Obama Voters Phone Home

     This week, a video surfaced of an Obama voter attending a protest of a Romney event. Actually the woman in the video was paid $11 an hour by the Service Employees International Union and given a bus ride to various Romney events throughout the state of Ohio. This is a tactic that has been replicated in many other states at Romney events . The woman in the video made it clear that she and all her poor minority friends were voting for Obama because he gave them free cell phones, actually it was the U.S. taxpayers  that paid for the phones. If you see or hear the woman in the video you will understand just how much the education system, that is controlled by the very same kind of unions that paid her to be a protester, has failed her.
     The program uses a tax that was instituted around the time of the Spanish-American war, and was originally used to string phone wire into under-served rural areas. In recent years, the tax has been used to buy low-income people cell phones (at last count 12.5 million) and to pay their bill every month. The problem is that there is rampant fraud in the program. Some recipients are acquiring 20 to 30 phones and selling them outright or using them with which to barter for other items.
     Besides the outright insanity of spending 1.5 billion dollars a year(and growing)  buying people cell phones when the Federal government borrows 40% of what it spends, the program begs the question, "What is the proper role of the government?" It leads me to wonder how many other similar superfluous Federal programs exist and how many hundreds of billions of dollars can be cut from the budget by eliminating them. The Department of Education is one which requires 100 billion dollars a year just to administer the Federal department, none of that money actually makes it to the schools. And since the DOE's inception by the Carter administration, the U.S. has gone from first in the world in education to 37th.
     Programs, like free phones for low-income people, are just one more step down the dangerous slippery slope of replacing our daily liberties with government-provided goodies. So all you Obama voters, use your government phone to phone your government-provided home, which contains your government-provided food and your government-provided air conditioner with your car in the driveway which is repaired using taxpayer money. Some day you will realize that what you have given up is far more valuable than what you have received.     

Sarah Palin Was Right !

     In 2010, when Obamacare was being rammed into law with one party support, in the darkness of night, using a process called reconciliation (which in this application violates the spirit of the Constitution), Sarah Palin was excoriated for suggesting that the new law incorporated death panels. She was characterized by the left as a crazy, right-winger who was trying to scare the American people. The Obama administration said it was a ridiculous accusation not worthy of debate. They announced sometime later that the panels had been taken out of the legislation.
     Last weekend, an Obama administration official, by the name of Steve Ratner, wrote an op-ed column in the New York times saying the only way the new health care law can work is to have death panels and rationing. Yes, he actually used the term, "Death Panels." This admission is consistent with the news that the National Kidney Register is changing the criteria for those waiting for a life-saving operation. In the past, the next available kidney would go to the next person on the list. Now, the determination for a kidney will be made on the basis of how much longer the individual will statistically live. In other words, those deemed as not having much more usefulness to the state, will be out of luck. This is similar to how other socialized medicine schemes work. Since health care dollars and providers are limited by the system, a model is used to determine how much useful life an individual posses. If it is deemed that the operation is not cost-effective, the individual is left untreated.
     This cost-basis model for health care was advocated strongly by Ezekiel Emanuel, a major contributor to the President's health care reform law. In a free-market system, competition drives down the price for procedures and creates an environment that is friendly to new health care professionals. In a recent poll, eighty percent of doctors said they were seriously considering leaving the field if Obamacare is fully implemented. Even if half of those doctors leave, it will further decimate the field where in recent years there have been thousands more doctors leaving the profession than there are new graduates to take their place. If the supply of health care dwindles and the demand continues to rise, rationing will necessarily be a reality. In the private sector, insurance companies reject 4% of the claims they receive. The government programs of Medicare and Medicaid reject 8%. If the free-market disappears completely, which is the goal of the new health care law, the rejection rate is any body's guess, but it certainly will not go down. Conservatives knew Sarah Palin was right when she made her proclamation in 2010. If Barrack Obama is re-elected, the rest of the country will discover the wisdom of her statement far too late to save themselves or their loved-ones.

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A Forthcoming Apology From Horrible Harry?

     When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said that an imaginary friend told him that Mitt Romney hadn't paid income tax for the last ten years, anyone tethered to reality knew he was lying. But still the narrative of a tax-evading Republican candidate for President was dutifully reported by the mainstream media as if it had any basis in fact and common sense. Forget the fact that if it were true, the IRS would have surely found out before now. Also lost on the irrational left is the fact that Mitt and Ann Romney have their money in a blind trust, which is managed for them, including the preparation of taxes every year. Unless you believe that Price-Waterhouse was willing to risk their reputation and business simply to aid Governor Romney in cheating on his taxes, Horrible Harry's lie was less meritorious than a six year old denying responsibility for a broken window via a baseball when he is holding the bat.
     This week, Price-Waterhouse released Mitt and Ann Romney's taxes for the current year and a certified statement that the Romney's had paid their taxes every year for the last 20 years. The same return showed that the Romney's paid an effective tax rate over that period of 20 percent, far higher than the average American who pays an effective rate of around 8 percent (according to IRS data). It also showed that the Romney's gave over 13 percent of their adjusted gross income to charity, far more than any leader in the Democrat party, including Mr. Reid. Did Harry Reid apologize for disseminating inaccurate information he gained from his imaginary friend, of course not. He doubled down on his lie and expected people to ignore the thick web of that lie which has now engulfed him. Harry Reid's sleazy bald-faced lying is nothing new for Democrats, neither is the fact that they are never held accountable by their propaganda wing in the mainstream media. During the election of 1964, the Democrats found several thousand sympathetic physcharitrists to say that Barry Goldwater was insane. This medical malpractice (it is morally and ethically wrong for a mental health care professional to make a conclusion on someones mental state whom they have not personally examined) had no consequences for these despicable doctors. Neither were there any consequences for the Johnson campaign which orchestrated the lie. Since then, this tactic has become a favorite way for Democrats to attack their political opponents so they don't have to defend their indefensible policies.
     I doubt Mitt Romney is waiting around for Harry Reid to admit his transgression, something only a decent and honorable man would do. In fact, a decent and honorable man would not have made the baseless charge at all. No, I think Mitt Romney is more concerned with the financial abyss into which Harry Reid, Barrack Obama and the rest of the Democrat leadership seem hell-bent on dragging this country. But don't expect the issue of Mitt Romney's taxes to go away anytime soon, it is a ridiculous and absurd distraction, but it's all this administration has to offer the American people in lieu of any success or achievement. It's par for the course for a community organizer, a sleazy Senate Majority Leader and their useful idiots that reside in Congress and the mainstream media.

The Disgrace of Appeasement

     This week the President spent seventy thousand taxpayer dollars to run a television ad in Pakistan, in an attempt to mollify Muslims there. After the ad ran on Pakistani television, some of the worst rioting of the last couple of weeks occurred, which lead to the the deaths of at least seventeen people. The idea of running the ad was bad enough, but the substance of the ad had the President and Secretary of State groveling to the Muslim world in an attempt to quell their violent outbursts. This ad, along with the continued insistence by the administration that some obscure video is the source of all the recent violence (even after all the evidence suggests that the attacks were pre-planned and had little to do with the video), is not only dangerous but disgraceful.
     President Obama is being burned in effigy all across the middle-east and the words from his Cairo speech of 2009 and his U.N. speech last November are being used as tinder. Some people actually voted for President Obama in 2008 specifically because they felt he would change the perception in the middle-east of the United States. Now there is polling that shows the current President is less popular in the middle-east than the last one ever was. If you watch the recent movie, 2016-Obama's America, you will understand why the President takes an apologetic posture with our enemies. It is what many conservatives knew from the beginning, Barrack Obama does not think this country, as constituted, is fair to its own citizens and it has used corrupt methods to steal wealth from the rest of the world. His job, as he sees it, is to redistribute America's wealth and influence to the rest of the world. There is little doubt in the mind of anyone with courage to admit the true intentions of this President.
     Watching the unleadership that President Obama is providing in the U.S. and around the world, I am reminded of two statements by men of different eras, but with a common philosophy. The first is Edmund Burke who said, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." The second is Ronald Reagan who said, "There hasn't been a war in the last 100 years that was the result of the United States being too strong."  Both quotes speak to the fact that there is a morally superior position that, if not strenuously defended, will result in human suffering much greater and more pervasive than the effort to defend that morally superior position. This is a concept that President Obama and the rest of the left do not understand, because in their twisted ideology every culture and every value is equal. This completely misses the fact that there are some ideas and cultures that are morally superior to others. The American culture has produced more freedom and prosperity for a greater number of people than any other culture in all human history. There is no other nation in world history that, while having its faults and failures, has advanced the human condition more than the United States. Conversely, the modern incarnation of Islam has done more than any other culture to destroy civility, freedom and the advancement of humans as spiritual beings. But the President and others on the left, and even some misguided souls on the right, have said that modern Islam is equal to the American culture. If you can't even identify the enemy as an enemy, then you are bound to be destroyed by them. In other words, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

The Myth of Could Have Beens

     Anyone exhibiting even a modicum of intellectual honesty, would admit that by any metric one would examine, things are much worse in this country than when President Obama took the oath of office in January of 2009. Unemployment is higher and has stayed there for more months than at any other time in our history. The Federal debt has increased by almost six trillion dollars. Gas prices have more than doubled since "The One" graced us with his brilliance. The housing market has shown little signs of recovery and Gross Domestic Product is growing at historically low post-recovery rates. And I haven't even gotten to the failure that is this President's foreign policy.
     Even the Democrats and the rest of the left know the Obama Presidency has been a failure. He hasn't even lived up to his own metrics he set for himself when he took office (halving the deficit, bringing unemployment under 6 percent, and making the Muslim world love us). But the tactic the President and his sycophants in the media have employed to excuse his pitiful record is to convince the nation that things would have been worse, if it weren't for the President's ground-breaking policies. In other words, "Just imagine how much more I could have failed." I like to call it, "The Myth of Could Have Beens." You can't prove or disprove a "Could Have Been", so it's an effective device employed by people who have failed to lessen the perception of their failure. This method is also used in reverse to blunt the success of the opposition, a tactic employed most notably during the Reagan years.
     This tactic, mostly employed by Democrats and the left, is only effective when practiced on an uniformed or misinformed populace. Therein lies the problem, i.e. the U.S. voter is woefully uneducated when it comes to the functions of government and the economy. If someone doesn't know, for instance, that the average GDP rate since the end of WWII has been around 3.2 percent, they can be fooled into thinking that 1.5 to 2.0 percent is good. Furthermore, if that same person doesn't understand the labor force participation rate and how it shows that there are 2 million fewer people working than when Barrack Obama took office, then they can be fooled into thinking that 4 million jobs have been added to the economy. And the deception goes on and on, it's easy, especially when you have a media that purposely misinforms the people.
     If the American public accepts the "Myth of The Could Have Beens", I wonder if they understand that what they are really accepting is mediocrity, from themselves and their leaders.

Big Ben Prints Money to Save His Job

     On Thursday of this week Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced his latest effort to help his boss, Barrack Obama, get re-elected. This will ensure that Mr. Bernanke can continue to impose his failed economic theories on the private sector for another four years. It is called quantitative easing, which is just a fancy word for printing money and then using that money to buy mortgage-backed securities. The theory from the inept chairman is that this will cause the stock market to rise and put more money in the pockets of the average American, which they will spend to stimulate the economy.The statement that Mr. Bernanke made to this effect shows his total ignorance of how the private sector operates. Sure, the stock market went up on the news, just as it did with the previous two QE actions from the Fed. But the previous two programs did nothing to boost GDP or lower the unemployment rate, in fact, those two economic metrics are much worse.
     The fly in Big Ben's ointment is that the stock market lost the average retail investor four years ago and they have not re-entered the market. That is why the volume of shares traded on a daily basis has been pitifully low over that time. Any exposure the average American has to the market is through retirement accounts, which will be worth much less because of the inflation that will occur as a result of printing dollars to buy the mortgage-backed securities. To make matters worse, the new round of quantitative easing is open-ended. Which means Ben will fire up his magical money machine and print 40 billion dollars a month in perpetuity.
     By artificially pumping up the securities market, the Fed has kept bond rates low in order to incentivize investors to move their money into the riskier assets. This has caused the ten year treasury bonds to be kept at historic lows, under two percent for the last year. The ten year bond is the basis for interest rates. It is also one of the mainstays of pension and other retirement vehicles. By keeping the bond rates artificially low to pump up the stock market, Mr. Bernanke has taken money away from current retirees.
     All the money that Ben Bernanke and the Fed is pouring into the market has to come out of the market at some later date. This is economic law that even the feckless Fed Chairman can not violate. When that happens, interest rates will sky rocket and inflation will rise to a level we have not seen since the Carter administration. This will also facilitate outside interest buying our debt, which now will cost us more to pay back with two credit downgrades under our belt. This will probably occur in the first half of President Obama's second term, if he is re-elected. That is why it is so important for Americans to elect rational people who understand how the private sector economy works. That is after all where most Americans live, work and raise their families, not in the theoretical world of Chairman Bernanke's mind.

The Left's Religious Intolerance

     It's not surprising that the first reaction of the Obama administration to the attacks on U.S. sovereignty in Egypt and Libya was to apologize. After all, it was then Illinois state senator Barrack Obama, who just days after the terrorist attacks in September of 2001, wrote an op ed column blaming the U.S. for the attacks. Further insult was added to the injury of four American deaths when the President praised the Libyan security forces, who it turned out, told the angry mob where to find Ambassador Stevens after they had moved him to a safe location per diplomatic protocol. The President and Secretary of State Clinton condemned the attacks later in the day in "the strongest terms possible", whatever that means. What are those terms?
     These events are not surprising to anyone who has watched this feckless administration bumble its way through almost four years of economic and foreign policy incompetence. The larger issue illuminated by statements from the administration is the left's bastardization of American values in order to advance an ever bigger government. Secretary Clinton said that religious tolerance is the cornerstone of our democracy. This is interesting in so much as religious tolerance is not mentioned in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence or any other founding documents. It is religious freedom that is the cornerstone of our democracy. This may seem to you to be splitting hairs, but it is an important distinction. Hillary chose the word tolerance over freedom because religious freedom empowers the individual and religious tolerance empowers the government. Religious freedom limits the authority of government over faith. Conversely, religious tolerance empowers the government to limit the expression of faith.
     Both the Secretary of State and the President talked about respect for all religions, however the actions of the left do not support this concept in the least. One only needs to look at how Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been ridiculed by Obama campaign surrogates to understand that the left doesn't respect the faith of those they oppose politically. Further evidence of the left's religious intolerance can be traced over the last 20 years. Whether it is taxpayer money that was used by the National Endowment for the Arts to fund an exhibit which included a crucifix in a jar of urine or the sculpture of the Virgin Mary made from elephant dung, the left seems to have no religious respect for Christianity. Christians are being tortured and slaughtered on a daily basis in Muslim countries and we are suppose to have tolerance for those engaging in the slaughter. Again, when religious tolerance is the value instead of religious freedom, we allow the government to decide which religions are tolerated and which ones can be mocked, ridiculed and ultimately have their followers murdered for their faith.