:: July 2009 ::







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[mramirez]

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Obama's Politics of Fear

[wsj] On the campaign trail last year, Barack Obama promised to end the “politics of fear and cynicism.” Yet he is now trying to sell his health-care proposals on fear.

At his news conference last week, he said “Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage, or lose their job. . . . If we do not reform health care, your premiums and out-of-pocket costs will continue to skyrocket. If we do not act, 14,000 Americans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day. These are the consequences of inaction.”

A Fox News Poll from last week shows that 84% of Americans who have health insurance are happy with their coverage. And because 91% of all Americans have insurance, that means that 76% of all Americans will be concerned about anything that threatens their current coverage. By a 2-1 margin, according to the Fox Poll, Americans want coverage from a private provider rather than the government.

Facing numbers like these, Mr. Obama is dropping his high-minded rhetoric and instead trying to scare voters. During last week’s news conference, for example, he said that doctors routinely perform unnecessary tonsillectomies on children simply to fatten their wallets. All that was missing was the suggestion that the operations were conducted without anesthesia.

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John Conyers (D-Mich.): What's The Point in Reading Bills?

[cns] During his speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), questioned the point of lawmakers reading the health care bill.

“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”



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[nro] Thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers conundrum would still hold: No individual can read these bills and understand what he's voting on. That's why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

As for optimum bill size, the 1773 Tea Act, which provoked the Boston Tea Party, was 2,263 words. That sounds about right.

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"Teachable Moment"
Let's bandwagon another phrase into oblivion by mind numbing saturation courtesy of the pathetic MSM - all but void of any original thoughts it seems. Oh yea. Teachable. Consider yourself healed. It seemed an open revelation of the Obama mindset, that somehow a magnificently schooled and ever articulate con-law wizard, could so easily admit to not knowing the facts, yet then, somehow, immediately renders judgment just the same, void of evidence in fact. 20 years under the Rev. Wright seems to colour not only the borderline frenzied delivery this guy still belches out. Nice mask. Forgive me if I don't believe a single sputtering that this guy says - and loyal readers would recall that I actually kind of liked the guy as he rose to his senate position. Hell of a job done there. Oh yea, also, if one can believe any of the nonsense, he also favours Bud, heinous piss that that 'beer' is. Party on, Bama.

- The Cynical Bastard

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Billions To Stimulate Criminality

Corruption: A nonprofit group committing a crime conjures up images of terrorist fundraising. But $8.5 billion in taxpayer money may go to specialists in political terror: the tax-exempt scam artists of Acorn.

[ibd] Did Democrats come to their present dominance of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington thanks in large part to a "syndicate of tax-exempt organizations" that "has coordinated and implemented a nationwide strategy of tax fraud, racketeering, money-laundering and manipulating the American electorate"?

The reams of evidence provided by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking Republican Darrell Issa of California and his GOP colleagues on the panel strongly suggest so.

Their more-than-80-page report charges that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) uses "a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities" — 361 different entities in 120 cities, 43 states and the District of Columbia, amounting to a "shell game" that "diverts taxpayer and tax-exempt monies into partisan political activities."

The group has over the last 15 years received in excess of $53 million in federal funds. Moreover, as the report warns, "under the Obama administration, Acorn stands to receive a whopping $8.5 billion in available stimulus funds."

Acorn's improprieties, of course, are not news. As Issa's report notes, a third of the 1.3 million voter registration cards the organization solicited and presented in 2008 ended up being null and void; the group has been investigated for voter registration fraud in places such as Connecticut, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio. [...]

Yet this corrupt outfit has actually been signed up as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to help recruit the nearly 1.5 million workers who will count and classify our 306 million population for 2010. It's like getting a car thief to manage a parking garage.

As the Capital Research Center's Matthew Vadum has documented, $3 billion from the stimulus package, another billion dollars from HUD, and $4.5 billion in Community Development Block Grants look set to come Acorn's way for a total of $8.5 billion.

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Community-Organized Crime

[as] The election fraud factory known as ACORN should be stripped of its jealously guarded tax-exempt status because it illegally spends taxpayer dollars on partisan activities, commits "systemic fraud," and violates racketeering and election laws, according to a congressional report unveiled yesterday.

Republican investigators on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found that by "intentionally blurring the legal distinctions between 361 tax-exempt and non-exempt entities, ACORN diverts taxpayer and tax-exempt monies into partisan political activities."

"Operationally, ACORN is a shell game played in 120 cities, 43 states and the District of Columbia through a complex structure designed to conceal illegal activities, to use taxpayer and tax-exempt dollars for partisan political purposes, and to distract investigators," the report says. Structurally, it is "a chess game in which senior management is shielded from accountability by multiple layers of volunteers and compensated employees who serve as pawns to take the fall for every bad act."

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Why the hell are we seeing David Frum all over the place? Seriously.

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Just how smart is Obama?

[at] Just how smart is the President? Famous presidential historian Michael Beschloss, a regular on PBS's Newshour show, says his IQ is "off the charts" and that he is "probably the smartest guy ever to become president," while admitting he doesn't know what his IQ is. I say: let's look at the evidence.

Obama's books

Jack Cashill has expended a great deal of effort at American Thinker to blast holes in the "foundational myth" that President Obama is a "literary genius".

Comparing books attributed to Obama with known undisputed samples of his writings, Cashill has shown that, in fact, Obama is a crappy writer, who, despite a Harvard-educated father, a mother with a PhD, attendance at the best private prep school in Hawaii and degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, never mastered such elemental matters of grammar as the necessary agreement of verbs and nouns in a sentence.

I think Cashill's rather convincingly demonstrated his thesis that Obama never authored the two books which are cited as proof that he is some kind of literary genius.

But the "literary genius" foundational myth is not the only one in need of serious examination. The very notion that he merited admission let alone degrees from these rigorous and competitive institutions is called into question every time Obama makes an extemporaneous remark. He knows little or nothing about history, economics, law, geography and the grammar rules of his native tongue. [...]

I have, with the help of fellow posters at Just One Minute, pulled together these representative errors not for the purpose of being mean spirited. We know we all are error prone from time to time. Just as we know that had Obama not been a certain favorite of the media each and every one of these illiteracies and gaffes would have received far more play than they have.

I have another purpose. I do not believe that someone with such a consistently weak understanding of economics, history, and the guiding legal document of our nation and its language merited admission to Columbia University or Harvard law school. Nor can I imagine how anyone could have merited graduation from these institutions (let alone edited the Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious legal publication of its kind) with these deficiencies.


It has always ben a source of great irritation for me that Obama is credited for high intelligence by those who should know better, including a majority of much-respected conservative pundits and bloggers. The fact that he graduated in Law with high honors seems , to them, to be proof positive of superior intellect. They manifest the attitude which has contributed to a large degree to the success of the scam the Alinsky/Axelrod organization has perpetrated: an insistence on" being fair" - a fatal weakness in defeating an enemy whose strategy is based on deceit and guerilla tactics.

It isn't just a matter of errors in speech, in elementary history, or geography, or economics, or simple business practices. It is also in lying in matters where his dishonesty is obvious to any reasoning mind. He sat for 20 years in Wright's Cathedral of Black Liberation Gospel and never once observed an anti-American rant. Bill Ayers was just an acquaintance that he ran into occasionaly in the neighborhood. He is a lover of Urdu poetry. Of Pushkin. These are simple-minded, flagrant lies. No person of intelligence would expose his inadequacies by such obvious lying.

And there is the the desperation of his team to maintain total and complete silence on anything that relates to actual achievement: no scholastic records at any level. All "lost". No reference to his performance as a manager in Ayers Annenberg Challenge debacle. No quotes from his publications in Chicago's black newspaper.

And the dim-witted things he does in foreign relations. Gives the Queen of England an ipod of his speeches. A full bow from the waist to an Arab potentate whose high state is totally due to sitting on an ocean of oil. Endlessly criticizing his predecessor. Cottoning up to communist bana public tin-pot Jefes. These are not the acts of an intelliigent person, aware of his world stature. His rhetoric, delivered with great panache and air of plausibiliy, does not stand up well to fair analysis. It is largely elaborate platitude.

The aggregation of all these revealing clues of a second-class mind, of great limitations in wisdom and probity, of a lack of sound reasoning and judgment in areas critical to god governance and leadership, makes claims of an IQ of 145 (approaching that of Einstein), or of being the smartest guy ever to be President, laughable. Or brings you to tears of rage.

JFK and GWB, I have read, both had an IQ of 119. Mensa level is just over 130. You will see Obama's IQ over Axelrod's dead body. It is probably around 110. He's not a man of high intelligence. He's wily. he's well trained and handled. He is like a vaudeville dog that can do backward flips on command, to loud applause. He is certainly undeserving of the Presidency of our great nation. His election was based on an Audacious HOAX. His whole campaign was, and remains, an unbelievably brazen fraud.

And yet wise lawyers and academics on nationally respected internet sites insist on treating him with respect! -stuart williamson

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Obama's intelligence or lack there of is becoming more apparent and irrelevant daily, we need to be concerned with the intelligence and intention of the man programing the teleprompter and directing little o. That is who we should be concerned with, the man pulling the strings not the puppet doing the dance and parroting the words. How smart is the boss and how loyal to the Constitution is he? - 2thman

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Iraq PM hints at longer US role

[bbc] Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki has hinted that US forces could stay in Iraq beyond the current deadline of 2011.

In a speech at a Washington think tank, he reiterated that the troop presence is due to end on 31 December 2011, under a bilateral agreement.

"Nevertheless, if the Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we shall examine this then at that time," he said.

US troops pulled out of Iraqi cities and towns at the end of June.

The move was seen as a major step in the transfer of security control to government forces in Iraq, which has been plagued by sectarian strife since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Mr Maliki was speaking at the US Institute of Peace, during a four-day visit to the country.

On Wednesday, the Iraqi leader met US President Barack Obama, who said the US would stick to the withdrawal deadline.

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Mayo Clinic calls House plan bad medicine

[wt] A world-renowned clinic that President Obama held up as an example of good medicine said Monday that the American people would be "losers" under the House's health care proposal, joining the growing chorus of critics the Obama administration is trying to fend off as the debate intensifies from Capitol Hill to Main Street.

Minnesota's not-for-profit Mayo Clinic, which Mr. Obama has repeatedly hailed as offering top quality care at affordable costs, blasted the House Democrats' version of the health care plan as lawmakers continue to grapple with several bills from each chamber and multiple committees.

The Mayo Clinic said there are some positive elements of the bill, but overall "the proposed legislation misses the opportunity to help create higher quality, more affordable health care for patients."

"In fact, it will do the opposite," clinic officials said, because the proposals aren't [R]patient-focused or results-oriented. "The real losers will be the citizens of the United States."

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5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform

If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you'll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.

[cnn] In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans -- and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.

A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.

If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company's Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests -- you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills that herald a health-care revolution.

In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.

Let's explore the five freedoms that Americans would lose under Obamacare:

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
5. Freedom to choose your doctors

[see link for rationale & explanation]

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Governors Fear Medicaid Costs in Health Plan

[nyt] The nation’s governors, Democrats as well as Republicans, voiced deep concern Sunday about the shape of the health care plan emerging from Congress, fearing that Washington was about to hand them expensive new Medicaid obligations without money to pay for them.

The role of the states in a restructured health care system dominated the summer meeting of the National Governors Association here this weekend — with bipartisan animosity voiced against the plan during a closed-door luncheon on Saturday and in a private meeting on Sunday with the health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius.

“I think the governors would all agree that what we don’t want from the federal government is unfunded mandates,” said Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont, a Republican, the group’s incoming chairman. “We can’t have the Congress impose requirements that we are forced to absorb beyond our capacity to do so.”

The governors’ backlash creates yet another health care headache for the Obama administration, which has tried to recruit state leaders to pressure members of Congress to wrap up their fitful negotiations. [...]

“There’s a concern about whether they have fully figured out a revenue stream that would cover the costs, and that if they don’t have all the dollars accounted for it will fall on the states,” said Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, a Democrat.

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Democrats' New Worry: Their Own Rich Voters

[wsj] A group of Democrats elected in recent years from some of the country's richest congressional districts have emerged as a stumbling block to raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for President Barack Obama's ambitious health-care overhaul just as the plan has begun to meet increasing resistance over its cost.

Friday, two freshmen representatives -- Dina Titus, from suburban Las Vegas, and Colorado's Jared Polis, representing Boulder, Vail and some of the tonier suburbs of Denver -- joined Republicans to vote against Mr. Obama's top-priority health-care overhaul when it faced a vote in their House Education and Labor Committee. One reason was a one-percentage point-surtax on couples earning between $350,000 and $500,000 -- gradually increasing to 5.4 percentage points on earnings more than $1 million -- to pay for it.

The bill passed the committee anyway, but if the number of Democratic defectors grows it could pose a serious obstacle to the president.

Also on Friday a busload of freshmen Democrats went to the White House to plead their case against sharp tax increases with the president and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. The organizer was Rep. Gerald Connolly, the president of the freshman class whose Northern Virginia district is the richest in the U.S. as measured by median household income.

"There could come a time," said Rep. Michael McMahon, a freshman Democrat from New York City's borough of Staten Island, when Democrats are in open rebellion. "We will certainly see in the next few weeks where we are going."

Election gains in some of these affluent regions have helped give Democrats big majorities in the House and Senate. Of the 25 richest districts, 14 are represented by Democrats, according to Congressional Quarterly. In 1995, Democrats represented just five of those districts.

Recently elected Democrats from higher-income areas also have been cautious about legislation that would make it easier for labor unions to organize, and about legislation imposing tough new rules on banks. Republicans have savaged the new Democrats for supporting legislation to stem global warming by capping greenhouse-gas emissions, then forcing polluters to purchase and trade emissions credits -- a "cap and tax," the GOP says.

But planned tax increases are likely the source of the toughest intra-Democratic tensions. The president wants to allow George W. Bush's income-tax cuts to expire in 2011 for families earning at least $250,000 and to stop the estate tax from being repealed next year. Mr. Obama also campaigned on putting an additional payroll tax of two to four percentage points on incomes above $250,000 to help put Social Security back on solid footing. As the president confronts a surging budget deficit and presses his ambitious agenda, all those tax increases may be necessary to make ends meet.

All together, Democratic plans could push the top tax rate to 47%, the highest level since the tax code was rewritten in 1986.

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Poll Shows Obama Slipping on Key Issues

[wapo] Heading into a critical period in the debate over health-care reform, public approval of President Obama's stewardship on the issue has dropped below the 50 percent threshold for the first time, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Obama's approval ratings on other front-burner issues, such as the economy and the federal budget deficit, have also slipped over the summer, as rising concern about spending and continuing worries about the economy combine to challenge his administration. Barely more than half approve of the way he is handling unemployment, which now tops 10 percent in 15 states and the District. [...]

Since April, approval of Obama's handling of health care has dropped from 57 percent to 49 percent, with disapproval rising from 29 percent to 44 percent. Obama still maintains a large advantage over congressional Republicans in terms of public trust on the issue, even as the GOP has closed the gap.

The erosion in Obama's overall rating on health care is particularly notable among political independents: While positive in their assessments of his handling of health-care reform at the 100-day mark of his presidency (53 percent approved and 30 percent disapproved), independents now are divided at 44 percent positive and 49 percent negative.

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States Hit Hardest by Recession Get Least Stimulus Money

[fox] The stimulus bill "includes help for those hardest hit by our economic crisis," President Obama promised when he signed the bill into law on Feb. 17. "As a whole, this plan will help poor and working Americans."

But FOXNews.com has analyzed data tracking how the stimulus money is being given out across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and it has found a perverse pattern: the states hardest hit by the recession received the least money. States with higher bankruptcy, foreclosure and unemployment rates got less money. And higher income states received more.

The transfers to the states having the least problems are large. Even after accounting for other factors, each $1,000 in a state's per capita income means that the state got $21 more per capita in stimulus funds. With a spread of almost $38,000 in per-person income between the top and bottom states, this has a sizable impact. High-income states get considerably more stimulus money.

States with higher bankruptcy rates got a lot less, not more, money — roughly $86 less per person for each percentage point increase in the state's bankruptcy rate. States with higher foreclosure rates were treated very similarly, losing $82 per person for each one percentage point more of the people suffering foreclosures.

The spending data come from two reliable sources: the Wall Street Journal and the Federal government's Recovery.gov. On June 30, the Wall Street Journal published data on stimulus spending by state for seven categories of social spending (education, HUD, health, crime fighting, job training, arts, and food and farming) and eight categories of infrastructure spending (transportation, water, energy, military, veterans, government, outdoors, and emergency shelters). The Journal's data allow a comparison by each category of government spending. Their total accounts for $195 billion out of the $787 billion that will be spent on the stimulus. Out of this money, the amounts vary a lot across the nation, with the very lowest, a mere $504 per capita in Florida, to the highest, at $3,712 per capita in D.C.

If one relies on the Recovery.gov accounts instead, which, as of July 8, reported $218 billion of spending but without the detailed breakdown provided by the Journal, the bottom line is the same: the money is not going to the states hardest hit by the recession or to the poorest states.

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Outrage!

[sfg] Last weekend, the New York Times reported that after 9/11, the CIA developed a "secret counterterrorism program" to train hit squads to kill top al Qaeda leaders. It seemed like good news to me. After all, why bankroll an intelligence agency if you can't use it to kill an enemy against whom America has declared war?

The news hooks: CIA Director Leon Panetta killed the program last month after he told Senate and House Intelligence committees about the program.

And: Congress allegedly did not know about the nonoperational operation because, according to unnamed sources, former Veep Dick Cheney told the agency not to disclose the program to Congress.

The part of the story that undermined the story: The covert program "never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year."

In plain English that means: Nothing happened - there never were any Jason Bournes - and no one informed the intelligence committees about it.

Subsequent stories elsewhere reported that the program never got off the ground. CIA Director George Tenet killed the program in 2004. Tenet's successor, Porter Goss, revived the program, but it never became operational, even when Michael Hayden, and later Panetta, took over as CIA chief.

Some unnamed sources say Cheney told the CIA not to tell Congress about the nonoperational operation; other sources claimed Cheney was not involved. Cheney isn't talking. My guess: If Cheney told the CIA to cork it, someone at the CIA's Langley headquarters would have leaked the whole story years ago. After all, the Bush years were replete with unnamed sources leaking classified intelligence on Iraq, wiretapping and efforts to squeeze al Qaeda's finances.

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Budget Update...Uh, Uh, Postponed

[yahoo] The White House is being forced to acknowledge the wide gap between its once-upbeat predictions about the economy and today's bleak landscape.

The administration's annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama's budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.

The release of the update — usually scheduled for mid-July — has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town Aug. 7 on its summer recess.

The administration is pressing for votes before then on its $1 trillion health care initiative, which lawmakers are arguing over how to finance.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Monday blamed the delay entirely on the "transition from one administration to the next" and not from any attempt to deceive Congress.

"The notion that this is somehow out of the ordinary seems somewhat silly," he told reporters. [...]

The administration earlier this year predicted that unemployment would peak at about 9 percent without a big stimulus package and 8 percent with one. Congress did pass a $787 billion two-year stimulus measure, yet unemployment soared to 9.5 percent in June and appears headed for double digits.

Obama's current forecast anticipates 3.2 percent growth next year, then 4 percent or higher growth from 2011 to 2013. Private forecasts are less optimistic, especially for next year.

Any downward revision in growth or revenue projections would mean that budget deficits would be far higher than the administration is now suggesting. [...]

The new budget update comes as the public and members of Congress are becoming increasingly anxious over Obama's economic policies.

A Washington Post-ABC News survey released Monday shows approval of Obama's handling of health-care reform slipping below 50 percent for the first time. The poll also found support eroding on how Obama is dealing with other issues that are important to Americans right now — the economy, unemployment and the swelling budget deficit.

The Democratic-controlled Congress is reeling from last week's testimony by the head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, that the main health care proposals Congress is considering would not reduce costs — as Obama has insisted — but "significantly expand" the federal financial responsibility for health care.

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CBO : Another blow to House health plan

[p] The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office dealt another blow to House Democrats on Friday night, saying their health care bill would increase the federal deficit by $239 billion over the next 10 years.

The projected shortfall means Democrats would need to find additional revenue or make deeper cuts to existing programs in order to meet their goal of paying for the $1 trillion bill.

But those projections don't account for a $245 billion reduction in the deficit this legislation would create, if Democrats can also approve new balanced budget rules that would permanently address an annual shortfall in Medicare payments to physicians Democrats may also defend the cost of their bill by pointing out that in the long run, under new accounting rules, the bill would generate a $6 billion surplus.

The CBO also found that the measure would provide health coverage to 37 million people, — meaning 97 percent of all U.S. citizens would be covered by some form of health care if these changes are enacted.

The plan would leave 17 million people within the U.S. uninsured — nearly half of whom would be illegal immigrants who are denied coverage under the bill.

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Put Up or Shut Up

Congressman Dr. John Fleming from Louisiana proposes House Resolution 615, which would require those who vote for Obamacare to live under Obamacare.

[dm] [...] Taking to the House floor, he said:

“Gradually, the details of the Democrat Health Plan are leaking out to the American people. Call it whatever you like this proposal is nothing more than a government run healthcare plan if it has a government run option.

Interestingly it exempts members of congress from having to join a government run healthcare system.

As a physician for many years, I’m amazed at the number of congressman who have enjoyed high quality personalized healthcare in this country, but are now willing to force post office style medicine on our people. In response to this I have offered a resolution that would give members of congress an opportunity to finally be accountable for the decisions we make and how they affect the lives of ordinary Americans.

Most Americans feel that congressman who vote for legislation creating a government run healthcare plan should lead by example and enroll themselves in the same public plan. I agree with them. As a result, I have introduced House Resolution 615 with a number of co-sponsors that simply says that if you vote for a government run healthcare option, you agree to choose government run healthcare for yourself and your family. I encourage members of both parties to vote for this. Thank you.”



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Kidding, Right?

[pl] [...] The Supreme Court, socialized medicine, cap and trade, record deficits, foreign policy fecklessness--it's easy to lose track of smaller issues with all that is going on. Still, H.R. 1018 shouldn't be allowed to pass unnoticed.

H.R. 1018 is the "Restore Our American Mustangs Act." It can fairly be described as a welfare program for horses. Believe it or not--this isn't satire--here is what the bill will do:

[T]he "Restore Our American Mustangs Act" ... would create a new $700 million welfare program for wild horses. The program:

* Conducts a horse census every two years

* Provides "enhanced contraception" and birth control for horses

* Establishes an additional 19 million acres of public and private land for wild horses

* Covers $5 million tab to repair horse damage to land

* Mandates that government bureaucrats perform home inspections before Americans can adopt horses

"Enhanced contraception" for horses? Maybe I'm out of touch, but I didn't realize that wild horses use contraception at all. Maybe the measure would be worth voting for if Nancy Pelosi would commit that she will personally attempt to fit a wild stallion with an "enhanced contraception" device at a critical moment.

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Do As I Say....Not As I Do

[dm] President Obama: “You can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime. There’s got to be some accountability and some responsibility.”

ABC’s affiliate in Phoenix reported that the Social Security administration spent $700,000 on sending 675 of its bureaucrats for a conference at the expensive Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa.

Social Security spends $700,000 on Phoenix conference

[abc] A Social Security Administration motivational management conference held at a high-end Valley resort last week cost $700,000, the SSA told the ABC15 Investigators.

Costs for the conference at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa included airfare, hotel entertainment, dancers, motivational speakers, and food, an administration official said.

A spokesperson outside the SSA's Phoenix office declined to comment.

A spokesperson from the SSA's regional office said the conference was essential, that teleconferencing was not an option, and that all 675 managers needed to meet in person.

The SSA provided ABC15 with a list of courses provided at the conference, which included "Techniques to Empower You," "Mentoring the Generations," and "Emotional Intelligence."

But the information provided by the SSA did not mention an after-hours casino trip, family members staying at the hotel, or the 20-minute dance party ABC15 observed.


Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA)Program. He promised:
1. That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary,
2. That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first$1,400 of their annual incomes into the Program,
3. That the money the participants elected to put into the Programwould be deductible from their income for tax purposes each year,
4. That the money the participants put into the independent "TrustFund" rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, wouldonly be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and noother Government program, and,
5. That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed asincome.

Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we aregetting (sic) taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to"put away," you may be interested in the following:

Q: Which Political Party took Social Security from the independent"Trust" fund and put it into the General fund so thatCongress could spend it?
A: It was Lyndon Johnson and the Democratically-controlled House andSenate.

Q: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax deduction for SocialSecurity (FICA) withholding?
A: The Democratic Party.

Q: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities?

A: The Democratic Party, with Al Gore casting the "tie-breaking"deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President ofthe U.S.

Q: Which Political Party decided to start giving annuity payments toimmigrants?

A: That's right! Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party. Immigrants moved into this country, and at age 65, began to receive SSI SocialSecurity payments! The Democratic Party gave these payments to them,even though they never paid a dime into it!

Then, after doing all this lying and thieving and violation of the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and [... guess he ran out of space] Darnel - ABC

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Box of Rocks



Black Chamber of Commerce, President and CEO Harry Alford accused Senator Boxer (D-CA) of playing race politics during an EPW Committee hearing on green jobs.

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House Democrats muzzle GOP on sensitive issues

[yahoo] In their zeal to protect their members from politically hazardous votes on issues such as gay marriage and gun control, Democrats running the House of Representatives are taking extraordinary steps to muzzle Republicans in this summer's debates on spending bills.

On Thursday, for example, Republicans had hoped to force debates on abortion, school vouchers and medical marijuana, as well as gay marriage and gun control, as part of House consideration of the federal government's contribution to the District of Columbia's city budget.

No way, Democrats said.

At issue are 12 bills totaling more than $1.2 trillion in annual appropriations bills for funding most government programs — usually low-profile legislation that typically dominates the work of the House in June and July. For decades, those bills have come to the floor under an open process that allows any member to try to amend them. Often those amendments are an effort to change government policy by adding or subtracting money for carrying it out.

The tradition has often meant laborious debates. But it has allowed lawmakers with little seniority to have their say on doling out the one-third of the federal budget passed by Congress each year. It was a right the Democrats zealously defended when they were the minority party from 1995 through 2006. [...]

"What they want to do is they want to avoid tough votes on appropriations bills," said Rep. David Dreier of California, senior Republican on the Rules Committee.

Even some Democrats are chaffing at the heavy-handed clampdown on debate. Abortion opponent Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., on Thursday lashed out at his party's leaders for denying him and others a chance to vote on restoring a long-standing directive by Congress blocking taxpayer-funded abortions in Washington, D.C.

Democrats effectively reversed that stance while the bill was still being considered by the Appropriations Committee. Stupak said the Democratic leadership's new policy on floor debates "muzzles the voices of pro-life members."

The process has become so relentlessly efficient that Democrats were actually forced to drag out action to Thursday on a $33 billion measure funding energy programs and water projects. The reason? They need to stretch the workweek into Friday to force lawmakers to remain in Washington for committee work on health care and other spending bills.

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House Health Bill Penalizes All but Tiniest Employers for Not Providing Insurance

[wsj] House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled sweeping health-care legislation that would hit all but the smallest businesses with a penalty equal to 8% of payroll if they fail to provide health insurance to workers.

The House bill, which also would impose new taxes on the wealthy estimated to bring in more than $544 billion over a decade, came as lawmakers in the Senate raced against a self-imposed deadline of this week to introduce a bill in time for action this summer. [...]

Under the House measure, employers with payrolls exceeding $400,000 a year would have to provide health insurance or pay the 8% penalty. Employers with payrolls between $250,000 and $400,000 a year would pay a smaller penalty, and those less than $250,000 would be exempt. Certain small firms would get tax credits to help buy coverage.

The relatively low thresholds for penalties triggered the sharpest criticism yet from employer groups, who said the burden on small business is too high and doesn't do enough to help them expand insurance coverage.

"This bill costs too much, it covers too few and it has way too much government involvement," said Michelle Dimarob, a lobbyist with the National Federation of Independent Business, the main trade group for small firms. "Small business doesn't want any of those things."

According to 2006 data from the federation, businesses with between five and nine workers, representing about one million employers, had an average payroll of around $375,000 a year. A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only about half of firms with three to nine workers offered health benefits in 2008.



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Iran could have atomic bomb within 6 months: report

[reuters] Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency believes Iran is capable of producing and testing an atomic bomb within six months, much sooner than most analysts estimate, according to a report in German weekly Stern.

The report, which quotes BND experts, says the agency has information supporting the view that Iran has mastered the enrichment technology necessary to make a bomb and has enough centrifuges to make weaponized uranium.

"If they wanted to, they could detonate an atomic bomb in half a year's time," the story quoted a BND expert as saying.

The BND did not return two calls from Reuters seeking comment on the report.

Iran says its nuclear program is for electricity generation to help it export more of its oil and gas, but Western countries suspect it of trying to pursue a nuclear bomb.

The U.N. Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on Tehran for defying its demands to suspend uranium enrichment.

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[yahoo] Where did it land? Was it a strike or wasn't it? Why didn't the network choose a better camera to shoot from? Those were the questions that viewers of baseball's All-Star Game were asking themselves at home after Fox elected to show President Barack Obama's ceremonial first pitch at the 80th All-Star Game from a tight angle.

Ruling as a part-time umpire who had a good view from the pressbox at Busch Stadium, Obama's pitch was a no-doubt-about-it ball, even factoring in an expanded strike zone for the Commander-in-Chief. Obama's southpaw delivery was a little short of the plate, but Cardinals star Albert Pujols(notes) was able to save it by quickly scooping it up.

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Sotomayor on Sotomayor: Revises, extends her words

[yahoo] It's a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran.

After week upon week in which plenty of other people on the planet interpreted Sotomayor's past comments, the Supreme Court nominee at last got a chance to deconstruct her own words Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. [...]

She drew loopy circles on her paper; she ran rhetorical circles around her past words.

"I didn't intend to suggest ..." she explained.

"What I was speaking about ..." she offered.

"As I have tried to explain ..." she parsed.

"I wasn't talking about ..." she demurred.

She was a tough critic at times.

"I was using a rhetorical flourish that fell flat," she averred.

"It was bad," she said. Of her own words.

Democrats were only too happy to take Sotomayor's rhetorical revisions at face value as she explained away the most problematic of her past remarks. [...]

Her suggestion that appeals court judges don't just interpret the law, they help make it? Taken out of context.

Republicans didn't readily sign on to Sotomayor's after-the-fact revisions.

"I don't think it's that clear," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., objected at one point.

"I think a person could reasonably believe it meant more than that."

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, late in what he called a long day, said he was puzzled by the contrasts between Sotomayor's legal rulings, her more provocative speeches "that just blow me away," and the reassurances that she provided in her testimony to the committee.

"Who are we getting here?" he asked. "Who are we getting as a nation?"

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Sotomayor's Unconvincing Backpedaling

[wapo] I'm surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making. [...]

I found it hard to believe that Sotomayor has now come to the realization that her words left a wrong impression. After all, she delivered similar lines in roughly half a dozen speeches throughout the years. Her explanation came across as dodgy at best and disingenuous at worst. [...]

SESSIONS: "Do you stand by your statement that my experiences affect the facts I choose to see?"

SOTOMAYOR: "No, sir. I don't stand by the understanding of that statement that I will ignore other facts or other experiences because I haven't had them. I do believe that life experiences are important to the process of judging. They help you to understand and listen but that the law requires a result. And it would command you to the facts that are relevant to the disposition of the case."

Sotomayor's initial response (“what I believe I was – the point I was making”) reeks of a nominee who's been prepped exhaustively in how to deflect possibly damaging questions. Most people don't have to recall what they "believe" they meant; they just say it.
As for the second half of her response, I wish Sessions had followed up by asking how a jurist would determine the "relevant" facts in a case in light of Sotomayor's assertion that life experiences can affect how a judge views a case.

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Justice Malaprop?

[nro] Judge Sotomayor says “eminent” when she means “imminent,” “providence” instead of “province,” “story of knowledge” instead of “store of knowledge,” and so on. Does the fact that she is a Latina immunize her from attention to that sort of (admittedly not uncommon) foible?

TCB - Seems also that she uses 'me' in an annoying and ill sounding manner...not that I'm a stickler, in fact I've taken it up to intentionally ignore some 'rules' of writing and other geographically ambiguous nonsense. Who makes them? Screw 'em. I'm also not a nominee for the SCOTUS gig that she is up for. Seriously. This is the best they can come up with? Yea, sure. She's 'overdue.'

Observationally, this hearing is like a little tea party (no, not those tax protests) compared to the Roberts or Alito similies. Quite respectful. How nice. How sweet. Bloviations like those peddled by the Kingpin, Joey 'the B' Biden seem generally absent. Neato.

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The 'Cap And Tax' Dead End
Sarah Palin
Tuesday, July 14, 2009

[wapo] There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America's unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won't bring jobs. Our nation's debt is unsustainable, and the federal government's reach into the private sector is unprecedented.

Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage. [...]

Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.

In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet. As the president eloquently puts it, their electricity bills will "necessarily skyrocket." So much for not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

Even Warren Buffett, an ardent Obama supporter, admitted that under the cap-and-tax scheme, "poor people are going to pay a lot more for electricity."

::


Why do folks keep saying Palin didn't explain why she resigned?

I realize the "talking points" from her critics are that her speech was incoherent and no one knows why she resigned, but she gave three very sound reasons:
(1) To protect her family from further emotional and financial harm;
(2) to prevent Alaskan taxpayerss from incurring the expense of partisan witch hunts aimed at her; and
(3) to avoid 18 "lost" months with a lame duck Governor Democrats refuse to work with.

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Obama Frees Iranian Terror Masters
The release of the Irbil Five is a continuation of a shameful policy

[nro] There are a few things you need to know about President Obama’s shameful release on Thursday of the “Irbil Five” — Quds Force commanders from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who were coordinating terrorist attacks in Iraq that have killed hundreds — yes, hundreds — of American soldiers and Marines.

[...]President Bush and our armed forces steadfastly refused demands by Iran and Iraq’s Maliki government for the release of the Irbil Five because Iran was continuing to coordinate terrorist operations against American forces in Iraq (and to aid Taliban operations against American forces in Afghanistan). Freeing the Quds operatives obviously would return the most effective, dedicated terrorist trainers to their grisly business.

[...] Obama’s decision to release the five terror-masters comes while the Iranian regime (a) is still conducting operations against Americans in Iraq, even as we are in the process of withdrawing, and (b) is clearly working to replicate its Lebanon model in Iraq: establishing a Shiite terror network, loyal to Iran, as added pressure on the pliant Maliki to understand who is boss once the Americans leave. As the New York Times reports, Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, put it this way less than two weeks ago:

Iran is still supporting, funding, training surrogates who operate inside of Iraq — flat out. . . . They have not stopped. And I don’t think they will stop. I think they will continue to do that because they are also concerned, in my opinion, [about] where Iraq is headed. They want to try to gain influence here, and they will continue to do that. I think many of the attacks in Baghdad are from individuals that have been, in fact, funded or trained by the Iranians.

[...] Obama has already released a leader of the Iran-backed Asaib al-Haq terror network in Iraq, a jihadist who is among those responsible for the 2007 murders of five American troops in Karbala. While the release was ludicrously portrayed as an effort to further “Iraqi reconciliation” (as if that would be a valid reason to spring a terrorist who had killed Americans), it was in actuality a naïve attempt to secure the reciprocal release of five British hostages — and a predictably disastrous one: The terror network released only the corpses of two of the hostages, threatening to kill the remaining three (and who knows whether they still are alive?) unless other terror leaders were released.

[...] You may not have wanted to addle your brain over his tutelage in Hawaii by the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, nor his tracing of Davis’s career steps to Chicago, where he seamlessly eased into the orbit of Arafat apologist Rashid Khalidi, anti-American terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and Maoist “educator” Michael Klonsky — all while imbibing 20 years’ worth of Jeremiah Wright’s Marxist “black liberation theology.” But this neo-Communist well from which Obama drew holds that the world order is a maze of injustice, racism, and repression. Its unified theory for navigating the maze is: “United States = culprit.” [...]

So Obama is pouring it on while his trusty media idles. When they are not looking the other way from the carnage in Iran’s streets, they are dutifully reporting — as the AP did — that the Irbil Five are mere “diplomats.” Obama frees a terrorist with the blood of American troops on his hands, and the press yawns. Senators Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl press for answers about the release of the terrorist and Obama’s abandonment of a decades-old American policy against trading terrorists for hostages, and the silence is deafening.

Except in Tehran, where the mullahs are hearing exactly what they’ve banked on hearing.

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Create or Save Blah Blah Blah

[th] [...] Back in February, when the Obama economic team did the full-court press for why we had to have the stimulus now, they said without the "stimulus" bill, unemployment might climb as high at 9%, and with the stimulus in place, unemployment would top out at 8.5%. Well, the Democrats got their stimulus, and the unemployment number sailed way past their dire prediction of 9%.

Remember when Barack Obama told Americans that Joe Biden would keep track of every dime of the stimulus? Remember when ol' Joe himself appeared on television and announced the new website to help him account for the money, if he just knew what the "numbers" of the website address were to give to people? It turns out the one place that is going to see a major influx of stimulus money is Joe Biden's stimulus tracking website. It is currently dysfunctional, and is slated to get an $18 million dollar taxpayer-paid for makeover. In case you aren't in the website design field, let me tell you. $18 million dollars can not only build you a top notch website, it can build you about 20 top notch websites.

In Ghana, Obama defended his stimulus plan, and make no mistake, this is his albatross, by saying, "It has already extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have lost their jobs in this recession." The problem is, that's not what the stimulus was intended to do. It was all about job creation - shovel-ready work projects. Extending the welfare safety net isn't economic stimulus. It's welfare extension. [...]

The questions you have to ask yourself, especially if you are one of the many who voted for Obama, is if the Obama administration tackled the economic recovery by misreading the problem, advocating for a solution that hasn't born fruit, spending trillions of future debt in the process, and then trying to tell you the results are great when you can see with your own eyes they're not, do you really trust the same group of people to get health care reform right by not just reforming or adjusting, but completely seizing the industry and dumping it into a government-run expansion of Medicare? Do you really trust them to create a new casino-like cap and tax and tax scam cleverly disguised as an energy bill?

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Report Reveals : Shameful

Andy McCarthy breaks down some aspects of the 38 page report, with more coming later this week.

[nro] "Had [President Bush's Warrantless Surveillance Program]" been in place before the [9/11] attacks, hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi almost certainly would have been identified and located."

Another Friday night, another dump by the Obama administration of a report underscoring the vital importance of President Bush's post-9/11 national security tactics.

The above quote about Midhar and Hazmi and is from Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director who was director of the NSA when that agency ran Bush's "Terrorist Surveillance Program." It is a bombshell mentioned in passing on page 31 of the 38-page report filed by five executive-branch inspectors general (from DOJ, DOD, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) pursuant to Congress's 2008 overhaul of FISA (the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). [...]

In sum, congressional Democrats knew about the program and knew that the dissent of the Justice Department's senior leadership in 2004 was not about warrantless surveillance. They knew that if they postured that the dissent was about warrantless surveillance, Gonzales — not an adept communicator — would not be able to rebut them in a public hearing because the details of the dispute were classified. Congressional Democrats also knew that President Bush agreed to make changes in the program in March 2004 to assuage DOJ's concerns, and they knew that the program activities continued thereafter for a year-and-a-half (i.e., until the Times blew part of the program) without incident and with bipartisan congressional leadership continuing to be briefed.

The politicizing of the nation's security that went on here was shameful.

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WTF Dept. ? : $18M Being Spent to Redesign Recovery.gov Web Site

[abs] ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: For those concerned about stimulus spending, the General Services Administration sends word tonight that $18 million in additional funds are being spent to redesign the Recovery.gov Web site.

The new Web site promises to give taxpayers more information about where their money is going than the current version of the site.

“Recovery.gov 2.0 will use innovative and interactive technologies to help taxpayers see where their dollars are being spent,” James A. Williams, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, says in a press release announcing the contract awarded to Maryland-based Smartronix Inc. “Armed with easy access to this information, taxpayers can make government more accountable for its decisions.”

The contract calls for spending $9.5 million through January, and as much as $18 million through 2014, according to the GSA press release.

“We are pleased that another major milestone has been achieved," Earl E. Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, says in the press release. “We thank the GSA for its assistance and look forward to working with Smartronix."



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Sponsorship Scandal at The Post

[wapo]> The Washington Post's ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record "salons" was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.

Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli have now taken full responsibility for what was envisioned as a series of 11 intimate dinners to discuss public policy issues. For a fee of up to $25,000, underwriters were guaranteed a seat at the table with lawmakers, administration officials, think tank experts, business leaders and the heads of associations. Promotional materials said Weymouth, Brauchli and at least one Post reporter would serve as "Hosts and Discussion Leaders" for an evening of spirited but civil dialogue.

While Brauchli and Weymouth say they should have realized long ago that the plan was flawed, internal e-mails and interviews show questions about ethics were raised with both of them months ago. They also show that blame runs deeper. Beneath Brauchli and Weymouth, three of the most senior newsroom managers received an e-mail with details of the plan.

Lower down, others inside and outside the newsroom were aware that sponsored events would involve news personnel in off-the-record settings, although they lacked details. Several now say they didn't speak up because they assumed top managers would eventually ensure that traditional ethics boundaries would not be breached. [...]

In an e-mailed statement Friday, Pelton said: "This is a new venture, there were some stumbles and too much of a rush to the finish. And I've taken responsibility for my part in this. However, I strongly believe that journalism must support more than a newspaper and a set of Web sites. It needs new avenues of expression -- and revenue -- and live events are just one of these."

Some at The Post view Pelton as overly eager and not attuned to the newsroom's ethical sensitivities. But Pelton raised questions about some of those very issues in a May 21 e-mail to Weymouth, Brauchli and Stephen P. Hills, The Post's president and general manager. Pelton reports to Hills, who declined to be interviewed.

The e-mail said the plan to hold the dinners at Weymouth's home "speaks to heavy editorial involvement" through "mixing different editors and beat reporters." But in arguing for "background only" discussions, Pelton asked if they thought the discussions should be "on or off the record." And while he endorsed the sponsorship idea, noting there would always be "more than one," he also said "I want to be sure our newsroom is also comfortable" with the arrangement.

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The nonsense continues in mind numbing consistency.

Sure Can Pick 'Em : With Czars Like This, Who Needs Enemies?

[zt] Obama's "Science Czar", John Holdren, is a horrifying loon whose positions include supporting mandatory (forced) abortions, mass sterilizations and a planetary government that rules over the United States.

These ideas, and other equally outrageous recommendations, were articulated in one of Holdren's books. In it, the "Science Czar" endorsed policies such as:

- Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;

- The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;

- Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;

- People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" -- in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

- A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans' lives -- using an armed international police force

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Washington is Going The Wrong Way

[nro] Are current government policies causing the U.S. to lose competitiveness in the global race for capital, prosperity, and growth?

Fortune magazine recently reported that the number of U.S. companies in the world’s top 500 fell to the lowest level ever, while more Chinese firms than ever before made the list. Thirty-seven Chinese companies now rank in the top 500, including nine new entries. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. firms has fallen to 140, the lowest total since Fortune began the list in 1995. This is not good.

China also surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest automaker in the first half of 2009, with June sales soaring 36.5 percent from a year earlier. The Chinese registered 6.1 million car sales for the first half of the year. That way outpaced American sales, which were only 4.8 million.

And China has no capital-gains tax. It only has a 15-to-20 percent corporate tax. The U.S., on the other hand, is raising its cap-gains tax rate to 20 percent. It’s also increasing its top personal tax rates.

In fact, the scheduled income-tax hike, plus the much-discussed health-care surtax, will balloon the top U.S. tax rate all the way to 51 percent. Compare that to the OECD average of only 42 percent. When those tax-hikes kick in, the top U.S. tax rate will rank above that of France, Germany, and Italy. That can’t be good.

Incidentally, our 40 percent corporate tax rate is already almost 15 percentage points higher than the corporate rates in most of Europe.

Washington’s enormous expansion of the government’s spending share of GDP to over 40 percent — including Bailout Nation, TARP, and government takeovers in numerous industries — is eerily reminiscent of Old Europe’s old policies. In a twist of irony, Europe seems to be moving toward a lower-tax-and-spend-and-regulate, Ronald Reagan–type approach, while we in the U.S. are regressing to the failed socialist model of Old Europe. This makes no sense.

Here’s the clincher: Year-to-date, Dow Jones stocks are off 7 percent, while China stocks are up 71 percent. The world index is up 4 percent. Emerging markets are up 25 percent. They’re all beating us. None of this is good.

We’re going the wrong way. That’s why stock markets are not voting for the United States anymore.

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Report : Reliance on Electric Cars Will do Little to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

[ibd] It's a beautiful theory — highways full of electric cars emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants after being plugged into an outlet in our garages overnight. The problem, according to a new Government Accountability Office report, is that the effort may only shift the problem somewhere else.

"If you are using coal-fired power plants, and half the country's electricity comes from coal-powered plants, are you just trading one greenhouse gas emitter for another?" asks Mark Gaffigan, co-author of the GAO report. The report itself notes: "Reductions in CO2 emissions depend on generating electricity used to charge the vehicles from lower-emission sources of energy."

The GAO report says a plug-in compact car, if recharged at an outlet drawing its power from coal, provides a carbon dioxide savings of only 4% to 5%. If the feeling of saving the environment from driving an electric car causes people to drive more, that small amount of savings vanishes entirely.

It's much the same effect we saw when the Corporate Fuel Economy Standards were passed in the '70s. Aside from forcing us into less-safe downsized vehicles that increased highway fatalities, the promise of more miles per gallon caused people to drive more miles. The promised energy independence never materialized as we imported more foreign oil than ever before.

Okay, so how about a zero-emission source of electricity — nuclear power? The administration has done little to promote it beyond lip service. The administration recently killed the safest place on the planet to store what is erroneously called nuclear waste — at the nuclear repository that was being built at Yucca Mountain, Nev.

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Senate Delays Climate Bill Until September

[wapo] President Barack Obama's push for quick action by Congress on climate change legislation suffered a setback on Thursday when the U.S. Senate committee leading the drive delayed work on the bill until September.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer said her self-imposed deadline of early August for finishing writing a bill to combat global warming has been put off until after Congress returns from a recess that ends in early September.

"We'll do it as soon as we get back" from that break, Boxer told reporters. Asked if this delay jeopardizes chances the Senate will pass a bill this year, Boxer said, "Not a bit ... we'll be in (session) until Christmas, so I'm not worried about it."

But Boxer did not guarantee Congress will be able to finish a bill and deliver it to Obama by December, when he plans to attend an international summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

"I want to take this as far as we can take it (before Copenhagen). The more we do the better," Boxer said.

On June 26, the House of Representatives narrowly passed its version of a bill to drastically reduce U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over the next four decades.

Senate Democratic leaders' quick timetable for writing a bill has run into two complications: the competing priority of passing healthcare legislation and dissension in Democratic ranks over the climate bill.

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T. Boone Pickens Pulls Plug On Wind Project?

[forbes] On Tuesday, Texas oilman and energy security proselyte T. Boone Pickens announced that he will delay, and likely permanently scuttle, plans for a 687 turbine wind project in the Texas panhandle.

The demise of the project, which was supposed to be the largest in the world at a rated generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts, came when Pickens discovered he couldn't raise money to build transmission lines to carry wind energy from his remote 200,000 acres to big cities that would consume the power.

Pickens had obviously hoped to become the poster child for wind. Instead, his Texas experiment is now a cautionary tale on the critical role of transmission to wind development. He's stuck with $2 billion worth of General Electric ( GE - news - people ) turbines, which he hopes to move to smaller projects throughout the Midwest and Canada. He's also decided to wait for the government to build transmission to carry wind power in Texas.

Transmission is a critical and often overlooked component to making green energy work, particularly because wind and solar resources are often located in rural areas far from major transmission backbones.

A year ago the Department of Energy released a roadmap by which the U.S. would generate 20% of its electricity from wind by the year 2030. The critical bottleneck in the plan would be transmission. DOE said a nationwide network of high-voltage power lines would suffice to get all that wind energy to market, but the plan would cost at least $60 billion.

In the drive to stimulate green energy, President Obama will need to keep the need for transmission front and center.

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Web Radio Nightmare....Over? Uh...

[wapo] Our long national Web-radio nightmare is over--sort of, at least for the next five years or so.

Yesterday, representatives of the recording and Web-radio industries announced an agreement on a lower set of royalties that Webcasters would pay to musicians and record labels for the use of their recordings.

Instead of the financially destructive fees--per song and per listener--that Webcasters were set to cough up, courtesy of an ill-informed panel of copyright judges, Web radio sites could pay either lower rates or a percentage of their revenues or expenses if they opt into this new royalty structure.

[...] leaving out some fine print to avoid anesthetizing all of you:

* Large Webcasters--defined as those who rake in more than $1.25 million in annual revenues--will pay either 25 percent of those revenues or a per-performance rate in the neighborhood of a tenth of a cent, whichever is greater. This deal runs through 2015.

* Small Webcasters--those raking in less than $1.25 million a year in revenues and fewer than 8 to 10 million listener-hours a month of broadcasts, depending on the year--can choose between paying a percentage of their revenues (12 percent of the first $250,000, then 14 percent of everything on top of that) or their expenses (7 percent). These options run through 2014.

Note that these rates, while cheaper than before, remain fairly expensive. Pandora's Westergren, for example, noted in that blog post that the site would have to charge listeners 99 cents if they tune in for more than 40 hours in a month.

These rates also far exceed those that satellite-radio broadcasters pay--6.5 percent of gross revenue this year, rising to 8 percent in 2012--and infinitely exceed the rates--zero percent--that American FM and AM stations cough up to musicians and labels. (In most other countries, terrestrial radio stations already pay performance royalties.) That has been the fundamental problem with the Web-radio-royalties debacle, going back not just to 2007 but to 2002: One group of businesses is getting charged more than others that provide the same basic service, apparently for the sin of taking too long to hire good lobbyists.

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The Wheels On The Hopenchange Bus Go 'Round and 'Round

[fox] The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past.

Johnson said such prisoners held without trial would receive "some form of periodic review" that could lead to their release.

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Obama holds a fire sale of America's nuclear defences in Moscow

[t] No apologies for posting consecutively on Barack Obama: the Looney Tunes President’s sell-out of US and Western interests is proceeding at such a speed that it is difficult to keep pace. Well said, Nile Gardiner, for asking if Barack Obama is the most naïve president in American history. The answer is undoubtedly yes – unless he has a secret agenda to cut America down to size.

It was always in Russia that Obama threatened to do most damage and, as Nile Gardiner has rightly pointed out, these forebodings have been fulfilled. His supposed missile deal with Vladimir Putin (let’s cut straight to the organ-grinder and by-pass Medvedev, the monkey) is very satisfactory to Russian ambitions and realpolitik.

The nuclear power balance, as at 2007, was a Russian superiority of 2,146 land-launched nuclear warheads to 1,600 US; this was counterbalanced by a US superiority of 3,168 sea-launched US warheads to 1,392 Russian and 1,098 air-launched US warheads to 624 Russian. What should also be factored in is the leaking, deteriorating, rust-bucket condition of some of Russia’s deterrent ordnance, although it has already decommissioned the most basket-case Soviet weaponry. The bottom line, however, is that it is Russia which is now in the lead in ICBM development, not America.

For America voluntarily to reduce its nuclear superiority is madness. Bien-pensant talk of a nuclear-free world displays total stupidity in a global situation where nuclear weaponry is proliferating, not receding. There is even a nuclear bomb in Pakistan, which is teetering on the brink of failed statehood at the hands of Islamist insurgents. Is this a time for America to disarm, to “sell the store” as one trenchant right-wing commentator has already described Obama’s posturing in Moscow?

For Obama, success is not the delivery of watertight nuclear security for America; it is a feel-good news conference and photo opportunity that will create huge approval ratings on liberal campuses where the delusions of 1968 and the anti-Vietnam war movement still linger on in these isolated Jurassic Parks.

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"As some people already know, a dance move called the moonwalk (a.k.a. backslide) had been existed before it became the "moonwalk". The video features the ancient moonwalkers and other greats who possibly influenced MJ's style of dancing."

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Franken : Dejavu

[wsj] The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year's disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don't need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat's strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team's real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn't demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn't lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

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An in-depth look at the Declaration of Independence : [history]

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Palin to Resign From Governor Position



Unrelated, Sarah Palin interview in Runner's World : [rw]

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Obama's Top Five Health Care Lies

[forbes] President Barack Obama walked into the Oval Office with a veritable halo over his head. In the eyes of his backers, he could say or do no wrong because he had evidently descended directly from heaven to return celestial order to our fallen world. Oprah declared his tongue to be "dipped in the unvarnished truth." Newsweek editor Evan Thomas averred that Obama "stands above the country and above the world as a sort of a God."

But when it comes to health care reform, with every passing day, Obama seems less God and more demagogue, uttering not transcendental truths, but bald-faced lies. Here are the top five lies that His Awesomeness has told--the first two for no reason other than to get elected and the next three to sell socialized medicine to a wary nation.

- No one will be compelled to buy coverage.
- No new taxes on employer benefits.
- Government can control rising health care costs better than the private sector.
- A public plan won't be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly.
- Patients don't have to fear rationing.

[see article for explanations etc. regarding each issue]

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Canada Day

[cbc] Playing ball hockey in Afghanistan, eating bison burgers in London, watching a parade in Halifax — these are just some of the ways Canadians across the country and around the world celebrated the nation's 142nd birthday Wednesday.

In Ottawa, tens of thousands of people, many dressed in red and white, attended a free all-day outdoor concert.

Before the show, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean wandered through the crowd, shaking hands with people. Harper told the crowd that the most peaceful, prosperous and enduring democracy the world has ever known was born 142 years ago Wednesday.

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Withdrawal Iraq

[rcp] This week, American troops start leaving Iraqi cities in compliance with both former President George W. Bush's negotiated start date for withdrawal and President Barack Obama's campaign pledge. Given Bush's profound commitment to succeed in Iraq, if he were still in office and if he judged such a scheduled removal of troops to be dangerous, he doubtlessly would have postponed the action -- just as he changed his strategy and ordered the surge against the advice of most of his government and most of Washington in 2007.

Yet it was that surge and the changed strategy designed and led by Gen. David Petraeus that left Iraq at noon Jan. 20 largely peaceful and on a steady march to a stable, friendly, representative government.

But in the past several weeks, a deep, if quietly expressed, concern has arisen on the part of some Iraqis and some U.S. military personnel that the removal of U.S. troops so soon is precipitous and seriously risks a return to the murderous sectarian conflict of 2004-07.

The withdrawal plan that our government is carrying out intends to reduce the current 130,000 American troops in Iraq, including about 24,000 in Baghdad, to 50,000 by the end of 2011 -- all of whom will be outside the cities and used only for training and U.S. force protection. Pursuant to that plan, about 24,000 troops in Baghdad have been moved outside the city already to secured locations, such as Joint Security stations Istiqlal, War Eagle and Ur and Camp Taji. [...]

We all must hope for the success of the current U.S. administration's idealistic theory that Shiites and Sunnis already have overcome their historic murderous hatred of each other and are ready to govern and live together in peace. Far too many of our troops, allied Iraqi troops and innocent Iraqi citizens have been killed or distressingly wounded to now lose the peace so terribly earned.

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Helen Thomas!? : O's White House 'Controlling the Press!?

[rcp : Video] CBS' Chip Reid and Helen Thomas double teamed Robert Gibbs today at the daily press briefing on the "tightly controlled" town hall meeting President Obama will hold on health care. Gibbs kept saying lets have this discussion AFTER the meeting. Helen Thomas accused the White House of "controlling the press." She said almost all White House/Obama events are "prepackaged." She accused the White House of not "having any answers."

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