Maryland Mall Shooting (That’s Right, For Those Keeping Score At Home: Another Shooting In ANOTHER GUN FREE ZONE)

The moment I heard about the shooting in the Maryland mall, I knew it: another shooting in another gun free zone.

It didn’t take long to determine the “gun free zone” thing.  All I had to do was identify the mall, then find their web page and then look at their “code of conduct” page.

And there it was: “No firearms or illegal weapons.”

Too bad nobody was allowed to have a firearm who was actually INCLINED to obey the damn law.

Wonder if MSNBC or any of the rest of the liberal media will cover the “gun free zone” angle (yeah, probably not).

“Gun free zones” again: Three killed in Columbia, MD Mall [Updated]
Posted by Bob Owens on January 25, 2014 at 12:42 pm

The Howard County Police are reporting via Twitter that:

Call came into 911 around 11:15 a.m. that shots were fired. Police made entry and found three dead, one found near a gun and ammunition.”

We’ll update the story as more information comes in, but the operating assumption at this time appears to be a double murder and suicide in yet another “gun free zone.”

Update: The incident is over. The UK Daily Mail and NBC Washington are both reporting that the shooter used a shotgun, and the Daily Mail  has posted a photo from a twitter user showing what appears to be evidence of a shotgun blast into the wall.

Daily Mail is further claiming that, “A mall employee described the shooter as a Latino or Middle Eastern man.”

I’d keep it firmly in mind that eyewitness statements are notoriously inaccurate.

[Mall image from WBAL]

Liberals are truly stupid people who will just not ever learn because their worldview obliterates any capacity for learning.  But when you criminalize guns or ban them, the only people who obey the laws are the law-abiding.

CRIMINALS ARE BY DEFINITION LAWBREAKERS WHO DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE LAW AND PSYCHOS ARE CRAZY PEOPLE WHO BY DEFINITION CAN’T CARE ABOUT THE LAW.

Every single mass shooting we have had in this country over the last several years – every single one – occurred in a “gun free zone” where the only people who had guns were the evil people.  Thanks entirely to Democrats.

Gun-free zones have been the most popular response to previous mass killings. But many law-enforcement officials say they are actually counterproductive. “Guns are already banned in schools. That is why the shootings happen in schools. A school is a ‘helpless-victim zone,’” says Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff. “Preventing any adult at a school from having access to a firearm eliminates any chance the killer can be stopped in time to prevent a rampage,” Jim Kouri, the public-information officer of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me earlier this year at the time of the Aurora, Colo., Batman-movie shooting. Indeed, there have been many instances — from the high-school shooting by Luke Woodham in Mississippi, to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo. — where a killer has been stopped after someone got a gun from a parked car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter.

Economists John Lott and William Landes conducted a groundbreaking study in 1999, and found that a common theme of mass shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know everyone will be unarmed, such as shopping malls and schools.

[…]

“Disarming law-abiding citizens leaves them as sitting ducks,” Lott told me. “A couple hundred people were in the Cinemark Theater when the killer arrived. There is an extremely high probability that one or more of them would have had a legal concealed handgun with him if they had not been banned.”

Lott offers a final damning statistic: “With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns.”

If you want to know all the most dangerous cities in America, just go visit the places that have the most restrictive gun laws.  YOU go to the places like liberal Chicago or liberal Detroit.  I’m sure not going to be one of the defenseless sheep praying to Obama to protect me.

State Department To American Olympic Athletes: ‘Be Ashamed, Afraid To Wear Your Uniforms’

Remember Obama’s promise to restore America’s “prestige” that demagogue Obama claimed had been lost under President Bush???  I sure do.

Now, five years into Obama’s presidency, America’s restored “prestige” means that even our greatest athletes at their greatest athletic event have to be so fearful and so ashamed of their flag that they dare not display it lest the villagers treat them like the Frankenstein monster and kill them with pitchforks and torches.

Time to put those clothes that in any way, shape or form advertise that you are an American away, boys and girls.  Being an American is literally a scarlet letter now:

The State Department is telling American athletes competing in the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics to avoid wearing team gear outside the games’ venues amid growing concerns over terrorist threats in the Russian resort town, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The memo, which details steps athletes can take to ensure their safety during the games, cautions them to avoid wearing team colors too prominently outside of the 1,500-mile so-called “Ring of Steel” security perimeter established by Russian security forces.

“The U.S. Department of State has advised that wearing conspicuous Team USA clothing in non-accredited areas may put your personal safety at greater risk,” said the memo, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Designer Ralph Lauren on Thursday unveiled the official uniforms that American athletes will wear to the Opening ceremony. The uniforms feature a knit patchwork cardigan emblazoned with big stars, an American flag, and the Olympic rings.

“A dynamic mix of patriotic references in a classic color palette of red, white and navy defines the Ralph Lauren 2014 Team USA Opening ceremony uniform, which is proudly Made in America,” the company said in a statement Thursday.

Greg Bretz, a member of the men’s halfpipe team, told the Wall Street Journal that U.S. Olympic officials “have told us not to wear our USA gear outside of the venues,” but added, “I have so much faith in the United States and our safety that I’m not too worried about it.”

Concerns about safety in Sochi have prompted some Olympians to tell their loved ones to stay home, however. One of them is Canadian goaltender Mike Smith, who said he doesn’t want to expose his wife and kids to any unnecessary risk.

“They’re not gonna go. It’s not worth it,” Smith told FOX Sports Arizona’s Todd Walsh. “For myself, it’s about thinking if [my wife is] OK when I’m not with her. It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the way it is.”

[…]

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

And I’m not going to be watching any of it.  Because Obama made it all about the celebration of homosexual sodomy rather than about international competition.

I’m surprised the “Team America uniforms” didn’t depict a male convict butt-raping his cellmate.  Because that’s really just where we are now.

It ought to be a joke by now that “Obama got bin Laden.”  I mean, NO OTHER PRESIDENT IN THE UNIVERSE WOULD HAVE DARED TO GO AFTER BIN LADEN, right???  It took Osama to kill Obama.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  But now, here we are: Obama triumphed that Al Qaeda was “decimated” and had to make up a story about some stupid video while Al Qaeda was busy murdering our Ambassador and our American heroes in Benghazi.  And now the black flag of Al Qaeda is going up all over the world.  Including the Iraqi city where 1,300 Americans died to set free until Obama came into power and gave it back to the terrorists.  And we’re afraid to even wear our “Team USA” uniforms in public lest our Islamic masters take offense.

Obama Gives 95% of Wealth Increase To Top 1% During His Regime Even As He Dishonestly Demagogues ‘Income Inequality’

Do you understand this, you stupid liberals???  Obama handed 95% of the wealth gains in America to the very richest one percenters.  Even as he publicly railed against the very thing he was doing in private:

But since the recession officially ended in June 2009, the top 1 percent have enjoyed the benefits of rising corporate profits and stock prices: 95 percent of the income gains reported since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent.

That compares with a 45 percent share for the top 1 percent in the economic expansion of the 1990s and a 65 percent share from the expansion that followed the 2001 recession.

The top 10 percent haven’t done badly, either. Last year, they captured 48.2 percent of income, another record. Their biggest previous take was 46.3 percent in 1932.

So let’s see: 65 percent under Bush vs. 95 percent under Obama.  That means that the income gap rose by 46.15% under the very same dishonest slandering demagogue who is now trying to distract the public from his colossal ObamaCare failure and all the lies he told about that fiasco.

My gosh.  It sounds like Obama demonizing Bush over national security abuses only to commit far worse abuses himself (yes he did SO do that!).  Under our fascist-in-chief, we are now a police state and Big Brother status (the Bible prophesied the coming of this Antichrist beast) is just around the corner.  It sounds like Obama demonizing Bush over the national debt only to explode the national debt at three times the rate that Bush did.  It sounds like Obama demonizing Republicans over refusing to raise the debt ceiling just like Obama refused to raise it when HE was a Senator and Bush was the president.

The decidedly leftist Huffington Post had this headline and began thus:

Income Inequality Worse Under Obama Than George W. Bush
The Huffington Post  |  By Alexander Eichler
Posted: 04/11/2012 6:19 pm Updated: 04/11/2012 6:19 pm

President Obama may talk a big game about economic fairness, but his record on the issue doesn’t quite match up.

There are lots of reasons to think so — and we’ll touch on several in just a minute — but the most recent comes from Matt Stoller, blogging at Naked Capitalism, who points us toward a recent bit of number-crunching from Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Saez, who’s known for his work on the income gap, has highlighted a surprising and discouraging fact: during the post-recession period of 2009 and 2010, the rich snagged a greater share of total income growth than they did during the boom years of 2002 to 2007.

In other words, inequality has been even more pronounced under Obama than it was under George W. Bush.

So how does the man who made the wealth gap worse than EVER and certainly worse than BUSH demonize Republicans and claim to be a voice for the very people he most hurt (and at a time when OBAMA’S DEMOCRATS had lock-step control over all three branches of government)???  It’s easy: Obama is a liar without shame, without honesty, without decency, without virtue and without integrity of any kind.  He just keeps on making dishonest promises – and when reality exposes one of his dishonest promises, he just lies again and then again as he slanders his opponents as being responsible for what HE as president did and led.

Meanwhile, of course, the rabid slanderer-in-chief has destroyed the American middle class.  Under Obama’s crony capitalist fascism where he rewarded his friends and punished his enemies, workers are taking home the smallest slice of U.S. income – EVER.  Inequality has WIDENED.  The job market is a gaping hole (with a record 100 million Americans not working).  The poverty rate hasn’t budged under Obama and is the worst since LBJ’s bogus “war on poverty” in the early 1960s.  More Americans are reduced to food stamps under Obama than EVER.  Obama’s war on business has forced business and particularly manufacturing business to move out of the country.  And we’re losing ground in global trade.

The labor participation rate has plunged like an anvil in a duck pond under Obama.  Every single year of his presidency fewer and fewer and fewer Americans have jobs.  And it keeps getting worse and worse.  You deserve this, America.  And you are going to get worse if you don’t get a whole lot smarter real quick in time to utterly reject fascist Democrats in 2014 and then resoundingly reject them again in 2016.  Because otherwise President Hillary Clinton will be saying, “What DIFFERENCE does it make?” to a  whole lot more tragic government incompetence and incredibly cynical political cover-ups.

It is now a documented FACT that the Pentagon knew within fifteen minutes of the Benghazi attack that it was a TERRORIST attack.  And yet for WEEKS afterward a dishonest President Obama and his dishonest administration and a dishonest Hillary Clinton and her dishonest State Department perpetuated an outright lie and fraud in order to cover-up for their failure.  For Obama, he had deceitfully boasted to the American people that he had decimated al Qaeda and that it was no longer a threat because of his policies.  That was a lie.  And Hillary Clinton had to cover-up for one of the worst acts of incompetence imaginable.  So they both lied to the American people.  Period.  End of story, to quote the liar-in-chief.

If you are a Democrat today, you are a liar, you are a hypocrite, you are a fascist.  You give giant rewards to rich liberal crony capitalist fascist boondoggles even as you demonize your opposition – in frankly the most intolerant and most race-baiting and most fascist way possible – for doing the very thing YOU’RE DOING WORSE.

You Democrat mass-murdering genocidal baby-killing sodomite worshipers are nothing short of pure evil in absolutely every single thing you stand for.  It’s all a bunch of lies intended to fool the gullible and the depraved so you can steal more power and use it to punish your enemies and reward your friends.  All you have to do to see that is watch how Obama used power to either criminally attack his enemies that he wanted or used the IRS as a weapon to punish them for him.

Barack Obama is a cynical, dishonest slandering demagogue.  His core promise – according to the liberal New York Times – was to “transcend the political divide.”  But no president in American history has EVER been so nakedly partisan or has dived more deeply into the sewer of political division than Barack Obama.

The Fascist Hypocrite-In-Chief Says He’ll Finally Stop (A Little Of) The Spying After Demoning Bush WHO SPIED LESS THAN OBAMA

I looked at a headline in the Los Angeles Times featuring something on Validmir Putin and almost vomited.

I almost vomited because I had had a thought that I never thought I would have in my lifetime: I envied Russia for its political leadership.  I mean, yes, the guy is a former communist KGB thug, but Barack Obama is a CURRENT communist thug who has turned his FBI and his IRS into the KGB.  And of course whenever Obama and Putin have crossed swords, Putin has made Obama look like such a chump it is beyond unreal.

The United States before Obama USED to be the most powerful nation on the face of the earth.  And the president of the United States was OF COURSE the most powerful man on the planet.  Not so anymore: the most powerful man in the world is Gog of Magog (the way the Bible describes the leader of Russia in the last days), Vladimer Putin.

Obama is Putin’s poodle:

According to the magazine [Forbes], Putin has replaced US President Barack Obama in the top spot because the Russian leader has gained the upper hand over his counterpart in Washington in the context of several conflicts and scandals.

Indeed, at the moment, Putin seems to be succeeding at everything he does. In September, he convinced Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. In doing so, he averted an American military strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad and made Obama look like an impotent global policeman.

In late July, Putin ignored American threats and granted temporary asylum to US whistleblower Edward Snowden, a move that stirred up tensions within the Western camp. The Germans and the French were also outraged over Washington’s surveillance practices.

Since then, Putin has scored one coup after the next. In the fall, when meaningful progress was made in talks with Tehran over a curtailment of Iran’s nuclear program, Putin once again played a key role.

Obama doesn’t even look THIRD rate as a leader advancing the cause and power of his people compared to Vladimir Putin over Syria.  He made Obama look like an organ grinder’s monkey when he got Obama to fold over his stupid “red line.”  And what has Syria done since to fulfill it’s promises to Obama?  Try “zero.”  Now Syria has all of its WMD and Assad – thanks to Obama – has an iron grip on power over the rebels whom Obama flat-out betrayed.  The joke is on Obama and of course the hapless American people who are screwed by this idiot’s “leadership.”  In the same way, Obama fails to rank as a FOURTH rate leader compared to Vladimir Putin over Iran.  Right after Iran – and Putin – got everything they wanted out of the Chump-in-Chief, Iran announced the truth to the world: that Obama had “surrendered.”  Oh, the media likes to say “the West surrendered,” but of course as the so-called “leader of the free world,” it was Obama who LED the West to surrender to Iran.  And now Iran is already on the rapid economic mend and will be able to pour more funds into its ballistic missile program – immediately after the success of which they will announce that they have become a nuclear power.

I never in my wildest dreams ever believed that I would prefer a Russian president to an American one.  I mean, even Jimmy CARTER didn’t make me think that.

Friday Obama gave his NSA speech.  And of course it was just like all of his other speeches: Obama the great and grand impartial listener has heard all sides, has not yet made his infinitely wise decision, and will punt all unpopular decisions to Congress in the meantime until he imposes his totalitarian godhood without any accountability via executive orders later.

The New York Times in one of its mostly drivel articles began this way:

WASHINGTON — As a young lawmaker defining himself as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama visited a center for scholars in August 2007 to give a speech on terrorism. He described a surveillance state run amok and vowed to rein it in. “That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens,” he declared. “No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime.”

It pointed out that:

Mr. Obama’s 2007 speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars came after the revelation that President George W. Bush had authorized warrantless surveillance in terrorism cases without permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A presidential candidate, Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Bush’s “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Oh, and my favorite line:

He was surprised at the uproar that ensued, advisers said, particularly that so many Americans did not trust him, much less trust the oversight provided by the intelligence court and Congress. As more secrets spilled out, though, aides said even Mr. Obama was chagrined. They said he was exercised to learn that the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was being tapped.

It took a traitor named Snowden to expose the treason and abject hypocrisy of our traitor-in-chief.  And so it was Snowden, now basically a Russian citizen (that’s just one of the many ways Putin has OWNED Obama) who pointed out the fact that no president in American history had ever built up such a large spying system on its own citizens.

Of course we also know that this same president used his IRS to target 292 conservative organizations plus a couple of liberal ones (who used “anti-Obama rhetoric”) so that liberals would say Obama went after both sides.

And we know that the FBI under Eric Holder refused to investigate this political crime and didn’t even bother to INTERVIEW any of the victims and get their stories to find out what actually happened.  Nope, they just listened to that lizard lady who pled the Fifth because the truth would have incriminated her.

Tyler Durden asked a good question this way:

Who said it?

This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.

That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.

That is not who we are. It’s not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works.

Our constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers and that justice is not arbitrary.

This administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.

There are no shortcuts to protecting America.

– August, 2007

Confused? It is the same guy who said this back in 2006:

“Mr. President, I rise today to talk about America’s debt problem. The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally.  

Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’

Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.  

Americans deserve better.

I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”

Still confused? Here he is:

Barack Obama isn’t just a hypocrite without shame, honor, decency, or virtue; he’s a liar without any shame, any honor, any decency or any virtue.

Do you remember Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Obama Press Secretary Jay Carney, Obama’s UN ambassador and a host of other Obama cronies repeatedly told us that Benghazi was NOT a terrorist attack and that it was the result of a video that even the Democrat-controlled SENATE says had nothing whatsoever to do with this Al-Qaeda-sponsored and linked terrorist attack???  And how they LIED???

Do you remember Obama’s top national security appointee Clapper who answered, “Not wittingly” to the question as to whether the NSA was keeping information on Americans that it was VERY MUCH “WITTINGLY” KEEPING???  And do you remember how he ADMITTED he lied and said he gave “the least untruthful” answer possible???  Which is of course exactly what I did every time I told a woman in a bar I was a Navy SEAL or whatever it took to get in her panties, right???

Yeah, he’s STILL on the job.  Because Obama has SURROUNDED himself with liars to cover and shelter his administration.  That’s why he also hasn’t done a damn thing about the fiasco at Benghazi where he and many of his cronies also lied, about the political attack via the IRS where his cronies pled the Fifth Amendment rather than telling the American people what they’d done, etc. etc.

Why wouldn’t we trust this abject liar???

Why wouldn’t we trust “the liar of the year” who promised if we liked our health plan we could keep it and if we liked our doctor we could keep our doctor and that health care would be less expensive after his ObamaCare and basically be wonderful for us when it turned out that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS PROMISES TURNED OUT TO BE ABJECT AND OUTRIGHT LIES???  Why wouldn’t we trust a man who demonized his predecessor for violating civil liberties only to himself be the worst violator of civil liberties in American history???  Why wouldn’t we trust the man who demonized Bush for increasing the national debt by $4 trillion but then increase it $8 trillion AND COUNTING himself???

I don’t know: why don’t we trust THE MOST DOCUMENTED LIAR IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENTIRE PLANET???  That is, unless you can show me which leader has had his lies literally heard and seen by more people than have heard and seen Obama’s lies.

The Washington reporters – and most of these guys are LIBERALS – say Barack Obama was the least transparent president since NIXON.  They point out that Obama is WORSE than Nixon when it comes to viciously targeting anyone who leaks anything that damages him.

And Obama’s pathological dishonesty, his political viciousness and frankly the demons screaming in his ugly little soul are why his approval ratings are the WORST SINCE NIXON.  As in Nixon mired in the Watergate scandal as his lies were exposed.

Barack Obama is a pathological liar.  To put it in Obamaesque terms, Obama is a pathological liar.  Period.  End of story.

Fascist Hillary Clinton Has An Enemies List So She Can Exact Revenge (‘Punish Her Enemies’) When She Gets Power

Richard Nixon is back.  He’s every bit as ugly and every bit as evil as he ever was.  Right now he’s inhabiting Barack Hussein Obama.  But soon he’s planning to don a pant suit.

We have NEVER heard this kind of talk from any president in history – not even Nixon who had least only talked about it in his office rather than in public.  But it’s clearly a regular mantra on the part of today’s fascist Democrats: “Punish your enemies and reward your friends.”

What is amazing is just how much energy and effort Hillary Clinton put into categorizing and formalizing and systematizing her enemies list.  The lady serpent has big, big plans for when she becomes the next Führer:

Hillary Clinton’s 2008 enemies list: John Kerry, Claire McCaskill, et al
posted at 9:21 am on January 13, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

This list comes from her failed 2008 campaign, not any she may (ahem!) be building for 2016, but it’s a useful reminder of the Clintonland landscape in any period. Cross a Clinton, make the list — and it doesn’t matter how well-established one might be, either.  According to a new book coming out from Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, the Hillary Clinton Hit List was short but distinguished:

Inside a cramped third-floor office of Hillary Clinton’s once-bustling presidential campaign headquarters in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod put the finishing touches on a political hit list. …

Almost six years later most Clinton aides can still rattle off the names of traitors and the favors that had been done for them, then provide details of just how each of the guilty had gone on to betray the Clintons—as if it all had happened just a few hours before. The data project ensured that the acts of the sinners and saints would never be forgotten.

There was a special circle of Clinton hell reserved for people who had endorsed Obama or stayed on the fence after Bill and Hillary had raised money for them, appointed them to a political post, or written a recommendation to ice their kid’s application to an elite school.

On one early draft of the hit list, each Democratic member of Congress was assigned a numerical grade from one to seven, with the most helpful to Hillary earning ones and the most treacherous drawing sevens. The set of sevens included Sens. John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Casey, and Patrick Leahy, as well as Reps. Chris Van Hollen, Baron Hill, and Rob Andrews.

Claire McCaskill made the list for telling the late Tim Russert that Bill Clinton was a fine President, “but I don’t want my daughter around him.” She apologized directly to Bill Clinton, but when she endorsed Barack Obama, all previous sins were unforgiven, too. Team Clinton carefully noted each perceived slight and betrayal — in Excel spreadsheets! — and exulted when their nemeses stumbled.

Even years later:

“Bill Richardson: investigated; John Edwards: disgraced by scandal; Chris Dodd: stepped down,” one said to another. “Ted Kennedy,” the aide continued, lowering his voice to a whisper for the punch line, “dead.”

Now, none of this is exceptionally different than what other politicians do. Everyone keeps track of friendships, betrayals, and chits owed and on call.  It’s just that, as Parnes and Allen note, the Clintons are particularly good at it — and have the power to make it count:

“It wasn’t so much punishing as rewarding, and I really think that’s an important point,” said one source familiar with Bill’s thinking. “It wasn’t so much, ‘We’re going to get you.’ It was, ‘We’re going to help our friends.’ I honestly think that’s an important subtlety in Bill Clinton, in his head. She’s not as calculated, but he is.”

It would be political malpractice for the Clintons not to keep track of their friends and enemies. Politicians do that everywhere. The difference is the Clintons, because of their popularity and the positions they’ve held, retain more power to reward and punish than anyone else in modern politics. And while their aides have long and detailed memories, the sheer volume of the political figures they interact with makes a cheat sheet indispensable. “I wouldn’t, of course, call it an enemies list,” said one Clintonworld source when asked about the spreadsheet put together by Balderston and Elrod. “I don’t want to make her sound like Nixon in a pantsuit.”

Perhaps not. But perhaps it’s not the healthiest thing for Democrats to give her the opportunity to become one, either.

There are two amazing things, with one more amazing than the next: the sheer wickedness of the modern Democrat Party and the willingness of the American people to vote for their own suicide-by-socialism as they listen to the biggest lies in American history.

I’ve said it over and over again: Democrats are fascists.  The only difference between the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers Party) and the Democrat Party (National Socialist American Workers Party) is the fact that the Nazis were able to seize absolute power and impose all the wickedness and viciousness in the dark, shriveled souls and the Democrats are still hoping for that chance.  Why do I say that?  Because the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Maoists, the North Koreans, the militant Muslims and the Democrat Party ALL have ONE thing in common: they exalt the State to the point of deity.  They ALL desire and demand and seek to impose a massive, totalitarian State with absolute power.  And as we saw in the case of Obama and his repeated abuses of power, power corrupts.

Hillary Clinton is pure evil.  This is a woman who is now documented (along with Obama) in being so cynical and so utterly uncaring about the American people or the security of the United States that they were willing to destroy a sound war-fighting policy that accomplished our mission and saved American lives for nothing more than sheer political benefit.  She will stop at NOTHING to get power.  And she will stop at nothing once she TAKES power.

Yet Another Outright LIE: Obama Sold ObamaCare Under Promise That People Would Stop Going To Emergency Rooms For Treatment

The title of the following article says it all: the whole point of “fundamentally transforming” medicine into SOCIALIZED medicine was a lie.

1/02/2014 @ 2:30PM |Avik Roy, Forbes Staff
New Oregon Data: Expanding Medicaid Increases Usage Of Emergency Rooms, Undermining Central Rationale For Obamacare

For years, it has been the number one talking point of Obamacare supporters. People who are uninsured end up getting costly care from hospitals’ emergency rooms. “Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it—about $1,000 per year that pays for [the uninsureds’] emergency room and charitable care,” said President Obama in 2009. Obamacare, the President told us, would solve that problem by covering the uninsured, thereby driving premiums down. A new study, published in the journal Science, definitively reaches the opposite conclusion. In Oregon, people who gained coverage through Medicaid used the emergency room 40 percent more than those who were uninsured.

The ‘free rider’ argument was always bunk

Just like the “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” promise, the promise that Obamacare would make health care less expensive by expanding coverage was always a crock. Nationally, it’s estimated that we spend about $50 billion a year on uncompensated care for the uninsured. But Obamacare spends $250 billion a year of taxpayer money on covering the uninsured. Only in Washington is spending $250 billion to address a $50 billion problem considered “savings.”

In Massachusetts, under Romneycare, the math worked out in a similar way. The Bay State spent $661 million on uncompensated care in the year before Romneycare went into effect; by the 2009 fiscal year, that figure had decreased to $414 million: a savings of $247 million. But in 2011, the cost of the state’s insurance subsidy program was $830 million, and that doesn’t even count the tab paid by the federal government for the state’s expansion of Medicaid.

Did emergency-room usage in Massachusetts decline because of all this extra money? The opposite. ER visits actually rose by 7 percent between 2005 and 2007, and the state’s costs for caring for ER patients rose 17 percent between 2007 and 2009.

And one of the big holes in the myth of uninsured “free riders” is that the uninsured only account for 15 percent of the population, 14 percent of total ER visits, and 12 percent of aggregate ER expenditures, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Medicaid beneficiaries, by contrast, accounted for 9 percent of the population, 15 percent of visits, and 9 percent of expenses.

Given all of this data and experience, it was obvious that expanding coverage through Obamacare would increase taxpayer costs, not reduce them. But predictably, the pro-Obamacare “fact-checkers,” like those at PolitiFact, have been nowhere to be found.

The latest data from the Oregon Medicaid experiment

Along come economists Amy Finkelstein of MIT and Kate Baicker of Harvard, who have been participating in the now-famous Oregon Medicaid experiment. Regular readers of The Apothecary will recall that this study compared a group of Oregonians who were uninsured, and stayed that way, to a group who had “won” a lottery to enroll in Medicaid. The study found that Medicaid “generated no significant improvement in measured physical health outcomes,” a finding that reinforces extensive published research. (I also discuss this research in my new book, How Medicaid Fails The Poor.)

Finkelstein and Baicker, in their new Science article, looked at emergency-room records for 24,646 residents of the Portland, Oregon area, spanning 12 regional hospitals, who had participated in the Medicaid experiment. The study was co-authored by Sarah Taubman of the National Bureau of Economic Research; Heidi Allen of the Columbia School of Social Work; and Bill Wright of Oregon’s Portland Medical Center. The authors found, as they had previously, that the subgroup that had gained coverage under Medicaid showed no improvement in the management of their chronic medical problems, such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

They also found that those on Medicaid used the emergency room 40 percent more than the uninsured did—1.43 ER visits per Medicaid enrollee, as against 1.02 for the uninsured. More to the point, a majority of the emergency room visits were unnecessary, because they involved conditions that could easily have been managed outside of the ER.

Of the 0.41-per-person increase in visits, 0.18 were “primary care treatable,” meaning they didn’t require ER care. 0.12 didn’t even qualify as emergency care. 0.04 did qualify as emergency issues, but could have been prevented by adequate primary care. The Medicaid-driven increases in each of these categories was statistically significant, meaning that the differences were large enough that they are highly unlikely to be statistical noise.

Medicaid is, in effect, designed to increase emergency-room usage

Why does Medicaid perform so poorly, given that we spend so much money on it—$450 billion a year? Because of fundamental flaws in the way the program was designed.

The authors of the 1965 Medicaid legislation believed that it was morally wrong to expect poor people to pay even modest sums for their own health care. So the law mandates that cost-sharing features, like co-pays, of Medicaid plans must be minimal to zero for both primary care coverage and emergency-room usage.

Because Medicaid was nearly free to the program’s enrollees, those enrollees ended up seeking—and receiving—lots of inappropriate care. That led to massive cost overruns that, even today, are bankrupting state governments. But states have had little flexibility to reform Medicaid’s cost-sharing features. The one thing they have been able to do is pay doctors and hospitals less and less to provide the same care.

That trend, in turn, has led many doctors to stop accepting new Medicaid patients. So it’s extremely difficult for Medicaid enrollees to get appointments with primary care physicians. They have to spend weeks on the phone to find someone who will treat them.

Put yourself in the shoes of that Medicaid enrollee. Why would you bother calling primary care docs all day and all week, if you can go to the emergency room and get the same care for the same price? So that’s what Medicaid patients do.

And then, consider that Medicaid pays hospitals far less than private insurers pay for the same care. Many hospitals say that they lose money on every Medicaid patient they see. But somehow, if we have more Medicaid patients, taxpayers will be better off?

It was bunk in 2009, and it’s bunk today. It’s why the states that have chosen to forego Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion were wise to do so. Governors and legislators who have ignored the data, and burdened generations of future taxpayers with this failed program, have a lot of explaining to do.

*    *    *

Avik’s new book, How Medicaid Fails the Poor, is now available in paperback, Kindle, and iBooks versions.

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*    *    *

UPDATE: Some more details on the study, for those who are interested. The twelve hospitals in the study encompassed “nearly half of all inpatient hospital admissions in Oregon.” The period observed was approximately 18 months—from March 10, 2008 to September 30, 2009. There were “no statistically significant differences between the groups in demographic characteristics measured at the time of lottery sign-up.” As noted above, the increase in ER usage “from Medicaid is solely in outpatient visits…Medicaid statistically significantly increases visits in all classifications except for the ‘emergent, non-preventable’ category. The increases are most pronounced in those classified as ‘primary care treatable.’”

For a longer list of the President’s repeated promise that Obamacare would reduce emergency-room usage, read Michael Cannon‘s take on the study.

INVESTORS’ NOTE: Among the biggest publicly-traded players in Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid are Molina (NYSE:MOH), WellPoint (NYSE:WLP), WellCare (NYSE:WCG), Centene (NYSE:CNC), and Humana (NYSE:HUM).

Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of those who are getting “health insurance” under ObamaCare are being thrown into Medicaid.  And keep in mind that having Medicaid is statistically no better than having no insurance at all in terms of health or longevity due to the crappy care of your new ObamaCare program.

People are waking up to the “sticker shock” of ObamaCare.  Whether or not they can afford the premiums is completely irrelevant when the average deductible PER FAMILY MEMBER is OVER $5,000 a year.  If you can’t afford that, you are for all purposes UNINSURED whether you have a stupid little card from Obama in your wallet or not.

Add to that the fact that the ObamaCare networks are unbelievably small and limited.  There are few doctors available for way, WAY, WAAAAYYY to many patients.  And if you want a specialist because the pain pill Obama wants you to take instead of treatment isn’t quite enough for you, well, I’d say “good luck” but even that would be overly optimistic.

The purpose behind ObamaCare was “to control the people.”  The purpose was to restrict health care to the masses.

It is by now beyond a joke to try to count how many times Barack Hussein Obama was caught in an outright lie in his effort to deceive the American people and impose his wicked worldview on what used to be the greatest nation in the history of the world.  Or how many different lies he told.

Just A Few Of The Things That Sefense Secretary Robert Gates Said About Barack Obama And Hillary Clinton

Robert Gates is a serious man who has spent his career in the Air Force and the CIA, and who has been in senior leadership positions since the mid-1980s under both Republican and Democrat administrations.

Listen to what the man says about the incredibly wicked Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”

What do you say about a man who doesn’t believe in sending troops and doesn’t think they will succeed – and then sends them there ANYWAY while ignoring the military experts’ recommendations simply out of pure, cynical politics???

Realize that Obama was a pure political agitator who relied on dishonest and deceitful and disingenuous rhetoric every step of the way in his rise to power.  He ran against the Iraq War as the “bad war” but ran ON fighting the Afghanistan War as “the good war” in order to falsely present himself as mainstream and as tough when in reality he was NEITHER.  Then he was elected by an incredibly foolish and depraved American people, the liar-in-chief had to stand by his dishonest rhetoric about Afghanistan even though he hadn’t actually believed ANY of it.  Therefore he sent 30,000 men (to their graves for all he cared) as a half-ass attempt to appease his Pentagon and his own previous lies on the subject of Afghanistan.  The military said they needed twice as many men to make a success out of Afghanistan; Obama should either have sent them all or admitted he had lied to get elected and didn’t believe in the war he had falsely claimed to support and sent NO ONE.

Gates goes on:

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. .?.?. The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

Do you hear that?  Do you understand that?  Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama BOTH admitted to demonizing a president during time of war out of pure, cynical, partisan politics.  They literally both admit to putting their political posturings over and above the lives of our troops and above America’s national security.

How does Obama and the Obama administration feel about and deal with the military?  Let’s use the word “shabbily:”

Gates continues: “I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing” Petraeus, and perhaps Mullen and Gates himself, “of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus. As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

And when it comes to the crony capitalist fascist weasel tyrant Barack Obama, the best political description of him in terms of American political history is “Nixonian”:

Gates acknowledges forthrightly in “Duty” that he did not reveal his dismay. “I never confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as [Hillary] Clinton, [then-CIA Director Leon] Panetta, and others) saw as the president’s determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations. His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”

It got so bad during internal debates over whether to intervene in Libya in 2011 that Gates says he felt compelled to deliver a “rant” because the White House staff was “talking about military options with the president without Defense being involved.”

Barack Obama is a pure thug who lied and demonized and demagogued his way into office and then proceeded to create an administration that used the political machinery to punish political opponents FAR more than Nixon ever did.  Nixon got impeached for TALKING about using the IRS against his political opponents while Obama was caught red-handed ACTUALLY DOING IT.

These are evil times.  And America has become evil as it has allowed itself to be influenced by the evil times and by the evil people we have foolishly and wickedly chosen to lead us.

Discoveries In Prayer And Trusting In The Lord

I had jury service this week.

I don’t like jury service.  I NEVER like jury service.  I groan when I see the summons.  And I groan again when I call and find out that I’m confirmed to appear at the courthouse on whatever day during the week.  Oh, I’m prepared to do my duty.  The public has an obligation to serve on juries if they want a decent judicial system, right?  But maybe I would be prepared to throw myself on a grenade to save others, also.  I just wouldn’t want to.  The bottom line is I am willing to serve and I am even more willing that someone ELSE serve rather than me.

And so, being somebody who prayers often, when I am sitting in that jury assembly room and the clerk starts reading off names of people who have to get up and report to the court room to begin the jury selection process, I say a fervent prayer of “please, Lord, please don’t let my name be on that darn list.”

Now, understand.  I believe that God can do ANYTHING.  But I also believe that He has His own will and His own plans and they don’t necessarily jive with my agenda.

Anyway, I’m sitting near a woman whose name was called.  And as she’s getting up and collecting her things to report to the court room, she says, “I’m glad my name was called.  It’s better to get called right away.  Otherwise you just sit here all day.”

So we’ve got a very different take: she’s glad that the thing I didn’t want to happen happened.

And who knows?  Maybe she’s right!  Maybe it IS better to just get called and report and get it over with in terms of getting on with your life and your schedule.

The woman who spoke was older.  She’d gone through the system more than a few times, I’m sure.  Just as I have.  I’m thinking, “If they call me onto a jury, I could be there for two or three days just getting through the Voir Dire (jury selection) process.  Even if I’m ultimately excused without having to serve on that eventual jury.  She’s thinking, “The sooner they call you the sooner it will all be over with.”

And there have been plenty of times when BOTH of us have been right, haven’t there???

The clerk in the jury assembly room gets on the microphone again and announces that the other court room will be reporting their need soon and to stand by for twenty minutes.  And I realize I have no idea whatsoever what to pray for.  Do I pray that my name be called or do I pray that my name NOT be called?  All I know is that I’ve got appointments and a lot of things to do that won’t get any better if I miss several days of my life.  I mean, Holy moly: we’re just starting the New Year and I’M ALREADY BEHIND!!!

So what do I pray for?  I have no idea.  But fortunately, when it comes to praying, I DON’T HAVE TO HAVE ANY IDEA.  Romans 8:26 says, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”  Even, I’m quite sure, the wordless groans of a helpless man awaiting his fate during jury duty.

“Lord,” I pray, “I have no idea WHAT to pray for.  I just surrender it to You.  You are God and You are in control.  I just want to be able to go home, and I have no idea how to make that happen.  I put my trust in You and in Your plan for my day.”

When the clerk comes back on the microphone, she announces that the other court has reported it does not need anybody.  And we are excused.

It’s 10:20AM.  And I have that child when the final school bell rings feeling.

Now, here’s the thing: maybe God would have wanted me to serve on a jury: maybe there was a case that He wanted to help decide.  Maybe my future wife will be one of the other jurors.  Maybe a lot of things I can’t possibly know about in advance but God does know about because He’s God and that’s what He does.

But as I’m racing out of the court-house to get to my motorcycle, I realize that maybe He just wanted me to come to that right place where I was actually desperate enough and unsure enough to turn things over to Him.

There’s a good theory that Israel spent forty years doing laps around the mountain in the wilderness during the Exodus because it just took them that long to finally come to the “Thy will be done” stage.

Dang, how often do we think we KNOW what is best for us???  How often are we completely certain that this needs to happen JUST THIS WAY and THAT most definitely must NOT happen???

I mean, it’s one point to come to that moment where you don’t even know what to do or what you want and finally turn it over to God.  But think of all the times you just flat-out KNOW what is best.

And do we?  Or are we like that woman who said she was happy her name was called when had her name NOT been called she would have been going home in just twenty minutes?  [And realize I’m not picking on that woman, because I realized her pet theory was every bit as sound as mine and it could have been me sitting in that jury room all day and finally getting called into a jury at ten minutes to five o’clock and having to show up again the next day while SHE went home early].

Life is a highway, as the song says.  But on this highway, we’re frequently driving around blindfolded and there are potholes and other cars all around us.  And we often don’t know where to get on and where to get off.  We’ve just got our inclinations and our guesses and our best judgment that often have us zigging when we sure should have zagged.

This is where the beautiful proverb of Proverbs 3:5, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” becomes so real.  When we finally realize, “I don’t know.  but God DOES.”  And put that realization into effect throughout our lives.

I’m not there yet.  But I want to be.

There are two ways we can fail to trust the Lord.  One I’ve already discussed; we THINK we know what’s best for us and anything other than that means God let us down.  When of course maybe that’s not true at all because maybe you didn’t have a clue what was best for you.

But there’s another one: are we willing to be shaped and changed and transformed from what we are into something else?

I found and called in a stolen car several weeks ago that was set on fire and abandoned in the desert.  The police had somebody come and tow what was left of the car away.  Left behind was a lot of small pieces of melted aluminum.

I’ve picked up quite a few of those pieces.  For some reason I find them fascinating.

Each of those pieces of aluminum had of course once been some part for the car (the engine block, the transmission, etc.).  Now it’s just a blob of one of the lighter metals.  But you look at a piece and you realize that of course it could be melted down again and become something else.

That’s how we are, too.

Malachi 3:3-4 says, “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.”

It’s a picture of God sitting over each one of us, refining us, melting away the dross and leaving behind the most beautiful and valuable part of us.

As I’m sitting there in that jury assembly room not being happy about what may happen next, God may have other plans for me.  I may have to do things that I don’t want to have to do and I may as a result literally become something different than what I am and contrary to my own plans and purposes.  So that God can use me for His better plan and purpose.

Do I trust God to do that?  Do I trust God to melt me down and change me into something else?

Often times, it’s just a matter of our letting go and letting God be God.  We go through hard, even bitter times.  Maybe years pass by, maybe decades.  And we finally come to that point where we are willing to be shaped and forged into what God intended for us.  And we’re finally ready to move on to the next, far better and far more meaningful, phase of our lives.

As we’ve had the imposition of gay marriage and the Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson blow-up, I’ve written a few pieces on homosexuality.  I want to be crystal clear: the Bible says repeatedly that homosexuality is a sin and it never says anything other than that homosexuality is a sin.  I’ve met homosexuals who realize that what they are feeling and doing is wrong.  I know what that’s like, because I’ve got my own entrenched sinful behaviors and attitudes and I don’t like them but don’t know how to live blamelessly, either.  And I truly feel compassion for these men because while we’re struggling with different things, we’re all struggling to overcome what we don’t want to be and do and become something we know is better.

But let me focus on the liberal, militant homosexual activist who says, “What I’m doing is NOT wrong!  I am NOT going to change.  I demand that I be able to continue to be EXACTLY what I am and keep doing EXACTLY what I’m doing.”  And of course that attitude and the behavior that flows from that attitude is the essence of what St. Paul describes in Romans chapter one.

But now let’s take this discussion away from militant homosexual rebellion and focus on ourselves: how many of us are defiantly holding on to attitudes and feelings and beliefs and behaviors and activities that we KNOW are not right before God?

Most of us need some refining.  Many of us need some serious melting down.

But God has ordained the universe such that we have to be willing to let Him work His ways and His wonders in us.  He gave us free will and He respects the free will He gave us as part of our being created in the Imago Dei (in His image).  And ultimately, we each of us have to come to that point in that circumstance where we need to realize, to recognize, that we are not where we need to be inside and that we need to be refined and transformed into something different.

Sometimes that process if unpleasant, even painful.  I’ve got to go through a surgery to re-attach a ruptured tendon.  I don’t look forward to it.  I don’t look forward to the whole day.  I don’t look forward to the recovery and the pain I will be in and the difficult rehabilitation it will take to successfully put me back together again.  But I am willing to go through it because I am looking to the (better) end result.  That said, I know a very pretty young woman who has a broken clavicle that literally comes loose but won’t have the surgery to get fixed up because she fears the process too much.  There are a lot of better things she would be able to do if she just went through the pain and had the surgery, but fear paralyzes her.

We’re often like that young woman.  We don’t want to change and we certainly don’t want to BE changed.  We desperately cling to who we are even though who we are is broken.

We have to acknowledge that something isn’t right in us.  We have to acknowledge that we’re broken.  And we have to be willing to trust God and allow Him to refine us and even melt us down and reshape us into what HE wants us to be.

Dr. Phil (a different Phil from Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson) used to say to dysfunctional people living dysfunctionally, “How’s that working out for you?”  If nothing else, let your failures guide you to God’s way.  Stop banging your head against a wall of your own choosing and let God shape you to be something different and better.

That’s my prayer for me.  And I hope it’s your prayer for you.

The American People Are RIGHT And The Media Is LYING: The Obama Economy Is MISERABLE

We’re being told that the economy is recovering.  Green shoots.  You stupid people, the lib-anointed experts say, we’ve been in recovery for years under Obama.  The streets are paved with gold.

Polls clearly show that the American people believe that about as much as they believe Obama’s NSA spying on them (that Obama’s Director of National Security flagrantly lied about to Congress and to the American people on national television) is harmless:

Poll Showing Most Americans Believe Economy Is and Will Stay in Poor Shape Puzzles Politico, CNN
By Tom Blumer | December 31, 2013 | 09:36

One thing the establishment press will not be celebrating this evening as we head into 2014 is the fact that they have been unable to convince the American people that the economy has been and will continue to be on the rebound.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released on Friday, which “oddly enough” (no, not really) is not being touted at ORC’s related press release web page, shows that 68 percent of Americans believe the economy is in poor shape. Over half expect the economy to be in that condition a year from now. This came as somewhat of a surprise to Lucy McCalmont at the Politico and Gregory Wallace at CNNMoney.com.

McCalmont’s brief post said that the result occurred “despite some strong indicators.”

Wallace’s longer report attempted to cite several specifics (bolds are mine):

Many Americans feel economy isn’t improving (Note to headline writer: That’s “most,” not “many.” — Ed.)

Despite a recent string of positive economic news, Americans say they aren’t feeling the improvements.

A new CNN/ORC poll released Friday showed people were pessimistic that the economy was improving. Nearly 70% said the economy is generally in poor shape, and only 32% rated it good.

By some metrics, the economy has moved ahead this year. The stock market, for example, has surged — the Nasdaq is up nearly 40% since January. Unemployment is at a five-year low point. Auto sales are at a seven-year high. Gas prices have dropped. And the housing sector, which dragged the U.S. into recession five years ago, is rebounding.

The Federal Reserve sees signs of strength, too. In December the central bank pulled back slightly on the stimulus that has boosted investor confidence this year.

But behind those numbers are the long-term unemployed, the under-employed and those who have dropped out of — or never even entered — the workforce. They’re not sharing in the surging stock market, and many are about to lose jobless benefits.

Wallace’s points about the job market are fine, but many of the alleged positive factors he cited really aren’t when subjected to any kind of analysis.

Unfortunately, the average American is not sharing in much if any of the stock market’s gains.

The point Wallace attempted on gas prices was pretty weak. The national average of $3.30 per gallon is still more than double what it was at the end of 2008.

As to the housing sector, new-home sales are still less than 70 percent of the 700,000 annual level considered healthy by writers at the Associated Press (I think it should be more like 750K-800K).

Finally, the idea that the Fed’s “pullback” indicates “signs of strength” is ludicrous. Given that the annual deficit and mostly related additions to the national debt are about half as high as they were during the Obama administration’s early years, the Fed should have been able to pull back much further if it were really comfortable with where the economy is going. But it’s not, which is why its “taper,” from creating $1.02 trillion per year of funny money to “only” $900 billion, was so small.

And of course, looming over all of this is the impact of Obamacare’s exorbitant premiums and sky-high deductibles on Americans’ spending hablts — something Wallace and McCalmont “somehow” forgot to mention.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

And the headline says it all:

Survey: Consumers Have Overwhelmingly Poor Outlook For 2014 Economic Recovery

Maybe we can put it this way: are these economic “experts” lying about the economic recovery?  “Not wittingly.”

As to this “recovery”:

WHAT RECOVERY? George Will Exposes Obama’s Failed Economic Record (Video)
Posted by Jim Hoft on Thursday, January 2, 2014, 6:47 PM

What recovery? George Will tonight exposed the Obama administration’s failed economic record. He nailed it.

“The recession began in December 2007. Since then we’ve added 13 million more Americans are in the country and we have 1.3 million fewer jobs. We’ve lowered the unemployment largely, not entirely, but largely because workforce participation rate has gone down as more and more workers have been discouraged and are no longer count any more because they’re no longer looking for work. If the workforce participation rate today were as high as it was when the recession began the unemployment rate would be 11.3%. We wouldn’t be calling it a poor recovery because it wouldn’t count as a recovery at all.”

George is right. The employment-population ratio the last twenty years has bottomed out during the Obama years — that is, the percentage of Americans above age 16 who work for a living.
The chart clearly shows the results of Barack Obama’s failed economic policies.

** Zero Hedge has more stats on how Obama’s policies have damaged the American economy.

I have written about Obama’s dreadful (and continually getting worse under his watch) labor participation rate, which is the measure of adult Americans who actually have JOBS.

In November 2010 it was 64.5% under Obama, which meant that the lowest percentage of Americans actually had jobs in 25 years.  But things had “improved” under Obama’s watch so that by August of 2011 it had plummeted to 63.9% and the worst in 27 years (the worst since January 1984).  But Obama kept working to “improve” things, such that by May of 2012 fewer Americans were actually working than at any time in 31 years.

And now Obama has “fundamentally transformed” the labor force again such that only 63.0% of working-age Americans are actually WORKING (and you can see how WONDERFUL it was in comparison when Bush was president in the Bureau of Labor Statistics chart here).

Forbes points out that during the last four years of Obama, you’ve got to go back FIFTY YEARS to find a worse four-year record.  Obama has failed America in the worst possible way.  And the American people know it in spite of what they’re being told by the “experts” who are nothing more than ideologue propagandists who might as well be working for Stalin.

BECAUSE OF OBAMA and his demonic failed policies, people are not working.  And the Americans who ARE working are mostly working part time jobs as they experience the ObamaCare hell of being 49ers (small businesses with more than fifty employees are cutting their workforce to be under the 50 employee limit to stay under the draconian ObamaCare regulations) and 29ers (whose work hours are cut to keep them below the full-time employee threshold so they don’t fall under the draconian ObamaCare regulations).

People are desperate.  So Obama and his Demonic Bureaucrats (i.e., Democrats) boast about the “recovery” while at the same time they point out things have never been WORSE than they are under Obama.

You deserve this, America.  You voted for the most wicked president in history and then actually voted to RE-ELECT him.  You voted for a baby-killing murderer with the blood of 55 million murdered babies on his hands.  You voted for a sodomite worshiper who lied about his stance on gay marriage only to put his “morality” above God’s and say what God declared to be an ABOMINATION is a good thing.

Updated January 10, 2014: Hi there, kids in TV land!  Just wanted to refresh you on the very latest Obama “fundamental transformation”: the labor participation rate – the best measure of how well or how truly godawful an economy is doing to create jobs – is now 62.8 percent.  That’s right, it aint Bush, it’s Obama who has brought America to low after low after low and has now degenerated America to the worst labor participation rate in 35 years (i.e., since 1978).

Again, you deserve this, America.  And more of what you deserve is coming for your baby killing, sodomite worshiping, demon-possessed president voting ways.

It was Obama’s reverend who put it best: “No, no, no!  NOT God bless America!  God DAMN America!”

You voted for it, and you got what you voted for.

Homosexual Sexual Assaults In Military Skyrocketing – And Also Why Sexual Assaults In Military Are Skyrocketing In GENERAL

First let’s have the news from the pages of the Los Angeles Times:

Air Force member’s allegation of sex assault brings him more grief
Male victims of sexual assault in the military rarely file complaints. When Air Force security guard Trent Smith did, his life got worse, he says.
By David S. Cloud
December 30, 2013, 9:19 p.m.

TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — Shortly after he arrived at Ramstein Air Base in Germany in March 2012, Air Force security guard Trent Smith was at an off-base apartment when, he says, a male sergeant touched him and pressed him to go into the bedroom for sex.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want to spend the night,'” Smith recalled. But Smith, 20, says he felt he had no choice. “I went along with it.”

For Smith, the encounter — which he reported up the chain of command three days later — began an emotional ordeal. As the months passed, his doctors say, the trim, polite airman with an engaging smile suffered bouts of anger, guilt and depression so severe that he contemplated suicide several times.

More disturbing for a Pentagon struggling to gain control of a seeming epidemic of charges concerning rape and unwanted sexual advances in the ranks, Smith’s attempts to get help only worsened his troubles. After a lengthy investigation, the military decided that no crime had occurred, and it later moved to discharge Smith on medical grounds.

The case highlights a little-recognized reality for the male-dominated military. Although members of Congress have focused their outrage on abuse of women in uniform, the Pentagon reported in May that 53% of the estimated 26,000 troops who were raped or forced into sex last year were men.

Although women are proportionally more likely to be the victim of a sexual assault — the Defense Department estimates that 6.1% of women and 1.2% of men are victims of sexual assaults — the fact that men so vastly outnumber women in the military means that the problem affects more men than women.

Only a fraction of those alleging rape or sexual assault file complaints with military police or prosecutors, as a rule, so the Pentagon’s most recent estimates are based on a confidential survey of service members. Smith was among those who did file an official report.

After a six-month criminal investigation, Brig. Gen. Charles K. Hyde, then commander of the 86th Airlift Wing at Ramstein, decided the sex was consensual, according to case records. The sergeant was admonished for an “unprofessional relationship” with a lower-ranking airman, the lightest punishment possible.

The Times is not naming the sergeant because he was not charged. He declined an interview request through a base spokesman at Ramstein. The spokesman, Maj. Tony Wickman, said the sergeant was considered an “above-average airman.”

As usual, of course, I turn out to be completely correct in my predictions from 2010:

In my “day” in the Army, soldiers in the infantry that I served in just would not have tolerated openly homosexual soldiers.  There would have been blanket parties galore, until the gay-berets got the message that they were most definitely not wanted.  I don’t know that that will happen today, but I just can’t imagine the mindset has changed that much in the years I’ve been out (by which I mean out of the military, and not, you know, “out”).

I heard a Democrat representative today say that the military is having a hard time keeping up its recruiting goals, and so therefore it’s stupid to deny thousands of gay men and women the opportunity to serve.  What that omits is the fact that there are a lot of heterosexual men and women who don’t want to be forced to shower and sleep right next to same-sex soldiers who may well want nothing more than to have “relations” with them.  There are also a lot of young men who continue to have something of that Judeo-Christian worldview who rightly believe that homosexuality is a serious moral issue, and these young men aren’t going to want to be forced to trust people that they don’t trust with their lives.

“Missile defense” is about to take on a whole new meaning.

And lo and behold, or for you French-surrender-monkey-loving liberals,  voilà.  Missile defense has taken on a whole new meaning under Obama just as I TOLD YOU SO.

Not only a  majority but a whopping majority – as in an even slightly larger majority that constituted a “landslide” for Obama in 2008 – of the rape cases involve some poor bastard who didn’t have adequate “missile defense” against some homosexual sodomy soldier (or sailor, because after all the openly homosexual Village People did sing that song, “In the Navy”).  Fully 53% of the rape cases in the military are men getting raped by other men.

The LA Times wants you to think that the 53% of cases of rape being against men is irrelevant given the ratio of male troops to female troops.  But I hasten to point out that less than 2% of the population is homosexual – and that “10% figure” is a giant load of crap that is merely a bellwether of the insane ideology of everyone reporting this easily refuted statistic as if it were even remotely true.  So we’ve definitely got the “gay military” I described back in 2008.  And if you don’t have kung fu missile defense, you’d better stay the hell out of Obama’s military unless you’re a guy who likes being the girl during your rape.  In which case you’ve come to the right place signing up for a tour of rump ranger duty.

I think of our prison system, where that less-than-2% of our population for some unknown reason (other than the biblical fact that their lifestyle is an “ABOMINATION” and “A DETESTABLE ACT”) constitute a massive percentage of our inmate population.  Go to prison or jail and you’re extremely likely to run into one of these innocent, wonderful homosexuals the media and the Democrat Party are so in love with.  To wit: if you’re entering the military or if you’re entering the prison system and you’re a heterosexual, sorry, dude.  Keep up with that “missile defense” and just do the best you can.  And remember that when they bend you over, you’re sacrificing your “virginity” for Obama’s glory.

This is the funny thing (unless you happen to be a heterosexual serviceman): sexual assaults in the military HAVE SKYROCKETED under the first “gay president” (aforementioned “gay” thing being according to überleftist MSNBC and Newsweek just in case you don’t want to take my word for it).

As an example, military sexual assault cases “skyrocketed” in 2012, according to the news reports.  Their words.  But then “there were more reported sexual assaults in the military in the first nine months of fiscal year 2013 than in all of fiscal year 2012.”  So let’s just say that the rate of the “skyrocketing” has “skyrocketed.”

And yes, that’s “rocket” as in what the poor bastard tries to protect himself from with “missile defense.”

Let me explain why it is that sexual assaults have skyrocketed under “first gay president” Obama.  It’s actually very simple: because Obama has purged “religion and morality” from the military that as “commander-in-chief” he has so much control over.  And without “religion and morality” you have NO MORALITY AT ALL.

I’ve pointed out the following point again and again:

Washington [as in George Washington, the Father of our country] said:

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality. If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all this, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life. And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism. He says in the very next sentence (immediately continuing from the quote above):

“In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

Washington says, Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I won’t allow them to call themselves a patriot. Because they are trying to destroy the country.

George Washington said:

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” –- George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

John Adams completely agreed:

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

Barack Hussein and the Democrat Party that stinks of all things Hussein are traitors to America and guilty of treason according to the men who fathered America and wrote our Constitution.  PERIOD.

Why were our founding fathers so right and Obama and the entire Democrat Party so treasonously and so wickedly wrong???

I wrote a brief response to a comment this morning that I think does a reasonable job expressing the reason why:

This gets to a far deeper problem with secular humanism: there ARE no grounds for morality.  To wit, if I am an atheist, what do I have to do such that I am not a “good atheist” the way one could easily point out that one is not a “good Christian” by comparing his or her moral behavior to the ethics of the Bible.  THERE IS NOTHING.  Stalin and Hitler and Mao were all “good atheists” even though they are responsible for way, WAY over the murders of 100 million people (and yes, for the official record, Hitler WAS an atheist, having been described as such by key members of his inner circle like Joseph Goebbels in private journals.

As an example of that last, here is the entry into Goebbels’ personal diary, dated 8 April 1941 (Tues):

“The Fuhrer is a man totally attuned to antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity. According to Schopenhauer, Christianity and syphilis have made humanity unhappy and unfree. What a difference between the benevolent, smiling Zeus and the pain-wracked, crucified Christ. The ancient peoples’ view of God was also much nobler and more humane than the Christians’. What a difference between a gloomy cathedral and a light, airy ancient temple. He describes life in ancient Rome: clarity, greatness, monumentality. The most wonderful republic in history. We would feel no disappointment, he believes, if we were now suddenly to be transported to this old, eternal city.”

Similarly, in a 1939 diary entry, Goebbels pointed out that Hitler had “expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity.”

Hitler said a bunch of things about Christianity, such as that Christianity was the invention of sick minds.  Hitler was an atheist who pointed out to his inner circle that “after difficult inner struggles I had freed myself of my remaining childhood religious conceptions. I feel as refreshed now as a foal on a meadow.”

Liberals are fascists who believe what Hitler said to the masses because Hitler spoke as the Führer of Big Government Socialism (NAZI standing for “National Socialist German Workers Party”) and to them Government is God.  The morality of God must be supplanted and replaced with the “morality” of the State.  They ignore the fact that Hitler was a demon-possessed LIAR who told the people one thing and told his trusted inner circle something very different (the truth).

So what does one have to do to be a “bad atheist”???  What IS morality to these people???  And the answer is as chilling as the worst of Stalinism: it is whatever the hell they SAY it is at any given moment.

So Obama was a “good liberal” when he said that marriage was the union between one man and one woman in 2008, and he was a good liberal for saying the exact OPPOSITE the moment political expediency enabled him to do so.  Because ultimately the “morality” of liberalism is dishonesty and abject personal hypocrisy.

I like the morality of the Bible better.  Because “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever,” whereas the “morality” of liberalism is a constantly shifting thing that always and only benefits liberals and their perversions.

The reason that morality is irrelevant to liberal Democrats is the reason that Obama could swear in 2008 that “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman” [and in fact said it on the very eve of the 2008 election to make sure we all heard him lying] and then said the EXACT OPPOSITE THING when it was convenient for him to do so.  Because liberalism stands for NOTHING but more liberalism.  It’s the same reason that your NEXT Democrat candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, did the same damn stinking lying dishonest depraved thing.

I repeat the moral lecture from a liberal to me, who said:

surely you cannot be so ignorant as to believe the eight mentions of homosexuality in the Bible are appropriate for total guidance in modern situations.

Because he prefers Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s constantly shifting stand and just as constantly self-centered and self-serving “morality” to the eternal morality of God and His Word.

“Morality” to a liberal is whatever the hell he or she wants it to be at any constantly shifting moment in time.  And of course every single time it shifts it will reinforce the ideology of liberalism.  And every single time it shifts it will agree with Satan and his depraved world and disagree with God and His Word.

If secular humanist liberals tell us not to rape, what does it matter???  Tomorrow they’ll tell us something very different, for one thing.  And give that liberals believe in evolution, aren’t they contradicting themselves???   Because after all:

The males of most species—including humans—are usually more eager to mate than the females, and this enables females to choose among males who are competing with one another for access to them. But getting chosen is not the only way to gain sexual access to females. In rape, the male circumvents the female’s choice [p. 53, A Natural History of Rape, MIT Press, 2000,  Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer].

These evolutionists make it very clear that we’re rapists by evolutionary biology:

“Human rape arises from men’s evolved machinery for obtaining a high number of mates in an environment where females choose mates” (p. 190, emp. added). They further state that “[e]volutionary theory applies to rape, as it does to other areas of human affairs, on both logical and evidentiary grounds. There is no legitimate scientific reason not to apply evolutionary or ultimate hypotheses to rape” (p. 55). In their proposed “scientific” evolutionary reasons why men rape women, they suggest that in some cases heavy metals such as lead “disrupt psychological adaptations of impulse control,” which may lead to a “higher rate of criminality” (p. 58). They state, “[l]ead may account for certain cases of rape, just as mutations may” (p. 58).

Of course, in our new gay military, the male circumvents the [politically unprotected] male’s choice, too.

No lesser evolutionary authority than William Provine pointed out that atheism and evolution equals zero morality or ethics:

“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”

So the facts are (according to secular humanist liberal Democrats) that: 1) there is no God and that therefore 2) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists which means that 3) Human rape arises from men’s evolved machinery.  and of course 4) the facts may change tomorrow when liberals say they changed 5) in order to suit liberals.  Oh, and 6) people vote “Democrat” because they are mindless and soulless meat puppets devoid of anything resembling free will.

And you seriously wonder why sexual assaults are flourishing in the age of Obama???

I just wonder when Newsweek will rightly put Obama on the cover as “the first buttrape president.”  I know that’s a truly crude term, but as ObamaCare rears its massively intrusive governmental ding dong and starts pushing it up their rears, that’s precisely how a lot of people who AREN’T either in the military or the prison system will feel…