Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economy. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Attention, Reince Priebus and John Boehner: More Than a Dozen Maine Republicans Just Fled the Party

If the Republican Party disintegrates, you can thank its spineless [air quotes] "leadership" including John Boehner and Reince Priebus. James Daniels at DownTrend explains:

Bangor Daily News published an interesting letter Monday from 13 Maine Republicans to State GOP Secretary Chuck Mahaleris. The letter, signed by six Maine Republican state committee members, a state RNC member and six other registered Republicans, addresses numerous glaring problems within the party both at the state and federal level.

One of their most notable criticisms is that of Speaker of the House John Boehner. The defecting Republicans condemn him for his decision to purge the most fiscally conservative Republicans from their leadership positions in late 2012.

And, they criticize the House’s “utter disdain” for the Constitution in its handling of the Amash Amendment, which would have restrained NSA surveillance... Among their other criticisms of Congressional Republicans include their support for:

• An Internet sales tax
• Gun control
• Illegal immigrants
• Illegal wars

The group also claims the RNC has “no intention of reforming and would rather fly under invalid rules than to right the wrongs of Tampa” in reference to rules battles that have taken place since the 2012 convention...

Hopefully, their decision will serve as a wakeup call to the Republican Party, which all-too-often abandons the principles of fiscal responsibility and freedom for its own gain. Until then, let’s hope more Republicans (and Democrats, for that matter) jump ship instead of contributing to the destruction of the very values that once made America great.

Mark Levin alludes to this kind of drastic action in his new book, The Liberty Amendments. Levin asserts that the answers for fixing Washington cannot be found in Washington.

The answers instead lie in the power of the states, the very states that gave birth to the federal government. These powers, articulated in the second amendment process of Article V of the Constitution, have laid dormant for more than two centuries.

The second Article V process allows the states to amend the Constitution without any Congressional or Executive Branch involvement. It bypasses the federal government altogether. It is an escape hatch against an oppressive federal government.

Levin notes that the second process was only included at the insistence of George Mason -- the famed anti-federalist -- who predicted the very quandary in which know find ourselves. That is, a federal government run amok, with each branch conspiring with the other to evade the constraints of the Constitution, growing ever larger and more tyrannical, tightening the circle of liberty around each individual like a noose.

Such a federal government, Mason presciently observed, would never agree to limit itself. And such is the political landscape today, with a far left political-and-media complex running an Executive and an immense, unelected fourth branch of government, unchecked by the courts and assisted by Congress.

Levin's approach is an escape hatch for liberty.

The states that created the federal government must be the instruments that reign it back in, reestablishing the Constitutional limits that made America great.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

CATASTROPHE: Obamacare tagged for huge spike in unemployment

"Unexpectedly", of course. John Nolte reports on the latest disastrous unemployment report:
Outside of the federal government's Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation's unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven't been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today...

This is an 18-month high.

...Gallup also shows an alarming increase in the number of underemployed (those with some work seeking more). During the same 30-day period, that number has jumped from 17.1% to 17.9%.


The reason for the jump is crystal clear. As Forbes contributor John Goodman observes:

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan [asserts that] ObamaCare discourages hiring, discourages full time employment and discourages businesses from becoming large rather than small. At The New York Times economics blog he writes:

“...the Affordable Care Act ... creates explicit taxes on employers, subsidies for layoffs and various implicit taxes on employees with many of the same economic characteristics as taxes on employers.”

According to Mulligan’s “calculations.... we might then expect the act to contract the 2015 labor market by about 3 percent rather than expand it.”

That’s a loss of 4 million jobs!

We may be seeing the tip of that iceberg now. The next BLS unemployment report is scheduled to be released on September 6th. Gird your loins.


Hat tips: RF and BadBlue Real-Time News.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Combating the Left’s Information Warfare Campaign

Guest post by Abernathy Crum


This article describes an Information Warfare Operation being orchestrated by the Left.  It is characterized by well-designed themes and memes, effective delivery, and advanced with MSM propagation. 

Not too confrontational, it uses fundamental American emotional buttons: family, kindness, and compassionate justice. It worms its way into the national psyche, one snippet at a time. The operation is funded, organized, and supported by the usual suspects; it’s coordinated with press organizations to carry the themes forward and propagate the message for as long as possible.

It starts with a question like this: “What are you going to do to stop the separation of families, for those of us that live in fear everyday due to unjust deportations?”

It’s a well-crafted question – a clever riposte for which we have not an effective parry. 

We are at war. Our efforts just do not match the opposition. We should have had a response packet put together before the meetings took place. To know what the Left is going to do, just visit their sites and blogs. They tell us their plans, and we’re still unprepared.  We need to plan for their campaigns, collect intelligence, and anticipate the obvious.   

Planning would enable this sort of exchange:

Valeria Ruiz, 17, of Racine, Wisconsin, prodded her congressman on deportations that divide families. According to the Facebook page of Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin anti-deportation group, she asked Paul Ryan, “What are you going to do to stop the separation of families for those of us that live in fear everyday due to unjust deportations.”

Ryan responded: “Welcome Valeria, I was looking forward to you coming this evening.  Did Voces de la Fontera or La Raza drive you? I hope your folks are well. I have one question for you.  Your parents are citizens. Your father Miguel was naturalized in 2004 and you mom has always been a citizen.  Who are you specifically referring to?  Can you define what an ‘unjust deportation’ is?”

The rank-and-file Left does not understand Operational Security.  Their leaders do, but their leaks and chest thumping on Facebook and blogs give us enormous insight. There we can learn what they plan to do before they do it.  That is called Predictive Battle-Space Awareness.  We should have been using it for a long time.

If the socialists win the next presidential election, this will no longer be a war of words.  It will be a war of survival, a war in all its manifestations. Why do you think they are building a domestic army? In a few years it will be formidable.

Robert Louis Stevenson said, "Sooner or later in life, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences." The debacle of the city of Detroit is the glaring reality of Leftist polices and the emerging consequences are writ large for the nation.
We fight or we perish, becoming a Detroit nation; lawless, corrupt and hopeless. We become helpless before tyrants who once were smiling politicians full of good will and earnest concern.  We are already a good distance down the troubled road to that outcome.  

Within the Leftists’ ridicule and posturing, and behind their histrionic stage dramas and concocted causes, can be heard the rattle of chains.


Abernathy Crum is, by decades of training, experience and teaching, an expert in the strategy and tactics of information warfare deployed by tyrannical regimes throughout history.   Special thanks to Lee.

There, fixed it for you, @GeeOhPees2

Some Demobat on Twitter published this hilarious pile of crap:


And I promptly repaired it for him, her, whatever:


Like all of the other collectivist schmucks, they can't point to their blueprint. They have no blueprint, no final design they can show us. They simply seek to have a few masterminds in some authoritarian, centralized government issue edicts. They lust to control people, to tell them what kind of cars they can drive, what kind of health care they can buy, what kind of light bulbs they can have in their homes, how much energy they can consume, and virtually every other aspect of their lives.

They don't believe in individual liberty. They don't believe in private property rights. They don't believe in free markets.

And, most of all, they don't believe in the Constitution. They despise the nation's highest law -- the foundation of the greatest country ever seen on the face of the Earth. They seek to eradicate the Constitution and replace it with a few master-planners who must use coercion to control every action of the citizen.

The very notion of God-given rights is anathema to kooks like this. The government grants rights, don't ya know? Like a "right" to health care, never mind if all of the doctors quit. They'll force doctors to treat you!

These Statists have no model they can point to that has ever succeeded in all of human history. For there is no such model. Their path is the road to misery and despotism. And we will resist them.


Sunday, August 18, 2013

THE WHITE HOUSE OR THE ONION: You Make the Call

The latest tweet over at the official White House Twitter feed is this delightful missive:


Every. Single. Minute.

Except for golf with Larry David and other rich white guys, his 139th official round as president.


And except for the swimming with Larry David and other rich white guys.


And except for the fireworks.


And except for the shopping.


And except for the cycling.


And except for more golf.


And except for yet more golf.


And except for taking napps in an abode just like those owned by the 99 percent.


"The only thing I care about is using every minute of the remaining 1,276 days of my term - to make this country work for working Americans again."

How so, Mr. President? What have you done? How have you spent "every minute" trying to help Americans? Is there a single shred of evidence that you've spent even one minute helping the private sector?

You know, this propaganda would be a lot more tolerable if it didn't consist of such obvious, patent lies.


Democrat Party Unveils Subtle Redesign of Logo

"As Detroit goes, so goes the nation under Democrats."


The stock and gold markets may be sniffing the stink of rotting debt in the U.S.

Australian financial writer Greg Canavan reports that foreign investors are spurning U.S. debt instruments.

We are headed for a reckoning and, despite all of the warnings, no one in Washington appears the least bit interested in stopping the train before it goes off the cliff.


Saturday, August 17, 2013

FANTASTIC: It turns out that Democrats destroyed the entire health care system to insure, like, 3 extra people

"“If you’re one of the 30 million Americans who don’t yet have health insurance, starting in 2014, this law will offer you an array of quality, affordable, private health insurance plans to choose from." --Barack Obama, 28 June 2012

The CBO has done another assessment of Obamacare: it finds that ClusterCare will leave, uhm, 30 million people uninsured:

A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report says that under the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022.

One of the main arguments the Obama administration made for passing the Affordable Care Act was that it would provide coverage for the uninsured.

...Under Obamacare, 8 percent of legal U.S. residents will remain without health insurance in 2022, according to CBO... The report was done to assess the fiscal impact of the Supreme Court June Obamacare decision.

“CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] now estimate that the ACA, in comparison with prior law before the enactment of the ACA, will reduce the number of nonelderly people without health insurance coverage by 14 million in 2014 and by 29 million or 30 million in the latter part of the coming decade, leaving 30 million nonelderly residents uninsured by the end of the period,” the report said.

“Before the Supreme Court’s decision, the latter number had been 27 million,” states the report.

As a result of the Supreme Court decision, states are no longer obligated under Obamacare to expand eligibility for their Medicaid programs.

Let me get this straight: Democrats destroyed the entire health care system to insure, like, 3 extra people?

Tell Congress: sign the petition -- Don't Fund Obamacare. Stop it now.


Two New, Humiliating Judicial Defeats for Obama Administration, in Remarkably Harsh Language

Guest post by Timothy H. Lee


“The President and federal agencies may not ignore statutory mandates or prohibitions merely because of policy disagreements with Congress.”

That rudimentary truth, familiar to any freshman political science major, should not be necessary instruction for a former professor of constitutional law like Barack Obama. The fact that it is necessary underscores the depth of lawlessness to which his administration has descended.

On a more optimistic note, however, two new judicial rebukes this week, notable for their harsh terms, show that he remains subject to some degree of adult supervision.

In the first decision, quoted in part above, the nation’s second-highest court commanded Obama’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission to cease “simply flouting the law” by refusing to rule on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository in Nevada. The governing 1983 statute mandates that the Commission “shall consider” applications and “issue a final decision approving or disapproving” within three years. Here, however, the application in question was filed in 2008, making it more than two years overdue.

That is no accident or innocent oversight, but rather deliberate delay in violation of federal law. Obama had promised during his campaign to stifle the project, so his appointees to the Commission just refused to take up the application.

Exacerbating matters, in 2011 the same D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had directed the Commission to complete the procedure post haste. “By its own admission,” however, “the Commission has no current intention of complying with the law.”

Accordingly, the Court issued a rare writ of mandamus, which amounts to an extraordinary order compelling performance of a ministerial act when all other judicial remedies have failed. In so doing, it felt compelled to address the broader issue of the Obama Administration’s habitual lawlessness:

“This case has serious implications for our constitutional structure. It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our decision today rests on the constitutional authority of Congress, and the respect that the Executive and the Judiciary properly owe to Congress in the circumstances here.”

Thursday, August 15, 2013

The Face of the Lawless Bureaucracy

Kevin D. Williamson's "The Front Man" is a strong contender for article of the year (emphases mine).

Democracy never lasts long,” [John] Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories...

...But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics...

...the president would very much like the unemployment problem to be somewhat abated by the time of the 2014 congressional elections, but he knows that this is unlikely to happen with employers struggling under an expensive health-care mandate that he has not told enough of a story about. And so he has decided — empowered to do so by precisely nothing — that the law will not be enforced until after the elections. Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law, but he has done that too.

This is a remarkable thing. The health-care law gives the executive all sorts of powers to promulgate regulations and make judgments, but it does not give the executive the power to decide which aspects of the law will be enforced and which will not, or to establish a different timeline from the one found in the law itself. For all of the power that Congress legally has given the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally...

...[Obama] has a constitutional duty to enforce the law. Representative Tom Cotton says that the president’s health-care delay makes a deal on immigration less likely — if the president can simply decline to enforce the provisions of a law he fought for, why trust him to enforce provisions of a law he is accepting only as a compromise? Representative Cotton must also of course have in mind the fact that after Congress had unequivocally rejected another piece of immigration reform, the so-called DREAM Act, that the president had supported, he simply instituted it unilaterally, as though he had the authority to declare an amnesty himself. He then did away with criminal-background checks for those to be amnestied, also on his own authority. Strangely, the order to halt background checks came down on November 9, 2012, the same day that John Boehner said Republicans would seek a compromise on immigration reform...

...The law also prohibits the president and his allies from using the instruments of government to persecute their rivals, but that is precisely what the IRS has been up to for several years, as it turns out. And not just the IRS: Tea-party activist Catherine Engelbrecht was subject to an IRS audit, two FBI visits, an OSHA investigation, and an ATF inspection of her business (which does not deal in A, T, or F). And although the IRS has no statutory power to collect Affordable Care Act–related fines in states that have not voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, Obama’s managers there have announced that they will do so anyway...

...Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.

The president's acts of lawlessness have become so egregious, so outre, that even the buttoned-down George Will -- pseudo-conservative columnist at The Washington Post -- just penned his own, far less cogent warning ("Obama’s unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s") to the Beltway elite.

And if the Republicans served as a true opposition party -- rather than a deer-like herd of feckless cowards -- they would have thrown roadblock after roadblock in front of the engine of Obama's long train of abuses and usurpations.

Instead, they watch and whimper and cower, terrified of their own shadows, interested only in preserving their tenuous grips on power rather than acting on principle.


Hat tip: Donald Sensing.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

"It's time to panic, Illinois."

Not exactly known for its political diatribes, Crain's Chicago Business is sounding the alarm claxons. In "Illinois on its way to becoming Detroit, and our pols don't give a rap", business writer Joe Cahill doesn't mention a political party by name, but his implication is crystal clear.

Decades of corrupt and incompetent Democrat governance have squeezed the state dry.

Unfunded pension obligations to state employees have reached $100 billion. Unpaid bills to various state vendors are estimated at $6 billion. The city of Chicago faces a $1 billion budget deficit in fiscal 2015. Credit ratings for the state and city have been slashed.

The ground is crumbling away under our feet. Yet our political leaders can't muster the will to act.

Legislators thumbed their noses at Gov. Quinn's July 9 deadline for action on the pension crisis. A conference committee of state Senate and House members formed to deal with pensions hasn't met since July 8, though they assure us they're working on it.

If the ramifications for everyone in Illinois weren't so dire, it would make a fascinating study in the human capacity for denial, deflection and self-delusion.

...Governments, like businesses, file for bankruptcy protection when they don't have enough money to pay their bills and can't borrow enough to cover the gap. We don't have enough money to pay our bills.

Until now, we've avoided going bust by borrowing. Despite our fiscal mess, bond investors have been willing to lend us money. That's because of a peculiar paradox that won't last. Because our credit is so weak, our bonds pay higher interest rates, making them attractive to investors at a time of historically low interest rates...

... our credit keeps getting worse. Rating agencies have made it clear they're no longer willing to give Illinois and Chicago a pass on their massive pension funding shortfalls.

As bond ratings drop, more and more institutional investors will be barred from buying Illinois bonds, no matter how high the interest rate. And with rates in general rising, risk-reward calculations start shifting against the city and state...

...One of these days, Illinois or Chicago will float a bond offering and find no takers. That's when we become Detroit.

One wonder whether the taxpayers of Illinois will someday have had their fill and throw the entire Democrat machine out of office.


Hat tip: BadBlue Financial News.

Monday, August 12, 2013

FINALLY: First Dog Bo Takes a Well-Deserved Vacation

Well, I can rest easy tonight knowing that Bo is enjoying the kind of posh vacation that most Americans can only dream of.

Americans can go to bed with a story to warm the cockles of their hearts tonight. First Dog Bo has been successfully transported to join the First Family on their well-deserved vacation on Martha's Vineyard.


...Bo was transported from Washington to the island on board a specially modified Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey. For security reasons similar to those of Vice President Joe Biden, President Obama and First Dog Bo cannot travel on the same aircraft, thus making a separate flight necessary...

In the event of an emergency involving the President, I believe the current Continuity of Government plan calls for Bo to assume the presidency, followed by Harry Reid, then Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, and then -- if memory serves -- Madonna.

I didn't see Biden on the list, but be sure to read the article and double-check my math.


Saturday, August 10, 2013

HARRY REID: Obamacare's only the first step we're taking to destroy the entire American health care system

The Statist's work is never done.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Friday that Obamacare isn't the final word in government health care reform, it's just a big step toward the real solution, which is a single-payer system.

..."Reid said he thinks the country has to 'work our way past' insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS' program Nevada Week in Review...

In other words, Democrats want to 'work our way past' the free-market system.

..."When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: 'Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.'

"The idea of introducing a single-payer national health care system to the United States, or even just a public option, sent lawmakers into a tizzy back in 2009, when Reid was negotiating the health care bill... [and] then-Sen. Joe Lieberman's opposition to the idea of a public option made them abandon the notion and start from scratch."

"Single-payer" is a system in which only the government provides and funds health care to citizens. Typical examples of single payer systems supported by U.S. advocates of the approach include Britain's National Health Service [NHS] and Canada's Health Canada program (which is also known there as "Medicare").

Ah, yes: Britain's NHS, authors of such classics as:

• "The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year"

• "Horror: 13,000 dead patients, left without food and water"

• "NHS darkest hour: 1,200 'appalling' deaths at Stafford hospital but NO ONE blamed"

Yeah, that single-payer system.

Socialized medicine has three priorities:

...the scheme requires complete government control of the national healthcare system. In this way, the government can control prices, costs, medical treatments, standards, and so forth. This is necessary because healthcare consumes a huge portion of government resources.

...socialized medicine is about providing equal care to every citizen. This is the basic pretext for instituting socialized medicine – to extend healthcare to those who do not already have it or cannot afford it. However, instead of merely providing taxpayer subsidized care to the have-nots, the promoters of Big Government seize the “crisis” opportunity to take control over everyone’s healthcare... schemes like ObamaCare and the NHS seek to ensure only that no one gets better care than anyone else.

...socialized healthcare is about rationing... The need for rationing is quite obvious... [as central planners try to control supply and demand]

We are watching the Statists dismantle the greatest health care system on Earth in pursuit of a Utopian fantasy. And the feckless "opposition party" won't even fight.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Friday, August 09, 2013

CONFIRMED: John Boehner holding secret meetings with Chuck Schumer to slip Amnesty for Illegals past the GOP base

Awesome: Your Republican "leaders" are conspiring with one of the most malevolent and nefarious Statists ever to set foot in the Capitol Building to create a permanent Democrat majority. We know this because of an inadvertent slip by that very same Statist -- a lifetime politician who has never held a real job in his life -- and a man who can't seem to resist a reporter's microphone.

The most dangerous place in Washington: standing between Chuck Schumer and a camera.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made his clearest indication yet that he would be fine with a piecemeal approach to immigration reform preferred by the Republican-led House.

Schumer, the leader of the Gang of Eight whose comprehensive immigration reform legislation passed the Senate in June, said even if the House passes separate bills, those measures could eventually be bundled in a House-Senate conference committee...

Schumer let slip that he is "having discussions" with House Republicans to get this deal done.

In other words, John Boehner and/or his committee chairs are secretly conspiring with Schumer and other Senate leftists to pass a series of "Security First" immigration bills to fool Americans into believing they're serious about border security.

Spoiler: they're not.

So Boehner and Schumer are hoping to get the package of bills into a conference committee, after which the full-blown Democrat Amnesty bill will emerge.

• It will be rushed to the floor of the House and Senate.

• It will consist of more than 1,000 pages of carve-outs, legal exceptions, payoffs to separatist groups like La Raza, bribes, wealth redistribution and corporate reach-arounds.

• Your elected representatives and the American people will have virtually no time to read the bill or understand it; they will be instructed to vote for it, or else.

“We would much prefer a big comprehensive bill, but any way that the House can get there is OK by us,” Schumer told CNN Wednesday. “I actually am optimistic that we will get this done.”

...Schumer also noted on CNN that a few of the House bills — such as one on agriculture workers and another on high-skilled immigrants — are “very similar” to components in the Gang of Eight bill.

Suffice it to say that Boehner and his apparatchiks, Paul Ryan among them, are conspiring against their base, their children, the American citizenry, and fiscal prudence.

Why am I certain Ryan is complicit with Schumer?

As a very visible spokesman for the corporatists' Amnesty campaign, I believe the odds that Ryan is scheming along with Schumer are slightly higher than the likelihood Lindsay Lohan will fall off the wagon.

By putting their own petty interests and personal power over principle, Boehner and Ryan appear ready to have the Republican Party commit political suicide.


Hat tip: Mark Levin.

Thursday, August 08, 2013

INFOGRAPHIC: The Ugly Truth About Obamacare

Guest post by Kelsey Harris

Obamacare: It’s unfair, unaffordable, and unworkable.

So it’s no surprise that Organizing for Action, President Obama’s campaign group, is aggressively posting on all of its media outlets to try to hide the truth about Obamacare.

Just last week, the group blasted out emails and tweets to activists encouraging them to “see how Obamacare is already working.”

But Organizing for Action is wrong. Obamacare isn’t working, and it won’t ever work. That’s why we’re challenging every claim Obamacare supporters make—and you should, too. Congress should refuse to spend a single dime implementing this massive train wreck.

Check out the infographic below and learn how Obamacare is not working.



Read the Morning Bell and more every day.

WHITE HOUSE PETITION: Grant All of the American People an ObamaCare Exemption

Guest post by The People's Cube


The best petition ever - short and sweet (started by a friend of ours in California).



WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Grant American People ObamaCare Exemption


We, the American people, kindly ask the President of The United States to grant us the same exemptions to the Affordable Care Act that were granted to Members of Congress and congressional staff by the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on August 7, 2013.

The Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment grants us all, including Congress, equal protection under the law. We all expect to be treated equally and have the same options and responsibilities as anyone whether they work for a Federal agency or not.

SIGN HERE:

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Terry McAuliffe Finally Brings Some Jobs to Virginia!

The Democrat candidate for governor in Virginia is a bizarre little man named "Crazy" Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe's background is especially troubling, given his incessant efforts to turn Virginia into a forced unionization state.

But more recent revelations regarding McAuliffe's disastrous "green energy" company are even more troubling. And all of us regular Americans -- taxpayers, not you irregular Americans -- are paying for his actions.

...McAuliffe and three top GreenTech advisers met with the key White House aide responsible for helping bankrupt solar-panel maker Solyndra win federal loans and high-profile presidential support, a Watchdog investigation has revealed... the confab came seven months after a stock transfer made McAuliffe a GreenTech minority owner and company chairman.

...GreenTech’s Solyndra connection won’t surprise Kimberley A. Strassel. Back in April, the Wall Street Journal columnist wrote, “GreenTech is the latest proof (after Solyndra, Fisker, A123 and others) that the political class is adept at hooking up cronies and investors with taxpayer dollars. But creating jobs? No can do.”

Documents released last week reveal that that Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating GreenTech’s sister company Gulf Coast Funds, stating that there’s “possible fraud” in the firm’s pursuit of EB-5 investors, primarily those in China. GreenTech is behind schedule in rolling out thousands of electric vehicles while as many as 81 foreign nationals who invested at least $500,000 each are awaiting visas...

Virginians, if you want more Solyndras, more forced unionization, and more legalized theft of your private property, then by all means: vote for Terry McAuliffe. On the other hand, if you want to support a real Constitutional Conservative, then lend your support to Ken Cuccinelli.


Tuesday, August 06, 2013

The Desperate Last Gasp Gamble of the Central Bankers

Guest post by Jim Quinn


In Part 1 of this article I detailed the insane solutions proposed and executed since 2008 by our owners as they attempt to retain and further expand their ill-gotten wealth, acquired through fraud, deceit, swindles, and the brilliant manipulation and exploitation of the masses through Bernaysian propaganda techniques. Madness has engulfed the entire world, with a concentration of power in the hands of a few psychopathic financial elite wielding an inordinate and dangerous expanse of power over the lives of the common man. They are a modern day version of Al Capone, except their weapons of choice aren’t machine guns, but a printing press, peddling debt, creating derivatives of mass destruction, and peddling heaping doses of disinformation. The contemporary criminal class wears Hermes suits, Rolex watches and diamond studded pinky rings, drops $500 to dine at Masa in NYC, travels by chauffeured limo, lives in $10 million NYC penthouse suites, occupies luxurious corner offices in hundred story glass towers, and spends weekends hobnobbing with the other financial elite at their villas in the Hamptons. They have nothing but utter contempt for the lowly peasants who depend upon a weekly paycheck to make ends meet. Why work when you can steal $1 or $2 billion from farmers with no consequences?

The willfully ignorant masses are kept at bay by the selling them a false dichotomy of Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals, and capitalism versus socialism. The ruling class distracts the public with fake wars on poverty, drugs and terror, while using these storylines to further enrich themselves and keep the public alarmed and frightened.

We’ve been “fighting” the wars on poverty and drugs for over four decades and poverty is at record levels, while drugs are easier to obtain than candy in a candy store. The war on terror is nothing more than a corporate arms dealer welfare plan. The end of the Cold War put a real crimp in the bottom lines of Lockheed Martin and the rest of the peddlers of death. 9/11 and the subsequent undeclared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria, with Iran on the horizon, have been a godsend to the bottom lines of the corporations Eisenhower warned about in 1961.

In reality, the politicians are interchangeable and bought off by corporate and special interests. The people are sold a fable, and controlled opposition is the fairy tale. They perpetuate the welfare/warfare state that enriches Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the healthcare service complex, politically connected mega-corporations and the corporate media propaganda complex. The American people are given the illusion of choice by their keepers. The system is rigged.

Detroit-like Collapse Closing in on Chicago due to Math and a Shortage of Pink Ponies, But Mostly Math

"Math always trumps politics."

I can't remember who said it, but we see evidence of the ironclad truth of that statement as we review the history of humankind on Earth. Unsustainable borrowing is, of course, a doomed proposition. And whether we examine current examples like Detroit, the last century's models, or even hundreds of years of experience (PDF), we find no example -- not one -- that monstrous levels of sovereign debt can lead to anything but economic collapse.

But enough about Paul Krugman. Let's review The New York Times' latest stunned prose regarding a Democrat-controlled government's imminent collapse ("unexpectedly", of course).

Chicago Sees Pension Crisis Drawing Near

...a crushing problem lurks beneath the signs of economic recovery in Chicago: one of the most poorly funded pension systems among the nation’s major cities. Its plight threatens to upend the finances of President Obama’s hometown, now run by his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel...

...The pension fund for retired Chicago teachers stands at risk of collapse. The city’s four funds for other retired city workers are short by $19.5 billion. At least one of the funds is in peril of running out of money in less than a decade. And starting in 2015, the city will be required by the state to make far larger contributions to the funds, which could leave it hundreds of millions of dollars in the red — as much as it would cost to pay 4,300 police officers to patrol the streets for a year...

...And last month, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Chicago’s rating by an unexpected three notches as part of a broad reassessment of how pensions are affecting the financial strength of cities. That “super downgrade,” in the parlance of the bond market, left Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, with a lower rating than 90 percent of Moody’s public finance ratings...

...Illinois, which has the most underfunded state pension system in the nation, controls Chicago’s benefit and funding levels [and in] Springfield, which, like Chicago, is controlled by Democrats, leaders have clashed over how best to cut costs of the plans — a notion that pits the lawmakers against labor unions, which have traditionally been allies...

...The city’s general budget fund faces a potential shortfall of $339 million in 2014, but city officials say that gap is lower than initially expected and manageable ... Circumstances grow far more complicated a year later, when state law will require Chicago to pay significantly more — $1 billion a year — into the city’s pension funds, to make up for years of underpayments. Even sooner, the Chicago Public Schools, which draws from the same tax base, is required to find an extra $338 million for its pension fund, and more every year after that.

In other words, fasten your seat belt, we're in for a bumpy ride.

Ironically, the twisted troll known as Paul "Enron" Krugman has a featured article linked nearby headed "Republicans Against Reality". In it, he blames GOP budget hawks for their unwillingness to compromise with the greatest creators of government debt in world history -- the Democrats and, specifically, the 110th Congress. Remember, because of Democrats' failure to pass a budget since Obama took office, the original $840 billion one-time, emergency "Stimulus" has been built into the baseline budget every year since.

And as we watch Krugman's collectivist Utopias of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy fall; as we watch the poisonous alliance of Democrats and public sector unions literally destroy cities like Detroit and Chicago; and as we wait for entire blue states like California and Illinois to follow; meanwhile, the real enemies of reality like Paul Krugman will be blaming Bush, Reagan, or James Monroe for the inevitable, miserable results of their deranged philosophy.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.

Helpful Chart Illustrates the Detroit-ification of America

The national treasure known as the Heritage Foundation posts this helpful infographic contrasting the plight of Detroit with that of the United States (via Katie Pavlich):


Unlike Detroit, the Federal Reserve has the option of printing its own currency whenever it needs it. This takes the form of "monetization of the debt", financial repression, and other measures that generally mark the precursors to a financial collapse.

In plainer terms, the average American family of four is on the hook for about $800,000 in payments to others. We refer to this madness as "redistributing wealth", the Cloward-Piven Strategy, or simply Obamanomics.

Anyone who thinks this is sustainable, please raise your hand.

Put your hand down, Krugman, you schmuck.


Hat tip: BadBlue Money News.

Sunday, August 04, 2013

And now, a Special Message for Karl Rove from the Hobbit, Whacko-bird, and Visigoth Brigades

Dear Karl:




Friends, I'd ask you to ignore the failed "architect" and support Constitutional Conservatives like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee: Sign their petition and tell your friends: Don't Fund It!.