Hells bells; two successive budgets….zero votes; this is bad even by Jimmy Carter’s standards.
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Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up,
Bobby Jindal: Obama “Never Even Ran a Lemonade Stand”
So much truth:
“President Obama hasn’t run anything before he was elected President of the United States. Never ran a state, never ran a business, and never ran a lemonade stand. This job’s too important for on-the-job training. In contrast, Mitt Romney’s been a successful governor, successful businessman; he’s got the executive experience,” Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-Louisiana) said on FOX News today.
For a breakdown on just what type of pre-public office experience President Obama does have, I refer to this timeless piece from the Weekly Standard. The mind reels:
By this point Obama had left law school, and academia was courting him. The University of Chicago Law School approached him; although they didn’t have any specific needs, they wanted to be in the Barack Obama business. (Just as Harvard wanted to be in the Elizabeth Warren business….assuming she was 1/32 Cherokee.) As Douglas Baird, the head of Chicago’s appointments committee, would later explain, “You look at his background—Harvard Law Review president, magna cum laude, and he’s African American.This is a no-brainer hiring decision at the entry level of any law school in the country.” Chicago invited Obama to come in and teach just about anything he wanted. But Obama wasn’t interested in a professor’s life. Instead, he told them that he was writing a book—about voting rights.(The lies begin.) The university made him a fellow, giving him an office and a paycheck to keep him going while he worked on this important project.
In case you’re keeping score at home, there was some confusion as to what book young Obama was writing.His publisher thought he was writing about race relations. His employer thought he was writing about voting rights law. But Obama seems to have never seriously considered either subject.Instead, he decided that his subject would be himself. The 32-year-old was writing a memoir.
B. Hussein may not have ever operated a lemonade stand, but if he had, it would likely have looked like….
….THIS.
But there’s two things The Obamao HAS done and continues to do, and those right well: lie through his teeth….and collect copious amounts of cash, as is detailed in today’s “You Can’t Spell “Liberal” without an “L-I-E!” segment, courtesy of Go.com and Conn Carroll:
Obama Courts Private Equity Cash at New York Fundraiser
On the same day his campaign launched an attack on Mitt Romney‘s record in private equity, President Obama is attending a big-dollar fundraiser at the Manhattan home of one of the industry’s top figures.
Hamilton “Tony” James — the president of the Blackstone Group, the nation’s largest private equity firm — is hosting a $35,800-a-head dinner for Obama, with 60 Democratic allies expected to attend, according to a campaign official. Many in attendance are expected to have ties to the private equity sector.
As the broadcaster of the Hindenburg disaster might have cried, “Ohhh….the hypocrisy!” Which, considering where his campaign is currently headed, is entirely….
….apropos!
Then there’s another manufactured story from CNN….the Communist News Network:
Romney donor pulls support, backs Obama, over same-sex marriage
A well-known, openly gay supporter of Mitt Romney in New York has decided to withdraw his support for Romney and back President Barack Obama instead. The clincher: Romney’s stance on same-sex marriage.
“I feel that I no longer wish to support your presidential campaign and ask that you please return the maximum contribution that I gave to you last year,” Bill White wrote in a letter addressed to the former Massachusetts governor and obtained by CNN.
As soon as someone can explain to me how Romney’s current position on gay marriage is any different today from what it was at any point in the past, we’ll believe this guy wasn’t a Dimocratic plant from the outset. Yeah….like Obama would ever have considered a Romney supporter, gay or otherwise, as his Secretary of the Navy.
Next up, courtesy of Steve Boss, BizJournal.com details another reason why the Dims are so focused on single-payer, government-run healthcare:
Governments employ 20 percent or more of workers in nine states
Governments employ more than one-fifth of all workers in nine states and the District of Columbia. It comes as no surprise that D.C. is the overall leader. The district’s workforce included 247,000 government positions as of March, accounting for 33.4 percent of its total complement of 738,600 jobs.
Alaska is the runner-up, with 25.8 percent of its workers being employed by the federal, state or local governments. Rounding out the top five are Wyoming (25.5 percent), New Mexico (24.3 percent) and Mississippi (22.7 percent). Five other states have crossed the 20 percent threshold: Oklahoma, Hawaii, West Virginia, Montana and Alabama.
On Numbers analyzed seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, calculating the percentage of all nonfarm jobs within each state that are part of the government sector. Federal, state and local governments employ 22.2 million workers nationwide, equaling 16.7 percent of the U.S. workforce of 132.7 million. A recent On Numbers report indicated that government employment levels are rising in 37 states.
….The state where governments have the smallest economic presence is Pennsylvania, in which 733,900 people work in the public sector. That’s 12.8 percent of Pennsylvania’s total workforce.
Now consider this: Great Britain’s National Health Service employs a unionized work force of over 1.7 million….out of a population of just over 62 million. Were Progressives ever able to achieve their goal of single-payer healthcare here at home, it would result in the largest enterprise on the planet: an additional 8.5 million unionized government workers, all beholden to Washington for their livelihood.
Any questions?!?
And following up on an earlier item describing perils of the looming castration….er,….sequestration of the Defense budget, Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt, writing at The Weekly Standard, report on why neither America nor its Armed Forces can depend on their leaders to adequately defend the fold:
Panetta plays chicken
How can we afford for me to fly home every weekend, honey? C’mon, it’s not like WE’RE paying for it!
When he was director of central intelligence, Leon Panetta earned a reputation as an energetic advocate for his agency. When he replaced Robert Gates at the Pentagon, it was reasonable to hope that Panetta would continue to play the role of a senior statesman. And to some extent he has—explaining that defense cuts would heighten risks to the nation’s security and stating that, should the “sequester” mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act come to pass in January 2013, cutting another $500 billion from defense, it would be a “disaster” for America’s military. As he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “Congress must do everything possible to make sure that we avoid sequestration.”
But no longer.Now that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has actually introduced a plan to avoid this disaster, blocking sequestration and proposing alternative reductions in federal spending to meet the goals set by the Budget Control Act, Secretary Panetta has reverted to his Democratic-congressman-from-California self. At a press conference Thursday, Panetta said the Republican bill would, “by taking these funds from the poor, middle-class Americans, homeowners, and other vulnerable parts of our American constituencies,” virtually guarantee “confrontation, gridlock, and a greater likelihood of sequester.” To top matters off, the secretary added that “defense should not be exempt from doing its share to reduce the deficit.”(Excepting, of course, SecDef’s weekend flights home to California.)
So, naturally, the news accounts portray the fight between the House GOP and the Obama administration as a choice between “protecting defense” and “slashing funds for the poor.”
Except it’s not.Since 2002, spending for the federal government’s food stamp program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has increased 270 percent, with participation in SNAP growing 160 percent since 2000.The proposed “slash” to the program would leave funding for food stamps in 2013 still 260 percent higher than a decade ago. Indeed, given the liberalized rules for eligibility, even if the economy recovers and returns to normal growth, the CBO projects nearly 37 million people will be receiving benefits in 2020, up from 17 million in 2000.
Or, take the proposed reforms to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the House bill. While the past decade has seen a large expansion in Medicaid spending, the program is projected to grow by some 125 percent in the next 10 years. The House bill would slow that growth to 123 percent.
These proposals hardly justify the Democrats’ accusations that the House GOP is rampaging through the federal budget like Attila the Hun.
Not that a little slashing isn’t sometimes called for. The health care law passed in 2010 created a “Prevention and Public Health Fund” to prevent disease and promote “wellness.” While presumably some of the money was well spent, U.S. tax dollars also went to improving signage for public parks and bike lanes in North Carolina, promoting “urban gardening” in Boston, and helping New York in its lobbying campaign to increase taxes on soda.
Nor is it the case, as Secretary Panetta suggests, that those trying to prevent further cuts to the military budget are ignoring the need to address the deficit or arguing that defense shouldn’t share the pain. Over the past four years, some $800 billion has already been taken from defense coffers. If the sequester stands, defense, though consuming less than 20 percent of federal spending, will bear half the total cuts.
The real issue here is the desire of the administration and its allies on Capitol Hill to keep defense spending as low as possible to make room for the domestic welfare and entitlement programs they want.In this connection, it should be no surprise that the $800 billion already lopped from defense is essentially the price tag for the 2009 Obama stimulus package that failed to restore the economy to healthy growth.
So, over the longer term, this really will be a matter of “guns versus butter”—with liberals wanting to add oleo, margarine, and extra virgin olive oil to one side of the ledger, while leaving the U.S. military looking more and more like the armless, legless Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Under the administration’s current plan to flat line future defense spending, and using CBO projections for the economy, America’s defense “burden” will drop to just over 2.5 percent of GDP in a decade. This is a remarkable figure—half a percentage point lower than the lowest level reached in the post-World War II era and well below even the post-Cold War average. With this level of resources, the United States simply cannot continue to play the role it has over the past 60 years in keeping the great powers at peace and helping provide the global security environment that has seen America prosper.
The GOP-sponsored plan in the House offers a sensible way forward. It keeps the government’s pledge to begin addressing the deficit and does so by only slightly slowing the growth in welfare programs. And it steps back from what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, has called the path to “a hollow force.” Unfortunately, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, most of his Democratic colleagues, and the White House seem unwilling even to consider the plan, preferring instead to play Russian roulette with the country’s security by letting the sequestration process go forward.
Perhaps this is to be expected given the Democrats’ slim hold on the Senate and a president whose record puts his reelection in jeopardy. But it does not excuse Panetta’s dismissal of what is, so far, the only plan to prevent the gutting of the department he leads.The Budget Control Act was a piece of national-security folly, for which congressional Republicans deserve a good share of the blame. But the relish with which Democrats, including Panetta, are playing a game of political chicken with the U.S. military is inexcusable.
Nor does it excuse the Military’s senior leadership’s continued participation and facilitation of this Administration’s deliberate decimation of America’s Armed Forces.
National defense? Military readiness? Are you nuts?!? I’m just setting myself for MY piece of the post-retirement pie!
Panetta’s playing chicken alright; with YOUR future, your children’s and that of generations to come….all for personal profit and short-term political power.
Which brings us to today’s Money Quote, courtesy of Michael Cannon and Cato.org….
“….Official estimates posit that Medicare and Medicaid lose at least $70 billion per year to fraudulent and otherwise improper payments, and that about 10.5 percent of Medicare spending and 8.4 percent of Medicaid spending was improper in 2009. Fraud experts say the official numbers are too low. “Loss rates due to fraud and abuse could be 10 percent, or 20 percent, or even 30 percent in some segments,” explained Malcolm Sparrow, a mathematician, Harvard professor, and former police inspector, in congressional testimony. “The overpayment-rate studies the government has relied on … have been sadly lacking in rigor, and have therefore produced comfortingly low and quite misleading estimates.”
In 2005, the New York Times reported that “James Mehmet, who retired in 2001 as chief state investigator of Medicaid fraud and abuse in New York City, said he and his colleagues believed that at least 10 percent of state Medicaid dollars were spent on fraudulent claims, while 20 or 30 percent more were siphoned off by what they termed abuse, meaning unnecessary spending that might not be criminal.” And even these experts ignore other, perfectly legal ways of exploiting Medicare and Medicaid, such as when a senior hides and otherwise adjusts his finances so as to appear eligible for Medicaid, or when a state abuses the fact that the federal government matches state Medicaid outlays.“
Meanwhile, The Obamao and his disciples are castigating, denigrating and investigating Jamie Dimon over a lousy $3 billion….of J.P. Morgan’s money!
And as just in time for Team Tick-Tock’s dissolution of America’s defenses, National Review Online‘s Daniel Vajdic notes.…
Putin’s growing detachment from the West — and reality
Vladmir Putin: crazy like a fox!
For several weeks now it’s been clear that Putin won’t attend this month’s NATO summit in Chicago. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently spoke with Russia’s new/old president and explained that it’s “not possible and not practical” for Putin to participate because of his “busy domestic calendar.” But the real reason is missile defense. Moscow is furious that the U.S. has rejected its proposal for a “sectoral” arrangement that would further downgrade the system’s capabilities and give Russia the responsibility to protect NATO countries from certain ballistic-missile threats.
This has triggered what I call the Kremlin’s Rodney Dangerfield syndrome. It demands “respect” and proceeds to show its displeasure when Russia’s supposed interests aren’t being acknowledged. In that context, Putin’s decision to skip the NATO summit isn’t entirely unexpected and shouldn’t be overanalyzed.
However, a few days ago, Putin announced that he also wouldn’t attend the G-8 summit at Camp David, which was moved from Chicago specifically to accommodate his likely absence at the NATO summit and to avoid the awkwardness of attending one but not the other. (Baloney: it was moved from Chicago to avoid the inevitable protests from The Obamao’s minions.)
Putin explained to Obama that he would miss the summit because he needs to assemble a new government in Moscow, which, of course, is the responsibility of the prime minister rather than the president. (Although in fairness, after four years as both Russia’s prime minister and de facto president, Putin can be forgiven for his confusion.) In typically Kremlinesque fashion, it was a blatantly obvious cop-out with a not-too-subtle message. Camp David was supposed to provide the venue for Obama’s first face-to-face meeting with Putin since his return to the presidency.
This was much more than a simple snub. It’s possible that Putin anticipated and wanted to avoid criticism from his G-8 counterparts about the Kremlin’s violent suppression of opposition protests before and after his May 7 inauguration. I’d prefer this to be a one-time judgment that stems from recent events. But I worry that Putin’s decision is indicative of his growing detachment from reality after 12 years at Russia’s helm.
Putin is apparently “sick of diplomatic routines and protocols” and “prefers meetings with business leaders, who have concrete goals, rather than with politicians.” If that means he’ll finally begin to address Russia’s sub-Saharan levels of corruption, virtually nonexistent rule of law, and other conditions that stymie the country’s economic and political development, then that’s great. But I doubt this very much.
Rather, I see Putin’s decision to skip the G-8 summit as the beginning of his self-isolation. The more repressive he becomes at home, the more uncomfortable he’ll be in settings — like NATO and the G-8 — that are dominated by democracies. And the less he interacts with the West, the less restrained he’ll feel from pursuing repressive policies at home. With Putin back in the Kremlin, Russia may soon find itself in the midst of this vicious cycle. It’s always difficult to make predictions about how authoritarian states will behave, but it looks like Russia’s relations with the West are about to enter extremely rough waters.
Occam’s Razor, as well as our gut feel, suggests a different explanation: perhaps Mr. Putin isn’t sick or dismissive of all politicians….just B. Hussein Obama. After all, it wasn’t an Apology Tour or Hands Across the Ocean that won the Cold War, brought down the Berlin Wall or secured the release of the Iranian hostages; it was the steely determination of Ronald Reagan and the unassailable superiority of the military forces at his command.
The current occupant of the Oval Office totally lacks the former, and is doing his Marxist best to ensure neither he nor his successors enjoy the latter.
And in the Environmental Moment, as The New Media Journal informs us:
Jarrett’s ‘Chicago Connections’ Led to Obama’s Solyndra Visit
Revelations from a new unauthorized biography of President Obama called “The Amateur,” continue to trickle out. The latest involves White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. According to the book, written by former New York Times Magazine editor Edward Klein, many of Obama’s most liberal and costly political mistakes stemmed from Jarrett’s advice.
Jarrett reportedly hatched the idea of Obama flying to Copenhagen to “make a dramatic presentation to the International Olympic Committee” for Chicago’s Olympic bid — and also encouraged Obama’s visit to “the Bay area solar company Solyndra” — despite the protestations of Lawrence Summers (who in 2009 warned against the loan guarantee) and others.
Klein implies Jarrett’s pro-Solyndra position was a result of her “Chicago connections” and,
“…especially her close ties to the George Kaiser Family Foundation, which controlled 35.7 percent of Solyndra. The foundation had made a sizable donation to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Jarrett once served as chairwoman and where one of Obama’s best friends, Eric Whitaker, is currently executive vice president. Billionaire George Kaiser, one of Obama’s top 2008 campaign fundraising bundlers, visited the White House no fewer than sixteen times, and Jarrett herself met at least three times with Solyndra lobbyists, who pushed for government assistance.”
But Jarrett didn’t always get her way. Regarding the killing of bin Laden, Klein writes that,
“…she privately urged the president not to send in a Navy SEAL team. She told Obama that the raid could turn out to be a replay of 1980’s Desert One, when President Jimmy Carter’s effort to rescue American hostages in Iran backfired so badly that it doomed the Carter presidency.”
The book casts former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as a pragmatic adviser, who was frequently overruled by the more liberal Jarrett. “[A]t almost every turn,” the book says, “Emanuel was thwarted by Jarrett, who functioned along with David Axelrod as Obama’s ‘political brain.’”
Jarrett and Axelrod functioning as his political brains; is it any wonder The Obamao’s political future is as dim as Joe Biden?!?
On the Lighter Side….
Then there’s this bit of satire that somehow reminded us of our old friend Taylor Chess:
No….you wouldn’t be driving behind Taylor; he’d be passing you doing just under the speed of heat.
Finally, we’ll call it a day with the “Your Tax Dollars at Work” segment, courtesy of Best of the Web:
Paint the InkRed
“A Central Connecticut State University art professor who says he has long been the target of ‘low-grade harassment’ by the university went public Tuesday, citing an incident with campus police that he said interrupted his students’ work,” the Hartford Courant reports:
Alewitz, who teaches a mural class and a street art class, said CCSU’s collection of more than 100 murals is the biggest of any university in the country. . . .
The mural, which will be finished over the summer, depicts students struggling under the strain of college debt as the CCSU mascot, a blue devil, looks on.
So these idiots take out student loans to pay for classes in how to paint murals protesting student loans? It would be funny, except for one thing: Like everything in the world of higher education, it’s all lavishly subsidized by your tax dollars.
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