This is really interesting and if you’re like me, you’ll have to listen to it a couple times to get it.Especially the part about the IRS. But this may be our way out of ObamaCare.
Reading The American Spectator today, Norman Podhoertz in the Wall Street Journal and Nile Gardiner of the UK Telegraph, reminded me of Evan Thomas (grandson of that loser but perennial socialist presidential candidate, Norman Thomas) declaring to Chris “tingly leg” Matthews in 2009 that “Obama is sorta god.”
(As an aside, Chris really should have this tingly leg thing checked out. It could be neuropathy caused by undiagnosed diabetes or something and maybe shove himself away from those jelly doughnuts, just in case it is. A weekly workout in the MSNBC gym wouldn’t hurt him, either. His god-dess Michelle will be the first to tell him, and the rest of us, that obesity is the number 1 cause of diabetes.)
But I digress and that’s a whole other blog.
Those were the days, weren’t they? Obama on the cover of every “news” magazine in the grocery store checkout line with the celestial halo around him, head upturned and nose in the air; the frown of determination and decisiveness across his face.
Under the spell of the messiah on Rolling Stone
Yes, Evan, he really was above us – on a ledge of your making. And every journalist in the nation, nay world, was all too quick and willing to acquiesce to their new found god Obama. His was the soaring rhetoric that was going to heal the world:
In the American Spectator, George Neumayr relates that “Obama loomed even larger than Lincoln. He was a “Lightworker,” as San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford put it in 2008, “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.” [A bizarre earthly experiment? Does anyone really talk like this? Maybe if you were in a 70’s consciousness raising group, or something…]
Now that the Lightworker has fallen to earth and the glorious new way of being on the planet turns out to be a lowered credit rating, some of his prominent supporters have fallen silent or resentful. Heady Lincoln comparisons have given way to Carter comparisons, sotto voce: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes,” an anonymous Democratic Senator said to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
Yep, well it’s a long, hard fall when you’re up “above the world” looking down. It’s an even harder fall when you start to believe all the mythology about yourself.
The new Emperial president.
There is a disturbing let them eat cake mentality projected by the Obama White House … No US presidency in modern times has been more elitist or out of touch than the present one, which exudes the kind of condescending left-wing snobbery that is normally the preserve of an ivory tower common room. President Obama looks increasingly aloof and out of sync with the American people, three quarters of whom now believe the country is heading down the wrong track – including a staggering 58 percent of Democrats, according to Rasmussen.Nile Gardiner/UK Telegraph
Norman Podhoretz says that his “own answer to the question, “What Happened to Obama?” is that nothing happened to him. He is still the same anti-American leftist he was before becoming our president, and it is this rather than inexperience or incompetence or weakness or stupidity that accounts for the richly deserved failure both at home and abroad of the policies stemming from that reprehensible cast of mind.”
The United States is still different [from European states]. In the wake of economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly “students” in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful and pointless “university” costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill and your multitrillion dollar porkathons and just stay the hell out of my life and my pocket.
That’s the America that has a fighting chance – a nation that stands for economic dynamism, not the stagnant “managed capitalism” of France, for the freest, widest, rudest bruiting of ideas, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion: for self-relience and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they’re photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. But when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America’s animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we’ve already gone. Live free – or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.
Like I said, if you want a happy ending, it’s up to you.
Your call, America.
from After America: Get Ready for Armageddon by Mark Steyn
For the sake of simplicity, you owe $1000 this month but you only have $600. You will have to borrow $400 to make it through the month. Now imagine you have to do that every month for the next year. That’s $4800 you will need to borrow to pay your bills for the year. And you know that you’re going to have to borrow that same amount every month for the next year (and the foreseeable future.)
Now add the interest to that $400/month loan, that is if someone or some entity will loan you this money. Interest at 13% (that’s a really good rate on your Visa card) adds $624/year to the balance or $52/month. So now you will owe $5424 for the year.
You know that you can’t pay your bills with the income you have now. You know that you can’t pay your bills without borrowing $4 for every $10 that you spend, or $40 for every $100 or $400 for every $1000. Or as in the case of the United States of America – .40 for every $1.00 that it spends.
What would you do?
You could start by calling your banker or your credit card company and ask them to raise your borrowing limit. Chances are real good they will laugh at you, before telling you no. And anyone with a high school education knows that raising your DEBT LIMIT will only dig your hole deeper in the long run.
So, you sit down at the kitchen table and prioritize. If you’re an average American, you start cutting out all the things you can do without so you can pay for the things that matter, like your mortgage and medicine and your personal yacht.
Then you put a lid or a cap on all your future spending.
No more dinners on Broadway or flying your favorite pizza chef in from Chicago.
No more Spanish vacations in your private jet. What? You don’t have a jet?
No more entertainment like those private Paul McCartney or Stevie Wonder concerts.
Next, you start looking around your house at the things you can live without and sell off. But remember, that’s only going to get you through a month or 2. Eventually, you’ll run out of things you can sell, unless you live in the White House and then there’s an unlimited amount of things of value to sell.
Maybe your Wall Street friends will throw fund raising parties for you. Oh please. Don’t tell me you have no Wall Street buds.
Publish a book with a well known terrorist ghost writing it for you? You don’t know any terrorists? Sucks to be you, then.
You don’t have a $10 million winery in California that you can sell? Oh, sorry. I’d mistaken you for Nancy Pelosi.
This isn’t our life. But we are shouldering the burden for these expenses and all the expenses that benefit everyone else, including and most irritating – the political class.
Most of us would fore go our social security checks for a couple more years. Most of us would be willing to work a couple more years rather than dump these bills on our children and grandchildren. Most of us are willing to do with less or do without to balance our books and not leave unheard of debt for our kids.
And most of us would like to see the ruling class suffering just a little bit with us.
Dena mentioned something to me in email several days ago that came as a surprise to both of us. It might be a surprise to you too.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation has been financially supporting Planned Parenthood for the last decade. And in fact, Planned Parenthood of the Greater Northwest is a co-owner, with Komen’s nephew (Eric Brinker), of a mall in Peoria, Ill. Brinker sits on the board of the SGK Foundation.
From 2004-09, SGK gave over $3M to PP.
At least one Catholic Bishop (of Toledo, OH) is urging his parishioners to donate their dollars to other breast cancer research and support organizations.
Something to think about this October during breast cancer awareness month. Where are your donated dollars going?
When the Obama administration releases a report on the Friday before a long weekend, it’s clearly not trying to draw attention to the report’s contents. Sure enough, the “Seventh Quarterly Report” on the economic impact of the “stimulus,” released on Friday, July 1, provides further evidence that President Obama’s economic “stimulus” did very little, if anything, to stimulate the economy, and a whole lot to stimulate the debt.
The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.
In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.
Aren't these the guys Obama wanted on his side? photo from Politico.com
Obama invited all these doctors to the White House, dressed them in taxpayer funded lab coats, schmoozed them and courted them to get their much needed endorsement for his Health Care plan and now he’s stealthily stabbing them in the back.
Is this what they had in mind when they went to the Rose Garden? I have to wonder if they understood how the government under Obama can and will reach it’s tentacles into their lives and livelihoods.
According to government documents obtained from Obama administration officials, the mystery shoppers will call medical practices and ask if doctors are accepting new patients and, if so, how long the wait would be. The government is eager to know whether doctors give different answers to callers depending on whether they have public insurance, like Medicaid, or private insurance, like Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
But of course, none of this information will be used against any particular doctor:
In response to the drumbeat of criticism, a federal health official said doctors did not need to worry because the data would be kept confidential. “Reports will present aggregate data, and individuals will not be identified,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss the plan before its final approval by the White House.
And these doctors are really supposed to believe this nonsense?
If this doesn’t reek of intimidation, nothing does. And I see nowhere in the story that the reporter called the AMA to get their opinion on this. I also have to wonder how the decisions were made regarding what states to target with these “mystery shopper” calls:
[…] administration officials said, a federal contractor will call the offices of 4,185 doctors — 465 in each of nine states: Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. The doctors will include pediatricians and obstetrician-gynecologists. [In addition to family practice physicans and internal medicine doctors.]
What I find most troubling about this is that these nearly 4200 doctors will be called at least twice to determine if the doctor has different standards of care for private insurance patients versus government insured patients. But 11% of these doctors will be called a third time and this time the caller will identify himself as a govenment employee and will ask whether the doctors accept private insurance, Medicaid or Medicare, and whether they take “self-pay patients.” The study will note any discrepancies between those answers and the ones given to mystery shoppers.
Tell me again that these results will not be used against a physician – tell me again that this information will be kept confidential. Tell me again how Obama wants the support of America’s doctors, most of whom do not belong to the AMA, by the way.
I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never played one on tv, so it took me a couple days and re-reading several times to figure out how this case, Bond v. Unites States, would or could have bearing on the ObamaCare lawsuit.
Thanks to Dena for sending this to me.
In a nutshell, Carol Bond found out there her husband had impregnated her best friend. To exact revenge on her best friend, “Bond placed hazardous chemicals on the homewrecker’s mailbox, car door handles and the like, hoping to injure her now-former friend. All the ex-friend got was a minor burn.” But instead of this being tried as an assault or manslaughter case in a state court, the federal government decided to step in and “charged her with violating a law that was passed under an international treaty banning the use of chemical weapons.”
“The court of appeals ruled against her, holding that she didn’t even have the legal right (which we call “standing”) to bring the claim,because only a state could argue that Congress had infringed upon state power. At the Supreme Court, Bond got some help from an unexpected source: the federal government, which agreed with her that she had the right to challenge the law – a procedure that is known as “confessing error,” or admitting that you are wrong. So the Court appointed an attorney (in this case, as it usually does, it chose a former Supreme Court clerk) to argue that the Third Circuit had been correct.”
The Supreme Court stated that the federal government had no right to interfere with a STATE’S RIGHTS issue. ” She argued that she couldn’t be charged with federal crimes because her crimes were the kind of crimes that states should prosecute. Put into constitutional terms, her argument was that when Congress passed the law, it intruded on the rights that the Constitution, in the Tenth Amendment, leaves for the states.”
Last “Thursday, the Court unanimously agreed with Bond and the government that she did have “standing” to argue that the federal government had gone too far. The Court pointed out that the right Bond seeks to vindicate is her own, because she benefits from a federalist (states’ rights) system.”
Now how does all this relate to ObamaCare, you ask?
The SCOTUS has ruled that an INDIVIDUAL has the right to claim a violation of state’s rights because that is the system of government that we live under.
Government mandated health care can be construed as a violation of the Tenth Amendment – a subject that must be left up to the individual states and its citizens to decide – not the federal government.
This case, that the SCOTUS found in favor of Carol Bond and State’s Rights, could very well be a foreshadowing of how they will rule on the ObamaCare case when it finally comes before them.
“Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” 31-year-old Faisal Shahzad told a federal judge. “Consider me the first droplet of the blood that will follow.”
Stop Sharia in America
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Obamas Wisdom and Terror in the Street
"We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever...we absorbed it and we are stronger."
Diary of a Mad Conservative 