Well, well, well….

It was just last summer, during the Democratic Convention, that a deal was struck between the Obama campaign and the Clinton campaign for Hillary to step aside in exchange for the Obama campaign’s paying off of Hillary’s campaign debts estimated to be around $6 million.

Now reasonable people took that to mean that the Obama campaign would pay off those debts.  It now has come to light that “the most transparent administration in history” tucked a small provision into the gargantuan “stimulus” bill whereby $6 million went to the media/polling firm of Mark Penn, who just happened to be a major player in the Hillary campaign.  The ostensible purpose was to “save jobs”.  The reported number of jobs “saved’ was a grand total of 3!!  That’s right…3!! $2 million per job…not bad work, if you can get it!

However, the most interesting aspect of this is the fact that, by the most amazing coincidence, the amount owed to Penn’s firm by the Hillary campaign was $6 million!!  Now that may not absolutely prove corruption, it certainly walks like a duck and quacks like a duck!

Yet our “watchdog” friends in the Mainstream Media keep telling us “move along, there’s nothing to see here!”   And they wonder why fewer and fewer people pay any attention to them anymore….

The con job continues

The Messiah continues the baldfaced lies about the economy and “jobs saved” with his speech at the Brookings Institute this morning.  This column “The Job Creation Snow-Job” by Thomas Sowell on National Review Online was written prior to today’s speech, but it captures the essence of the ongoing con job:

But government creates no wealth. Ignoring that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do in fact. Without creating wealth, how can they create jobs? By taking wealth from others, whether by taxation, selling bonds, or imposing mandates.

However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector, not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy.

If that was all that was involved, it would be a simple verbal fraud, with no gain of jobs and no net loss. In reality, many other things that politicians do reduce the number of jobs.

Politicians who mandate various benefits that employers must provide for workers gain politically by seeming to give people something for nothing. But making workers more expensive means that fewer are likely to be hired.

Economists have long been saying that there is no free lunch, but politicians get elected by seeming to give free lunches, in one form or another. Yet there are no magic wands in Washington to make costs disappear, whether with workers or with medical care. We just pay in a different way, often in a more costly way.

Nor can these costs all be simply dumped on “the rich,” because there are just not enough of them. Often people who are far from rich pay the biggest price in lost opportunities. A classic example is the minimum-wage law.

Minimum-wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing — and appearances are what count in politics. Realities can be left to others, so long as appearances get votes….

…Constant government experiments with new bright ideas is another common feature of Obama’s “change” and FDR’s New Deal. The uncertainty that this unpredictable experimentation generates makes employers reluctant to hire. Destroying some jobs while creating other jobs does not get you very far, except politically. But politically is what matters to politicians, even if their policies needlessly prolong a recession or a depression.

Real people are still losing real jobs and no phony estimate of “jobs saved or created” by this pack of lying  #@%*& s is going to change that anytime soon!

Bringing al-Qaeda to New York

So now we have our “genius” attorney general announcing that the planners of 9/11 and the USS Cole attack are going to be tried in civilian court in New York City. Aside from the incredible stupidity of putting these monsters under the jurisdiction of some of the most notoriously “pro-defendant” judges in the country, there is the small matter of the splashing of classified national intelligence information across the world as the result of infinite discovery motions and testimony in open court. Of course, that’s assuming that there is anything else left that the New York Times hasn’t already provided to al-Quaeda by plastering it on their front page in bold type.

The multiple problems with this decision are outlines in Bringing al-Qaeda to New York by The Editors on National Review Online:

Friday’s announcement that KSM and the other 9/11 plotters will be sent to federal court in New York for a civilian trial is the most significant step to date in Obama’s determination to turn back the clock to the time when government believed subpoenas rather than Marines were the answer to jihadist murder and mayhem.

It is difficult to quantify how dangerously foolish this course is. As they demonstrated in offering to plead guilty while bragging about their atrocities, KSM and his cohorts don’t want a trial so much as they want a soapbox to press their grievances against the United States and the West. With no real defense to the charges, they will endeavor to put America on trial, pressing the court for expansive discovery of government intelligence files. Having gratuitously exposed classified information on interrogation tactics and other sensitive matters in order to pander to Obama’s base, the Justice Department will be in a poor position to argue against broad disclosure, even if it were so inclined. As the court orders more and more revelations, potential intelligence sources and foreign spy services will develop even graver doubts about our capacity to keep secrets. They will reduce their intelligence cooperation accordingly, and the nation will be dramatically more vulnerable.

Moreover, the transfer of the worst al-Qaeda prisoners into the U.S. will grease the skids for many, if not most, of the remaining 200-plus Gitmo terrorists to be moved here. This will be the worst of all possible outcomes. These are trained terrorists who have been detained under the laws of war, but most of whom cannot be tried because the intelligence on them cannot be used in court. We are still holding them because they are deadly dangerous and because no other country is willing to take them off our hands. Once inside the United States, they will indisputably be within the jurisdiction of the federal courts — which are staffed by judges predisposed against wartime detention without trial. As long as the terrorists were at Gitmo, those judges were reluctant to order them released into the U.S. — a transfer that would violate federal law. If the terrorists are already here, though, judges will not be as gun-shy. Inevitably, some will be freed to live and plot among us….

But of course, that could never happen…could it?  We have been assured of this by our genius attorney general…who, just coincidentally, was the driving force behind the outrageous pardons granted on the final day of the Clinton administration to such paragons of virtue as international fugitive financier Marc Rich and convicted Puerto Rican terrorists in prison for setting off bombs in New York.

Why would we ever have cause to doubt the judgment of such as genius as AG Eric Holder?  He’s always been right…hasn’t he??

The Job Con

As one of the current 10%+ unemployed, as well as someone who predicted months ago that the “stimulus package” was destined to fail, I second the sentiments of the above titled editorial in National Review:

The unemployment rate has hit 10.2 percent. All those laid-off Americans must be wondering why Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein still have jobs. Romer and Bernstein, economic advisers to the Obama administration, warned back in January that, unless Congress enacted the $787 billion stimulus package, the unemployment rate would hit 9 percent by 2010. The stimulus would prevent this disaster, they promised, causing the unemployment to level off at 8 percent and then fall.

This can’t be simple incompetence; Romer and Bernstein are too smart. Nor was the extent of the crisis unknowable at the time. None other than stimulus-worshipper Paul Krugman called the team’s predictions “kind of optimistic.” That leaves fabrication: The administration sold the stimulus to the public on false pretenses.

The odds that the stimulus package would “create or save” millions of jobs, per the administration’s promises, were never good. The government is borrowing enormous amounts of money to pay for the stimulus. That money should be funding job creation in the private sector. Instead, it is going to shore up insolvent spendthrift state governments, to expand Medicaid and unemployment benefits, and to lay the groundwork for an aid-dependent green-energy sector that is going to drain the nation’s resources for years to come….

…Government can provide a social safety net for workers, but the Obama administration has taken the concept to absurd extremes. The president just signed yet another extension of unemployment benefits, stretching the eligibility period to nearly two years in some states. The bill funds the additional benefits by extending a payroll tax on employers that was scheduled to expire at the end of the year. In other words, the administration is simultaneously providing incentives for workers not to work and for employers not to hire them.

Gollllleeee!  Who could have seen that coming?  Oh wait, just about anyone who understands how economies actually work as opposed to those clowns who legislate on the basis of how they simply wished economics would work!

Read the rest of the column here.

Declaration of Independence revisited

In rereading the text of the Declaration of Independence, I am struck by how much of it reads like it could have been written yesterday.  I know that some (probably my son included) will object that I am being overly dramatic.  However, over and over again the political class in Washington has shown that they are turning a completely deaf ear to the genuine concerns of everyday people outside the Beltway:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. –Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. (emph. added)

While this paragraph was specifically addressed to “the present King of Great Britain”, the track record of “a long train of abuses and usurpations” is just as easily demonstrated on the part of the Beltway elites of both parties– members of all three branches of government.  When was the last time that the question of whether or not the Constitution actually gave the government authority to “do something” in a particular case was even given serious consideration?  No, instead the term “unconstitutional” has become only a convenient term clever lawyers use to manipulate the system to their own advantage.  The term has been so abused over the last 50 years that it has totally lost its meaning!

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

When people have tried to petition their “representatives”, they have been rebuffed at every turn.  This first became apparent to me during the immigrant amnesty controversy 2 years ago.  Letters and e-mails to elected representatives received responses which were patronizing beyond belief, amounting to little more than a pat on the head and a “there, there, we know better than you do”.  When I and many other strongly objected to President Bush’s dismissive tone of those who objected to the amnesty bill, those whom we had voted for publicly vilified us as being “ignorant” and “hateful”, and then such people as John McCain and Lindsay Graham turn around and expect us to vote for them again.

More recently, objectors to the pork-laden “stimulus” bill or the MASSIVE deficits being created are derided as “astroturf” protestors, called “nazis” or mocked with a vile sexual variant on “teabags”.  We expect this from the sycophants in the MSM…where it gets a little harder to stomach is when this comes from our “elected representatives” who don’t represent anyone but themselves and their own radical agenda.

The anger that boiled over during the townhall meetings this summer is born of the very real frustration that average people outside the Beltway are feeling more and more that “our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.”  As Congress and the President seem hellbent on ramming this excreble “health care reform” down the throat of a people who more and more are saying we don’t want it, they should know our patience is not unlimited.

What Happened to Liberalism?

A great question that Ben Shapiro addresses here: Ben Shapiro : What Happened to Liberalism? – Townhall.com.

In particular, I like his discussion of how John Steinbeck, once considered a serious voice for liberalism, has been marginalized because he refused to go along with the dismantling of all moral barriers and disparaging of patriotism so popular amongst 60s liberals and their intellectual progeny:

Whereas today’s liberal spokespeople have been infected by a virulent anti-Americanism that sees all businessmen as profiteers and all public workers as saints, Steinbeck was a patriot. He worried about the lack of kindness he saw in his fellow men, particularly the willingness to cut corners to make a buck — but at the same time, he saw the virtue of freedom.

In 1960, Steinbeck wrote a piece in Newsday magazine in which he explained his view of morality. “[It's] very clear that peoples are strong when they are moral in the sense that the good of the group or the nation takes precedence over the selfish good of the individual. And we know from many examples of the past that when this is reversed and the individual raids the public good for his own purposes, the laws of decay have set in.” In short, a nation comprised of a group of individuals governed by a common morality is stronger than an agglomeration of atomistic individuals acting solely for their own benefit.

Steinbeck’s brand of liberalism made political debate a real possibility. After all, conservatives agree that men are neither angels nor devils, and that not everyone will behave with the same honor as an Ayn Rand-ian hero. Steinbeck’s solution to the problem of “immorality” was not necessarily more government, but better men in government, and not necessarily more regulation, but more self-regulation. (emph. added) Communal standards were important, but there was no guarantee that government would be the best judge of communal standards. As Steinbeck wrote shortly before his death, “It is our national conviction that politics is a dirty, tricky and dishonest pursuit and that all politicians are crooks. The reason for this attitude is fairly obvious — we have had cynical and dishonest officials on all levels of our government.”

Yet now we are continually bombarded with the idea that government is the answer to everything!  People who maintain this have obviously not paid much attention to…oh…4500 years of recorded history.  The main thing that more government brings is more oppressive government!

To quote Ben Franklin: “Those who would trade liberty for security will have neither”

Good for the goose…

A more complete picture

As I have listened to the fawning media coverage of the life and death of Edward Kennedy this week, there are a couple of major life events that have been mysteriously missing.  In particular, there is one name rarely mentioned at all, or when it was, in a quick, passing whisper.  As Mark Steyn points out in Airbrushing Out Mary Jo Kopechne:

When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty.

While it is one thing to “not speak ill of the dead”, it is quite another to have someone’s entire existence disappear down the memory hole because it is an inconvenient detail for “the Lion of liberalism”.

Another person who might beg to differ concerning the present canonization of Ted Kennedy is Robert Borck.  It has been almost comical to hear commentators wax on and on about how Kennedy was “a man of principle” and, while he forcefully fought for his positions, he “never got personal or petty”.  Really?!?

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”

Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.

While a person’s life must be defined by more than a couple of mistakes, it is also true that, until those events are dealt with honestly, they will always remain as the unacknowledged gorilla in the room.  It will be interesting to see this afternoon how many will remain willfully blind to the furry creature lurking in the corner!

Wellstone funeral II?

Dems need to be careful or this will backfire too…

Burning down the house

In trying in recent weeks to put my finger on exactly what it is the single worst feature about the Obamacare proposal, there are many things that come to mind… massive government control, exploding deficits, very real possibilities for abuses in the area of abortion and euthanasia… to name just a few off the top of my head.

However, it seems to me that the place to start is with the fundamental underlying premise – that we just have to do “something” about the uninsured.  While I don’t accept the inflated figure so often tossed around of “45 million without healthcare” (particularly since a large percentage of those simply lack health insurance, not health care … many of these by their own choice) , it is probably reasonable to say that there is some number uninsured through no fault of their own… likely in the range of 10-15 million.  Using the high end of that range for argument’s sake, that works out to approximately 4.25% of the US population.   This would seem to be in line with a number of national polls that show 80-85% of Americans as generally satisfied with their own healthcare. (There always seems to be 10% who complain about everything!)

So, in essence, what we’re talking about doing is tearing the entire system apart and remaking it for the sake of 4.25% of the population.  Maybe that makes sense in Obamaworld, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.  Judging from the huge numbers of people showing up at Congressional townhall meetings to speak out against this plan, it seems that it doesn’t make much sense to a very large number of others as well…and is further demonstrated by the absolute freefall the plan is experiencing in national polls.

In trying to capsulate this into an understandable illustration, I came up with the following:  Suppose that my house has some serious plumbing problems.  There are a number of approaches I can take to relieve the problem: fix it myself (not likely), find a friend with more knowledge to tackle it with me or pay a professional to fix it.  One thing that I’m not likely to do, however, is burn down the whole house so that I can build a new one with better plumbing!  I’ m particularly not going to try this approach if my neighbor tried it a few years ago and is now facing bankruptcy because of his giant mortgage on the new house…and his plumbing still leaks!

In a nutshell, that’s what I see the idiots in Congress doing – burning down the whole house of one of the best healthcare systems ever devised.  Is it perfect?  Of course not!  Nothing built by human beings ever is.  But there are plenty of ways of improving it without destroying it in the process… tort reform to stop frivolous lawsuits, allowing medical insurance to be sold across state lines, greater use of medical savings accounts, to name a few.

Like I said, fix the plumbing…don’t burn down the house!