"In fact, in Feelingstown, facts become insults: If facts debunk feelings, it is the facts that must lose." Ben Shapiro
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The DC Tea Party Protest
Thanks to all those people who showed up in DC today to represent all of us hard working taxpayers who couldn't be there today.
While that's supposed to be the job of congress, it was nice to have someone there representing for a day.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Life in "Progress" State
Want to retire with a fat pension? Get a government job in Illinois.
Nearly 4,000 retired government workers have pensions that pay them at least $100,000 a year. They include politicians, judges, doctors and school administrators, as well as top cops, firefighters and park officials.
More than half have collected more than $1 million each since they retired. A few have topped $2 million. And five have gotten more than $3 million each, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found.
And these numbers are soaring faster than taxpayers can afford.
Consider:
• 3,958 retirees have pensions paying $100,000 or more a year.
• 2,255 of those retirees have each collected more than $1 million in pension benefits. They include two doctors who have each gotten more than $3 million over the last 10 years.
• 14,280 retirees have pensions that pay them more than their final salaries. That's largely because all government pensions in Illinois automatically increase 3 percent every year.
• 11,521 retirees get checks from two or more government pension plans.
• 23 widows each get more than $100,000 a year, every year, in survivor benefits.
• 16 judges' widows have each gotten more than $1 million since their husbands died
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What's so "progressive" about looting your treasury?More....
Life in "Progress" State
The place to be
They watched the sinking sun
Sinking in the sea
From the golden state of California, who hasn't had a conservative run the state since Charlton Heston was doing Moses impersonations.........
The price of a public education at the University of California may be going up again - not once, but twice.UC President Mark Yudof is recommending a 15 percent increase in in-state undergraduate fees that would take effect next spring, and another 15 percent increase on top of that beginning in fall 2010.
The governing Board of Regents will hear details of the proposal - which also includes graduate-level fee increases of 15 percent - at its meeting Wednesday, but won't vote until November.
If approved, the undergraduate fee increases would be the eighth and ninth in seven years, and would send the price of a year at UC above the $10,000 mark for the first time next fall.
"It makes me really angry," said Gracelynne West, 20, a first-generation college student at UC San Diego who expects to graduate in June with years of debt to pay off.
Riddle me this Batman. How is it the liberals keep bitching about health care costs but never education costs?
Even better; do you know how the feds go after credit cards companies for targeting college kids loaded up on debt but never the predatory federal student loan programs, who load up kids with liberal arts degrees with debt that measure in the tens of thousands?
No, of course not.
Thanks reader Jeremy for the tip.
More.......
A deal with Obama
As you probably don't know, I'm one of those tea bagging, conservative, nazi's out there trying to wreck your socialized medical plan for Americans.
According to your own statement, you'll be able to pay for this plan by "reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan."
I guess we could debate that this should be part of your job in the first place but why dwell such details when there's bigger fish to fry.
None the less, I'll make you a deal. Show us the savings in Medicare and Medicaid first and I'll support your plan like a paid SEIU astroturf campaigner.
Thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Gordon Gekko
PS If your health care plan doesn't pass, does that mean you won't cut a trillion dollars of waste out of Medicare and Medicaid?
PSS By the way, we need more cowbell.
And we want these guys to run health care?
As billions of dollars from the economic stimulus plan pour through the U.S. economy, members of Congress, the administration and regulatory agencies are increasingly worried about the risks of fraud.Earl Devaney told Congress on Thursday the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board he chairs is investigating those who may have misappropriated stimulus money.
His board has "forwarded more than 100 matters to various IGs (inspector generals to ensure heightened scrutiny of specific procurements that board staff has identified as potentially problematic.
Stealing elections, a democratic art form.
The former judge-executive of Perry County plans to plead guilty in a federal vote-buying case.The attorney for Sherman Neace filed a motion Thursday seeking a hearing for Neace to be rearraigned, meaning to enter a guilty plea. The hearing has not been scheduled.
Neace, 68, and Chester Jones, 65, another longtime county official, are charged with using $7,500 from the state Democratic Party to buy votes for themselves last November.
In that election, Neace was running for magistrate and Jones for school board.
According to the indictment, the state Democratic Party sent the local Democratic Party Executive Committee $7,500 to use in promoting voting. Jones was chairman of the local party executive committee.
Jones allegedly went to the bank where the party had its account and got 75 blank counter checks and filled them out for $100 apiece, leaving the payee line blank, the indictment said.
More....
Want to be a union member?
Those folks probably just saved their jobs.Boeing Co. workers voted overwhelmingly Thursday to disband the union at the North Charleston factory, boosting prospects corporate officials will consider the Lowcountry for a second assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner.
Of the fewer than 300 International Association of Machinist organized workers at the local plant eligible to vote, 199 voted to decertify the union and 68 voted to keep it in place, Boeing spokeswoman Candy Eslinger said.
“We are pleased that hourly workers elected to deal directly with the company on employment matters,” Eslinger said. “We are also pleased that Boeing Charleston can move forward and meet commitments on the 787 program.”
More......
I won't forget
Here's a photo from a parade in Loveland, Ohio honoring the police and fire sacrifice during the 9/11 attacks two years previous.
The city did this parade for another year and then it just drifted away. Like the memory of those attacks eight years ago.
I'll never let that memory fade.
When government gets involved
Check out the graph to the side.
Notice how education prices have gone up astronomically. It's probably only a coincidence that the government is involved.
Look at housing. It's probably only a coincidence that the spike in housing prices occurred only after the government got involved in attempting to increase home ownership.
It probably only a coincidence that health care prices rise faster than inflation only after the government created Medicare.
Yeah, it's only a coincidence.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
We already pay for other's health care
One of the myths being perpetrated by liberals on this health care issue is that there is this huge population out there with no access to health care.
This a complete lie.
Maybe you are not aware, but the fact is, if you are a property owner, you are already paying to for people's health care via property taxes.
As you can see from the scan to the side, Gordon Gekko pays $43.38 every six months for indigent health care. That's $86.76 a year, one little business property in Loveland. That doesn't count the taxes we pay on our palatial three bedroom palace in Maineville.
Those tax dollars are used to cover indigent people who need medical care.
Now, let's say you show up to the emergency room with a gun shot wound and no insurance card. You get treated.
If you don't have insurance but you can afford to pay, you pay. Just like you would pay for the lottery tickets and six packs you could have used for insurance.
If you are indigent, you fill out some forms and this fund pays for you on a sliding scale. Case closed.
I'm sick of hearing about the numbers of people who have no coverage. The fact is people get health care in this country. As much as maybe some need? No. But not so many that we need to initiate an entire socialized program.
So Obamunists, get off our backs.
17 million recently bought health insurance
"We are the only advanced democracy on Earth - the only wealthy nation - that allows such hardships for millions of its people," Obama said. "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone."Read the rest.........That's quite a change from earlier this year when Obama was using different numbers. On July 22, the president used a much larger number in a press conference. He said had cited "47 million Americans" with no insurance, a mistake that had been made the previous two years by many in the media (emphasis added).
"This is not just about the 47 million Americans who don't have any health insurance at all," Obama said. "Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job, or change their job. It's about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage because it became too expensive."
And with the exception of a Fox News commentator Frank Luntz on the FNC's Sept 9 "Hannity" and ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper, who pointed it out on the social media Web site Twitter, the subtle change when relatively unnoticed by the media.
Life in "Progress" City
At least 7 in 10 people who committed murder in this city last year have gotten away with it.
The most generous interpretation of 2008 homicide warrants and convictions supplied by local law enforcement officials shows that in more than 70 percent of homicide cases no suspect has been identified, arrested, charged or convicted of a killing.
"The reality is, we have a reputation in the state that if you want to commit a crime, come here," said Kym Worthy, the Wayne County prosecutor who said she does not challenge the analysis. "The chance of arrest is quite low, the chance of prosecution is quite low. What does that say about the commitment to the public's safety?"
The state? Try the world.........
What's so "progressive" about wanton violence?
More.....
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Did they check her insurance card?
A 31-year-old pregnant woman who was shot in the stomach early Monday gave birth to a boy later in the day, and she and her baby are expected to recover, Cincinnati police said Tuesday.
Ebony Mackey of West Price Hill was shot in the arm and stomach about 3:30 a.m. Monday during a street robbery in the 200 block of Peete Street, said Lt. Mark Briede, spokesman for Cincinnati police.
Out of curiosity, when the EMT's ran her to the ER, did they get her insurance information prior to admitting? Or did they treat her first?
By the way, nothing like being pregnant and out and about at 3:30 AM in the morning. Maybe she got a craving for White Castles.
Article here
Who did he vote for? #4
Meet Stephon Bennett. Why is Mr. Bennett in the news?
Police said they arrested a suspected robber on Sunday after he returned to his victim's home to ask her out on a date.So given that people are having a hard time wondering "what he was thinking at the time", did that make him a automatic vote for The One or Four More Years of Bush?
According to investigators, Stephfon Bennett was one of three men who robbed a couple on the city's north side late Sunday night, 10TV News reported.
Less than two hours after the robbery, police said that Bennett, 20, returned to the home and asked Diana Martinez out on a date.
"We are not exactly sure what he was thinking at the time," said Columbus police Sgt. Sean Laird. "She recognized him right away when he returned and was able to have her cousin call 911."
More............
Those damn dams
Responsibility for ensuring the safety of the rest of the nation’s dams falls to state dam safety programs. Many state dam safety programs do not have sufficient resources, funding, or staff to conduct dam safety inspections, to take appropriate enforcement actions, or to ensure proper construction by reviewing plans and performing construction inspections. For example, Texas has only 7 engineers and an annual budget of $435,000 to regulate more than 7,400 dams. Alabama does not have a dam safety program despite the fact that there are more than 2,000 dams in the state. And in some states many dams are specifically exempted from inspection by state law. In Missouri there are 740 high hazard potential dams that are exempted because they are less than 35 feet in height.
In 2009, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) estimated that the total cost to repair the nation’s dams totaled $50 billion and the needed investment to repair high hazard potential dams totaled $16 billion. These estimates have increased significantly since ASDSO’s 2003 report, when the needed investment for all dams was $36 billion and the needed investment for high hazard potential dams was $10.1 billion.
The 2009 report noted an additional investment of $12 billion over 10 years will be needed to eliminate the existing backlog of 4,095 deficient dams. That means the number of high hazard potential dams repaired must be increased by 270 dams per year above the number now being repaired, at an additional annual cost of $850 million a year. To address the additional 2,276 deficient—but not high hazard—dams, an additional $335 million per year is required, totaling $3.4 billion over the next 10 years
More........
Paglia on democratic fumbles
This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster — as witness the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to "green jobs" czar Van Jones last week — but there's a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web — both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
Read the rest......
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
The clue phone is ringing
Hiring expectations for the fourth quarter are improving around the world except in one key region: the U.S. That's the finding of two quarterly employment outlook surveys released Tuesday byNow why might that be.Manpower Inc. ( MAN). Employers in 17 of the 35 countries and territories expect to add to their workforce next quarter, according to the Manpower Global Outlook Survey. And 20 of 34 regions reported an improvement in the job outlook, "indicating an easing in the pattern of layoffs prevalent in the past several quarters," the survey said.
A key exception to the improving trend was in the U.S. The Manpower U.S. Employment Outlook Survey showed among U.S. employers, only 12% expect to add to their workforce in the October-December period, while 14% expect a decline and 69% see no change. Manpower says the results suggest employers expect a slight decrease in the rate of hiring when compared to third-quarter results. The outlook is "considerably weaker" than the year-ago results, the survey said.
1) The increase in the minimum wage
2) The uncertainty regarding health care mandates
3) The uncertainty surrounding card check legislation
4) The over regulation on management compensation
5) Increases in income taxes and payroll taxes.
Yeah I can see why US employers might be a little hesitant to hire on employees in this environment. Do the Obamunists?
More.........
Deep thoughts
Maybe it's not "too big to fail" but "too big not to fail"
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Why health care? Why now?
One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation's medical care before the August recess-- for a program that would not take effect until 2013!
Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years-- more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?
If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?
If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don't we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to "hurry up and wait" on something that is literally a matter of life and death?
If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.
Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.
Unfortunately, this way of doing things is all too typical of the way this administration has acted on a wide range of issues.
Read the whole piece.............
Monday, September 07, 2009
Why Reverend Wright mattered
No one says it better than Krauthammer
President O'Narcissist
I’ve run the speech through a word frequency counter and found the following results:
* 56 iterations of “I”
* 19 iterations of “school”
* 10 iterations of “education”
* 8 iterations of “responsibility”
* 7 iterations of “country”
* 5 iterations each of “parents”, “teachers”
* 3 iterations of “nation”In other words, Barack Obama referenced himself more than school, education, responsibility, country/nation, parents, and teachers combined. And to think that people accused Obama of self-promotion!
But hey, it's not about him. It's about what we can do for him.............
We need more cowbell!
More..........
Congratulations UC football
Rutgers was one of about four schools with a shot at the Big East championship along with Pitt, WVU and S.Florida.
So given the fact that UC was on the road, first game and the loss of a bunch of seniors, i was worried about a tough loss to start the season.
WOW.
That was as thorough a butt kicking you'll see in college football.
The UC offense just imposed their will on Rutgers. Given the early domination of the offense, the defense was able sit back and play their typical soft zones.
Now the question will be, was UC really that good or was Rutgers totally overrated.
We'll see.
Now it's kickoff for Miami/FSU. There's a lot of worse things than watching Erin Andrews.
Jack Webb Schools Barack Obama on Healthcare
This is funny.
HT Lucianne
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Huh?
"This administration has the potential to be FDR or Jimmy Carter, and I think the Republicans are going to do everything they can to make him Jimmy Carter, to create a failed presidency."
Clue phone to Joe, there is really nothing the republicans can do to create a failed presidency for The One.
Seriously, I love how the media will try to blame the republicans for any failed Obama agenda item.
Remember? He won! And so did Lollapelosi, The Weasel and huge majorities in both chambers.
If The Messiah showed any leadership skills within his own party, there is absolutely nothing he couldn't accomplish in his attempt to turn the US into France; the majorities are just too overwhelming.
What I don't get is this. If socialist policies are so great, advance them with your democratic leadership and majorities, turn the country around, take credit for it and then rule for the next 70-80 years. It's almost like these guys want and need republicans for cover so their FUBAR assault on America can't be blamed on them.
Any failure of Obama to get anything done is the democrat's failure; plain and simple. It's also why it's important to pressure all republicans not to advance this socialist agenda. Force the dems to own their messes (see California).
Media malfunction II
In addition, it should be noted that the NY Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS et al reported not one thing about Jones until this weekend.
Gateway Pundit, a conservative blog, did all the leg work on a story that was a slam dunk scoop for the traditional media outlets. Well, except for the fact that they would have let go of the Obama water buckets for a couple of hours.
Go to Gateway Pundit for a entire list of this douche bag's goofy beliefs and affiliations.
The Fox all stars point it out here.............
Media malfunction
As Times reporters James C. McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon wrote: “Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader.”
So what did Steyn actually say about the Obama cult of personality?
Oh, dear! “A Canadian author”: Talk about damning with faint credentialization. I don’t know what’s crueler, the “Canadian” or the indefinite article. As to the rest of it, well, that’s one way of putting it. Here’s what I said on Wednesday re dear old Saddam and Kim: “Obviously we’re not talking about the cult of personality on the Saddam Hussein/Kim Jong-Il scale.”
Big difference eh?
But it really explains why a lie from the Times spreads like a R2D2 virus across the traditional news organism.
Come and Take It
If you ever wanted the best lesson on conservative values, watch this.