Bob Woodward, Conservative Warrior

Bob Woodward, Conservative Warrior
By Bruce Bialosky
3/4/2013

Not being one to jump on the current topic du jour, we could not pass up this one. The Obama Administration picks a major fight with the most famous journalist in America -- and we are not speaking about Bill O’Reilly or Ron Burgundy. It is rarely a good thing for political leaders to jump into hand-to-hand combat with the press.

Bob Woodward has been a liberal icon for forty years. After all, Woodward and Bernstein were the principals in bringing down the all-time boogie man of the left – Richard Nixon. How can you question a man played by Robert Redford in the movie about the whole escapade? How could anyone ever envision anything that would damage his reputation short of kidnapping Susan Sarandon? This guy could have driven a Hummer and never been questioned by the intellectual left. That is, until he decided to take on the Obama Administration.

As you are properly aware, Woodward had the goods on Obama. As the President was running around screaming fire in a movie theater about the dreaded sequester and blaming the whole thing on his political enemies, Woodward pointed out that Obama and his aides had told Woodward two years ago that they were the brain trust behind the plan. Back then Obama and his crew thought it was a brilliant way to box in the Republicans regarding the ever-growing federal expenditures. (We would refer to it as the “budget,” but Obama and his team have not allowed one to be passed in four years.)

Once Woodward tells the truth he begins to experience an Obama backlash. He has a 30-minute discussion with Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council, which by even Sperling’s description turned into a screaming match. As part of an email exchange, Sperling writes “I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

There has been a lot of discussion and analysis of the email exchange and whether it was a threat. The left and even some mainstream and conservative commentators concluded Woodward’s reaction was out of line. That is not the way we see it. We are not going to analyze the word play. We are going to ride with Woodward. Here is a man who confronted the Nixon Administration and brought it down. He has reported on all aspects of our federal government and presidential administrations for forty years. He has written over fifteen books on such matters. He has had a relationship with Gene Sperling for twenty years. If Woodward says it was an attempt to intimidate him, we should take him at his word. He was the one there and he should know.

It goes deeper than that. We are not one month into the second term of the Obama Administration and their heavy-handed methods. After four years of Fox News being the only ones investigating the Obama Administration and being bullied, the rest of the press is finally speaking out about the anti-press methods of this Administration. Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton, came out and told of how his editor was advised to stop running Davis’s columns or the paper’s White House credentials would be pulled. In his interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, Woodward stated “I am flooded with emails from people in the press saying this is exactly how the White House works. They are trying to control and they don’t want to be challenged or crossed.”

Make no mistake; Bob Woodward is still a man of the left. After being taken to task by Gene Sperling, he still made this statement: “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, “Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ‘you going to regret challenging us.’” Mr. Woodward, on this point you are delusional. This comes straight from Obama. That is why we read and reported on Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals. These tactics and the ones the President is embracing on a daily basis come straight from the book – threaten your opponent, demonize your opponent and if need be pulverize them. This has Obama written all over it. This is what they did in the campaign and, now free from having to face voters again, this is what appears to be their plan for the second term.

The redeeming factor of this matter is that the national press may have finally come alive. They ignored Benghazi. They ignored Obama’s fundraising peccadillos. They helped to get him re-elected by swooning over him. Now maybe they might actually do their job and expose this President as the inept bully he has become.
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The Cliffhanger, March 4

The Cliffhanger, March 4
By: John Hayward
3/4/2013 09:15 AM

Ever since the language of the “fiscal cliff” was appropriated to describe the political battle over a tax increase, it’s become increasingly clear that every issue is a “cliff” now. Here are today’s snapshots from the edge…

** Sequestration Terror continues to deflate: The hybrid earthquake-tsunami-blizzard of sequestration threatened by President Barack Obama and his Administration chiefs continues to be downgraded through each successive fiscal weather forecast. The day it hit, it was abruptly downgraded from hurricane strength to a topical depression; by Sunday it was more like scattered showers of austerity, with the chance of some light flooding in a month or two, if you happen to live right on the dependency beach of Big Government.

White House economic adviser Gene Sperling (the guy who told Bob Woodward he’d “regret” diverting from the approved media narrative on sequestration) appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to claim that “nobody ever suggested that this was going to have all its impact in the first few days.” It’s simply amazing to hear advisers dismiss their own boss as “nobody,” since Barack Obama was indeed loudly bellowing that sequestration would produce instantaneous devastation… as recently as Friday, in fact, when he falsely claimed during a news conference that “starting tomorrow everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol. Now that Congress has left, somebody’s going to be vacuuming and cleaning those floors and throwing out the garbage. They’re going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real.” No, it’s not real, as the Washington Post’s fact-checker pointed out in a four-Pinocchio complete-B.S. smackdown.

Sperling also finally admitted – for the record, and contrary to hundreds of hours of false rhetoric from Obama during and after the 2012 campaign – that sequestration was “designed” by the White House. But everyone north of the fabled Low Information Voters already knew that. The real bombshell of the interview was hearing the President of the United States openly dismissed as “nobody” by top White House staffers on national television. If only Mitt Romney had been that tough on him.

** Romney for Sequester Czar: Speaking of Mitt Romney, he turned up on Fox News Sunday to criticize President Obama’s divisive, blame-shifting perpetual sequester campaign, which has included roughly one hour and seven minutes of actual governing through meetings with congressional leadership. ”It kills me not to be there, not to be in the White House doing what needs to be done. It’s hard,” lamented the defeated 2012 Republican presidential candidate.

But why couldn’t Romney be there, doing what needs to be done? Obama flatly refused the offer of authority to implement the sequester cuts in a “smarter,” less arbitrary manner. If he’s not up for the job, why not let one of the world’s most renowned efficiency experts and turnaround managers have a crack at it? Appoint him “Sequester Czar” and let him get to work trimming $44 billion out of the most outrageous government flab. That bit of fiscal liposuction, so completely beyond the abilities of Barack Obama, will take Dr. Romney about six hours. Give him another $50 billion to cut the next day, and let him repeat until he’s finally forced to submit a budget that actually would require furloughing Capitol Hill janitors, increase airport wait times to 90 minutes, or any of the other dark fantasies Obama has been peddling. We might well have a balanced budget in time for Tax Day. Granted, Romney wasn’t all that good at campaigning – but why shouldn’t the American people receive the benefit of what he indisputably is good at?

** North Korean madman, has-been athlete propose basketball summit with Obama: The practical requirements of governing may lie outside Barack Obama’s skill set, but he is very good at sweet-talking people and wasting time on long discussions of ephemeral issues, so why not take sports oddity Dennis Rodman’s suggestion and hold a basketball summit with Kim Jong-Un, the blood-splattered lunatic dictator of North Korea? ”He loves basketball,” Rodman said of Mr. Kim. ”I said Obama loves basketball. Let’s start there.”

Rodman promised more trips to North Korea “to find out more about what’s really going on,” but he’s already seen enough to pronounce Kim – whose psychotic regime executed people in creatively sadistic ways for failure to show appropriate levels of grief at the passing of his father, the previous Grand Poobah – a “good guy” and declare “as a person to person, he’s my friend.”

Say what you will about Rodman, but he’s actually got a pretty good geo-political strategy here. Just look at what Barack Obama’s foreign policy has done for the Middle East! If Obama starts directly engaging with Kim and spending time in North Korea, it’ll become an Islamic theocracy in no time. Granted, that’s not much of an improvement from the standpoint of global stability, but at least we’d finally be able to close the books on the Korean War, and we could point at China and laugh like Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons. And China would finally stop sticking up for the Norks all the time, since they’re not generally wild about Islamic theocracies perched on their borders. It’s so crazy it just might work!

** State Department confirms Obama has been blocking Keystone XL pipeline for no good reason: Part of this week’s epic Friday night document dump was a State Department report that found “there would be no significant environmental impact” to building the Keystone XL pipeline, and in fact “other options to get the oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries are worse for climate change,” according to the Associated Press. Now two of the most powerful special interests in Washington – which, of course, are never described as “special interests” by Barack Obama – will get to fight a cage match for our amusement: Big Labor vs. Radical Green. It will take months for Obama’s sclerotic Administration to make a final decision, so enjoy the show.

** 700 more pages of ObamaCare rules land on America’s back: Guess what else popped up in the Friday document dumpster? Another seven hundred pages of ObamaCare regulations. A lot of the new paperwork load pertains to the state health care exchanges, the fabulously expensive, inefficient, and coercive ObamaCare substitution for free-market competition in health insurance. But remember, if we trim one dollar from this federal non-budget, it’s curtains for teachers and firefighters.

** Menendez scandal widens again: It’s good news and bad news for Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ.) The good news is that people aren’t buzzing about his alleged dalliances with underage Dominican prostitutes these days. The bad news is that it’s because the sex scandal has been eclipsed by corruption scandals. Questions continue to multiply about the legislative services Menendez performed for his best buddy and top donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen of Florida, who is apparently one of the true Renaissance men of our age. Not only is Melgen an eye doctor, port security expert, and aviation enthusiast, but he’s also on the board of directors of a company that converts diesel vehicle fleets to use natural gas instead. Senator Menendez just happens to have been a “principal supporter of a natural gas bill that would boost tax credits and grants to truck and heavy vehicle fleets that converted to alternative fuels,” according to the Associated Press. The bill didn’t pass, and the company Melgen invested in eventually discarded its plans to market its technology for the sort of vehicles that would have been heavily subsidized by the bill, but for a while there it looked as if a truly beautiful multi-million-dollar act of legislative and investment symmetry was in the offing. If you think “clean energy” is a process of enormous expense in the pursuit of impractical goals, try comparing it to the quest for clean government.

** Biden Cliff update: The Cliffhanger has determined that yet another cliff we are all dangling from is the Joe Biden Advice Cliff, in which taking the ravings of the Vice President seriously can result in arrest, serious injury, and/or death. A man in Virginia Beach found out the hard way that Biden’s recent advice for dealing with trespassers – firing a shotgun through the door – constitutes “reckless handling of a firearm,” which is a misdemeanor in Virginia. Biden was most recently seen at the commemoration of the 1965 voting-rights march in Selma, joining in the hysterical denunciation of common-sense voter ID laws as racist vote suppression. Once again, a public service reminder: taking Joe Biden seriously, about anything, is dangerous.

** Wisconsin Democrat compares governor to cannibal serial killer: A spokesman for the Democrat Party in Wisconsin compared Republican Governor Scott Walker to Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous flesh-eating serial killer, Friday on Twitter. After a weekend of blowback, said flack – dismissed as “pretty insignificant” by the Governor, so we won’t bother with his name – apologized to both Walker and the families of Dahmer’s victims. Wisconsin Dems have a history of going nuts over Walker; the really interesting part of this story is that Mr. Insignificant took pains to delete his offensive Tweets. It’s so adorable when people do that. As if there’s any way to erase the bottomless cached and screen-captured memory of the Internet!
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.

The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection

The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection
By: David Harsanyi
3/4/2013 05:00 AM

Nationally syndicated columnist and Human Events editor David Harsanyi’s new book Obama’s Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection is out today.

“This is not a book for the faint-hearted. In chilling detail, David Harsanyi exposes the brutal and bloody dangers looming ahead during Obama’s second term. Harsanyi outlines how the Nanny State progressive-in-chief has enabled the four horsemen of debt, dependency, national decline, and the culture of death. Yes, it is apocalyptic. No, it is not irreversible. Conservatives must pray, pick themselves up, and pull together to turn our country back from Obama’s highway to hell. America must heed Harsanyi’s prophetic work!”

—Michelle Malkin, New York Times bestselling author of Culture of Corruption

You can order the book on Amazon. Below is a free chapter.

***

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? The Book of Revelation? Fire? Brimstone? Armageddon? The Last Judgment?

Really, David? Yes, really.

As metaphors go, it’s an entirely apt one. To begin with, Conquest, Famine, War, Death—the four horsemen of the Obama Era— are coming, and they are coming in the form of a national debt disaster, an epidemic of government dependence, an erosion of our world standing, and a nihilistic view about the value of human life. If our federal government had been inclined to do anything to avoid these impending catastrophes—and I’m not sure it ever was—that day has now passed. Barack Obama’s reelection ensures we’ll be deal- ing with some level of societal instability and economic calamity in the future. No, these calamities won’t transform us into Bangladesh, and they won’t mean the United States will cease to exist. They will only mean that this particular iteration of the United States will be no more.

Change, of course, doesn’t always imply impending disaster. Americans seldom accept that terrible events can befall them. We have solid reasons not to. Truth is, I have always been somewhat of a utopian regarding our prospects. I operated under the rosy assumption that our free markets, individual liberty, technological superiority, astonishing wealth, and Constitutional protections (however eroded they may have become) would allow us to adapt to or over- come nearly anything—recessions; wars; terror attacks; demographic shifts; environmental disaster; and, the most treacherous of all threats, Washington. Regrettably, I underestimated Washington.

President Barack Obama didn’t invent the impending disasters America faces—not our debt problem, not our welfare state—but he did accelerate nearly every one of them. It’s not only that the president’s progressive politics have battered economic dynamism, ham- strung capitalism, and discredited the importance of meritocracy; it’s that, in the Obama era, the relationship between the average Ameri- can citizen and his government has been transformed forever into something unhealthy.

Using frightening religious symbolism in this political argument also makes sense because Obama has consistently portrayed his political aims as the great moral cause of our time, one that pits the highway to hell forces of decency and empathy against the self-serving profiteers of the old guard. His central case for government’s existence rests on the notion that the state is society’s moral center, the engine of prosperity, and the arbiter of fairness. Obama treats government as a theocrat treats his Church—but he’s got an army and the Internal Revenue Service to ensure your participation.

Anyone who stands in the way of Obama’s vacuous moral constructs is branded an obstructionist, unpatriotic, a hostage taker, “the enemy,” or worse. Those of us who refuse to buy into left-wing orthodoxy remain “uninformed” and, inevitably,“selfish,” a bunch of bigoted clods, intellectual buffoons, and moral cripples who got our deserved comeuppance in the 2012 election. If we continue to insist that partisanship is a healthy, organic reflection of differences in a vibrant society—Republicans, after all, still control the House—we can expect to be demonized as remnants of a brutal and obsolete age. Under Obama and his progressive successors, all must submit to the progressive agenda. You saw a bit of this after the election when liberal commentators kept crowing about how the Republican party is a rump party of elderly white males; either the party changes—by which the liberals mean, becomes more progressive—or they gleefully predict it will die.

Progressives are in power, and Obama has treated the political arena as a massive socialist revival meeting. Obama spent four years preaching his own brand of progressive morality: everyone “must” sacrifice. Obama challenged Americans “to find meaning in some- thing greater than themselves,” and by that “something greater,” he meant government. Every initiative he proposes, every law he signs, is an expansion of the state.

The American political conversation is not what it used to be. We’re no longer debating policy, no longer talking about whether government should be merely huge or whether it should be ginormous. We’re not really wrangling over what levels of debt or spending are acceptable. We are in a clash for the soul of our country.

And we’re losing.

Here are the facts. Obama won reelection convincingly in 2012. There was no theoretical hope-peddling this time around. There was no mystery about what Obama stood for. He had a record of com- prehensive economic failure, of divisiveness, of attacks on freedom of religion. He had a record of relentless class warfare, cronyism, incompetence, and stagnation. There were many broken promises. This time around, Barack Obama wasn’t bashful about plying the most explicitly left-wing agenda in presidential history—more government, more taxes, more dependency, more bailouts, more regulations—and he won easily. He promised government-run health care, more crony “investments” in proven economic losers, more interference in markets, more coercion, and more redistribution—yet he cruised to victory. He promised these things as the economy sputtered and his foreign policy crumbled.

Conservatives lost, and the prospects are grim.

If you’re a conservative, you might be shocked by the statist slogans tossed around at the Democratic National Convention about government being “the only thing that we all belong to.” You might be completely scandalized to hear an American president utter the words “you didn’t build that,” and to argue that private businesses owe their success to a beneficent government. You might think these statist sentiments are outrageous. But your neighbors? Not so much. We talk about liberty, but many Americans are far less worried about preserving individual freedom and far more attracted to politicians who make promises about what government can do for them.

Things can change to some extent. Political variables are always in motion. A retooled and revamped Republican Party might help. Perhaps a new charismatic leader can better articulate the values of mainstream conservatism. But let’s not fool ourselves. There’s been a fundamental shift, especially among young people, in how Americans view government’s role in society that will be difficult to ever turn around. A Pew Research study conducted after the election found that nearly six in ten of the voters under thirty supported a more expansive role for government in solving problems.

Put it this way: in a post-election poll, Gallup found that more than half of Democrats and left-leaning Americans had a positive view of socialism. Democrats—the majority party in the United States—have a more positive image of the federal government than they do of capitalism. And there is every reason to believe that it will get worse, as Obama works at expanding the power of government, at telling us that government knows best and is the highest calling (and a darn good employer), that government has the answers to all our problems and can take care of us. As recent elections bear out, a large portion of the electorate is happy to embrace this vision.

Feeling depressed? Well, hey, nothing is meant to last forever. With all that’s gone on, all the divisive rhetoric, all the political ploys, all the executive abuse, all the hyper-nastiness, one may have forgotten that the Golden Age of Obama dawned with a call to fundamentally remake America. Mission accomplished. If you happen to believe, as I do, that government should be strong, but limited, and that individual freedom is more vital than fairness—guess what? We’re screwed. And how.

Order David Harsanyi’s new book Obama’s Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed by Obama’s Reelection
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To read another article by David Harsanyi, click here.

Eight GOP Governors Squander SCOTUS Victory

Eight GOP Governors Squander SCOTUS Victory
By David Catron on 3.4.13 @ 6:09AM

The Court ruled Obamacare’s Medicaid provision unconstitutional, but these wimps still caved.

Since the Supreme Court ruled on Obamacare last June, the White House and its allies in the media have diligently promoted the myth that the decision was an unqualified victory for the supporters of “reform.” In reality, the Supremes dealt the Obama administration an important defeat on one of the two primary issues decided, namely whether the federal government has the right to withhold all matching funds from a state that fails to expand Medicaid according to the dictates of the unpopular health care law.

Medicaid is a joint state-federal program, yet a provision of Obamacare required the withholding of all federal funds from noncompliant states. The plaintiffs argued that this was so coercive that it amounted to an unconstitutional “commandeering” of the states. Seven of the nine justices agreed. This victory, despite the Court’s ruling that the individual mandate is somehow a tax, was viewed by many as an opportunity for GOP governors to thwart implementation of an integral component of the law.

To the disgust of Obamacare’s opponents, however, eight GOP governors have nonetheless decided to comply with the law’s Medicaid provision. Arizona’s Jan Brewer, Florida’s Rick Scott, Michigan’s Rick Snyder, Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, New Jersey’s Chris Christie, New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, North Dakota’s Jack Dalrymple, and Ohio’s John Kasich have all caved. Even worse, several of these people have been vocal opponents of Obamacare and govern states that participated in the lawsuit that produced the Court’s favorable ruling.

It’s difficult to decide who among them deserves the most scorn, but an excellent candidate is Rick Scott. Governor Scott was ostensibly one of Obamacare’s most stalwart opponents. He founded Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, an organization allegedly dedicated to promoting free-market alternatives to the expansion of government-run health care and, as Kyle Peterson recently pointed out, wrote an opinion piece for The American Spectator specifically denouncing Obamacare’s provision for Medicaid expansion.

Moreover, it was Scott’s state that led more than two dozen others all the way to the Supreme Court in the successful bid to have Obamacare’s Medicaid provision struck down. Nonetheless, on February 20, Scott announced that he had “wrestled” with the question in the aftermath of the November election and ultimately decided that Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid “is a compassionate, common sense step forward.” Like many politicians, in other words, Scott wrestled with his conscience and the latter lost the bout.

Sadly, Scott’s venality is not unique among these GOP “leaders.” The flip-flop of Ohio’s John Kasich is another profile in political cowardice. It is not too much to say that Kasich won the governorship of his state by aligning himself with the Tea Party movement and vociferously denouncing Obamacare in countless stump speeches, talk radio, and television appearances. Yet, in early February, he caved on the Medicaid issue, saying that “It makes great sense for the state of Ohio because it will allow us to provide greater care with our own dollars.”

But Kasich, Scott, and the rest of these GOP opportunists know full well that participation in Obamacare’s Medicaid scheme does not “make sense.” They know it will lead to fiscal disasters in every state that falls for this scam. The federal government will inevitably cut back its financial contribution to the vast expansion of Medicaid, leaving the states holding the fiscal bag. Scott, Kasich, and their six accomplices will be out of office by then, of course, leaving their hapless successors to clean up the disaster.

In fact, the groundwork for a federal cutback on matching funds is explicitly laid out in Obamacare. Avik Roy explains, “For the first three years of the expansion, federal taxpayers will pick up the full cost.… This 100 percent funding rate will phase down to 95 percent in 2017, 94 percent in 2018, 93 percent in 2019, and 90 percent in 2020.” And, considering the deep fiscal hole into which Obama is digging us, we hardly need to call on Nostradamus to predict that Washington will welch on its 90% commitment.

This will leave the states with millions of new Medicaid enrollees and virtually no assistance from Washington to cover the cost of their increasingly expensive health care, thus leaving them with a choice between kicking poor people out of the program and cutting other basic services. As Betsy McCaughey pointed out last week, “Medicaid is already consuming a third or more of many state budgets. States would literally have to stop funding roads, public schools, and other essential services to pay for Medicaid.”

What makes this so infuriating is that these Republican governors are waving the white flag after winning a hard fought legal battle in order to escape this very dilemma. The Supreme Court ruled, by a 7-2 majority, that Obamacare’s Medicaid mandate was unconstitutional. Comparing a conditional grant like the federal contribution to Medicaid to a contract, the majority put it thus: “The legitimacy of Congress’s exercise of the spending power… rests on whether the State voluntarily and knowingly accepts the terms of this contract.”

Now, putting their own political prospects ahead of the fiscal health of their states, Governors Scott, Kasich, Brewer, Snyder, Sandoval, Christie, Martinez, and Dalrymple have “voluntarily and knowingly” accepted the terms of the contracts. Most of these eight governors probably expect to be working in Washington as elected officials or lobbyists when the bill comes due, and at least one has his eye on the White House. With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?
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To read another article by David Catron, click here.
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To read more about Obamacare, click here.

Private Insurance But Government Control

Private Insurance But Government Control
By Betsy McCaughey on 3.4.13 @ 6:09AM

What everyone needs to know.

If you think the Obama health law won’t affect you because you have private insurance, keep reading. The Department of Health and Human Services announced final rules for private insurance last month. The federal government will have control over your care. Sec. 1311 of the law empowers the Secretary of Health and Human Services to dictate how doctors treat privately insured patients and what questions patients must be asked. Your doctor will enter your information into an electronic data base, your doctor’s decisions will be monitored for compliance with federal guidelines, and your doctor may have to choose between what is best for you and avoiding a government penalty.

1. Ask your doctor about keeping two sets of books, if you tell your doctor things you wouldn’t confide to anyone. Otherwise your electronic record will include everything and be seen by thousands of eyes. Have depression, erectile dysfunction, or a drinking problem? Your chiropractor will see it. So will thousands of nonphysicians. President Obama’s January 16 Executive Actions to curb gun violence deemed healthcare privacy protections “unnecessary legal barriers,” making it clear federal agencies will use health information for non-health purposes, such as background checks.

2. Line up your doctors now, if you’re a baby boomer. If you wait until you turn 65 and go on Medicare, you won’t find a doctor willing to treat you. Doctors will be paid less to care for seniors than any other patients.

3. Insist on a specialist, if you have a heart problem. Obamacare requires insurers to implement HMO-like controls that will reduce use of specialists. Recent research shows that patients with unstable angina do far better at avoiding heart attacks when they are seen regularly by cardiologists.

4. Brace yourself for less care at the hospital. Cuts to Medicare pay for over half this law, including a whopping $247 billion reduction in what hospitals will be paid. That will push hospitals into financial crisis, warned Richard Foster, Chief Actuary of Medicare. Nurses will be spread thinner, and patients of every age will wait longer for help.

5. Ask your employer whether your on-the-job coverage is going to be dropped. The law compels employers with 50 or more full time employees to provide a package of benefit that costs twice as much as what many currently offer. Some employers will opt to pay a penalty instead, and notify you by October 1. Amazingly, even federal actuaries admit the employer mandate will result in fewer people having employer coverage.

Some employers are already adjusting the size of their workforce to avoid the mandate, or pushing workers to part-time status (under 30 hours a week). Employers’ obligations in 2014 will be determined by the size of their 2013 workforce.

6. Avoid Medicaid. If you lose on the job coverage, you’ll either be directed to an insurance exchange or dumped into Medicaid. “Dumped” is the right word, because Medicaid is often inferior coverage. Research shows that surgery patients on Medicaid are 50% more likely to die than surgery patients with private coverage and more at risk of dying even than uninsured patients.

Citizens with household incomes below 133% of poverty ($19,000 for a single person and $33,000 for a family of four) are ineligible for subsidized private plans on the exchanges. They have to settle for Medicaid. Legal immigrants with low incomes get a better deal. The law makes them eligible, because otherwise they would be uninsured. Medicaid has a 5 year waiting period for newcomers.

7. Don’t be bamboozled by fancy marketing. An exchange is like a supermarket that only sells one product: the government-mandated “essential benefits” package, period. The bronze, silver, gold, and platinum labels merely indicate different copays and deductibles. The cheapest bronze plan for a family of five will cost about $20,000 (before subsidies), according to the IRS, and will cover only 60% of medical bills. Platinum plans will cover 90%.

The Obama health law empowers the Secretary of Health and Human Services for the first time in history to standardize medical care for privately insured patients. Look for thousands more regulations controlling you and your doctors.
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To read more about Obamacare, click here.

The Sequester Amnesty

The Sequester Amnesty
By Jed Babbin on 3.4.13 @ 6:11AM

The lawless Obama administration is brazenly endangering the country to prove a political point.

Because the word “sequester” sounds more like a bronchial infection than a governmental disaster, President Obama failed to terrorize House Republicans into raising taxes in order to avoid it.

They tried everything they could think of to scare us. We’d have meat shortages because federal inspectors would be laid off, long lines at airport security stations would get longer because the TSA molesters would be cut back. Education Secretary Arne Duncan earned four “Pinocchios” from the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column for brazenly lying about teachers he said were already being laid off in West Virginia.

Duncan, for all his faults, is relatively harmless. The same cannot be said about Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose department has begun releasing criminal illegal aliens — which for this discussion is not redundant — from the jails where they were being held pending deportation. Even before Friday, when the $85 billion in cuts took effect, Napolitano’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement began releasing criminal illegal aliens among the public.

It’s the Obama administration’s “sequester amnesty,” which endangers the public to make a political point.

Pinal County, Arizona, is about seventy miles from the Mexican border. It’s larger than Connecticut, running south and east from the city of Mesa. Its sheriff, Paul Babeu, is a tough guy in a very tough place. And both his job and his county are made a lot tougher by ICE’s release of an unknown number of these criminal illegals, people who were held pending deportation because their criminal records made them “inadmissible” into the United States.

Arizona is high on Obama’s list of enemies. It’s the state Obama’s Justice Department sued to set aside the state law that enables the arrest and detention of illegal aliens. The Supreme Court struck down part of the law, but left in place the part that allows state law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people they’ve stopped for other reasons.

Obama’s position is that federal law preempts any state law to control illegal immigration and any state action for which the state lacks federal permission is impermissible.

Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona, is trying to deal with that one-way street. I interviewed him on the Roger Hedgecock radio show last Thursday. What Sheriff Babeu told me is shocking. It confirms that our government is now willing to endanger public safety to prove a political point.

In December 2012, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had more than 33,000 illegal aliens in custody pending deportation. These aren’t people who were arrested just because they were illegal aliens. They are criminals, held by ICE because they were convicted of separate crimes, usually serious felonies, and held after they’d served their sentences until they could be deported. Others have long criminal records in their own countries who came here to do more of what they did at home.

Federal law allows these people to be held for up to six months pending deportation. Some, from nations such as Pakistan, are held for that long — and should be held longer - because their country of origin won’t issue travel documents enabling their return. The non-cooperating nations are content to leave their problems with us, be they terrorists or drug traffickers.

The federal government says there are 11 to 12 million illegals in the United States. Sheriff Babeu told me that 300-500 of the 34,000 criminal illegals held in pre-deportation detention were released into his county two weekends ago.

Janet Napolitano said that ICE won’t be able to maintain 34,000 criminal illegals in custody — not because of legal limitations on incarceration, but because of the sequester. In a statement to the press last week, she said, “Look, we’re doing our very best to minimize the impacts of sequester. But there’s only so much I can do,” Napolitano said. “I’m supposed to have 34,000 detention beds for immigration. How do I pay for those? We want to maintain 22,000-some odd Border Patrol agents. I got to be able to pay their salaries.”

Babeu told me that neither he nor the county’s police chiefs were given notice of the release. “The doors swung open and there they go,” he said.

I asked Babeu if he even knew who these people were. He said that he’s asked for that information numerous times, including by letter, and ICE has refused to tell him. “These people were released into the community. We don’t know their names, we don’t know what charges they were held on or their criminal history.” He added, “But we do know this: this is the same group that Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama have all agreed that these are the worst of the illegals.”

ICE is saying that some of these illegals were released on terms that supposedly provide some supervision. Sheriff Babeu is, to say the least, skeptical.

“They’re saying that they’re going to put them on supervised release, meaning some of them wear an ankle bracelet or they have to check in with authorities. Are you kidding me? These people have broken the law countless times and now they’ve got their chance. They’re out of prison.”

He added, “There’s no incentive for them to report in because what’s the worst thing we can do to them? Deport them?”

Sheriff Babeu apparently learned from ICE and Border Patrol agents who called him unofficially. He said, “Good people who work for ICE, work for Border Patrol, they call me all the time.…They said, ‘Sheriff, help us. We’re releasing all these criminals. This order just came down from Washington and now they’re all out in the streets.”

Which streets? It’s improbable that Pinal County is the only place where criminal illegals are being set free. He’s asked about that, too, and the federal bureaucrats won’t tell him.

So we don’t know how many criminal illegal aliens — criminals because they’ve committed serious crimes other than illegally entering the United States — are being set free around the country. According to an Associated Press report, Homeland Security has released over 2,000 of these dangerous illegals since February. Of the 34,000 held by ICE in December, how many more will be turned loose to endanger the American people, because the Obama regime wants to punish us for the sequestration of $85 billion out of the nearly $4 trillion the government will spend this year?

The release of criminal illegal aliens is probably illegal itself. Under our muddled immigration law, Napolitano has the authority to release illegal aliens individually when her department determines that they pose no danger to public safety. But mass releases, such as the one into Pinal County, are beyond her power.

The only answer to this is for Sheriff Babeu — perhaps joined by other concerned law enforcement officers around the country — to sue Napolitano to stop the releases. That lawsuit would reveal who the illegals are, what crimes they’ve committed before, and just who within ICE, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, or possibly the White House ordered the releases.

Congress won’t find the answers to these questions no matter how hard it tries. The House subpoena on “Fast and Furious” was blocked by Obama’s claim of executive privilege when Congress held Attorney General Holder in contempt. The Benghazi investigation is still incomplete, the survivors of the terrorist attack on our diplomatic outpost held — or, more technically, sequestered — out of congressional investigators’ reach.

The only answer is “sue the bastards.” Get a federal judge to issue an injunction against further releases and to compel answers to Babeu’s questions. He, and the rest of the law enforcement community, are entitled to know who was released, what crimes they had committed before, and where these people were when last seen. They have to know these things if they’re going to do their duty to protect their communities.

Gene Sperling, Obama’s top economic adviser, was wandering around the Sunday talk shows blaming Republicans for the sequester. He said Republicans are to blame for all the harm that results from the sequester. After Napolitano’s release of criminals from ICE incarceration, that’s a bolder lie than Arne Duncan’s.

We are living in an era of government lawlessness that is unprecedented in our history. Obama and his minions will do whatever they like, whenever they can, to make political points. In this case, only the courts can stop them.
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To read another article by Jed Babbin, click here.

Media: Actually, This White House Threatens Us All The Time

Media: Actually, This White House Threatens Us All The Time
By Guy Benson
3/4/2013

But they know deep down that President Obama still loves them, and that it was kind of even their fault anyway. The New York Post's Maureen Callahan chronicles the abusive and intimidating tactics the current administration employs against the press:

This administration is more skilled and disciplined than any other in controlling the narrative, using social media to circumnavigate the press. On the flip side, our YouTube culture means even the slightest gaffe can be devastating, and so you have an army of aides and staffers helicoptering over reporters. Finally, this week, reporters are pushing back. Even Jonathan Alter — who frequently appears on the Obama-friendly MSNBC — came forward to say he, too, had been treated horribly by the administration for writing something they didn’t like. “There is a kind of threatening tone that, from time to time — not all the time — comes out of these guys,” Alter said this week. During the 2008 campaign swing through Berlin, Alter said that future White House press secretary Robert Gibbs disinvited him from a dinner between Obama and the press corps over it. “I was told ‘Don’t come,’ in a fairly abusive e-mail,” he said. “[It] made what Gene Sperling wrote [to Woodward] look like patty-cake.” “I had a young reporter asking tough, important questions of an Obama Cabinet secretary,” says one DC veteran. “She was doing her job, and they were trying to bully her. In an e-mail, they called her the vilest names — bitch, c--t, a--hole.” He complained and was told the matter would be investigated: “They were hemming and hawing, saying, ‘We’ll look into it.’ Nothing happened.” He wound up confronting the author of the e-mail directly. “I said, ‘From now on, every e-mail you send this reporter will be on the record, and you will be speaking on behalf of the president of the United States.’ That shut it down.”

One correspondent says that when he inquired about a staging choice for the president’s speech, he was steamrolled. “There was one specific White House aide calling me up, yelling and screaming,” he says. “It was condescending and abrasive: ‘Why is this a story? Why are you doing this? This is of no consequence. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’” This went on for two days. “All I wanted,” says the reporter, “was an answer to a question. It’s not like I was looking to do a 12-page exposé to take down an aide. It was unnecessary vociferousness.” He eventually got his statement. Another White House correspondent says that last week’s blowup over pool reporters’ access to the president’s golf game with Tiger Woods — which was none — is indicative of a larger problem. “Today’s a perfect example,” he says. “Jack Lew is sworn in” — as US Treasury secretary, on Thursday — “and they didn’t even allow a photographer in there. A reporter asked [press secretary] Jay Carney why, and his answer was, ‘It’s a family ceremony.’ No! This is a high-ranking government official whose salary is paid for by taxpayers. No.” “This administration has tools to reach people on their own,” CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante said this week. “They don’t need us as much. And to the extent that they’re able to do that, they’re undercutting the First Amendment, which guarantees a free press through many voices. If they put out their own material, it’s state-run media.”


So Team Obama isn't averse to punishing even overtly friendly media figures who step out of line, and the president who pushed a "war on women" meme in his re-election campaign employs high-level advisors who call female journalists the C-word for asking inconvenient questions. Hope and change. National Journal's Ron Fournier wrote last week about an escalating series of emails he received from a senior White House official, which eventually became so vitriolic that Fournier decided to "ice" -- or cut off -- the source altogether. In justifying both that decision and his choice to go public, Fournier cited the administration's successful bullying of younger reporters:

I changed the rules of our relationship, first, because it was a waste of my time (and the official’s government-funded salary) to engage in abusive conversations. Second, I didn’t want to condone behavior that might intimidate less-experienced reporters, a reaction I personally witnessed in journalists covering the Obama administration.

This was the same concern Bob Woodward raised when he initially told CNN's Wolf Blitzer about the infamous "regret" email: "I've tangled with lots of these people," he said. "But suppose there's a young reporter who's only had a couple of years — or 10 years' — experience and the White House is sending him an email saying, 'You're going to regret this.' You know, tremble, tremble. I don't think it's the way to operate." Though the context of the email exchange between Woodward and Gene Sperling clearly diminished the severity of the "threat" involved, subsequent anecdotes and confessions from other journalists have vindicated Woodward's critique of the White House press shop's culture and standard operating procedures. This isn't about one controversial email; it's about a pattern of behavior -- to say nothing of the Obama gang's subsequent campaign to marginalize and malign Woodward's reputation. Allahpundit notices that even the media whistle-blowers exhibit a strange compulsion to go out of their way to distance Obama himself from the sleazy actions of his top staff: "[Fournier] ends, as did Woodward and as any indictment of White House boorishness evidently must as a matter of professional obligation, by noting that St. Barack would surely frown upon such treatment — even though Obama chooses to surround himself with people like Rahm Emanuel and Fournier’s source and he not-so-secretly disdains the media despite their adulation of him." Yes, because surely St. Barack would never condone such boorish and acerbic treatment of reporters, right? Ahem:

It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage. Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an a--hole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet hit local newsstands. It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

The fish rots from the head. The thin-skinned, slash-and-burn, Chicago Way head.
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To read another article about The Obama bullying administration and the press, click here.
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To read another article by Guy Benson, click here.

George Stephanopoulos Has "No Hate" For Dennis Rodman's N. Korea Trip

George Stephanopoulos Has "No Hate" For Dennis Rodman's N. Korea Trip
By Katie Pavlich
3/4/2013

Former NBA player and all-around freakshow Dennis Rodman went to North Korea last week to visit with newly minted dictator Kim Jong Un. This is outrageous and ridiculous for many reasons, which I'll get into below, and should be condemned by Democrats, Republicans and the press. That being said, leave it to former Clinton communications director and ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos to have "no hate" for Rodman's trip.



First of all, Stephanopoulos is ignoring Kim Jong Un's most recent nuclear test and his plans to launch a new intermediate-range ballistic missile any day now.

North Korea appears to be preparing for a test launch of a new intermediate-range ballistic missile that would further heighten tensions in the region following an underground nuclear test earlier this month.

Test preparations for the launch of a road-mobile Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile were spotted recently by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Signs at a remote missile base include indicators of fueling for the road-mobile Musudan missile, classified as an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), said officials familiar with intelligence reports.

North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test on Feb. 12, prompting international condemnation. It was the third test since 2006 and raised new concerns among Western intelligence agencies about whether North Korea is close to fashioning a warhead small enough to fit on a missile.

Second, this is a country in which leaders literally starve children.

There were times and places in North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population, that children feared to sleep in the open. Some of them had wandered in from the countryside to places like Chongjin, an industrial town on the coast, where they lived on streets and in railroad stations. It wasn’t unusual for people to disappear; they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions. But dark rumors were spreading, too horrifying to believe, too persistent to ignore.

“Don’t buy any meat if you don’t know where it comes from,” one Chongjin woman whispered to a friend, who later defected and recounted the conversation to the reporter Barbara Demick for her book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” Fear of cannibalism, like the famine supposedly driving it, spread. People avoided the meat in streetside soup vendors and warned children not to be alone at night. At least one person in Chongjin was arrested and executed for eating human flesh.

And last, we're taking political advice about North Korea from Dennis Rodman now because basketball or something? What could go wrong? The good news is, during Stephanopoulos' actual interview with Rodman, he wasn't so tolerant of the trip.

View Video Here:

When Rodman said he planned on going back, Stephanopoulos gave him a copy of the Human Rights Watch report on North Korea, telling him he might "learn something."
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To read more about North Korea, click here.
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To read another article by Katie Pavlich, click here.

Obama White House: Vulgar and Abusive

Obama White House: Vulgar and Abusive
By John Ransom
3/3/2013

Catball wrote: Can anybody out there tell me the difference between the tea party and the taliban. No this is not a joke. Seriously, the tea party wants to destroy the american government. The t-party crew walked into a church and killed a doctor because they like what he was doing. That was in Wichita,KS. The t-party does want to dismantle our government. They don't want women to have any rights. M. Bachmann said you should be submissive and do whatever they want you to do. They want rich white men & women to take over the country. They don't care if our kids have good schools and they hate unions because they give the money to people that need it. They believe blacks and mexicans should all be locked up. They think standing around holding their machine guns is cool while babbling about the bible. - Sequester-Sized Government Waste Can Go First

Dear Comrade Catball,

The difference between the Taliban and the Tea Party is that the Tea Party believes in constitutional government as expressed in the United States Constitution. The Taliban believes in Sharia law as expressed in the Quran and Shunna, or the life of the prophet Muhammad.

The Tea Party supports your right to be let alone, the Taliban wants to make it a capital crime for you to fly a kite.

As to George Tiller’s death in Wichita, KS, I can’t find any material that supports your notion that Scott Roeder, the man who killed Tiller, was a Tea Party member. Instead, he is an avowed prolife activist who thinks that abortion is a crime. He got life in prison with no parole.

You seem to be arguing that Michele Bachmann, arguably one of the more influential women in the US- by virtue of her role in congress- is saying that women should be subordinate to men. I think her actions say otherwise. She did run for president after all...against a bunch of men.

I'm sorry. I had trouble typing that last line because I had to reload my semi-automatic weapon that I use to change the channels on cable TV.

The rest of your rant is too stupid to be addressed seriously.

Proverbs 26:28 “A lying tongue hates the truth and the malicious mouth works trouble.”

Who do you think you are? Ezra Klein?

DuaneUrban wrote: Hi John, how do we fix this mess we are in? - Sequester-Sized Government Waste Can Go First

Dear Comrade Urban,

If were running for office, I would propose:

1) Impose term limits on Congress.

2) Enact a single-subject rule in Congress to prevent pork barrel spending from being inserted into bills, say, on disaster relief.

3) Limit all legislation to 100 pages.

4) Enact a balanced budget amendment to the constitution.

5) Scrap the current tax code in favor of a flat tax or fair tax.

6) Allow no bills be introduced unless they qualified under the 10th Amendment as powers specifically reserved for the federal government.

Carl469 wrote: Lumping in Al Sharpton and John Boehner together as "liberals?" Maybe John Ransom qualifies as the idiot here. - Another Reason Ezra Klein is an Idiot

Dear Comrade 469,

John Boehner helped Obama get his tax increases through congress. If that doesn’t qualify as a liberal, Boehner sure did a pretty good imitation of it.

Here’s the thing: After campaigning for two years as dead-set against tax increases, it’s a little much for Boehner to change his mind within hours of the general election tally to decide that tax increases are OK.

The problem with party politics is that both parties really stand for the same things right now. Until the GOP offers more than just cosmetic differences, the conservative base won’t take them seriously.

DG wrote: I just learned Ezra Kein is not an economist. He has a BA in journalism. (Evidently with a minor in BS.) - Another Reason Ezra Klein is an Idiot

Dear DG,

Comment of the week, brother.

Bitobush wrote: Mr ignorance has spoken once again. Hate to break it to you Johnny, but the tsunami in Japan was a geological event not a weather event. While tsunamis can sometimes be caused by weather, the one in Japan was triggered by an earthquake. Get the facts straight, before we mistake you for just a big bag of wind. - Another Reason Ezra Klein is an Idiot

Dear Comrade Bitters,

Yeah. Score one for you. The sentence should say “natural disaster” rather than weather event.

The scoreboard reads: Ransom 5,847 to Bit’O 1.

That’s even worse than the Chicago Bears beating the Green Bay Packers 2-0 in 1938.

From PackersNews.com:

The Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears played in a downpour that kept scoring to a bare minimum at City Stadium on Sept. 18, 1938. The Bears won 2-0.

Packers quarterback Arnie Herber's failure to handle a low snap from punt formation led to Chicago's only score. The Bears got a safety after the Packers' Tom Jones fell on the ball in the end zone.

The Packers' Clarke Hinkle missed a 37-yard field goal three plays from the end of the game.

Congrats, Comrade Bito-Hinkle.

Laces out.

Joseph64 wrote: The blame for the housing meltdown can be laid squarely on two parties. The lenders, who made it easy for unqualified borrowers to buy homes they knew they couldn't afford and the borrowers, who bought the homes anyway knowing they couldn't afford them. - America's Fiscal Stupidity Mirrors Detroit

Dear Comrade 64,

The two parties to which blame can be assigned for the housing crisis are the Democrats and the Republicans.

Once the parties teamed up to allow the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the other quasi-government banks to guarantee mortgages, it was all over.

Banks and homeowners just did the natural thing, which is to do what they thought was in their best interest.

I will give banks credit for trying to invent ways to monetize subprime mortgages in a way that would lessen risk. Their math was off, but they didn’t really need to do that.

The one thing that TARP proved was that the banks were right when they guessed that the federal government would guarantee the banking industry against disaster come what may.

From our own Dan Mitchell:

The just-confirmed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was given a huge bonus for leaving Citigroup several years ago. Did the company give Lew a bonus because they were happy to shed his $1.1 million salary after he presided over gigantic losses at the firm’s alternative investments division?

Don’t be silly. He was showered with money specifically for leaving the company to take a “high level position with the United States government”

Again, nice work if you can get it.

But Lew’s loot is pocket change compared to the $115 million that former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin received for helping to steer the company into financial collapse.

So is this evidence that the private sector is systematically stupid?

Nope.

He continues:

According to the Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General, Citigroup got $45 billion of TARP handouts and $301 billion of guarantees.

Not to mention an estimated $13.4 billion subsidy thanks to the government’s too-big-to-fail policy.

Since we’re talking apples and oranges, I have no idea how to compare the value of the payments to Lew and Rubin with the value of all the handouts and subsidies that Citigroup got (and is still getting) from taxpayers.

But I do know that mere mortals like you and me don’t have a prayer of “earning” the incredibly high returns that Citigroup received by “investing” in Robert Rubin and Jack Lew.

And let’s not forget what Goldman Sachs “earned” by “investing” in the previous Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner.

Hey, nice work if you can get it.

What’s really hilarious to me is seeing the liberal, hippie-types have to rally around guys like Lew and Geithner and Rubin.

They so screwed you, Comrade Doctor.

Vietnam Vet wrote: The article is an interesting take on 'how stuff happens', but one sentence stood out in my mind. " ... Woodward called out Obama in print on hyperbole over sequestration cuts. Prior to publication, Woodward says, a White House staffer threatened him over the story. ..." How does the White House staffer know the content "prior to publication" ... ??? Are media outlets required to 'have their homework graded by a teacher' at the White House before 'telling us the news'? - Obama’s Rat Madness

Dear Vet,

Woodward called the White House to get comment, which is a normal practice. It’s kind of journalism etiquette. I don’t have a problem with it.

Especially when they send email apologies for their threats.

GII67 wrote: Dear Comrade John, A nice job. As the ship of the administration tips ever so much more to port, the rats begin to run to starboard. It is still obvious that neither political party has the will to cutback any spending. It is also obvious that without serious tax reform, entitlement reform, and spending reforms, the economy will continue to underperform as you have analyzed for us before. The only ethical thing is to propose raising taxes to balance the budget. After all, that would be the difference between Germany and Greece. - Obama’s Rat Madness

Dear Comrade 67,

The only moral thing would be to stop deficit spending and actually balance the budget.

No matter what marginal tax rates have been tried, federal revenue collection remains between 15 percent to 20 percent of GDP.

Michael Barone of NRO explains it:

Why is that? As the late Jack Kemp liked to say, when you tax something, you get less of it. When the government took 91 percent of what the law defined as adjusted gross income over a certain amount, not many people had adjusted gross income over that amount.

According to a Congressional Research Service study, the effective income-tax rate on the top 0.01 percent of earners in the days of nominal 91 percent tax rates was only 45 percent. Others have pegged it at 31 percent.

In the 1970s, when the top rate on wage and salary income was 50 percent, and 70 percent on investment income, high earners spent much of their time and energy seeking tax shelters. The animal spirits of capitalists, to use John Maynard Keynes’s term, were directed less at productive investment and more at tax avoidance.

Barone goes on to explain that in Europe they use regressive taxes like value-added taxes to get the additional revenues that a progressive income-tax scheme can’t produce. And a VAT falls more heavily on the poor and the middle class.

Raymond, (Ret) wrote: Please notice that Woodward gave Obama a pass by saying he was sure Obama was not aware that stuff like this was going on. He should have. Just like Hillary should have been aware of the repeated pleas for help from Ambassador Stevens. Yet another instance of a Democrat excusing culpability by pleading incompetence. - Obama’s Rat Madness

Dear Raymond,

I think Woodward was just putting Obama in a box.

There’s pressure too coming from inside the White House to exonerate the “staffer.” Mentioning Obama puts him squarely in the spotlight.

Come on, Mr. President: Either you did or didn’t approve what people did on your behalf.

As one reporter asked White House Press Jester Jay Carney: “Just one quick follow-up on the Woodward thing. Another longtime, respected Washington journalist, Ron Fournier, came out and talked about Woodward, and he said that -- he talked about his own story about how he’s received many what he called “vulgar and abusive” emails and phone calls from White House officials. I mean, have you ever heard of anything like that?”

We’re waiting. Mr. Obama…

Yachtsman388 wrote: If that's incompetence [threating Bob Woodward], it's small potatoes compared with conservatard incompetence. The neocon brand incompetence cost us more than 4,000 American lives and over $1.3 trillion and they never could find those WMD's that they had no reason to believe were ever there. - Obama’s Rat Madness

Dear Comrade Kapt’nKrunch,

I never cared about WMDs.

There were a lot of other good reasons to invade Iraq. The occupation was screwed up for sure, but that was mostly Rumsfeld.

Abe Lincoln didn’t always manage the American Civil War well, to say the least. But that doesn’t mean that the war wasn’t worth fighting.

Not sure if you have ever heard of the liberal phenomena called the Arab Spring? You either approved of it of you didn’t.

This much is for sure though: The changes in Iraq are much preferred over chaos and uncertainty of the Arab Spring.

And the Arab Spring is almost incomprehensible without the US first freeing Iraq.

Liberals don’t really seem understand that for all the anti-American rhetoric that comes out of places like Egypt, Tehran and Damascus, the US is still understood universally at the standard-bearer of freedom for the rest of the world.

We proved that in Iraq. Again.

DoctorRoy wrote: There was no questioning of Bush or his policies by either the columnists or the Townies. And I mean absolutely none. - Obama’s Rat Madness

Dear Comrade Doctor,

I’m disappointed. I thought you were an idiot, but not a liar.

I was wrong.

Look, there are literally hundreds of these types of columns critical of Bush while he was president. I’m not going to pull more than one because you wrote: “And I mean absolutely none."

But here’s Michelle Malkin November 16, 2005:

Things are going from bad to worse at the Bush Department of Homeland Security.

Do not be fooled by DHS chief Michael Chertoff's tough-sounding rhetoric. While the Washington muckety-mucks pay lip service to reforming the nation's broken detention and deportation system, catch-and-release of immigration lawbreakers remains the order of the day -- not only at the border, but all across the country's interior.

The rudderless and overwhelmed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency still does not have a new chief. Which is just as well since Bush nominee Julie Myers (a nice Bush lawyer with virtually no immigration or customs enforcement experience who happens to be the niece of recently retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers/wife of Chertoff's chief of staff/former employee of Chertoff and former colleague of outgoing ICE head Michael Garcia) would provide as much leadership and morale-boosting ability as a pair of junior high pom-poms. Her nomination is still pending.

Meanwhile, as illegal immigration continues unabated, the White House has seen fit to honor the chief of the Border Patrol, David Aguilar, with a presidential "Meritorious Executive" award, which comes with a cash bonus, for his outstanding performance. I kid you not

Comrade Doctor, if you’re going to complain about conservatives, please do it on a factual basis.

gmallast wrote: Mr. Ransom is right, of course. But he is getting shrill. He is getting almost as sarcastic as I am. -The Big O Goes for the Big Zero Again

Dear Comrade G,

Oh I am, am I?

Supercarp wrote: If asteroids "want to destroy the middle class and women," then asteroids must be Republican. Truthfully, I think most Republicans would be happy with that. - Asteroids Want to Destroy the Middle Class- and Women

Dear Supercarp,

That’s the equivalent of “Asteroids are all Bush’s fault.”

If you think that Republicans have a secret plan to destroy the middle class and women, then you need more medication than Nixon took. Or Obama. Combined.

BFDOFR wrote: John, this is not the first column of yours that I've read that is full of extraneous words and other minor errors that should have been caught by a good editor. I agree with almost all of your opinions and I like your snarky style and ability to skewer the buffoons on the other side. But, if you don't get a good editor soon, these minor errors are going to mount enough for me to have to stop reading you. Please. - Asteroids Want to Destroy the Middle Class- and Women

Dear BFDOFR,

You do know that BFDOFR isn’t a real word, right?

Future complaints can be directed to our new associate editor Michael Schaus at Michael.Schaus@salem.cc.

That's it for this week.

V/r,

JR
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.

Welcome to the Armageddon

Welcome to the Armageddon
By Derek Hunter
3/3/2013

Welcome to Thunder Dome.

Well, at least sequestration was supposed to bring about a post-apocalyptic world until President Obama realized Republicans weren’t going to capitulate to his will (again) and raise taxes (again) to replace the sequester he birthed in 2011.

There was a distinct change in tone from the White House this week on what sequestration would mean. In little more than a week we went from roving bands of teacherless children wandering darkened streets filled with uninspected rancid meat, illegal aliens and pre-convicted felons released because of lack of funds setting fires there aren’t enough firefighters to extinguish to not a “cliff” but a possible gradual “tumble downward.” That’s on the order of the difference between ordering a ham sandwich and getting a foot massage.

What caused this change? Two things. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward’s spam filter seemingly malfunctioned, blocking White House talking points and forcing him to tell the truth about the sequester’s origin, and Republican leadership took pills to address their low testosterone.

Woodward’s piece left no ambiguity as to who introduced the concept and insisted upon adoption of sequestration as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling. Within days Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor decided they wanted to keep their titles and thus would bend no more to the will of a relentless demagogue.

Woodward immediately took a beating from his fellow journalists that makes being “jumped out” of a gang feel like afternoon tea. Conversely, Boehner and Cantor had only to do nothing, at which they excel, to force the president’s hand.

The scare tactics the White House tried to employ proved as successful as their attempts to employ Americans.

The wheels came off this strategy when it became clear these “cuts” were going to happen. They’d oversold and Armageddon would under-deliver.

The panicked selling of the Mad Max world reached such extreme levels that Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., predicted 170 million jobs, roughly 30 million more jobs than exist in the country, would be lost. Shaving what amounts to a rounding error off the rate of increase in yearly government spending was so bad not only would we lose every job we have, sequestration would create 30 million more jobs just to lose them too. Snake oil salesmen were blushing in their graves.

Waters made a gaffe, but the absurdity of it didn’t dwarf the absurdity of the President’s claims; it fit in like a Legos snap together – like it belonged there.

The American people are busy and tend not to pay attention to government actions, but they do see a steady stream of reports of government waste, expensive parties and all manner of waste that makes its way to lunch break conversation. The idea of a minor decrease in the amount of increase in government spending causing end-times is laughable to everyone who has more IQ points than teeth.

That common-sense intelligence was the Achilles heel for President Obama’s failed messaging.

On Friday the president launched a new scare tactic. He said, “So every time that we get a piece of economic news, over the next month, next two months, next six months, as long as the sequester is in place, we’ll know that that economic news could have been better if Congress had not failed to act.” This is his self-granted “get out of blame free” card. Anything bad that happens economically, no matter what it is or when, throughout the rest of his term is not his fault, it’s Republicans fault for not caving on sequester.

The media will be only too happy to enable this meme.

But now that we’ve survived Armageddon, there was something else the president said Friday that Republicans should find interesting. Reductions in government spending, he said, will cause ripples throughout the economy. “Layoffs and pay cuts mean that people have less money in their pockets, and that means that they have less money to spend at local businesses. That means lower profits. That means fewer hires,” he warned.

Reread that paragraph and replace “reductions in government spending” with “higher taxes” in your mind. That’s nearly a full-throated endorsement of supply-side economics and a better, clearer argument against Obama’s tax hikes – both past successes and future attempts – than any Republican has made in years.

As Americans slowly emerge from their doomsday bunkers and sift through their stockpiled canned goods, it’s good to remember this moment for a number of reasons and lessons there to learn. Democrats will always overplay their hand because it’s based on an emotional appeal to fear. It’s a tough card to trump, but it can be done by using their words against them and reminding people of their false prophecies of the past. Chicken Little lost her credibility for a reason.
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To read more about the Sequester, click here.
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To read another article by Derek Hunter, click here.

From Behind Enemy Lines

From Behind Enemy Lines
Friday, March 1, 2013
by Burt Prelutsky

Because I am a conservative living in California, I often find myself thinking that, like those members of the French underground in World War II movies, I should be transmitting my dispatches by way of a shortwave radio.

How crazy is California, you ask? Well, for openers, the voters back in November, voted to raise the state income taxes. And why did they do that, you ask? Because Governor Jerry Brown told them it was a good idea. That’s how crazy California is. But there’s more.

Now it’s been discovered that the world’s largest deposit of shale oil lies beneath our feet. Not only could it provide jobs for tens of thousands of unemployed people, but it might even lower our gas prices 50 or 60 cents-a-gallon, finally putting us in range of the national average. But for all the good that oil is likely to do us, it might as well be lying beneath the feet of Martians. That’s because nearly every wealthy Democrat in California is a devout environmentalist.

All those rich dipsticks, like Rob Reiner, George Clooney, Ted Danson and Barbra Streisand, who spend millions electing the likes of Barack Obama, Henry Waxman, Brad Sherman and Governor Moonbeam, are more concerned with being invited to Sierra Club galas than they are with the state’s double digit unemployment rate. It may not be easy being green if you’re a Muppet, but you’ve got it made if you’re a greenie in California.

In a saner world, it’s not insects that would need to be on lists of endangered species. Instead, it would be two-legged creatures like Jim Carrey. The sometime actor/fulltime buffoon recently declared that “Anyone who ran out after Newtown to get a gun has nothing in his body or his soul worth protecting.” One has to suspect that in the sequel to Dumb and Dumber, Carrey will play both roles. In Hollywood, that’s called typecasting.

How is it that when Obama releases photos of himself playing basketball at the White House, it’s okay, but if a conservative mentions Obama and basketball in the same sentence, he can count on Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow labeling him a racist?

Speaking of which, how is it that blacks claim to feel insulted if they are in any way connected to fried chicken and watermelon, two very tasty items, but, by and large, they don’t seem to be even slightly embarrassed by a 71% illegitimacy rate, a flourishing drug culture and more young men going to jail than to college. If they were serious grown-ups, instead of being a pair of celebrity suck-ups, wouldn’t we expect Barack and Michelle, the First Black Couple, to address those problems instead of constantly lecturing white, law-abiding, people about guns and cookies?

The latest in a litany of good reasons why conservatives should home-school their children was the suspension of a seven-year-old from the second grade. It seems during recess he fantasized a game in which evil monsters were hiding in a box. His solution to saving the world was to toss a fantasy hand grenade and blow them up. The school administrators, who no doubt fantasize that they are sane, wasted no time dealing with this menace.

For the boy, it was no doubt a learning experience. One thing he learned was that all the monsters don’t hide in boxes; often, they can be found lurking in the principal’s office. The other thing he learned is that fantasy hand grenades are good, but real ones are more effective.

On the other hand, if the kid was anything like me, he knew exactly what he was doing. If I were attending public school these days and I found out how easily one could be sent home, I would be spraying the schoolyard with an imaginary tommy gun.

I don’t really believe that little kids pointing their fingers and going “Bang bang” are really a cause for great concern. I do think that adults lying about disabilities in order to either retire early or increase their pension benefits is every bit as disgusting as a president blowing millions of dollars on vacations for himself and his family when so many Americans can’t pay their bills, thanks mainly to his left-wing agenda.

At present, there are 8,830,026 Americans collecting disability checks. That is a record number. In fact, a new record has been set every month going back to January, 1997. That month, the number went from 4,385,623 to 4,385,374, a dip of 249. Does anyone actually believe that we have doubled the number of disabled Americans over the past 16 years? Even with all those nanny state safety measures in place? Disability fraud is definitely a growth industry. Along with gun manufacturing and gun sales, it’s just about the only one we have.

Finally, in Colorado, some very bright legislators are trying to change things so that the burden of proof will be on defense attorneys to prove their clients are sane rather than on prosecutors to prove they’re loons.

Although it is a step in the right direction, the solution should be to throw out the plea of guilty by reason of insanity. Evil is evil. It is not a state of mind, but a state of soul. The lame argument that the insane can’t assist counsel in their own defense falls on my deaf ears. As I see it, if the accused didn’t need a bunch of shysters to help him molest, rob, rape or murder, I don’t see any compelling reason why these law school grads need his help to con a jury.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.

5 Reasons Barack Obama is a Creep

5 Reasons Barack Obama is a Creep
By John Hawkins
3/2/2013

Is Barack Obama the Vladimir Lenin of American Presidents? No, Lenin was competent in an evil sort of way. Obama is more like Leonid Brezhnev: an ultra left-wing, belligerent doofus who isn't laughed at by the general population primarily because the mainstream media liberals say nice things about him out of fear that they'll end up in a gulag if they're too harsh. Of course, we don't have gulags, but reporters who criticize Obama would be snubbed by their peers at cocktail parties in Manhattan and Old Town, which seems almost as bad to liberals. This is how a narcissist who scores at "Nixon after Watergate" on the presidential likability scale can be perceived by much of the public as a long suffering, bipartisan nice guy. The real picture is less Van Gogh and is more Andy Warhol, if Andy Warhol were a five year old coloring with cow dung crayons.

1) Obama NEVER stops campaigning: Barack Obama almost seems disinterested in actually governing the country. Apparently the only thing he does passably well is campaign; so he has just decided to do that. His agenda, from Obamacare, to free birth control, to amnesty for illegals has nothing to do with the country's immediate problems and everything to do with politics. This is a big part of the reason that Washington has become even more nonfunctional than usual under Obama -- because he ALWAYS acts as if there's an election next week and winning it by trying to make the GOP look bad is his first priority.

2) What he says is completely unrelated to what he does: Barack Obama is like an alcoholic who pledges to quit drinking and then gets hammered every night. Afterwards, his doting family full of enablers (played by the part of the mainstream media) pats him on the back and talks about what a great example he is for other people because he pledged to quit drinking. This is how Barack Obama can demand a sequester and then turn around and run against it or yammer on incessantly about transparency while he stonewalls on Fast and Furious. We're talking about a man who's worth nearly 10 million dollars, who has campaign events with celebrities and millionaires on a regular basis, and who just seems to squeeze in a little bit of work in between lavish vacations and golf outings with Tiger Woods; yet he spent most of last year campaigning against rich people. This is almost like listening to Bill Maher complain about loud mouth know-nothings who regularly say incredibly stupid things just for shock value.

3) He works overtime to pit Americans against each other: Barack Obama's entire campaign strategy -- and don't forget, he's always campaigning -- is based on convincing different groups of Americans to hate each other. He tries to convince black and Hispanic Americans that Republicans hate them for their skin color, gays that Republicans hate them for their sexuality, women that the GOP is pro-rape, poor people that the rich are taking all their money, people who've had children killed that gun owners are in favor of their children dying -- it just goes on and on. There have been campaigns of genocide across the world that have featured less vitriolic rhetoric against the people who were murdered than Barack Obama and Company have engaged in since he became President. Then they turn around and wonder why Republicans in Congress have trouble working with them. Go figure.

4) His hypocrisy on bipartisanship never ends: Politics is a brass-knuckled street fight in a phone booth and if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog or alternately, if you're Robert Menendez, you hire an underage Dominican prostitute. What's so frustrating about Barack Obama is that he's as much of a diehard partisan as Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews, but he never stops yapping about the importance of bipartisanship. This is a man who has done everything short of screaming, "Screw you, Republicans," over and over at the State of the Union and he keeps talking about putting "party before country." It would be nice if he ever did that himself. Once. Ever. In his entire presidency. But, we're still waiting.

5) He's such a liar: Calling a politician a liar is a little bit like calling the Occupy Movement lazy and violent. It just sort of goes with the territory. But, even in a profession known for lying, Obama is the “lyingest” liar ever to spew lies out of his lie hole because he is allowed to get away with it. Obama's coverage by the press is like that movie, The Invention Of Lying, where the main character is the first person on the planet to ever figure out how to lie and everyone simply takes whatever he says at face value. In this case, the part of "everyone" is played by the mainstream media which starts with the uncritical assumption that Obama is always right, good, and truthful, while the people who disagree with him are mean, partisan liars. Obama could sacrifice a child to Satan at a press conference tomorrow, get ripped for it by Republicans, and the headlines would read, "Republicans Accuse The President Of Child Murder. Have They No Shame?" Afterwards, Obama would blame the child sacrifice on Bush and we’d have weeks of “Republicans and Satan team up to wage war on children” stories in the media.
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To read another article by John Hawkins, click here.