As we reported in July 2008: The Obama Campiagn was paying women less, when McCain was paying them more; all while Obama accused McCain of not supporting equal pay for women – LINK.
Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.
According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).
Calculating the median salary for each gender required some assumptions to be made based on the employee names. When unclear, every effort was taken to determine the appropriate gender.
The Obama campaign on Wednesday lashed out at presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney for his failure to immediately endorse the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, a controversial law enacted in 2009 that made it easier to file discrimination lawsuits.
President Obama has frequently criticized the gender pay gap, such as the one that exists in White House.
“Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income,” he said in a July 2010 statement. “And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole.”
It is not known whether any female employees at the White House have filed lawsuits under the Ledbetter Act.
The president and his Democratic allies have accused Republicans of waging a “war on women,” and have touted themselves as champions of female equality. Obama’s rhetoric, however, has not always been supported by his actions.
White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters last week that Obama believes it is “long past the time” for women to be admitted to the traditionally all-male Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament.
But the president has demonstrated a strong preference for all-male foursomes in his frequent golf outings, a bias that extends well beyond the putting green and into the Oval Office.
“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers told the New York Times.
“There’s a looseness to Obama when he’s hanging out with the boys club that doesn’t appear in co-ed gatherings,” she wrote. “The president blows off steam on the golf course with male colleagues and friends. He takes to the White House basketball court with NBA stars, men’s college players, and male cabinet members and members of Congress.”
Barack Obama on the Ellen DeGenerous Show in 2008:
If mandating that everyone could buy healthcare would solve the healthcare problem, than government could just mandate that everyone should buy a house to solve homelessness. It isn’t that people don’t want healthcare, they can’t afford it.
This is as solid an example of attitude change propaganda as this writer has ever seen.
In an NBC segment featuring George Zimmerman’s 911 call on the night of the Trayvon Martin shooting, Zimmerman is heard saying: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”
The full version, though, unfolds like this:
Zimmerman: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”
911 Operator: “Okay. And this guy, is he white black or Hispanic?”
Zimmerman: “He looks black.”
“I guarantee you if Santorum was considered a threat, they’d be pulling out quotes from him and twisting them and turning them, and turning him into a pretzel, too. If they thought Ron Paul was a threat … they’d be turning him into a pretzel, too. Romney pulled the same thing with Fred Thompson.
He pulled the same thing with Rudy Giuliani. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are conservative, if you are tea party activists, you’ve got to step back and say, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ All these commercials aimed at destroying opponents, not in communicating facts, not in advancing our principles, not focused on Obama, who’s the problem, but turning people into monsters.”
Who didn’t see this one coming? Your Democrat Party union controlled schools at work….
Drew Zahn:
Who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – a group of men merely fighting “for a cause,” or a band of radical Muslims bent on violent jihad?
According to a new, comprehensive study of 6th-12th grade textbooks used by schools across the country, America’s children are being taught a very different answer to that question than many alive to witness 9/11 remember.
The non-profit organization ACT! for America Education studied 38 textbooks from popular publishers like McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin, for example, to determine whether American schoolchildren are being taught the truth about Islam and its role in 9/11.
“This report shines a bright light on a pattern of errors, omissions and bias in the textbooks reviewed,” explained ACT! for America Education founder Brigitte Gabriel in an email. “To give you just one example of the errors our research uncovered, in discussing the 9/11 attacks, the textbooks typically fail to mention the perpetrators were Muslims or that they acted in the cause of Islamic jihad. In one book the terrorists are portrayed as people fighting for a cause.
“In just a few years after Sept. 11,” she continues, “the history of what happened on that tragic day was rewritten in our school textbooks. Omitting this vital information, that jihad was the motivation for the attacks, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for today’s young teens, who don’t remember 9/11, to really understand what happened that day – and why.”
According to the executive summary of the report, “The full reportreveals a pattern of historical revisionism, omissions and bias in the presentation of all aspects devoted to Islam in these textbooks. These aspects include its theology and doctrines, its role as a world religion, its ongoing struggle with Western tradition and its intrinsic anti-Semitism.”
The summary continues, “Textbook errors identified in the report range from egregiously false historical statements to significant omissions and subtle half-truths. Some are blatant and obvious, others are subtle and deceptive. The errors in these textbooks are not grammatical or typographical. They are substantive, significant and often repetitive.”
For example, the report notes the textbook “World History: Patterns of Interaction,” published by McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin in 2007, glosses over the violent birth of Islam and paints its founder, Muhammad, in a glowing light.
“In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills,” the textbook asserts. “He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing.”
But did Muhammad win converts among and build a peace accord with the Jews? The study’s founders cite several sources and recorded histories in asserting this description is a bald-faced lie.
“This language is a gross falsification of the relationship between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina,” the report states. “Muhammad … expelled two of the Jewish tribes from Medina and destroyed the third, beheading the men and selling the women and children into slavery. This important and essential historical fact of the Medinan period is commonly omitted in the textbooks reviewed, and it is impossible for students to accurately understand the rise of Islam without it.”
Remember when Obama and the Democrats went on and on saying that ObamaCare would only cost $900 Billion so that it would be revenue neutral (not ad to the deficit)?
It wasn’t just this writer back in his college days who said that this number was a pipe dream. Many conservatives who ran the numbers said it would cost over $2 trillion as I reported in my college days (1, 2, 3, 4).
But it gets worse, the CBO is still underestimating the cost. Why? ObamaCare doesn’t start to spend huge money until the last phase of it’s implementation in 2014, but the new taxes are already starting to be phased in and really ramp up in 2013 just after the election. So ObamaCare is taking in money for over a year before the large expenses start incurring. If we take that into account and start the ten years in 2014, which is much more honest, the expense according to my estimates will be close to $2.3 trillion over ten years. Feel free to mark me on this readers, as I am certain others will verify this in time, as my earliest predictions about ObamaCare have been spot on so there is no reason to believe my estimate will prove to be any different (the Examiner piece below mentions the nine year issue as well).
Remember the adverse selection “death” spiral we spoke of in posts below? The longer ObamaCare goes on the more the costs will rise exponentially as that is exactly what it is designed to do. If Democrats manage to prevent an ObamaCare repeal, they know darn well they will have to replace it with a total government take over soon or the system will blow up in a short time.
President Obama’s national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projectionreleased today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.
Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.” When the final CBO score came out before passage, critics noted that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.
Today, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned to $1.76 trillion. That’s because we now have estimates for Obamacare’s first nine years of full implementation, rather than the mere six when it was signed into law. Only next year will we get a true ten-year cost estimate, if the law isn’t overturned by the Supreme Court or repealed by then. Given that in 2022, the last year available, the gross cost of the coverage expansions are $265 billion, we’re likely looking at about $2 trillion over the first decade, or more than double what Obama advertised.
UPDATE – ObamaCare to force increases in state Medicaid programs:
Again, this is something I wrote about and you can find on my old college blog in the four links above. One of the ways that the costs of ObamaCare was hidden is that some of it’s implementation is through unfunded mandates to state medicaid programs.
The CBO now projects that from 2012 through 2021 the federal government will spend $168 billion more on Medicaid than it expected last year, $97 billion less on subsidies for people to purchase insurance on government-run exchanges and $20 billion less on tax credits to small employers. That works out to a $51 billion increase in the gross cost of expanding coverage from what the CBO estimated a year ago. However, the CBO also expects the federal government to collect more revenue from penalties on individuals and employers, as well as other taxes. These revenue increases will more than offset the spending increases, according to the CBO, so it now expects the cost of Obamacare during those years to be $48 billion lower.
It’s also worth noting that we were told time and again during the health care debate that the law didn’t represent a government takeover of health care. But by 2022, according to the CBO, 3 million fewer people will have health insurance through their employer, while 17 million Americans will be added to Medicaid and 22 million will be getting coverage through government-run exchanges.
Editor’s Note – It is unfortunate that I have to gloat about such bad news, but this very writer was among the first in the country to observe and write that ObamaCare creates what is called an “Adverse Selection Spiral” (also known as an economic death spiral); meaning that the short term incentives, regulations and tax structure in the ObamaCare is designed to make the long term risk management economically unsustainable due to the long term increases in costs forced into the system.
This very writer said that ObamaCare is designed to break private insurance and make people “cry out for a public option”. Ironically some months later former Democrats Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said the exact same thing.
Speaker Pelosi used IUSB Vision Editor Chuck Norton’s exact words that ObamaCare will “make them cry out for a public option” on C-Span [Notice how all of the Democrats cackle maniacally when she says it]:
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday that the days of private health insurance are coming to an end in the United States.
“The private market is in a death spiral,” Sebelius said, contending this would be the case whether or not President Barack Obama’s health care law had been enacted.
At the Ways and Means hearing, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) asked Sebelius about the administration’s assurances that people who liked their current health insurance plan would be able to keep it under the new law.
“How about when the president said you can keep your health care coverage, if you like it?” Roskam said. “And yet, the reality is, according to Bloomberg (News) at least, 9 percent fewer businesses are offering medical coverage than in 2010. There the rhetoric didn’t meet the reality, did it?”
Sebelius did not contest the numbers.
[Here comes the spin – Political Arena Editor] “Well again, congressman, what you’re seeing, it wouldn’t have mattered if we had passed the Affordable Care Act or not,” she said. “The private market is in a death spiral.”
It would have happened anyways is the new spin. Nice try.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says that private health insurance providers are in a “death spiral.” Of course they are. Isn’t that the way the authors of ObamaCare planned it?
Testifying last Wednesday in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, Sebelius was asked by Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., if the administration was being honest when President Obama promised that those who liked their health plans could keep them.
Said Sebelius: “The private market is in a death spiral.”
Sebelius tried to temper her comment by claiming the private insurance market would collapse even if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act had not been passed. But the truth is, the market cannot survive under the growing weight of government, and Obama-Care was to be the final heavy load that will crush it.
Don’t believe it? Look at the provisions of ObamaCare and consider them in context with the Democrats’ constant public demonization of insurers.
Start with the mandates. By now, most of the country knows that ObamaCare requires health insurers to pay for contraception and other birth-control measures. But that’s not the law’s only mandate. Among the many diktats of the Democrats’ health care overhaul is the requirement that insurers must spend at least 80 cents on medical claims for every $1 they take in from premiums in the individual and small group markets, and 85 cents from premiums in the large group market.
Insurers’ first response was to cut broker commissions. But what gets trimmed next? At what point will the industry no longer be able to pay competent people in companies because of the medical-loss ratio mandate, or to make the profits needed to stay in business?
Maybe the industry could simply increase premiums to avoid problems created by the medical-loss ratio. But the central planners thought of that, too. Under ObamaCare, the secretary of Health and Human Services has the power to decline premium increases of 10% or more in the individual and small group markets. Only those considered “reasonable” by bureaucrats’ standards will be accepted. This policy is an effective price control that’s sure to cause losses in the industry.
Remember Bart Stupak? He was head of the Democrats for Life Caucus in the House. President Obama promised him an executive order, in exchange for the votes of his group of congressmen, to strip public funding of abortion so ObamaCare would never use tax dollars to kill babies? Well guess how well that worked out? And Stupak’s constituents were not fooled as he sold out the values he ran on and sacrificed his political career to advance the cause of government power.
Related:
The Myth of the Pro-Life Democrat in Congress – LINK
Stupak’s “Pro-Life” Caucus Gets $4.7 Billion in Earmark Funds after Voting for Public Funding of Abortion – LINK
Despite President Obama’s empty rhetoric to the contrary, a recently finalized Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule makes clear that ObamaCare will use tax dollars to fund abortion.
Sadly, these facts have now come to fruition. HHS, under the direction of President Obama and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has issued its final rule for implementing the state exchanges created by the ObamaCare law. These final rules include requirements for how abortion funding must be handled.
First off, when we consider that the President told us that his Executive Order made it clear that abortion was not a part of this law, it is reasonable to ask why the final rule references ‘abortion’ 30 times? If abortion funding was not to be a part of this law, the statute needed only a short, clear prohibition of such funding – a prohibition offered in the Pitts/Stupak Amendment, which was initially approved by the House of Representatives, and later stripped out by the President and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Because the law does indeed contradict the President by allowing abortion funding, this final rule goes to great lengths to devise a scheme that attempts to hide that funding. The result is a complicated web of regulations that reference ‘abortion’ 30 times.
Everyone concerned about government promotion and funding of abortions should read this rule for themselves, but allow me to outline a couple of the basic components with regard to the abortion requirements.
First, beginning on page 453, this rule describes and reaffirms the “segregation of funds for abortion services” as required under ObamaCare. Essentially, insurance plans may include abortion services in a plan subsidized by federal taxpayer dollars. To justify this inclusion, the plan will collect a $1 “surcharge” from all policy holders. Of course this surcharge will be collected as part of a larger premium payment, and not as a part of a separate collection. Additionally, plans are entirely free to advertise the total cost of these plans without mentioning that $1 of the premium is specifically intended to subsidize the abortion coverage. Further, the surcharge is only to be disclosed when the policyholder first enrolls.
In short, the $1 surcharge does not even attempt to resemble an actual offset of the abortion coverage cost, is virtually undetectable by the policy holder, and serves the singular purpose of providing a flimsy defense for inserting the federal government into the business of providing coverage for elective abortions.
Additionally, on pages 364-365, the final rule makes it entirely plausible that States that have passed laws prohibiting abortion coverage will be forced to provide that coverage anyway. This would occur through the multi-state plans administered by the Federal Government. The final rule simply says that rules governing these plans will be issued at a later date, so it’s entirely feasible (I’d say likely) that these plans will be permitted to cover abortion, even when one of the States within the multi-State area prohibits it.
You can see our previous Sandra Fluke coverage HERE and HERE and HERE.
Not only does she take grand international vacations, not only does she go to a top private university, she travels to and fro across the country and is represented by one of the most powerful PR firms in Washington D.C.; yet, she insists that government should force the Catholic Church to pay for her birth control. It gets better, it turns out that her boyfriend is one of those evil super rich 1 percenters that groups she associates with protests against for not spreading their wealth…
Just when you thought you’d seen everything.
Poor Sandra Fluke, the 30 year-old far left activist who wants you to pay for her $9 a month birth control, is dating a rich socialist.
They recently traveled to Spain and Italy together.
It was a lovely getaway for the women’s rights activist and her rich socialist boyfriend.
Here the two lovebirds are roughing it late at night in Barcelona – drunk.
Sandra Fluke and Adam in Barcelona
And, here the poor little darling tries to make ends meet in Pompeii.
Sandra Fluke in Pompeii
What a brave woman. How does she manage it all?
Brooks Bayne has much more on Sandra and her very rich boyfriend.
Editor’s Note: Since Steve Schmidt is in the news for his lies portrayed in the film “Game Change” it seemed like an appropriate time to go back to my old college blog and repost what I wrote about him early on.
From the beginning of Steve Schmidt’s and Nicole Wallace’s lies starting as early as October 2008, campaign staffers have gone on the record setting the record straight:
Tim Crawford
Jason Recher
Randy Scheunemann
Meg Stapleton
Tom Van Flein
Doug McMarlin
Andy Davis
Patrick Hynes (Whose name does not appear on a current list going around the internet but wrote a piece expressing such in 2009)
All have gone on the record saying that Schmidt’s allegations are lies. Is it any surprise that Schmidt is portrayed as the hero of the film? Senator McCain himself has gone on the record stating in no uncertain terms that Schmidt’s allegations in the film are nonsense. There is another high level staffer who worked for McCain who made it very clear to this writer privately that Schmidt was the problem in the campaign and is just not truthful. I wish said staffer would go public, but has chosen not to.
Aside from covering up for their loss to a half of one term Senator with no executive experience and the dreadful communications strategy Schmidt and Wallace engineered for the campaign, Schmidt, as you will see below, has had a long term hostility for religious conservatives; Wallace worked for CBS and is a long time personal friend of Katie Couric. Considering Schmidt’s and Wallace’s previous record, it is obvious that these two high level staffers were not properly vetted and ultimately Senator McCain is responsible for the mistake of hiring them in the first place.
In September 2009 I wrote a followed up article to the piece below when Sarah Palin herself commented on the false allegations – McCain’s communications machine was incompetent. Liberal McCain staffers had a hostility to Palin’s base and thus misjudged it. May have cost them the election – LINK. Worth the time to read to be sure.
Note– I just saw this interview of Nicolle Wallace on the Rachel Maddow Show saying that Governor Palin has not talked about policy since the end of the 2008 campaign. This is a prime example of the level of dishonesty that we have even in GOP circles. Sarah Palin has taken substantive positions on her web site, on her PAC web site, in the Wall Street Journal, and in countless interviews with Greta Van Susteren and Chris Wallace who are not softball throwers by any stretch. Chris Wallace even said last fall that he threw every policy question in the book at Palin and she was not hit each one out of the park. Other web sites such as PalinTV have lists of her positions along with explanations, sourced evidence and video. This very writer has reported on several of the policy positions and predictions that Sarah Palin has staked out and her predictions about ObamaCare, food and energy, inflation, monetary policy, and other issues were well ahead of the curve.
How Steve Schmidt blew up the McCain campaign and is attacking Sarah Palin to keep the heat off of himself.
Is Sarah Palin is the biggest threat to the corrupt, big government, crony capitalist kickback establishment culture in modern political memory? But what about Ronald Reagan…– While eventually Ronald Reagan was able to create a massive power-base from the ground up with massive popular support, he never went after the elite media or after bad apples in the GOP like Governor Palin has.
With lobbying, corruption, and crony favors in Washington now at an all time high the Democrats have become the party of Wall Street, corrupt crony capitalist, big government “A”; and while there are still some honest hold outs (Bachmann, DeMint, Paul, Sauder, Pence, etc) much of the GOP leadership is still the party of big, corrupt, crony capitalist government “B”. The exit polls in the last election showed this very clearly when voters said that the Republican Party used to stand for something but had lost their way.
Voters had learned that most Republicans in Congress circa 2008 were not the same stock that took over Congress in 1994 and worked so well with President Clinton in 1996 and 1998 to balance the budget, reign in spending, cut taxes and pass the hugely successful (and popular) welfare reform package that helped so many people get back to work. It is no secret that John Kasich, the GOP House Budget Chairman who was the architect of that success has been none too pleased with the House Republicans’ lack of leadership and financial discipline since 2004.
After taking devastating electoral defeats in 2006 and 2008, some wings of the Republican Party still have not learned their lesson. For example: Eight Republicans voted for the 1300 page, corporate favor and pork lined energy tax bill that amounts to the largest tax increase in U.S. history. A bill that almost no one had read when they voted for it.
Members of that big government wing of the Republican Party talk about small, common sense government at election time, but history has proved beyond doubt that they do not govern that way. While not at election time the big government wing bashes the more Reaganite and fiscally responsible wing of the GOP in the media. Of course, the elite media being very hostile to conservatives, goes along with such bashing gleefully. John McCain was the elite media’s favorite Republican because he was happy to be used as a tool to bash people in his own party. John McCain used to say that the elite media was his constituency. McCain learned just how far that gets you when you run against a far left Democrat. McCain was praised by the elite media until the primary battle was over and hours after McCain had the nomination secured the NY Times (in an article that got them sued for libel) printed a baseless and unsourced thinly veiled allegation that McCain was having an affair with a 40 year old lobbyist. That was just the beginning (LINK).
Did the big government wing of the GOP learn it’s lesson in the face of two stark defeats in recent election history? The big government wing seems desperate to stop another 1994 like “Republican Revolution” and is back to currying favor with the elite media by bashing conservatives. The target of targets for months has been Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
Vanity Fair published an unsourced, half truth filled attack piece on Palin (LINK) by Todd Purdum that has been refuted/exposed reasonably well by National Review (LINK) and the Weekly Standard (LINK). Todd Purdum wrote a similarly unsourced nasty hit piece on the Clintons late in the last primary (LINK) [when you follow the link also be sure to compare the Obama picture with the Clinton picture which presents a narrative all it’s own – Editor].
Here is what Bill Clinton had to say about Purdum and about some of the elite media’s biased coverage (LINK with audio):
“[He’s] sleazy,” he said referring to Purdum. “He’s a really dishonest reporter. And one of our guys talked to him . . . And I haven’t read [the article]. There’s just five or six blatant lies in there. But he’s a real slimy guy,” the former President said.
When I reminded him that Purdum was married to his former press spokesperson Myers, Clinton was undeterred.
“That’s all right– he’s still a scumbag,” Clinton said…
“You know he didn’t use a single name, cite a single source in all those things he said.. It’s just slimy.
It’s part of the national media’s attempt to nail Hillary for Obama. It’s the most biased press coverage in history. It’s another way of helping Obama. They had all these people standing up in this church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn’t do anything about it. The first day he said ‘Ah, ah, ah well.’ Because that’s what they do– he gets other people to slime her. So then they saw the movie they thought this is a great ad for John McCain–maybe I better quit the church. It’s all politics. It’s all about the bias of the media for Obama. Don’t think anything about it.”
“But I’m telling ya, all it’s doing is driving her supporters further and further away– because they know exactly what it is– this has been the most rigged coverage in modern history– and the guy ought to be ashamed of himself. But he has no shame. It isn’t the first dishonest piece he’s written about me or her.”
Clinton goes on to say exactly how a piece like this gets generated. A writer decides that they want to write a hit piece, talk to a few political enemies of that person and report every allegation against them as fact with no attempt to present some objective truth. In fairness, while the Clinton’s do not always tell the truth, he is spot on in these comments. When Hillary Clinton’s communications advisor Howard Wolfson says repeatedly that they have to come on Fox News to get a fair shake, when Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are going after NBC News for their bias against Hillary, well you know it’s bad. Hillbuzz and PUMAPAC, both sites of those who supported Clinton in the campaign, have done a meticulous job of reporting on the outrageous media bias against Hillary and Governor Palin.
Enter Steve Schmidt
When asked by NBC news about his “sources” Purdum said , “I don’t want to get into sources and methods”. Of course he doesn’t. Politico.com was able to track down some of the unsourced comments back to former McCain chief campaign strategist Steve Schmidt (LINK).
Politico:
The vitriol also suggests the degree to which Palin remains a Rorschach test not simply to Republicans nationally but within a tight circle of elite operatives and commentators, many of whom seem ready to carry their arguments in 2012. Was Palin a fresh talent whose debut was mishandled by self-serving campaign insiders, or an eccentric “diva” who had no business on the national stage?
Politico’s instincts are spot on, and it is very likely Steve Schmidt who is fueling the “hate Palin” flames behind the scenes in the elite media.
So why would Schmidt and a handful of other big government Republican’s want to keep attacking Sarah Palin? There is a long list of reasons, but let’s start with Schmidt.
Schmidt was on the verge of winning the election for his candidate until McCain suspended his campaign to help pass the TARP crap sandwich bailout bill. Up until that weekend McCain/Palin’s numbers were on the rise in spite of being outspent by the Obama campaign. Sarah Palin gave the most effective political speech at a convention in 30 years, and John McCain said at the convention that he was going to name names, the corrupt and the pork spenders were going to be outed by name and he promised that we would “know who they are”. McCain wasn’t serious. When McCain voted for that bailout bill with hundreds of pork amendments on it, it was if he took a stake and drove it through the very heart of his own brand. The “maverick” fight the corrupt spending brand for the McCain ticket was destroyed. All credibility was lost. The emperor had no clothes.
The number one rule of any campaign is to never, ever, ever violate your own brand and the McCain campaign did just that with Steve Schmidt at the helm. Schmidt either created a campaign brand that wasn’t honest, or he failed to keep his candidate from sabotaging the campaign brand, both of which means that Schmidt should never run a campaign again. If McCain was dead set on sabotaging the campaign brand Schmidt should have resigned to help save his career.
This writer believes that suspending the campaign and the decision for McCain to support the bailout was supported by Schmidt and he didn’t make the connection that he was about to trash his own brand. We would know if Schmidt had fought hard with McCain to keep him from those actions because it would have been leaked [by the way what is stopping McCain from naming names now, the corruption and corporate favors from Congress now are off the chart, where is the outrage? – editor]
Schmidt is trying to keep the focus off of his failure by keeping the ball on Palin and he hopes that by continuing to trash her in Washington circles that he can get a job with one of the other 2012 presidential candidates.
Schmidt has an ideological axe to grind against Palin as he has made it very clear that he very much opposes religious and social conservatives (LINK). Schmidt supported McCain when he was the poster child for the so called “moderate lets get along and play nice with Democrats that we know full well are corrupt” Republican. The type of Republican that voters have tossed out of office for two elections in a row.
Palin is anything but that type of Republican.
Sarah Palin outed and very publicly tore down corporate corruption ring that owned much of the Republican Party machine in Alaska. Much of the Republican machine in Alaska still hates her for that (LINK, 2). While some Republicans talk about “naming names” Palin fights corrupt people in her own party fearlessly and ruthlessly. If Governor Palin is ever President Palin you can expect to see some Republicans and Democrats being carted off in handcuffs.
Palin used her overwhelming popular support to force very tough new ethics laws in Alaska and she made real cuts to state government spending. Palin cut off the money train for plenty of the corrupt in Alaska, especially in the so called competitive bidding process that lent itself to cronyism before the reforms (like why it is she stopped that bridge project in Ketchikan – LINK). These are not the kind of reforms a big government wing of the GOP would like to see implemented, because they have gotten wealthy just talking about them and doing the opposite. The prospect of a Palin presidency is bad for them because she means business.
Schmidt, as the Politico article link above makes clear, is very hostile to Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard. The Weekly Standard is a very influential conservative publication that holds Republicans who talk one way and govern another to account. The Weekly Standard was quite favorable towards Governor Palin’s record in Alaska.
It is not enough that Sarah Palin is the embodiment of everything the corrupt, big government wing of the GOP opposes, because there are some in the GOP who are very dedicated to those ideals as well. They fear her because Palin has demonstrated the ability to generate larger crowds than Obama has on campaign events and has also proved that she is a fund raising machine the likes of which the Republican Party has never seen. They have to destroy her now, if they can, because if Sarah Palin hits the stump in earnest she will be able to outspend her opponents by real margins and that is what the smear campaign against her is all about.
By the way, notice how her detractors never talk about her accomplishments as Mayor and Governor? They never get into policy that she has pushed for and executed. Think about it.
UPDATE – Former McCain staffer Patrick Hynes (2) comments:
And what did the lovely Governor of Alaska do to deserve this morning thrashing? Um … she had the gall to be the subject of a Vanity Fair hit piece by Todd Purdum.
That’ll learn her.
Look, I worked on the McCain campaign. Palin had her shortcomings, but she also brought some incredible strengths to the campaign. And perhaps the McCain staffers who continue to trash the governor are deflecting attention away from how remarkably screwed up and dysfunctional the operation was even before the Palin pick. What I don’t understand is this: Why would anyone hire a bunch of campaign staffers after watching how viciously they are attacking their former employer?
UPDATE II – National Review concludes it was Schmidt too – LINK.
…and why we should not let “the establishment” and the conventional wisdom choose our nominee.
John McCain wants NATO/UN etc (read US) to respond militarily in Syria. The situation is portrayed as a crazed dictator indiscriminately slaughtering his own people who want democracy – and that description is a load nonsense if their ever was one. We were told the exact same thing about Libya and Egypt, and as soon as we helped the Muslim Brotherhood take over the freedom crowd vanished instantly. The Muslim Brotherhood is now murdering Christians in Egypt, murdering black Africans in Libya, imposing Sharia Law and abusing women. The now Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egypt is sabre rattling at Israel
The dictators in the Middle East kept the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Qeada’s at bay. Mubarak was critical to maintaining the Israeli/Egyptian Peace Treaty and many of the worlds terror groups want to replace the Arab dictators with Sharia inspired regimes.
Now President Obama is arming the Middle East to the gills, including modern M1 battle tanks to Egypt in spite of the fact that the new authorities are engaging in Taliban like behavior such as attacking peaceful Coptic Christians with armored military vehicles.
If our entire policy is designed to undermine Israel’s security it explains why Obama was not interested in helping the Iranian freedom movement.
There has been every indication, as Prof. Niall Ferguson (video) pointed out as the Egyptian protests began in early 2011, that the so called “Arab Spring” is being coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
With all of this information now known so publicly, Senator McCain’s advocacy of Syrian intervention is not only irrational, it aids our enemies and Israel’s enemies in the middle-east.
Related:
Prof. Niall Ferguson Blasts Obama and MSNBC on Egypt – LINK
Former head of CIA “bin Laden Unit”: Libyan rebels are like the Taliban – LINK
My Concerns About the Operation in Libya & Egypt – LINK
Analysis: Obama proposes $800 million in aid for the Muslim Brotherhood – LINK
Islamic militants receive two-thirds vote in Egypt – LINK
AP: Egyptian Women March Against Abuse by Military – LINK
Sandra Fluke claims to have no money for birth control, but she is flying all over the country speaking and appearing. How is she even attending class? How much it cost to have Anita Dunn’s PR firm (her husband is White House counsel), the PR firm that is closest to the White House, represent you?
Wal-Mart sells birth control pills for $9.00 a month. Many not for profit clinics give them away or sell them for even cheaper than Wal-Mart, but no, the Catholic Church needs to be forced to pay for “day after” abortion pills? Give me a break.
UPDATE – There is now a Send a Condom to Sandra Fluke Facebook Group – LINK.
We have heard it time and time again, “RomneyCare was a choice for Massachusetts as an experiment, but doing it nationally is a bad idea, likely won’t work, and is unconstitutional”. This is what Mitt Romney has been saying since the Iowa debates (LINK), but the video taped evidence shows that Romney was supporting a national insurance mandate up to at least 2009.
In the videos Mitt Romney says that his plan helps keeps costs down, but the record shows that the RomneyCare policy team was not really interested in keeping costs down, and as the record shows the cost of healthcare in Massachusetts has far exceeded the rest of the country (and YOU are helping to pay for it). Even if RomneyCare or such a plan could help keep costs down in theory; the simple truth is that getting control of healthcare (a sixth of our economy) is too much of a temptation for politicians to regulate favors, kickbacks, ideological experiments etc into the system. Government cannot be trusted with that much power as we have seen with socialized health care around the world and are already seeing in ObamaCare.
Mitt Romney not being honest about this is nothing new to our readers as we reported:
Romney: Requiring people to have health insurance is “conservative” – LINK …
….on January 9th, but these videos bring a new attention to this important story.
“Well that’s what we did in Massachusetts and that is we put together an exchange, the president is copying that idea. I’m glad to hear that. We let people buy their own private insurance. Most people can afford to buy that insurance once you have an exchange that allows them to do that in a cost effective basis. And then for those that are low income you help them buy their own private insurance. But you don’t set up a government insurance plan because it’s going to end up costing billions of dollars in subsidy. It’s the wrong way to go.”
Related:
New York Magazine: How Romney Advocated Obamacare and Lied About It – LINK
Newsmax: RomneyCare and ObamaCare Are Identical – LINK
MIT Economist: ObamaCare is RomneyCare with three more zeros – LINK
Romney Supporter Florida AG Pam Bondi Says Mitt Wants RomneyCare In Every State – LINK
You paid the high cost of RomneyCare in Massachusetts – LINK
Newt Gingrich blasts NBC’s David Gregory and the elite media for deliberately misleading the American people about this made up “access to contraception” issue. No one is being denied access to contraception and not one politician is trying to ban it, yet the elite media and the Democrats are either saying or directly implying that this is what Republicans are trying to do.
The Obama Administration is trying to make the Catholic Church pay for abortion pills.
“I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the president’s apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion-dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression, and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of the week,”
This is where it gets interesting, according to the evidence, the textbooks the EMU used said that councilors cannot be value neutral and that values are essential to the healing process:
Defendant Ametrano, Chair of the formal review committee that dismissed Ms. Ward from the program, assigned a book as required reading in a required course Ms. Ward took from Defendant Ametrano, which states that “[i]t is now generally recognized that the therapeutic endeavor is a value-laden process and that all counselors, to some degree, communicate their values to clients,” and that “the assumption that counseling is value-neutral is no longer tenable.”
(Ex. 8 at 73.) A true and accurate copy of excerpts from this book, Becoming a Helper by Marianne Schneider Corey and Gerald Corey and published in 2007, is attached as Exhibit 8.
This book also explains that “because the values [counselors] hold cannot be kept out of their work, they should not refuse to discuss their core values.” (Id.)
Regarding values, the book further states: “In our view it is neither possible nor desirable for helpers to remain neutral or to keep their values separate from their professional relationships. Because values have a significant impact on the helping process, it is important to express them openly when doing so is appropriate.” (Id. at 73.)
As taught by the EMU counseling department in required courses, the counseling profession understands that personal values impact a counselor’s practice, and that exposing a client to your values can be an appropriate course of action in a counseling relationship.
The other textbooks used in EMU’s own courses said that referring a client is the appropriate action when a values conflict may become an issue in the client/therapist relationship. EMU could demonstrate no rule or reason to ban or prevent Ms. Ward from asking for the referral. To be clear, in multiple instances EMU violated standard counselling practices and procedures in order to persecute Julea Ward for holding Christian beliefs.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of a Christian graduate student expelled from Eastern Michigan University’s counseling program after refusing to provide services to a gay client.
In 2009, EMU student Julea Ward was assigned a client seeking help with a homosexual relationship.
Believing that taking on such a case would violate her Christian convictions, Ward asked the clinic to reassign the client to another counselor — a move in keeping with the school’s counseling code of ethics.
“I explained that I was a Christian and that I could not [endorse] homosexual behavior,” Ward said.
Following a formal review hearing, EMU sent Ward a letter dismissing her from the school’s graduate program.
“Rather than allow Julea to refer a potential client to another qualified counselor — a common, professional practice to best serve clients — EMU attacked and questioned Julea’s religious beliefs and ultimately expelled her from the program because of them,” said Alliance Defense Fund Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco, who argued Ward’s case last October.
The 6th Circuit sided with Ward in a sternly-worded decision being hailed by Christian groups as a victory for free speech and religious freedom.
“A reasonable jury could conclude that Ward’s professors ejected her from the counseling program because of hostility toward her speech and faith,” the appellate court wrote in its opinion Friday.
“A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems… as the price for obtaining a degree,” the 6th Circuit wrote. “Tolerance is a two-way street.”
Here too, what did Ward do wrong? Ward was willing to work with all clients and to respect the school’s affirmation directives in doing so. That is why she asked to refer gay and lesbian clients (and some heterosexual clients) if the conversation required her to affirm their sexual practices. What more could the rule require? Surely, for example, the ban on discrimination against clients based on their religion (1) does not require a Muslim counselor to tell a Jewish client that his religious beliefs are correct if the conversation takes a turn in that direction and (2) does not require an atheist counselor to tell a person of faith that there is a God if the client is wrestling with faithbased issues. Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.
When gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said it was due to previous failed energy policies. Now that prices are heading still higher, President Obama calls it progress.
Already, pump prices are higher than they’ve been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.
President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.
“Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic,” Gibbs said Sunday. “Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we’re making progress.”
“Progress” isn’t exactly how Obama described the country’s energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of “Washington’s failure to lead on energy,” which was “turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans.”
Well well well, who didn’t see this coming? The readers of my former college blog knew all about it as we explained how ObamaCare is designed to increase costs and insurance to such a point that the only “solution” would be a total government take over. Even Nancy Pelosi said that the bill was designed to make them “cry out for a public option”.
[I have nine pages of posts and links devoted to this subject on my old college blog starting HERE. To verify that we got it right and called it early just start on this link and proceed forward. Figuring out that ObamaCare was designed to do exactly this, and recognizing that the behavior incentivized by the program creates an economic death spiral – technically called an adverse selection spiral – which is designed to burden the system with such costs and regulation that it will collapse, was not difficult. It did not take an MIT Economist to see what so was obvious in the structure of ObamaCare and quite frankly this editor rejects the idea that Prof. Gruber just figured this out in some grand revelation recently. Anyone with some decent economics training could see this coming a mile away; yes it has always been that obvious – Editor.]
Medical insurance premiums in the United States are on the rise, the chief architect of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul has told The Daily Caller.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s statewide health care reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms.
In an email to The Daily Caller, Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some conservatives had warned in 2010 would ultimately rule the marketplace.
“The market was so discriminatory,” Gruber told TheDC, “that only the healthy bought non-group insurance and the sick just stayed [uninsured].”
“It is true that even after tax credits some individuals are ‘losers,’” he conceded, “in that they pay more than before [Obama’s] reform.”
Gruber, whom the Obama administration hired to provide an independent analysis of reforms, was widely criticized for failing to disclose the conflict of interest created by $392,600 in no-bid contracts the Department of Health and Human Services awarded him while he was advising the president’s policy advisers.
UPDATE – CNBC’s Jim Cramer: CEO’s scared to hire because of ObamaCare. Moving more operations overseas
This series by The Daily Caller is amazing and is a must read (excerpts):
Founded by Brock in 2004 as a liberal counterweight to “conservative misinformation” in the press, Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in Democratic politics. The group operates in regular coordination with the highest levels of the Obama White House, as well as with members of Congress and progressive groups around the country. Brock, who collected over $250,000 in salary from Media Matters in 2010, has himself become a major fundraiser on the left. According to an internal memo obtained by TheDC, Media Matters intends to spend nearly $20 million in 2012 to influence news coverage.
Donors have every reason to expect success, as the group’s effect on many news organizations has already been profound. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”
The group scored its first significant public coup in 2007 with the firing of host Don Imus from MSNBC. Just before Easter that year, a Media Matters employee recorded Imus’s now-famous attack on the Rutgers women’s basketball team, and immediately recognized its inflammatory potential. The organization swung into action, notifying organizations like the NAACP, the National Association of Black Journalists, and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, all of which joined the fight.
Over the course of a week, Media Matters mobilized more than 50 people to work full-time adding fuel to the Imus story. Researchers searched the massive Media Matters database for controversial statements Imus had made over the years. The group issued press release after press release. Brock personally called the heads of various liberal activist groups to coordinate a message. By the end of the week, Imus was fired.
Rachel Maddow (NBC), Keith Olberman (Former NBC), David Brock (Media Matters CEO), Anita Dunn (Former Obama White House Communications Director), Dan Pfieffer (White House Communications Director).
More:
“As part of the Drop Dobbs campaign,” explains one internal memo prepared for fundraising, “Media Matters produced and was prepared to run an advertisement against Ford Motor Company on Spanish Language stations in Houston, San Antonio, and other cities targeting its top selling product, pick-up trucks, in its top truck buying markets.”
Ford pulled its advertising from Dobbs’s program before the television ad aired, but Media Matters kept up its efforts, working primarily with Alex Nogales of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and with the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other self-described civil rights groups.
In November of 2009, Dobbs left CNN. “We got him fired,” says one staffer flatly.
More:
“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”
“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”
“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”
More:
Reporters who weren’t cooperative might feel the sting of a Media Matters campaign against them. “If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper,” a Media Matters source said, “all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.”
A group with the ability to shape news coverage is of incalculable value to the politicians it supports, so it’s no surprise that Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration. According to visitor logs, on June 16, 2010, Brock and then-Media Matters president Eric Burns traveled to the White House for a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, arguably the president’s closest adviser. Recently departed Obama communications director Anita Dunn returned to the White House for the meeting as well.
It’s not clear what the four spoke about — no one in the meeting returned repeated calls for comment — but the apparent coordination continued. “Anita Dunn became a regular presence at the office,” says someone who worked there. Then-president of Media Matters, Eric Burns, “lunched with her, met with her and chatted with her frequently on any number of matters.”
So your teachers union asks you to donate the the children’s charity associated with the union. They do everything to hide the fact that the money does not go to help children at all. It goes to billionaire John Kerry and multimillionaire Barack Obama.
Here’s a quote from House Oversight Committee testimony re unions:
“Later that day, while in the restroom, I over heard two ladies from California discussing the Children’s Fund. I asked them if they were required to give and the ladies told me no. They did not give to it because it is a political contribution. I cannot tell you the rush that came over me at that time. It was a mixture of anger and stupidity. I felt as though I had been totally duped. To add insult to injury, later that afternoon, then NEA President, Reg Weaver announced the NEA would be endorsing John Kerry for President. President Weaver went on to announce the NEA Children’s Fund had raised a large amount of money; and that, too would go to our friend in education, John Kerry. I felt a wave of illness come over me like none I have ever felt before. These who were supposed to be my people; duped me into donating to a candidate I was voting against.
Indeed. Romney is not selling us a product, he is just carpet bombing the other candidates with almost 100% of his ads being negative. Why should we vote for Mitt Romney? What policy heavy lifting has he gotten done for conservatives? This is a must see.
Can you imagine? When Rick Santorum was running in 1994 for the Senate. He won his house seat against a Democrat in a 3 to 1 Democrat district and he ran as a Conservative. He ran statewide in 1994 as a Conservative in a relatively blue state, a heavy union state. And in 1994 he was talking up Ronald Reagan. Go over a few states, or up a few states, and there you have Massachusetts, at almost exactly the same time, if not exactly the same time, Romney was running for the Senate against Kennedy, TRASHING Ronald Reagan. Distancing himself from Republicanism. Called himself an Independent PROGRESSIVE if I recall correctly. Now THIS Romney is attacking Santorum from the Right, as if he’s the Conservative and holds the high ground. Mitt Romney is not questioning Santorum’s Conservative credentials. He is attacking Rick Santorum from the Right. This is what is so damned annoying, because it is so disingenuous.
Because Romney has now taken in the last few years solidly Conservative positions, even though he can’t articulate them very well past one line in the Declaration of Independence (Come on America. Let’s go. Come on. I’m for America. Come on. Let’s go. Hey. Everybody. Line up. Lets just go) Anyway, the point is, Santorum was a true Conservative. You don’t have to agree with everything he voted for; everything he says. I get all that. Honestly I do. But that’s not the point. His principles were not negotiable. His principles were not mush. You could disagree with a vote here and say that vote does not line up with your Conservative agenda. I get that. I really do. But he was a very high, what was he in the 90’s with the American Conservative Union, if not 100% with pro-life groups and so forth. Romney was mush. He’s Jello. So now he’s going to attack Santorum as a Liberal while Romney is posing as a Conservative. This is why I’m so sick of this and disgusted with it…
I look at Rick Santorum at so many things that he did and tried to do from a Conservative perspective throughout his career and I can’t think of very many that Romney did. I’d even look at Newt Gingrich. You can attack him for a thousand things but one thing you cannot say is that he wasn’t a Conservative speaker. He was a Conservative speaker. Even though people may not have liked certain foibles and all the rest, the fact of the matter is, Gingrich gave us the House back and Gingrich lead a Conservative house and he did it in a way that was more Conservative than the way Boehner is leading this house. And he’s attacked from the Right by Romney too! So while Gingrch was trying to do the right things in the House, Romney was a Liberal; excuse me, a PROGRESSIVE; an Independent. So Romney attacks Gingrich from the Right when Romney at the time was on the Left and he attacks Santorum from the Right when Romney at the time was on the Left. Now he’s Mr. Conservative. How do you get away with this?
I’ll tell you how you get away with it. A massive amount of money to flood underfunded campaigns, a lot of media support, old media and, yes a lot new media which has been sucked right into this like the old media. And everybody just says well that’s just the way campaigns work, negative negative, you know, you’ve just gotta be a big boy…
This idea that Romney can attack bonafide Conservatives, at least they were, from the Right when he was on the Left is just so crazy. I hope you folks in Minnesota and Missouri and the other states coming up, I hope you remember this because you are now going to be flooded with ads telling you that Santorum was no damned good, he was a gutter snipe. Oh, he was a sell-out. He was a this or that. You remember those ads are paid for by a man and people who support a man who was all but trashing Ronald Reagan and when he ran against Ted Kennedy tried to move to the Left of Ted Kennedy; when Gingrich was running the House of Representatives and fighting Clinton and when Santorum was fighting the Democrat machine in Pennsylvania, a formidable machine, to win the Senate as a Republican. Just remember!
Oh, and by the way, the Romney people like to say that Santorum lost his reelection in 2006 by 17 points or 18 points. But in 1994 Romney lost to Kennedy by 16 points. Well guess what. Obama is every bit Kennedy and Kennedy was Kennedy. So, I’m asking you, is this the kind of nominee that you want?”
I was asked the question in the title so I thought I would provide a short answer with some supporting evidence.
Socialists like Soros are not truly into socialism, they are into control. Envy is the tool and socialism is the vehicle that he and people like him use.
There are essentially three kinds of socialists:
The Control Freak: We are the ruling elite and are born to rule. Follow me and stay out of my way or else…
The Utopian: The Utopian wants to create a perfect society which is impossible. The more they tighten their grip the more slips through their fingers. When Utopians come into power they often lose that naivete and become control freaks.
The Sucker: Those who have swallowed the envy narrative. They see someone else get taxed or punished who has more and that makes them feel better in spite of the fact that they are not better off for it and are in fact, worse off. Why? Because envy corrupts the spirit and the thought process. There are 37% fewer millionaires in the country now than when Obama got elected. If this is all about redistribution of wealth let me ask you – how much of that money did you get?
Obama while giving a speech to Google blasted the Chamber of Commerce for opposing a raise in the top marginal tax rate to 39.9% because millionaires and billionaires weren’t paying their fair share.
Google paid 2.4% federal tax on 3.1 billion in income. Google doesn’t pay the top marginal rate – small to medium sized businesses called “S-Corps” do.
Google pays the corporate rate and has the influence to get favors in the 60,000 page tax code. Google also makes money overseas and chooses not to repatriate the profits.
Raising the top marginal tax rate doesn’t effect millionaires and billionaires because by and large they do not pay that tax, but small businesses would get soaked. Google and GE pay next to nothing and small to medium domestic business pays 39.9% (albeit with some deductions). This is how President Obama and the leadership of his party define fairness. Now you have just figured out why the largest Wall Street outfits and many other mega-corporations donate to Democrats in such numbers over Republicans.
Hence Norton’s First Law: Big Business loves big government because big government taxes and regulates the small and medium sized domestic competition out of the competition.
The taxes Democrats propose to “soak the rich” always seem to miss those who they demagogue for not paying their fair share. They have been “soaking the rich” for decades and keep missing the target. Why? – LINK
Related:
George Soros and Warren Buffet benefited from Obama Keystone Pipeline Veto – LINK.
In the process she tells whopping lies about RomneyCare in Massachusetts.
Pam Bondi says that RomneyCare cuts costs and expands choice, both claims are shown to be false with just minutes of research.
As far as cutting costs, RomneyCare was not designed to cut costs and they said so when creating it. Romney’s team made it clear that they aimed for “universal coverage” first, and decided to worry about controlling costs later – LINK.
Costs continue to rise faster in Massachusetts than in the rest of the country. So much so that when one examines the details of just how much RomneyCare costs not just the Massachusetts tax payer, but the American taxpayer you will not be pleased.
Be sure to read this entire post.
You paid the high cost of RomneyCare in Massachusetts… – LINK and here is an excerpt:
The High Price of Massachusetts Health Care Reform
This is amazing. The lies are so huge that I am about to break my own rule against Nazi comparisons: it smacks of Goebbles saying that the bigger the lie, the more people are likely to believe it. The lies in this video are beyond whopping and are easily demonstrated with readily available facts.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 