Category Archives: Political polemics

THIS PRESIDENT DON’T NEED NO STINKIN’ CONGRESS TO CHANGE THE LAW

Posted on June 16, 2012 | Leave a comment

A White House official comments on Obama’s de facto amnesty for young illegal immigrants as reported by Politico.

“We work to achieve our policy goals in the most effective and appropriate way possible,” the official said. “Often times Congress has blocked efforts …… and we look to pursue other appropriate means of achieving our policy goals. Sometimes this makes for less than ideal policy situations – such as the action we took on immigration – but the president isn’t going to be stonewalled by [the law], he will pursue whatever means available to do business on behalf of American people.”

In the interest of clarity I have changed one word in the White House official’s statement.  The statement actually made was the President will not be “stonewalled by politics”.  But the context is an announcement by the administration that certain specified laws will no longer be enforced, Congress be damned.  What other law might the President next declare null and void, voter fraud?

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CATCH AND RELEASE, OBAMA’S NEW IMMIGRATION POLICY

Posted on June 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Prior to Barack Obama, presidents urged Congress to make laws.  Obama doesn’t bother.  He cuts out the middle man with an executive order.  The orders always come on a Friday after the White House newsroom has largely been vacated for the weekend.  Besides, nobody reads the Saturday paper in any event.  The Constitution?  Oh that was written years ago, it’s out of date.

In a move that might be called the campaigns first October surprise, the presumptive Democratic candidate has granted amnesty to youthful immigrants.  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made the announcement Friday morning; the new policy will not grant citizenship to children who came to the United States as illegal immigrants, but will remove the threat of deportation and grant them the right to work in the United States.

If socialism is his goal,
He has the country on a roll.
Inch by inch, hair by hair,
He is quietly taking us there.

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BARACK OBAMA AND FRANCE, LIKE TWO BULLIES IN A SANDBOX

Posted on June 5, 2012 | 1 comment

You hit me first!!  No I didn’t.  YOU hit ME first!!

While Obama blames today’s American unemployment on France and Europe, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius threw it back at Barack Obama saying the threat of the European debt crisis originated in the United States.  “Lehman Brothers was not a European bank” Fabius said.

The PIGS, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain not to mention France and Great Britain have been spending at unsustainable rates ever since they recovered from World War II and now it’s our fault that they ran out of money.  Here at home, our own government set up a house-of-cards in the mortgage market that inevitability had to fail like a Ponzi scheme. When it did, we chose a socialist to solve the problem and he blames France.

The Brits have Monty Python; we have Washington.

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Posted in Opinion, Political philosophy, Political polemics

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A COUPLE OF THINGS YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T KNOW

Posted on June 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Let the New York Times increase your knowledge, at least on these 3 things.  Ignore my comments.  I never even went to college.

1. Republicans must be as pleased as Punch with Obama’s economic program.  The President is following economic policies Republicans consider ideal and have always dreamed they could put in place.

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years. Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams. ~ Paul Krugman

And all the time I thought the Republicans were saying cut the strangling over-regulation, stop stifling oil and coal production, stop passing vague laws for your czars to enforce as they see fit, stop threatening to increase the tax burden when things are already slow and stop attacking success.  In other words, just get out of the way.

2. Obama is slashing spending at a rate not seen since the end of the Korean War.

Look first at total government spending — federal, state and local. Adjusted for population growth and inflation, such spending has recently been falling at a rate not seen since the demobilization that followed the Korean War. ~ Paul Krugman

Mr. Krugman provides this link, Mr. Obama a big spender to a couple of charts that he portends prove his point.  The charts do show a sharp decline in the last 12 months, but the charts are not a picture of spending at all.  They are a convoluted measure of growth rates.  To illustrate – If you spend 100% more this year than last, and then 50% more next year than this, and 30% more on top of that in the third year, then the lines on Krugman’s charts would show a dramatic decline while you were actually spending more and more each year.

3. With Barack Obama as President, U.S. borrowing costs are lower than they ever were before in the history of the country.

Well, U.S. borrowing costs have just hit a record low. ~ Paul Krugman

Wags have often said “You can’t make this stuff up”.  Paul Krugman can.  Perhaps that’s why he won a Nobel Prize.

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MEDICARE AND OUR OUTRAGEOUS MEDICAL CARE PRICING PROGRAM

Posted on June 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

This is a true story.  A family member had an accident in the home.  She took a nasty backward fall and her head slammed against a piece of sharp edged furniture.  The result was a bloody mess and a call to 911 for assistance.  Ambulance, police and fire department vehicles were promptly on the scene.  The patient was transported to the hospital about 4 miles distant.

Three stitches were required to close the wound.  Some tests were made to be sure there were no hidden injuries.  Twelve hours later the patient was released and walked out of the hospital.  It was as simple as that; there were no extenuating circumstances.  The medical care was good; the healing was complete.  That’s not the story.

When the bill came, it was $27,607.92.  That’s the story.  One item was $13,541.54.  It was called Trauma Response Level II.  That’s the price for the house call.  The other items were all various hospital charges.  One does not expect good medical care to be cheap but having to pay these prices is bizarre!  But wait.

There were two more items on the bill.  One item was Insurance Paid $1,610.51.  The other was Insurance Adjustment $25,947.41.  Translation – A) the prices were highly inflated, and B) nobody paid the artificially inflated prices.  Nobody was ever expected to.  The injured was a Medicare patient.  Medicare only pays a certain percentage of the “price” for each service, so the price is set high because the percentage paid is low.  There is something seriously wrong with a system that requires healthcare providers to bill at horrendous rates in order to receive modest remuneration for their services.  That’s the story.

Oh yes, there was one more item.  There was a box at the top of the bill that read Your Portion $50.00.  And so in round numbers, the patient paid $50, the healthcare providers got $1,600 but they had to bill for $27,000 to get it.

What about the uninsured, perhaps a mid-life family provider currently out of work, a foreign tourist or a member of the perpetually unemployed?  Is there a separate billing rate for them?  In some cases there is not.  Full rate billings happen every day.  In these cases it is up to the patient to negotiate a better rate.  It’s similar in the doctor’s office.  There is a list price, the price an insurance company pays and there is the price Medicare pays, all different prices for exactly the same service.  What you pay if you are uninsured may be different from all the other three and it will be the highest.  Health care in America is superb.  The financial administration of it stinks.

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CITIZENS UNITED, THE ISSUE IN A NUTSHELL

Posted on June 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

The liberal faction of the main stream media raises a lot of hoopla over the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision commonly known as Citizens United.  The complaints center on the fear that money plays too big a role in the election process, particularly big corporate money.  George Will has written an excellent piece on the subject for the Washington Post.  Here are the highlights, slightly edited.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision held, unremarkably, that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they come together in corporate entities or labor unions to speak collectively.  What do liberals consider the constitutional basis for saying otherwise?

The ruling’s primary effect has been to give unions and incorporated nonprofit advocacy group’s freedom to spend what they choose on political speech as long as they do not coordinate with candidates or campaigns.

Through March 31, the eight leading super PACs supporting Republican presidential candidates received contributions totaling $96,410,614.  Of this, $83,220,167 (86.32 percent) came from individuals, only $13,190,447 (13.68 percent) from corporations, and only 0.81 percent from public companies

These facts refute such prophesied nightmares as The Post’s fear that corporate money “may now overwhelm” individuals’ contributions

While much of the media and most liberals urge Americans to be scandalized about “too much money” in politics, the media’s real concern is that there is more political speech by others yet media advocacy remains unrestricted.

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A LIST OF BARACK OBAMA’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT

Posted on May 31, 2012 | 1 comment

There is a list going around the Internet outlining an extensive number of things the President has accomplished since coming into office.  The author seems to be addressing Obama supporters who are disappointed in the President’s performance.  It’s an impressive list, well documented and straight forward in it’s presentation.  I thought I would check it out.

Here is an example from the middle of the list.

He signed an order banning anyone from working in an agency they had lobbied in previous years. He also put strict limits on lobbyists’ access to the White House.   http://nyti.ms/gOrznV

REBUTTAL. He did sign the ban, but continued to hire former lobbyists to serve the White House. Mega lobbyists Steve Ricchetti, Broderick Johnson, James Heimbach just to mention three.

Not to cherry pick, I started from the top.  Here are the first seven.  They are enough to tell the storey.  Here’s a link to the full list.

Legislative Prowess
Despite the characterizations of some, Obama’s success rate in winning congressional votes on issues was an unprecedented 96.7% for his first year in office.  Though he is often cited as superior to Obama, President Lyndon Johnson’s success rate in 1965 was only 93%.   http://n.pr/i3d7cY

REBUTTAL. True. With Democratic control of the House and the Senate, Pelosi, Reid and Obama had a radical’s field day.

Fiscal Responsibility
Within days after taking office, he signed an Executive Order ordering an audit of government contracts, and combating waste and abuse.   http://1.usa.gov/dUvbu5

REBUTTAL. True. The Order added the requirement for contractors to disclose their political party affiliations when applying for government contracts making it easier to reward those who had done political favors for the President and his party. 

Created the post of Chief Performance Officer, whose job it is to make operations more efficient to save the federal government money.   http://n.pr/hcgBn1

REBUTTAL. True. But his appointee to initiate the post never served due to her personal income tax problems.

On his first full day, he froze White House salaries.  http://on.msnbc.com/ewJUIx

REBUTTAL. Not really. On his first full day it was a proposal and not a freeze.  And it didn’t stop federal employees from getting increases in their income.  It only stopped raises within grade. Increases could still be given as bonuses or the raising of pay grades without the need for promotions.  The proposal was more fanfare than substance.

He appointed the first Federal Chief Information Officer to oversee federal IT spending. http://www.cio.gov

REBUTTAL. True. Each government agency already had a Chief Investment Officer. The creation of this new layer of oversight provided the means to control all of the agency career CIOs by one czar appointed by and beholden to the President.  It also added and an unnecessary expense

He committed to phasing out unnecessary and outdated weapons systems, and also signed the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act to stop waste, fraud and abuse in the defense procurement and contracting system.  http://bit.
ly/hOw1t1     http://bit.ly/fz8GAd

REBUTTAL. Defense Secretary Gates called this a controversial move.  I am not qualified to judge the advisability of it. However one thing is clear; it dismissed one third of private contractors, replacing them with civilian government workers.

Through an executive order, he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.  http://bit.ly/hwKhKa

REBUTTAL. This is better known as the Erskine-Bowles commission.  The Commission made many recommendations for the President and the Senate to include in the Federal Budget.  None were adopted.  Harry Reid’s Democratically controlled Senate hasn’t presented a budget in 3 years, contrary to law.

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OBAMA’S BIGGEST LIE YET

Posted on May 26, 2012 | Leave a comment


Obama is making the claim that he is the one who is the fiscally responsible president.  He says it’s the Republicans who are the wild spenders and creating huge deficits that he is cleaning the mess up.  He must be operating on the theory that if the people aren’t believing the lies you have been telling it must be because the lies weren’t big enough.

Watch the video; listen to the reaction of the crowd.  The immediate thought is they are a bunch of useful idiots.  But they are not as much idiots as they are true believers.  Faith is immune to facts.  Here are some of the facts.

Obama’s budget proposals to Congress have been so irresponsible that not a single member of the House or the Senate voted for them. And then there is the deficit record.  The numbers at the left are millions (2012 is estimated).

The deficit figure for Obama’s first year (2009) would have been even higher had it not been for the fact that the TARP loans made in 2008 were paid back, reducing the deficit in 2009.

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Posted in Audio/Visual, Political polemics

CANDIDATE OBAMA IS GETTING HIS CHICKEN FRIED IN KENTUCKY

Posted on May 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

Barack Obama has captured 57.9% of the votes cast in the Kentucky Democratic primary. That may not seem so bad until you consider he is running against nobody and nobody won 42.1% of the votes. Of course the ballot doesn’t say “nobody”, that would be silly. It says “Uncommitted”. It is understood that uncommitted is nobody. Any fool knows that. The Party’s primary voters know that.

The man is having trouble in Arkansas as well. It looks like he has won it 42% TO 51%. At least in Arkansas Obama ran against somebody. Arkansas, Kentucky, Obama and Hillary, the four have a mutual history. During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign Clinton was doing better than Barack was in Kentucky. Obama said it’s because Hillary’s home state of Arkansas borders on Kentucky (which it does not) whereas my home state of Michigan does not” (which it does). Karma anybody?

Obama has lost support of the Catholic Church, much of the Jewish community, those white blue-collar workers not working for the government, and many of the unemployed youth. And now he is losing his own party’s elected officeholders. Not one single Democrat in the House or the Senate voted in favor of Obama’s budget. The prominent black mayor of Newark, New Jersey has been blunt in his criticism of the President’s attack on capitalism in his Bain Capital push on Romney.

Who does he have left? He still has the solid support of voters from the black community who vote brotherhood loyalty above all else, ACORN, welfare recipients, Bill Ayers, Rev Jeremiah Wright and a majority of the illegal aliens and dead people who vote. Such a motley group would not be enough but Obama also still has academia, the MSM, Hollywood and all of those people who always vote Democratic because Republicans are so mean and greedy.

You can judge a politician by the constituency he serves. My vote will be cast for a candidate who supports live citizens striving to be self sufficient. My vote will be cast for the candidate who serves the common man with common sense. My vote will be cast for the candidate who is proud to stand and say “I am an American”. As you can see, I cannfor Barack Obama.

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RULES for RADICALS by SAUL ALINSKY – THE GENESIS OF TACTIC PROXY

Posted on May 21, 2012 | 2 comments

Continuing with the chapter by chapter series on Rules for Radicals, today we add Comments about the chapter called The Genesis of Tactic Proxy.

Synopsis of the chapter entitled The Genesis of Tactic Proxy
“America’s corporations are a spiritual slum, and their arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.”

The title of this chapter is derived from the idea of using corporate shareholder proxies to achieve your own goals.  Corporate stockholders have certain rights as to how the corporation conducts its affairs.  These rights are exercised by voting and the voting document is called a proxy. The tactic involves persuading colleges, foundations and churches to vote their proxies in solidarity according to the organizer’s plan of attack.

Alinsky stumbled upon this idea when talking to three business administration college students who were opposed to the Vietnam war, but “recoiled from such actions as carrying the Viet Cong flag or burning their draft cards.  However, they did believe in using proxies.”

The genesis of the proxy tactic is an example of why an organizer should hang loose. When a door opens unexpectedly, go through it. Be not concerned that it takes you off the path you had planned. Do not fall into the trap set by “our alleged educational system” that teaches “order, logic, rational thought, direction and purpose”. These ideas are invalid because they are too rigid. The organizer must be ready to go where the flow leads him.

Commentary
The author’s statement at the top of this awkwardly named chapter only needs minor editing to be correct.  “America’s corporations Democratic leaders are a spiritual slum, and their Obama’s arrogance is the major threat to our future as a free society.”

Saul Alinsky must have been quite proud of himself when he stumbled on this idea.  Here he was, using capitalist corporate procedures to promote a Marxist cause.  He didn’t realize it was never destined to work.  Not many corporate shareholders are going to join in solidarity with any radical causes, let alone socialist ones.

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