Hoping for Change in 2010

Our clueless federal government is intellectually, morally, and financially bankrupt

I have three thoughts on this health care bribery and corruption porktacular slouching through senatorial Gomorrah, but they all involve long strings of profanities, so I'll share these three instead:

Constitutional Buffoons Crapping Down Our Chimneys
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has written an excellent summary on the constitutionality of this stinking heap of communist excrement Harry and the Pelosicrats are crapping down our chimneys just in time for Christmas.  Too much to summarize here.  Go read the whole thing; it is rich with links to smart people who are prepared to challenge this court.  There is hope!

Harry Reid, Mass Murderer
"We've got to get this done!" is the urgent cry of the power-mad progressives.  "People are dying!"

OK.  This bill doesn't kick in until 2014, so Harry will kill over 200,000 people in the interim, points out Larry Holland at ResistNet:

Earlier today Harry Reid whined that every 10 minutes 2 people die in this country because they have no healthcare. 

Rush did the math and asked this question, If 2 people die every 10 minutes because of no healthcare, then by 2014, when your healthcare bill takes effect, you Harry Reid, will have allowed 200,445 people to have died because you made amendments that will not allow them to have healthcare til then!

2010:  Year of Bankrupt Governments
Ralph Peters, an articulate and patriotic veteran I greatly respect, says 2010 will be the year of the bankrupt government.  He lists countries like Greece and Dubai, and includes states like New York and California.  Here's his conclusion:

What of our own country, with its soaring debt, congressional irresponsibility and an administration whose No. 1 priority is expanding unaffordable entitlement programs? Draw your own conclusions. (Source:  NY Post)

Indeed.  If ever there were a time crying out for change, it is now.

Real Hope

Liberal bureaucracies are crumbling worldwide, their promises as empty as the people who defend them
 
Obama's magic spell is broken, the hopium smoke is dissipating...  Presidential approval has cracked 50%, going down.

Support for Obama and the Pelosicrats' Soviet Style Health Care Monstrosity is sinking fast.  Only 35% support this monument to lying and irresponsibility.

Economic suicide upon the altar of Gaia looks less and less likely.  Only 35% of Americans support Senator Boxer's Cap and Trade lunacy.

Millionaire mushy middler Mort Zuckermann elucidates the national mood:

In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, Americans were asked which economic issue facing the country concerns them the most. Deficit reduction ruled over health care. Half were prepared to defer spending or to spend less, even if it meant extending the recession.

CAN THE GOP CAPITALIZE?

Europeans are making painful decisions and slashing spending. 
Lefties in America love pointing to some European program and asking why we aren't doing it.  Now it's the GOP's turn.  Republicans should ask, "Why aren't we reducing government budgets like our European friends? 

'Kill Bill' and start from scratch on Health Reform

Charles Krauthammer provides clarity, as usual:

The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one -- tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 -- and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.

Keep asking, "How are you going to pay for it?"

The GOP needs candidates who are not afraid to crap in the DC punchbowl.  McCain should have done it it 2008; at the time, he was the only one crusty enough to credibly pull it off.

Now, one year and trillions of dollars later, every Republican politicians should be focusing on fiscal sanity like a laser beam.   

Stand with the heroes, Fight the Zeros!

Supersize My Government

For only $99,000,000,000,000.99 we'll supersize that for you!

Robert Samuelson, economic journalist extraordinaire, writes:

WASHINGTON -- The question that President Obama ought to be asking -- that we all should be asking -- is this: How big a government do we want?

Without anyone much noticing, our national government is on the verge of a permanent expansion that would endure long after the present economic crisis has (presumably) passed and that would exceed anything ever experienced in peacetime. This expansion may not be good for us, but we are not contemplating the adverse consequences or how we might minimize them.

How to Fight Back Against Obscene Spending
The case conservatives should be making is a non-partisan one: We are on a fiscally unsustainable path. We don't want either party spending more money. In order to fight this fight, first we've got to acknowledge a few skeletons in the GOP closet:

* Yes, Reagan grew the deficit, but it was in the cause of breaking the back of global communism. He got it done, and then military spending went back down.

* Yes, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative standard-bearers used to not care about deficits, even going so far as to poo poo the notion that they were a threat. That was then (when deficits grew no faster than GDP), this is now (projected deficits will overtake GDP projections and keep skyrocketing from there.)

* Yes, George Bush spend too much money. But if he was irresponsible in pursuit of security, then President Obama is four times as irresponsible in pursuit of windmills and government bureaucracy.

* Republicans used to scorn the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). They now tout the CBO's damning projections as an effective rebuttal to the Social Democrats' agenda. It is true, when the GOP wanted to pass their agenda, the CBO played the same role: Using actual facts and figures to puncture the fantasy bubbles that politicians of both parties are so fond of. It's all sunshine and lollipops until an adult steps in with a dose of reality.

Cutting earmarks and pork won't get the job done
Our government is systemically overleveraged: There is no way it can pay for everything it has promised everybody. Even higher taxes won't do it. Dismantling this structurally untenable debt will involve breaking promises and slaughtering sacred cows. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and government pensions (including military pensions) account for over half of the annual federal budget.

Restoring Fiscal Sanity Won't Be Easy
If the GOP were to gain enough power to restore fiscal sanity, it still would not be easy, since there are no easy answers, just unsatisfying trade-offs. They would face a hellstorm of invective from the left, with the press megaphone propagandizing all the way: The children, the elderly, the indigent, cold-hearted, cruel, Hitler...

The news would be an endless parade of heart-tugging misery, with The Ballad of Tom Joad playing full-blast in the background. Hard-working, abused Okies will be played by our brothers and sisters from south of the border. Inner city ghettos will simmer and seethe with rage, threatening to boil over at any time. An avalanche of stories about hardworking people fallen victim to GOP cruelty will assault our senses daily.

You get my drift. These are the emotional arguments we must deal with if we really want to get our fiscal house in order. Given that Republicans and Democrats alike profit nicely from the current system, I don't think any of this will ever happen until China moves in to repossess the collateral.

RCP - Robert Samuelson

America For Sale

The US Treasury will put you and I further in hock to China this week, to the tune of $100,000,000,000

You've heard all the buzz-phrases: Overleveraged... Mortgaging our future... Upside down... Under water. My favorite: They bought too much house.

Well, Americans, we bought too much government. In fact, we've created a government bubble, and it's bursting in cities and states all over this land, nowhere more so than in the World's Largest and Busiest Hog Trough, Washington DC.

States and cities are not in as deep as the Federal Government, but they are in bigger trouble because they can't print their own money or bully others into buying their outsize debt. Also, most state governments are bound by self-imposed laws that frown on deficit spending.

I wish we could hog-tie Washington

I'd love to snatch everything away from those gluttonous, incontinent senators, congressmen and their bureaucratic Mongol horde. We should fire every politician and then require each one to pass a constitutional test in order to get his or her job back.

Wrong answers about the proper role of the Federal Government would be punished by permanent banishment back to reality. Imagine...

"I er, uh, I demaand to run health care!"

Sorry Teddy, get your ass back to Cape Cod!

Folks, they can't even protect our borders or balance a budget, what evidence is there that they can run health care, especially in light of the fiscal nightmare medicare and medicaid have become?

CNBC - Debt

It's all Fun and Games until somebody loses an Island

WestPac Press: June 19, 2052 – With the final passage of the Treaty of Oahu in the Senate following the walk-out of the remaining 7 Republicans and accompanied by muted protests in Honolulu, the USS Government today transferred sovereignty of Hawaii to China in exchange for 500 trillion (US) in debt relief. With the national debt at 857 trillion dollars and the GDP hovering around 141 trillion, the United Socialist States was unable to maintain the minimum required annual payments of 54 trillion to the IMF. This action is forecast to reduce this year’s deficit from 57 down to 13 trillion barring any further currency devaluation.

While the Anglo-Polynesian and Anglo-Nippon minorities in Hawaii still maintain a slight combined majority, the vote for unification with China paralleled Chinese ownership of property with some 73 % of citizens voting for unification. Despite the overwhelming support, the outlawed Pelean Liberation Front (PLF) claimed responsibility for Post Office bombings in both Lahaina and Kailua. The People’s Liberation Army representative assured concerned citizens that peace and tranquility would soon return.

President Alexandra Pelosi in an interview on Larry King Junior Live said that despite the recent vote rescinding Alaskan statehood, there was no truth to the rumors that the government was in negotiations with the Greater Islamic Republic over the transfer of the Alaskan Territory in exchange for further debt relief and additional petroleum rations. Ending her interview on a positive note she said that everyone should be pleased with the recent fall of Billings and that if the oil held out Big Timber and Livingston should be next. With the projected transfer of another division out of Iraq, USS forces should have the rebels bottled up in Helena by first snowfall.

With the price of gas approaching six dollars a liter and last years poor harvest severely impacting ethanol supplies Congress announced that Government Motors would get another infusion of cash to support the all electric GM Plug-n-Play Fleet. The Plug-n-Play lineup of vehicles has been hard hit by National Electric’s rationing, limiting the electric supply in the city-states of the east and west to the hours of 7 AM to 7 PM. National Electric’s “Patriots go down with the Sun” campaign has done little to alleviate fuel supply problems rampant in the highly urbanized east and west coastal corridors.

In the southwest, Homeland Security announced new efforts to clamp down on the flow of illegal immigrants over the border following the fourth protest this year by Mexico to the United Nations. Facing the possibility of additional sanctions for lack of border control HS was stepping up enforcement in south Texas and California, while the governors of New Mexico and Arizona called up additional National Guard troops. The Mexican ambassador’s protest to the UN was focused on the unreasonable burden imposed on his country’s medical system by undocumented Americans seeking care.



See! You can have fun as the opposition!



~Finntann~

The Audacity of BS

Does President Obama think we're stupid? The guy drops $4 Trillion ($4,000,000,000,000) and then warns Congress to watch the spending. I'd laugh if I weren't sick to my stomach...

Obama urged passage of "pay-as-you-go" legislation that would require any new tax cut or automatic spending program to be paid for within the budget.

"Entitlement increases and tax cuts need to be paid for. They are not free," said Obama

Charles Manson admonishing people to avoid dropping acid and killing people...

Chris Matthews telling someone they talk too loud...

Lindsay Lohan giving driving tips...

Adolph Hitler urging his fellow man to lay the hatred down and give peace a chance...

You can get by with big lies like this when the press is in love with you. Apparently, it is possible to fool all the liberals all the time...

Reuters - Obama Spending
Fortune CNN - America's Great Debt
Bronstein at Large - Love or Lust, the press and Obama

National Schizophrenia: A Chinese Plot?

In a fit of collective insanity, or some type of delusional hysteria, this nation (self-identified liberal: 21%, Conservative: 35-40%) elected the most liberal president ever.

He swore he'd close Gitmo. Everybody cheered and voted for him. Now, the nation is 2-1 against closing the facility.

60% of Americans believe the federal government has too much power and spends too much, yet GM President and all time big-spender Barack Obama remains wildly popular.

This is schizophrenia on a national level. Maybe the Chinese really are poisoning us with their crappy products, driving us slowly insane. Some think that's what happened to the Roman Empire.

Who says it can't happen here...

USA Today
San Diego Source
Washington Examiner

Salesman Obama: Sale Ends Soon, So Hurry In!

President Obama is a car salesman squeezing the last buck out of the suckers

From USA Today:

Bottom line: The government took on $6.8 trillion in new obligations in 2008, pushing the total owed to a record $63.8 trillion.

I've always thought Obama was more of a car salesman than anything. Now, Like Remington owner Victon Kiam, he liked the product so much he bought the company.

He sold us a clunker last November, but good salesman that he is, he knows that follow-up after the sale keeps the buyer happy. He continues to coo and congratulate the suckers who voted for him, while simultaneously adopting Bush terror policies and advancing his liberal domestic agenda.

Health Care On Sale Now!

His latest sales pitch is that health care is on sale now, but the deals won't last! We've got to get this done now! Of course we need to do it now. There won't be any money left to do it tomorrow. We're $63,000,000,000,000 ($63 trillion) in the hole, and China is itching to take our credit card away.

USA Today explains how our government has saddled us with a debt of "a record $546,668 per household...

That's quadruple what the average U.S. household owes for all mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other debt combined."

Taxpayers are on the hook for an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year for retirement benefits, the national debt and other government promises, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The 12% rise in red ink in 2008 stems from an explosion of federal borrowing during the recession, plus an aging population driving up the costs of Medicare and Social Security.

Cutting earmarks won't do it.

USA Today has breakdown of the federal debt.

Other: .4%
Civil Service & Military Retirement: 8.3%
Federal Debt Interest: 10%
Social Security: 29.3%
Medicare: 52%

Medical costs, as it stands now, are responsible for over half of the national debt. And they want the government to take on more health care? Are they crazy, or stupid?

What kind of citizenry allows their privileged political class to get away with such blatant banditry?

USA Today - Debt
Breitbart - Health Care Now
NNDR.Com - Victor Kiam

... And in the No Sh*t Category...

Obama Calls Deficit Spending Unsustainable!

President Obama was in Redneck Ron territory last week (I'm sure Ron was there to enthusiastically cheer him on!). The O'President made an amazing pronouncement, according to Bloomberg:

May 14 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

And in other news…

Eating too much causes obesity
Drug use causes irresponsible behavior and may lead to life on the street
Wars result in death and destruction

Does anyone else find it galling how this man can spout such statements as if he were a casual bystander making an observation on the passing scene? It chaps my hide even more that the press reports this with a straight face, never once even hinting that some of this debt just may be his fault.

US News Media: From attack dogs to lap dogs in 100 days

A Debtor Nation

"The fortunes we have heard so much about in the days of speculation, have melted like the snows before an April sun."

John Steele Gordon provided this quote in his excellent WSJ article, "A Short History of the National Debt."

The man who spoke those words was a Wall Street trader in the 1830's. Booms and busts, bubbles and crashes are a part of a natural economic cycle for all nations. Even the US falls prey to the predations of human nature.

A trillion dollars (current annual budget deficit) is a lot of money. $10 trillion is the size of the national debt, and total liabilities including entitlements is said to be around $60 trillion. The Federal Government spent over $400 billion in interest on the debt last year.

John Steele Gordon puts this in perspective for us:

In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit this year would be $1.2 trillion before the stimulus package. That's more than twice the deficit in fiscal 2008, more than the entire GDP of all but a handful of countries, and more, in nominal dollars, than the entire United States national debt in 1982.

But while the sum is huge, it is not in and of itself threatening to the solvency of the Republic. At 8.3% of GDP, this year's deficit is by far the largest since World War II. But the total debt is, as of now, still under 75% of GDP. It was almost 130% following World War II. (Japan's national debt right now is not far from 180% of that nation's GDP.)

He goes on to say that what is really worrisome is the trend. Washington is incapable of stanching the flow of red ink. Spending taxpayer money on chimeric schemes to cure all ills is just too much fun.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123491373049303821.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r2:c0.33881:b0
http://www.federalbudget.com/