….why?!? After all, not only have you seen and heard it all before, it’s all you’re going to see and hear between now and next November.
As contributor Bill Meisen noted, here’s The Juice According to The Obamao: if you’re a billionaire or millionaire (like The Obamao!), you don’t deserve what you’ve have (which of course is projection on B. Hussein’s part!) If you’re not, no matter what you do, there’s no chance of ever becoming one.
To paraphrase B. Hussein Niedermeyer, “You’re all worthless and weak!”….thus your only hope is government. Unfortunately, the government is unable to help you because the evil billionaires and millionaires aren’t paying their fair share, the precise definition of which Tick-Tock is neither able nor willing to detail.
If only the equally-evil Republicans would allow the Boy Blunder to somehow, someway, raise taxes on the evil rich, the unwashed masses (after all, The Anointed One has his!) would miraculously become prosperous.
And if you believe that, you’re either a product of America’s over-funded, under-performing public education system….or the proud but poverty-stricken possessor of a Arts or Humanities degree!
Bottomline?
And as this forward from Bill Meisen describes, when Team Tick-Tock isn’t openly attempting to recast America’s economic system in their own Marxist image, they’re surreptitiously striving to subvert the Constitution:
Documents: ATF used “Fast and Furious” to make the case for gun regulations
Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.
In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the “big fish.” But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called “gunwalking,” and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3”. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.
On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF’s Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:
“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”
Remember, everyone of these guys took an oath requiring them to defend the Constitution against ALL enemies, foreign AND domestic!
In a related item, The Boy Blunder’s latest act of head-in-the-sand, Muslim-pandering political correctness was apparently too much for even the thickest-hided RINO on Capitol Hill:
Lawmaker Blast Administration For Calling Fort Hood Massacre ‘Workplace Violence’
Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday blasted the Defense Department for classifying the Fort Hood massacre as workplace violence and suggested political correctness is being placed above the security of the nation’s Armed Forces at home.
During a joint session of the Senate and House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, the Maine Republican referenced a letter from the Defense Department depicting the Fort Hood shootings as workplace violence. She criticized the Obama administration for failing to identify the threat as radical Islam.
Atta girl; welcome to the party, Senator Snowjob. But where were you when Tailhook, women in combat roles, the rescission of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell and a myriad of other social engineering initiatives sacrificed national security and combat readiness on the altar of political correctness? Gee….Olympia wouldn’t be….up for reelection next year?!?
Next up, courtesy of the WSJ, a frank and factual excerpt to counter The Obamao’s “fairness” folly, from a December 5th interview with George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok:
Schulz: You argue that the economic benefits of college are oversold. Assuming that is true, there’s a cultural hurdle to overcome: The BA has become a societal totem, something that defines and divides society along class lines. How do you convince folks—especially parents—that they can risk not sending a kid to college when they are told it is essential to an upper middle-class life?
Tabarrok: First, there is plenty of risk in sending a kid to college! Forty percent of students don’t graduate within six years (and probably never will), many more graduate with degrees that won’t help them much in the labor force, and even the ones that do graduate often do so with student debt that will follow them for decades. Moreover, even when college pays for kids is it paying for society? A lot of schooling is just signaling, not the true building of human capital. There is an argument for subsidizing science, technology, engineering, and math fields, but should we really be subsidizing anthropology, sociology, and English lit students?
In Germany, far fewer kids go to college than in the United States. Instead, most German high school students opt for apprenticeships and on-the-job training. These students are given high-skill, technical training that motivates theory with practice, and the students are paid! Moreover, on-the-job training promotes acculturation into the adult world instead of walling off 16- to 18-year-olds in their own, sometimes dangerous, world.
By the way, when I make these arguments I am sometimes accused of not appreciating that college education makes for a “well-rounded” person.What a load of rot. Basically, these critics define well-rounded as someone who can quote Plato! Rather self-serving. Well-rounded should also mean being able to replace a light fixture, a challenge to many Platonists!
More seriously, take a look at students in Finland, Sweden, or Germany. In these countries, more than half the students enter apprenticeship programs instead of going to college, but these students are very well-educated and well-rounded.
And since we’re on the subject of government-sanctioned mediocrity, John Stossel relates America has roughly….
Ten Years to Greece
America moves steadily toward the cliff. When Greece blew up, its government debt was 126 percent of gross domestic product. Ours is on track to exceed that in about 10 years.
If we haven’t learned from Greece, might we learn when other countries blow up? That may be about to happen, says Daniel Hannan, author of “The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America.” Hannan, a British member of the European Parliament, says, “The consequences of the better part of 40 years of reckless borrowing have caught up with us.”
I told him that most Americans don’t notice Europe struggling. I hear people say: “I went to Paris. I went to Rome. Things are OK.” “Things are OK in the same sense that a house that is massively overmortgaged can still be a nice-looking house. … But there comes a point when the bills are due, and we’ve reached that point.”
On the surface, things do look good on the other side of the Atlantic. Europeans have shorter workdays and longer vacations than Americans. Many of us would say, “Sounds good.”
“In the short term, it’s lovely. What’s not to like? … The trouble is you can’t carry on doing that indefinitely. … In the mid-1970s, Western Europe accounted for more than a third of the world’s economy. Today, it’s about a quarter. And in 2020, it will be 15 percent. That’s the reality of burdening yourself with more taxes, more regulations … deeply uncompetitive practices.”
Adding to the fiscal burden is the fact that people live longer.
“It’s a good problem to have. … But, of course, the longer people live, the worse the (worker-to-retiree) ratio grows. … We introduced the old-age pension in the U.K. almost exactly 100 years ago. … And in those days, you typically drew your pension for about 18 months. That was the gap between retirement and death. Fortunately, we can all now look forward to much longer periods of life. But, of course, you’ve got to pay for that. … We are going to have to ask people to make a greater contribution or to retire later, or both.“
People don’t want to hear that. Hannan notes that his fellow Europeans are remarkably selfish when it comes to things they think they’re entitled to. Some understand that cuts must be made, but don’t touch their handouts.
“In France, they call it the ‘droits acquis,’ the acquired rights. … As the governments try belatedly to … restore some order, some sanity to their public finances … people who now feel entitled by right, and who have stopped thinking about where the money comes from … quite understandably turn around and say: ‘This wasn’t what I expected when I started doing this job. Go and find the money somewhere else.”
But there really isn’t anywhere else.
We Americans feel entitled, too. We work longer and harder than Europeans, but American students say they are entitled to government loans; industries and their friends in politics insist that housing, agriculture, energy and all sorts of other businesses deserve subsidies; and most everyone expects health care to be free, or nearly free. Many politicians tell people that’s all possible, and some promise more.
But that just moves us closer to the cliff.
Why don’t we learn? Because there are problems that must be solved, and politicians act so interested in our welfare that we believe them when they say, “Yes, we can.” But the educated response to “Yes, we can” is “No, they can’t.” Not when “they” means government.
Our government should be a fraction of the size it is now. Its girth is the result of electioneering politicians who promise the moon to gullible voters while using debt to push the costs onto our children and grandchildren.
Politicians can dream of guaranteed incomes and free medical care, but as economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in “The Fatal Conceit”: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
But saying that government can’t solve our problems is not to say that humanity cannot solve them. When people and markets are left free, we manage to prosper.
In other words, despite decades of deceitful declarations from limitless Liberals, Progressives and other snake oil salesmen to the contrary, one cold, hard, simple truth remains: there IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH!
And no matter how many Presidents The Obamao attempts to channel, be it Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan, Kennedy, Truman or most recently TR, his central truth will always be self-evident:
Which is why, no matter what happens to the rest of us, Barry can rest easy knowing Sasha and Malia have theirs!
Speaking of the First Kids, for any inquiring minds wanting to know what was on the menu marking the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor for the Obamlettes at the exclusive Sidwell Friends School, Bill Meisen offers the answer:
Pearl Harbor Shock: Obama’s Daughters Dine on Japanese
Curiously, no public school in Japan, let alone Hiroshima or Nagasaki, has ever marked August 6th or 9th by requesting a fly-over by either the Enola Gay or Bock’s Car.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Jonah Goldberg uses the occasion of yet another Ging-Gag to highlight….if you’ll forgive the redundancy….the hypocrisy of the Left:
Gingrich the compassionate
Newt Gingrich wants to pay poor kids to clean toilets. And all of the right people are horrified.
The Nation says Gingrich is running on “a platform that seems to have been written by the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge.” The editors of the Newark Star-Ledger proclaim Gingrich wants to “bring back the days of Oliver Twist.” The host of “Meet the Press,” David Gregory, suggests Gingrich’s take on the inner-city poor is a “grotesque distortion.”
This controversy started last month at Harvard, when Gingrich suggested in a speech that perhaps the best way to break the cycle of poverty in inner cities is to break the culture of poverty that sustains it by, among other things, paying kids to do janitorial work.
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” Gingrich explained recently in Iowa when asked to clarify his position. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”
It’s a classically Gingrichian spectacle, illuminating a lot about the presidential candidate, but also about his critics and his swarming ranks of fans.
Gingrich is a rhetorical yoga swami. As my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson says, he can shove his foot in his mouth while putting his finger on the issue. Gingrich is right about the culture of poverty, but he opens himself to easy rebuttal by speaking so sweepingly and categorically. And did he really have to pick toilet-scrubbing as his preferred workfare?
Still, what his critics don’t — or refuse to — understand is that he’s not driven by a lack of compassion, but a surplus of it.The liberal bureaucratic mind-set seems to define compassion simply as spending more money on systems and policies that have made problems worse and keep the usual special interests happy.
Gingrich thinks compassion should be measured not by inputs but outputs. Spending trillions on poverty is beyond simply uncompassionate if you waste the money and make things worse.It’s evil.
Anyone who wants to understand Gingrich’s views on poverty should read his March 2008 speech at the American Enterprise Institute (where I’m a visiting fellow). Gingrich rejected then-candidate Obama’s suggestion that the legacy of racism combined with a failure to fund education to liberals’ satisfaction “helps explain the pervasive achievement gap” in poor inner-city schools.
“That is simply factually false,” Gingrich declared.“The Detroit schools are the third or fourth most expensive schools in America. They’re a disaster.” Washington, D.C., schools — perhaps the most expensive in the country — don’t languish because of racism, Gingrich explained. They’re bad because D.C. “has an incompetent bureaucracy, a failed model of education, a unionized tenured system. It is utterly resistant to improvement. That has nothing to do with racism.”
He noted that when Newsweek asked Oprah Winfrey why she went to South Africa — and not south Chicago — to open a girls school, she responded: “I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn’t there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don’t ask for money or toys, they ask for uniforms so they can go to school.”
Gingrich probably agrees with the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan more than any other leading conservative. “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Moynihan observed. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” A constant theme of Gingrich’s career is a desire to use government to fix the culture.Indeed, there’s no Republican in the field with a more robust faith in the power of government.
That’s the irony of the Gingrich surge. All of these GOP voters and Tea Party activists who once supported Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain and are now flocking to Gingrich seem not to have noticed Gingrich’s progressive bent.
The primary season began with a race to see how much of the government we could send back to the states. We’re now in the phase where the GOP front-runner is proposing janitorial reform in the schools.
Which is why Newt concerns us only slightly less than the Dims: they’re opposite sides of the same coin. They both see government as the answer to whatever ails society, be it poverty, global warming or the economy; only their methodology differs. After all, with someone as smart as Newt at the helm, can there be ANY problem to which Washington cannot offer the solution?!?
In related item….
Newt Says Romney a Possible VP Pick
Belts and suspender; you know….in case Newt alone wasn’t enough to lock in the flip-flopping RINO vote.
And in the “Why Is This Man Still Running?!?” segment:
Perry looks for comeback in Iowa
More importantly, why is anyone still contributing to his campaign?!?
Then there’s this headline which should serve to cause anyone living with an ARM sleep better at night:
Government to Help Consumers Understand Credit Cards
Sure….right after Timmy the Tax Cheat….
….helps them with their Form 1040!
On the Lighter Side….
Finally, this next video clip serves not only as a sign The Apocalypse is upon us….
….but confirms college, no matter WHAT the Dimocrats maintain, isn’t for everyone.
P.S. Tell us again why this animal’s been kicked out of school, but has yet to be arrested for assault?
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