerman accuses NBC of creating a "false and defamatory misimpression using the oldest form of yellow journalism: manipulating Zimmerman's own words, splicing together disparate parts of the recording to create the illusion of statements that Zimmerman never actually made."

Two things: 1) We look forward to George Zimmerman sitting on a small mountain of NBC's cash when all is said and done and 2) this is just a gentle reminder of how corrupt and degenerate this country's media has become.







Ugh... We're forced to blog about this guy:

From the Washington Times:

The White House deleted a petition Friday on its web site demanding that President Obama rescind an invitation to “Gangnam style” rapper Psy to sing at a Christmas concert in Washington, due to the performer’s anti-American rants.

The petition was signed by about 500 people who object to the singer’s scheduled performance, which Mr. Obama is to attend. But the White House said it took down the petition because it violated the terms of participation on the administration’s “We the People” web site.

Psy, a 34-year-old South Korean performer whose “Gangnam style” video is the most-watched of all time, apologized Friday for making obscene comments about U.S. troops at a protest concert in 2004 in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He reportedly sang:

“Kill those f–ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives.”
“Kill those f–ing Yankees who ordered them to torture.”

“Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers.”

“Kill them all slowly and painfully.”

In his apology, the rap star said, “As a proud South Korean who was educated in the United States and lived there for a very significant part of my life, I understand the sacrifices American servicemen and women have made to protect freedom and democracy in my country and around the world.”

“The song in question — from eight years ago — was part of a deeply emotional reaction to the war in Iraq and the killing of two innocent Korean civilians that was part of the overall antiwar sentiment shared by others around the world at that time,” he said in a statement. “While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted. I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused anyone by those words.”

(italics, ours)


8 years ago... Remember? That was back when dissent was patriotic. Besides, we've moved way beyond all that torture stuff. We won't be holding our breath, however, for a PSY rap-rant on indefinite detentions and/or drone strike assassinations to be performed at this concert.







ObamaCare: improving the financial health of lobbyists one congressional staffer at a time.

Liz Fowler worked for Democratic Senator Max Baucus in the first half of last decade, and so it wasn’t surprising when she cashed out to run the lobbying shop at Wellpoint, the nation’s largest private insurer.

After all, that’s what Max Baucus staffers do. They become high-paid lobbyists for powerful companies dependent on government. Former Baucus chief of staff David Castagnetti is now a lobbyist partner at Mehlman, Vogel, Catagnetti. Successor Jeff Forbes is a partner at Cauthen, Forbes, and Williams. Baucus’s chief trade counsel Scott Parven doesn’t have a lobbying firm named after him, because he sold his firm to K Street giant Akin Gump. There are literally dozens of others.

It also wasn’t surprising when Baucus hired her back to help write Obamacare. After all, Baucus is famously close with K Street and industry lobbyists.

Given Baucus’s central role in drafting Obamacare, and lobbyists’ access to Baucus, it wasn’t surprising either when the bill won the backing of the biggest health-industry lobbies in the country — Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the American Medical Association, and the American Hospital Association.

The hand-in-hand public-private corporatism so derided during the Bush years has re-branded itself to become the single greatest feature of the Obama administration. Congratulations on this feat that was accomplished in no small part by the silence if not advocacy of the government/media/entertainment complex.






Not all calls for genocide are created or viewed equally:

Is promoting genocide a human-rights violation? You might think that's an easy question. But it isn't at Human Rights Watch, where a bitter debate is raging over how to describe Iran's calls for the destruction of Israel. The infighting reveals a peculiar standard regarding dictatorships and human rights and especially the Jewish state.

Human Rights Watch is the George Soros-funded operation that has outsize influence in governments, newsrooms and classrooms world-wide. Some at the nonprofit want to denounce Iran's regime for inciting genocide. "Sitting still while Iran claims a 'justification to kill all Jews and annihilate Israel is a position unworthy of our great organization," Sid Sheinberg, the group's vice chairman, wrote to colleagues in a recent email.

But Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who runs the nonprofit, strenuously disagrees.

Asked in 2010 about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that Israel "must be wiped off the map," Mr. Roth suggested that the Iranian president has been misunderstood. "There was a real question as to whether he actually said that," Mr. Roth told The New Republic, because the Persian language lacks an idiom for wiping off the map. Then again, Mr. Ahmadinejad's own English-language website translated his words that way, and the main alternative translation—"eliminated from the pages of history"—is no more benign. Nor is Mr. Ahmadinejad an outlier in the regime. Iran's top military officer declared earlier this year that "the Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel."

A Clintonian torturing of the English language to be sure when we all know the official party line of Iran and about every other bad actor over there in that neck of the woods.





Turns out Mitt Romney was spot-on regarding Benghazi. So explain to us again why it is he is taking so much grief for saying Obama won the election because he promised free stuff.

The city of Detroit faces a major financial crisis and one member of city council thinks President Barack Obama should step in and help.

City Council member JoAnn Watson said Tuesday the citizens support of Obama in last month's election was enough reason for the president to bailout the struggling the city. (Click the video player to listen)

"Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president and there ought to be a quid pro quo and you ought to exercise leadership on that," said Watson. "Of course, not just that, but why not?"

Nearly 75 percent of Wayne County voters pulled the lever for Obama in November.

"After the election of Jimmy Carter, the honorable Coleman Alexander Young, he went to Washington, D.C. He came home with some bacon," said Watson. "That's what you do."

Young served as Detroit's mayor for 20 years and served as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1977 to 1981.

We're sorry. Not free per se, rather quid pro quo meaning Detroit and Wayne County vote for Obama and the rest of us pay for another four years.

Related: Is there a correlation between the percentage of votes going to Obama in a particular city/county and that city/county's fiscal dysfunctionality?








And finally...

You may be shocked to learn that some coastal types that appear on MSNBC on a regular basis don't think you are paying enough at the pump and would like to see that price go higher to make alternative energy sources more competitive.

It's telling that they no longer speak of making wind and solar more competitive by improving the technology of wind and solar rather making wind and solar more competitive by taxing oil and natural gas, i.e. sticking it to the consumer, you, in order to fulfill their half-witted, agenda-driven energy fantasies.




OK, gang, that's it for today. We'll see you all tomorrow.

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All the hep cats are getting with the times

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Europe is so modern they're throwing things into reverse.


From CNBC:

The French politician who said Indian steel company ArcelorMittal should leave the country has told CNBC that his government is only acting like U.S. President Barack Obama.

Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg, a member of the governing Socialist party, caused controversy last week when he said that the Indian company, which employs close to 20,000 people in France, should leave after it said it would have to close down a factory.

The French government announced on Thursday that it could nationalize the factory in question, with backing from an unnamed businessman.

The news raised the specter of the nationalizations of the early 1980s, which were instigated by Hollande’s predecessor Francois Mitterrand.

Montebourg told CNBC after a meeting with trade unions in Paris: “Barack Obama's nationalized. The Germans are nationalizing. All countries are nationalizing. I've also noticed the British nationalized 6 banks.”

Montebourg brushed off comparisons with that era. He said: “It's a very good sign to send out (to investors). Nationalizing is a very modern step to take. Especially when you not only nationalize losses but profits as well, when you make public/private partnerships. This is our strategy.

(italics, ours)



Just an aside but the U.S. taxpayers stand to lose tens of billions of dollars as things currently stand from our most ballyhooed nationalization effort: the government-engineered bankruptcy cramdowns of Chrysler and General Motors.


Yeah, that whole nationalization trend in Europe back in the 30s worked out pretty well, didn't it? Oh, but you say, to use the term this guy does, Europe is too "modern" to let some monster like Mussolini or Hitler come to power. Perhaps, but the framework for gross abuses of power against the individual and society as a whole via a supra-legal public-private complex would be firmly entrenched serving at the behest of an unaccountable political class.

We see it here as there are no fewer than 40 lawsuits being brought against the Obama administration on the grounds of religious liberty being infringed upon by the public-private fascist union of the largest health insurers bound to the federal government which was made possible by the Affordable Care Act, or, ObamaCare.

What power you grant the federal government to grant you "rights" is the same power by which the government can take away actual rights.





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"Nationalization": It was the "modern" thing to do back in the 30s.

Quickies: the Elections Have Consequences Edition

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A round-up of articles, news items, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.





Time to pay the piper, gang:

Shortly after Nov. 6, Zane Tankel, who runs 40 Applebee’s restaurants in the New York City area, announced that his company was freezing employment and would not build any new restaurants. President Obama’s re-election, Tankel explained, meant that ObamaCare was likely to be fully implemented, costing his company millions of dollars and significantly raising the cost of hiring a worker.

Tankel’s statement prompted outrage and threats of a boycott, but he was far from alone. Already John Schnatter, CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, has announced that he would likely lay off some workers. Earlier, Schnatter said that ObamaCare would cost his business $5 billion to $8 billion annually, forcing him to increase the price of pizzas.

Meanwhile, two other restaurant chains, Olive Garden and Red Lobster, are moving many of their employees from full- to part-time work in order to avoid the law’s mandate that anyone working more than 30 hours must have insurance. An owner of 40 Denny’s in Florida, meanwhile, says he’ll add a 5% surcharge to customer bills in 2014 to cover his increased costs.

Restaurants which employ many low-wage employees will simply not be able to afford ObamaCare's expanded coverage mandates beyoned the mini-med plans they currently provide their employees.

And for the outrageously outraged lefties who think that these layoffs and hiring freezes are some sort of "revenge" against employees who supposedly voted for Obama and have vowed to boycott places like Applebee's: that revenge boycott list is going to keep growing and growing. You all have fun with that.








So, this is what smart power and leading from behind will get you:

Egypt's president on Thursday issued constitutional amendments that placed him above judicial oversight and ordered the retrial of Hosni Mubarak for the killing of protesters in last year's uprising.

Mohammed Morsi also decreed immunity for the Islamist-dominated panel drafting a new constitution from any possible court decisions to dissolve it, a threat that had been hanging over the controversial assembly.

Liberal and Christian members withdrew from the assembly during the past week to protest what they say is the hijacking of the process by Morsi's allies, who they saw are trying to push through a document that will have an Islamist slant marginalizing women and minority Christians and infringing on personal liberties. Several courts have been looking into cases demanding the dissolution of the panel.

The Egyptian leader also decreed that all decisions he has made since taking office in June and until a new constitution is adopted and a new parliament is elected — which is not expected before next spring — are not subject to appeal in court or by any other authority. He also barred any court from dissolving the Islamist-led upper house of parliament, a largely toothless body that has also faced court cases.

The moves effectively remove any oversight on Morsi, the longtime Muslim Brotherhood figure who became Egypt's first freely elected president last summer after the Feb. 11, 2011 fall of autocrat Hosni Mubarak. They come as Morsi is riding high on lavish praise from President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for mediating an end to eight days of fighting between Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers.

It's good to be the King!


And let's not forget our little gun-running operation in Benghazi, Libya which ultimately resulted in the deaths of 4 Americans and a cover-up as to what happened on 9/11 at our consulate there.








Time to pay the piper pt. II

Want to know what we see here?

Blue

Top Five Tax Increases Tax Increases as % of Income

#1 – New Jersey $6,933 6.82%

#2 – Maryland $7,194 6.74%

#3 – Connecticut $6,653 6.62%

#4 – Massachusetts $6,632 6.53%

#5 – New Hampshire $5,660 5.81%








And nearly 4 years on, more waste, fraud and abuse from Porkulus:

President Obama sought to fund “shovel ready” projects with the 2009 stimulus, so the federal government spent $29 million in taxpayer money to dig a port in Alaska that has no roads connecting it to other towns.

“It’s not normal,” Steve Boardman of the Army Corps of Engineers civil projects division told KUCB (Alaska) . “And it has prevented the construction of harbors in the past, when that supporting infrastructure is not there.” Boardman explained that they were able to build the port in part because “the project was ‘shovel-ready’ when $29 million of federal stimulus money became available in 2009,” as KUCB put it.

Construction of a road to connect the “port” to the nearest town two miles away won’t begin for years, but the federal government is now committed either to losing the money spent already or having to lay out even more cash to build that road.

That's how it is with these massive public works boondoggles. We've seen it played out here in California with high-speed choo-choos. Once you cross the Rubicon, there is no turning back.

Once you have aligned the political forces behind a project and that project has wetted its beak at the trough, you quickly have a tax-payer funded black hole if the project was ill-conceived and not well-planned from the start.








This is Sarah sez- worthy:

By now you've heard the outrageous quote from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on his doubts about the origins of planet Earth. When asked to give its age, he replied: "I'm not a scientist, man. … Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."

He's not a scientist—no, indeed—and his comments have brought on a slew of finger wags and face-palms from the godless left. The answer was "so confused and error-riddled," wrote Phil Plait in Slate, "it's difficult to know where to start." We all should understand the age of Earth is not a matter of opinion, but a scientific fact: Our planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. If Rubio suggested otherwise, it's because he's uninformed or stupid.

But take a wild guess as to what Bible-thumping former Illinois back-bencher's view on creation and the age of the world sounds an awful like that of Rubio's. Check it out, here.







Here's Kobe Bryant:

“I’m not working too hard, to be honest with you. The shots that I made were all jumpers. It doesn’t take much energy to knock those jumpers down,” he said. “Bringing the ball up and having me kind of initiate the offense and score and stuff like that, it’s making me work a little more than I will when Gatsby gets back.

“When Gatsby gets back, I don’t have to do that. The game’s going to become even more easy for me.”

Gatsby?




But of course...

OK, gang, that's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.

Another day, another DOE green energy loan fail

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You know your idea is sunk when even the Chicomms who probably throw more tax-payer money at "green" technology than we do can't make it work.

A123 batteries, whom we've covered previously, is part of the Department of Energy's green loan program. They make or attempt to make lithium-ion batteries. One problem is, those batteries don't work. Despite this fact and despite the fact that they've declared bankruptcy hasn't appeared to have been sufficient cause for removing them from the government pay roll.

The Obama administration provided struggling battery maker A123 Systems Inc with nearly $1 million on the day it filed for bankruptcy, the company told lawmakers investigating its government grant.

The company, which makes lithium ion batteries for electric cars, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month after a rescue deal with Chinese auto parts supplier Wanxiang Group fell apart.

That same day, October 16, A123 received a $946,830 payment as part of its $249 million clean energy grant from the Energy Department, the company said in a letter, obtained by Reuters, to Republican Senators John Thune and Chuck Grassley.

In the letter, dated November 14, A123 said the October payment was the most recent disbursement it had received from the government, with an additional $115.8 million still outstanding on the grant.

Thune and Grassley have pressed the Energy Department for more details about its funding of A123 as the company has faltered.

"The Department of Energy needs to answer for why it appears to put federal grants on auto-pilot to the detriment of U.S. taxpayers," the two senators said in a statement. "This can't stand."

We haven't seen an actual pay check in perhaps 20 years. DOE loan recipients haven't seen one in a while either as no matter what condition their business is in, every two weeks it seems, they get that direct deposit into their bank account.

And it gets better: A123, who has blown threw just under half of their loan allocation, says they may still need to use the balance of their grant money to work on their batteries that don't work.

In saner times, companies that produced stuff that didn't work would simply be allowed to go out of business. Their capital, both material and human, would be allowed to move on to ventures that perhaps did work bettering the economy and society as a whole. Not anymore. With tax-payer dollars, we enslave this capital in perpetuity that could better be employed elsewhere.

Welcome to our new economic model.

Winning: when no one is any longer paying attention

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Last week, KT posted an article that took an L.A. Times op-ed piece to task for ignoring the deplorable state of the state of California and choosing instead to focus on the politics of the state.

KT wrote:

The entire article is about politics. Winning, losing, success, failure, it's all about the politics. There's no connection at all to real life where California is at the bottom of most non-political statistics - education performance, debt loads, credit ratings, shrinking tax base, etc. Reality doesn't enter into the equation at all. "More sentient Republicans" would focus on winning elections and stop worrying about all of this performance nonsense.

My boy would really love today’s op-ed from George Skelton in the pages of the very same L.A. Times. Skelton was opining on the voters of California granting the Democrats a super majority in California and passing a tax increase ballot initiative backed by the Governor a combination of which has put the Governor, according to Skelton, in a very powerful political position.


Here’s Skelton:

Contrast all that with Jerry Brown's year. He just bolstered his governorship by finessing rare voter approval of a riskily sought tax increase. At last count, Proposition 30 was ahead by a surprising 9.4 percentage points.

Brown's job approval rating among voters, according to a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times post-election poll, is a respectable 49%. And 54% of people under 30 approve of the old guy.

His future is on the upswing. He's not even facing lame-duck syndrome, as he would be if he truly had been reelected to another term. And he should benefit from new supermajority Democratic control of both legislative houses.
Brown is in an extraordinary position to perform great deeds.

But where there was a lack of an agenda in the piece that KT was fisking, Brown’s press conference from last week offered up what he hopes to accomplish… and that is the entire problem. Here is the first of the five priorities:

•Business regulatory relief. Or, as he described it, "calibrate our regulations to ensure that they encourage jobs" while still protecting the environment, health and working conditions. "Are they retarding investment?”

We’ll assume he said that with a straight face because does anyone who can rub two brain cells together and who has also witnessed the scene here in Calfornia for any length of time think that is actually going to happen?

Sacramento has long been under the influence of the Big Green environmental lobby and the public employee unions. With this super majority now in place, who in their right mind thinks that any and all legislation coming out of Sacramento will not have to pass muster with those two groups?


And you’ll be pleased to know that high speed choo-choos are one of those priorities:

•Bullet train. "A lot to do there." Yes, like finding some financiers. Now it's running $55 billion short.

And right on the heels of bullet trains, here’s Brown on the state budget:

•The state budget. "We have to make sure … that we pay our bills, we invest in the right programs, but we don't go on any spending binges.... We've got enough money if we spend it wisely."

Now, he’s just showing off as you cannot take a man seriously who speaks of the largest public works boondoggle in the history of this nation in one breath and in the very next speaks of fiscal responsibility.

KT was right. There is such a detachment from reality that we don’t think Brown even believes what is coming out of his mouth. He won. And that is all that matters. He won and now he can pretty much do and say anything he wants as this state slips further and further into a fiscal, educational and economic abyss.

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Got Super Majority?

... why, yes. Yes, we do.



From the Washington Examiner:

The California Republican Party is functionally dead. And how is California doing, now that liberals have successfully terminated the state's remaining conservatives?

For starters, it's still in debt. Despite Brown's historic tax hike, the California Legislative Analyst's Office announced this week that the state still faces a $2 billion budget deficit just for the next fiscal year. California's liberal electorate has already racked up an additional $370 billion in state and local debt over that last decade. That is more than 20 percent of the state's gross domestic product.

What are Californians getting for all this government spending? According to a new census report released Friday, almost one-quarter, 23.5 percent, of all Californians are in poverty. One-third of all the nation's welfare recipients live in the state, despite the fact that California has only one-eighth of the country's population. That's four times as many as the next-highest welfare population, which is New York. Meanwhile, California eighth-graders finished ahead of only Mississippi and District of Columbia students on reading and math test scores in 2011.

Middle-class families that want actual jobs, not welfare, are fleeing California in droves. According to IRS data compiled by the Manhattan Institute, since 2000, almost 2 million Americans have left California for other states. Their most popular destination: Texas.

How bad is it? A state that votes to inflict this amount of pain upon itself yet won't even vote to legalize marijuana as it had a chance to back in 2010.

Political cartoon of the day...

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... from the best, Michael Ramirez:

We don't make it a habit of banging on the American electorate as a whole in this blog. Overt criticism of the electoral decisions of our fellow Americans has never sat well with us. It makes us feel… well, it makes us feel like these whiny, petulant, 3 yr. old-acting secessionists that have sprung up overnight since last Tuesday night. (We may have more on that later but for the time being, please crawl back into the whole from whence you came)


Without having seen the cartoon, we tweeted something earlier this week along the lines of “We’ve been told that the GOP got beat on “messaging”. But how do you competed against “free stuff”". And just yesterday, again, without having seen the cartoon we tweeted: “We’ve been told GOP needs a freedom and liberty-centric message. Perhaps but election proved nation into shiny things-centric message."


That a President presiding over the worst economy in decades while making hash of the Constitution via his actions both here and abroad could campaign essentially on Big Bird and making sure a middle-aged Georgetown law student got free rubbers speaks to a combination of his amazing campaign skills and, quite frankly, a nation that has completely lost its bearings. You can talk internals, ground games, over-eager Republican pollsters and pundits all you want but there is just no other way to explain how in the end this was not really that close of a race, certainly not as close as some (formerly) respected people were calling it.


Did this represent the war cry of the baby-boomers, our most spoiled generation, riding off into a Social Security back-lit setting sun? Was this their way of leading from the front, electorally speaking, and telling the rest of us that, “Hell yeah! You can have yours and the person’s next to you”?


Or maybe it is the inevitable result of decades upon decades of an education system that holds on a pedestal “diversity” and dares not speak of American Exceptionalism let alone the basic virtues of property rights, free speech, free markets and the rule of law.


Perhaps we should also be looking at the 4th estate. That they have not come after, in the most forceful manner possible, a Commander-in-Chief that holds the completely incongruent positions of wanting to try foreign terrorist master-minds in civilian court yet has no problem wacking U.S. civilians overseas via drone strikes is a white-flagged signal that they’ve packed it in and thus have no interest in performing the essential duties that the press must in a viable republic.


There is plenty of blame to go around but suffice to say the long march of statism through our nation’s institutions culminated, against all rational reasoning to the contrary, in a win for President Obama last Tuesday night.


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This image may as well be on the back of a milk carton

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On Wednesday, November 7, we will look forward to the potential return of that political animal we will call the anti-corporatist populist as they seem to have been absent from the scene the past 4 years.

We are speaking of people like lib-talker, Thom Hartmann, who back in 2004, penned a book titled, What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy. Being written when it was and given the political leanings of Hartmann, though there was a lot of good historical perspective provided, it was ostensibly a hit piece on his perception of then-President George W. Bush's politics and economic policies.

Here's what he had to say with respect to the cozy relationship enjoyed between the federal government and the private sector and, specifically, corporations/big business.

Beware: Tight control can look very good at first.

When Germany faced the last depression, its government turned to a hand-in-glove partnership with corporations (including some American corporations, as has been shown in recent years) to solidify its power over its own people and to wage war on others.

When Benito Mussolini named this new form of corporate/state partnership “fascism” referring to the Roman fasces or bundle of sticks held together with a rope, that was the Caesars’ symbol of power, he said that the bundle represented the police and military powers of the state combined with the economic power of industry. The fascist system was adopted by Italy, Spain, Japan and Germany.

Mussolini also said, "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Advocates speak of the advantage of running things in a businesslike fashion, managing for results. And in the early days of fascist Italy, Mussolini (like many business leaders) had a reputation for getting things done: a common remark was, “He made the trains run on time.”

Indeed, the results of fascism can look very good, at first; in Germany it brought such dramatic changes to that nation ravaged by World War I and crushed by the Treaty of Versailles that Adolf Hitler was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year on February 2, 1939.

It speaks volumes that the Obama administration can’t even get their own brand of corporatism/fascism/Peronism to work even on an initial basis.

But that’s not why we're here. What we’re here to do is put out an APB on folks like Thom Hartmann who have been entirely absent the scene for the past 4 years. If Hartmann is offering an explicit critique on G.W. Bush and warning of the dangers of fascism then what the heck did he think of Porkulus, ObamaCare and the government –engineered bankruptcy cramdowns of General Motors and Chrysler (while still owning a significant chunk of GM stock)?

Do not these policies and legislation represent the very cozy hand-in-hand relationship between the government and the private sector that Hartmann warned against? And the argument of “things were so bad, Obama had to do what he had to do to save the country” is intellectually lazy and unprincipled as that was most likely how Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascism was sold to the public (We want to make it 100% clear we are in no way comparing the person of Barack Obama to the two aforementioned monsters.)

Besides, rather than being stop-gap emergency measures, the President has not given any indication that he is willing to try anything other than his brand of Keynesian corporatism; a 4 year record of pursuing nothing but does not lie.

We said it before and we will say it again, these populist anti-corporate Bush-bashers, like Hartmann, that were finger-wagging from 2001-2008 but have remained silent as their guy has grossly exceeded the economic fascism of his predecessor have proven themselves to be the biggest hypocrites we have witnessed since we’ve started really following politics some 20-25 years ago.

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Not so random thoughts of the day

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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.

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Some things worth remembering here in the heat of the battle

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Reason.tv presents their special presidential election edition of Nanny of the Month:

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It reminds us of an un-attributed quote we heard some time back:

Democrat or Republican... no matter who wins the election, government still gets in.

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Of the 47% and trying something else...

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... because what we have now, just ain't working.




In 1992, a full 74% of Americans paid some amount of federal income tax. Twenty years later that number has plummeted to 47% so we were rather puzzled as to why everyone was going bonkers over Romney's "47%" remarks (oh, that's right - the man dared to open his mouth) which were ostensibly about a culture of dependency which has been cultivated by the statist-left of this country for a number of decades. From 74% to 47% in 20 years..? We're sorry - there's something wrong with this picture.


Evidently, an overwhelming majority of Americans are of similar mind as we. Here's Glenn Reynolds on some encouraging poll results that show that 79% of Americans* say their fellow citizens, regardless of their income, should be paying some amount of federal income tax:

These Americans understand instinctively what a recent report from the Tax Foundation said: "Aside from the revenue impact of not having 58 million Americans pay income taxes, economists worry about the social and political effects of having so many people disconnected from the cost of government — a phenomenon known as fiscal illusion. The concern is that when people perceive the cost of government to be cheaper than it really is, they will demand ever more government benefits because they either don't feel the cost directly or believe that others will be paying those costs. Indeed,when one takes into account those who do not file, about half of all households pay no federal income tax, making the situation particularly worrisome in a majority-rule democracy."

You've heard us use the term before but we cannot over-emphasize how much having skin in the game should count for things like health care and the services we receive for our taxes. You think Americans might pay a little bit more attention to bond initiatives and ballot propositions like, say, California high speed choo-choos when they realize that ridiculously butchered estimate of $68 billion is going to be coming out of their hide from both state and federal taxes? You think the term "low information voter" might, hopefully, become a thing of the past if everyone had skin in the game? We do.


It's time to do away with our current byzantine and progressive tax code. Our liberal friends don't think the rich are paying enough and we find it, yeah, we're totally going to highjack the left's own terminology for this context, "unpatriotic" that only 47% of Americans are paying federal income tax. No one's happy. It's not working. Time to scrap it and try something else.


We can probably be talked into a flat tax but what we've recently become intrigued by is the concept of a national sales tax to replace the income tax whereby the wealth you generate for yourself and your family is not taxed rather what and how much you consume. We think that's an idea that would have cross-over appeal to our liberal friends.

So, what do you all think? As alway, your comments are appreciated.



* This would mean that a significant number of that 47% think they themselves should be paying at least some federal income tax. Hmmmm...

Video clip of the day

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Alternate headline: High school kids send a shout-out to their parents vote for nanny-statism back in 2008.




The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 finds some kid not so hunger-free.







It's definitely not a stemwinder nor an explicit rant but it does appear that they would have to have received some level of cooperation from the school(s) to cut this video.


Exit question: The tune. We know it, we just can't place it. It has an 80s Euro-synth sound to it, though. New Order?

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Photo image of the day

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Hey, ladies....



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That's Jim Messina, the Obama 2012 campaign director. This image, which circulated around social media yesterday, was the subject of much photo-shopping. Why bother?


In its uncut form, what better illustrates the creepy, paternalistic, don't-worry-your-pretty-little-head-we know-what's-best-for-you mindset of this administration as demonstrated through its signature piece of legislation?


We don't want a warm, fuzzy, cuddly government. We want competence and efficiency. Don't think "relationship", think "friend with benefits".



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