What’s Wrong With Hillary Clinton’s Economic Plan? Plenty, But Here’s The Bottom Line

So Hillary Clinton’s basic economic pitch is that she is going to “level the playing field” by punishing Wall Street and big businesses and allowing all those horrible profits to be shared by the American people.  And it will be oh, so good for us and oh, so bad for those terrible, greedy, evil Wall Street firms and corporations.

Sounds good.  At least it sounds good to people who either aren’t that honest, or aren’t that bright, or are neither honest nor bright.

For one thing, Hillary Clinton has taken more filthy, greedy money from Wall Street than ANY politician in the ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD has EVER taken.  To express it in the form of a headline, “Clinton is the Wall Street candidate based on donation figures.”  Hillary Clinton has been bought and paid for by Wall Street.   She was paid millions – a total of at least $153 million with a shocking percentage coming not only from foreign entities but from the worst rogue nations on planet earth – to give speeches and Wall Street was one of the top U.S. entities.  And recordings or transcripts those Wall Street speeches, unlike any national security secret which she treated with cavalier disdain, are top secret classified never to see the light of day.  Even the leftist-oriented Huffington Post puts it this way: “Release of Clinton’s Wall Street Speeches Could End Her Candidacy For President.”

Hillary Clinton was paid MILLIONS to tell Wall Street what her presidency would do to benefit them.  She made very sure that all reporters were BARRED from her speeches to Wall Street firms.  Why did she do that???  She allowed NO RECORDING DEVICES other than her own recording for her own use which of course is in a vault somewhere.  Why did she do that???  And lastly, when Hillary Clinton was a Senator from New York, she was “hands off” on Wall Street in spite of the fact that Wall Street happens to be in HER state where SHE should have been in control of regulating what they did in HER district.  But she never bothered.  Why do you seriously believe she will bother now when our enemies can find out every single national security secret Hillary Clinton knew, but NOBODY can find out so much as a single word she said to Wall Street in speeches that she was paid as much as $675,000 to give???  She wouldn’t even allow PLACARDS on tables for fear that a photo might leak and the American people could see an image of who Hillary Clinton was being paid MILLIONS of dollars to talk to.  Why would she do that???

A Wall Street pay-to-play player said, “It was pretty glowing about us,” one person who watched the event said. “It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a rah-rah speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”  And that’s exactly why we will NEVER hear her speeches as she betrays the American people and betrays as a lie every single thing she now says in her campaign rhetoric.

Hillary Clinton has proven herself more than any politician who has ever LIVED that she will be a crony capitalist fascist who will do insider deals with those who offer her something in return.  She will sell out the American people for a nickel if that’s the going rate.  You can absolutely trust Hillary Clinton to sell out your interests for larger, more powerful interests every single time.  That is simply the story of her life.

The notion that this candidate is going to actually reform Wall Street in a way that would benefit anyone but Wall Street is so beyond laughable that it is beyond unreal.  You literally have to be a fool to believe that.  Mind you, there ARE plenty of intellectuals who are just such fools indeed.  Famous prophetic novelist George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an ‘intellectual’ could believe them,” because no ordinary man was capable of being such a fool.”   And the point he was making is that these people live in a giant ivory tower vacuum and none of their ideas actually have to ever be proven or even be provable in the real world to be believed.  They live in a world of theories, not in a world of facts.  They build nothing and have no grasp whatsoever on how TO build anything.  They are nothing more than eloquent ideologues consumed by hidden agendas.  Whereas people who must face reality every single day can never be so disconnected from the truth because unlike the intellectuals they would STARVE in the COLD.  I came across a meme on Karl Marx that ought to be illustrative how such foolishness contaminates minds:

Why one earth would not merely millions but BILLIONS believe so passionately in the theories of this man, who had never in his lifetime actually produced ANYTHING in the actual, real world and whose theories have failed in every single “laboratory of reality” in which they have EVER been tried???

Karl Marx was precisely one of the fools that the great author of 1984 and Animal Farm was describing.  In  fact, both books were written by a horrified Orwell as he contemplated totalitarian socialism.  The Marxist theory continues because of the sheer, ponderous weight of all the other ivory tower egghead fools who have absolutely no grasp whatsoever of actual reality.

Hillary Clinton is another such fool.  She accomplished exactly NOTHING in spite of her so-called record of accomplishment.   Even her own State Department had to REDACT her list of “achievements.” 

But as bad as that indictment of Hillary Clinton is, that actually isn’t the “bottom line” fallacy that I am describing regarding Hillary Clinton’s economic plan.  I merely cite that to try to undercut her own claims and the claims of other fools on her behalf.  Just realize that the pile of intellectual manure that is laid out comes from the minds and the belief-systems of the very worst form of fools whom no ordinary man could ever be capable of becoming because they are forced to deal with actual real-world realities that prevent them from ever being such fools.

So what is it that I am describing about what is so truly wrong with Hillary’s plan???

It boils simply down to this: Hillary Clinton is saying she will tax and regulate and force Wall Street to be more “fair” or more “just.”  And ignorant people believe that any regulation or tax or coercion on the part of government must surely be a good thing.

That’s where the bait-and-switch takes place.

What you need to understand is that Wall Street and mega-big corporate business actually WANTS higher taxes and punitive regulations and difficult compliance benchmarks.  That sentence very likely shocks you and your mind may say, “No way!”  But let me explain and hopefully you will agree with me when I lay it out.

I googled the phrase “percentage of jobs created by small businesses” and got this result:

According to the SBA’s Office of Advocacy: “Small firms accounted for 63 percent of the net new jobs created between 1993 and mid-2013 (or 14.3 million of the 22.9 million net new jobs). Since the end of the recession (from mid-2009 to mid-2013), small firms accounted for 60 percent of the net new jobs.

So you need to simply first understand that Wall Street and mega-big business are in direct competition with small businesses.

The second thing you need to understand is the crony-capitalist mindset that invariably prefers a larger share of a smaller piece of the pie than a much smaller share of a much larger piece of the pie.  Every truly awful leader understands and exemplifies this mindset, with Kim Jong-un being possibly the very best example.

Let me show you a couple of satellite images of North Korea at night compared to South Korea at night to drive home my point:

South Korea is far more like what Republicans envision where laissez-faire free market enterprise is allowed to flourish; North Korea is far more like what the Democrats envision of a State-controlled economy.  Guess which one ends up being DARK AT NIGHT because THERE’S NOTHING.

And you say, why on earth would they want that?  Why wouldn’t they want a more open and free economy where they have less power, but far more is actually produced and it is better for all the people?  And the simple answer is, “Because they wouldn’t have as much control and as much power.”

The word “fascism” comes from the Roman/Latin word, “to bundle together.”  The image was of a bundle of sticks with an axe head protruding, the concept being that when the people are all bundled together, there is power.  And of course, who controlled that bundle?  The State, the emperor.   That is what the Democratic Party wants: they want to bundle us together like sticks, so that THEY and THEY alone can control the bundle.

There’s a line from Milton’s Paradise Lost that I always remember: when Satan says, “Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.”  That’s the mindset of the left: better to have totalitarian rule over a small, impoverished economy than to be a smaller, weaker part of a large, powerful economy.

That is the quintessential essence of progressive liberalism: they want the power to dictate; they want to have the power to determine who wins and who loses, who pays and who receives, who is taxed and who is tax-exempt.

And what about Wall Street and what about the giant corporate entities.  Don’t they just want more profit for their shareholders?

You need to understand: what if we allowed small business to truly flourish?  What would happen to the market share of those great big giant corporate entities and the Wall Street that I’ve already established and documented owns Hillary Clinton and flourishes off of trading those giant corporate entities???

Now let me ask you a follow-up question: which would have an easier time paying higher taxes, great big corporations or small business owners???  Think about this and ANSWER it before you go on: who has an easier time coming up with an extra ten, twenty thousand dollars???  Who is going to be hurt more: the big corporation or the little business?  Let me go on: which would have an easier time complying with a dizzying array of regulations and compliance burdens and costs???  Would the great big corporation or the small business owner have an easier time hiring a full-time compliance officer???

When you actually THINK about it, these are no-brainers.  Just as it is a historic no-brainer that tax cuts increase revenues and have ALWAYS increased revenues as businesses are allowed to keep more of their own money and expand and grow and it is ultimately good for everyone in the form of more wealth and more opportunity for all.

It is BEYOND OBVIOUS that that great big business has a considerably easier time dealing with the increased costs imposed by Democrats than the small business owner.

Small businesses are CRIPPLED by these costs.

Which is why entrepreneurship is at an all-time low because of the Obama administration.

Which is why new small business start-ups are at an all-time low because of the Obama administration.

Our labor participation rate – the measure of the percentage of working-age Americans who actually have a damn JOB – is basically at the lowest rate in history, given that in 1977 which is the last time it was as low as Obama has made it now, we had far more stay-at-home moms as dad went off to work.  A hundred million working-age Americans AREN’T.

Home ownership has declined to its lowest level in 51 years under Obama.  Which like the labor participation rate is basically in the entire history of the statistic being kept.

You find that under Obama, the rich got way, WAY richer and everyone else got poorer as the income gap soared to heights we’ve never seen.  Even Bernie Sanders got that.  And Politifact was forced to agree that under Obama things are worse than they’ve ever been going back to the damn 1920s.

HuffPo has an article titled, “Middle Class Jobs, income, Quickly Disappearing.”  The New York Times says, “Middle Class Shrinks Further as More Fall Out Instead of Climbing Up.”  MSNBC has an article titled, “The Vanishing of the Middle Class.”

These aren’t right-wing sources.  And if they WERE actually FAIR they would depict their articles the way they would if a REPUBLICAN were in the White House, a la “Obama’s War on the Middle Class: The real story behind “hope” and “change.”

This Forbes article probably best nails the dilemma that Obama and the Federal Reserve that is struggling to monetize Obama’s failed policies have placed the United States in.

These are things called facts and I am explaining to you precisely WHY they are facts.

It is like this by design.  You’ve been sold out.  Obama was bought and sold and Hillary Clinton is more bought and more sold than any human being who ever lived.

Over the last eight years, Barack Obama – and now Hillary Clinton is actually promising to do even worse for another eight years- and those under them who control the “bundle of sticks” that we all now ARE thanks to these policies have sold our collectivist souls to the devil.

Let me get back to that all-telling statistic involving entrepreneurship and new business start-ups being DESTROYED by this president like we have never seen.

Would the market share of the giant firms go up or down if the smaller businesses were allowed to actually be unleashed as they were allowed to keep more of their profits and put those profits back into their businesses and be forced to comply with fewer stupid regulations that incur thousands of hours of compliance paperwork???  And the answer is that the pie would grow larger, but the Wall Street- and the corporate-share of that pie would grow much smaller as small businesses grew and grew and grew and were ultimately large enough to become big players themselves.

So let me just quickly lay it out for you: when a Barack Obama or a Hillary Clinton – who are owned lock, stock and barrel by Wall Street and by the mega-corporations – gets into power, they create laws and taxes and regulations and compliance factors that they invite the great big giant entities to write on a pay-to-play basis.

And the biggest players write the laws to shut out their smaller competition, understanding that if they can strangle those smaller businesses and stop them from being able to build and grow and compete with them, that they will get to remain at the top of the heap for decades, even for generations.

The economic purpose of the Democrat Party is to ensure that the very biggest players remain the very biggest players and the smaller competitors are never truly allowed to compete.  The giant Wall Street and corporate dinosaurs don’t want that smarter, more agile mammal to come along and eat their eggs and finish off their road to extinction.  No.  they will continue to maintain the Democratic Party as the engine to maintain the status quo so that that new mammal can never evolve to threaten them.

If you elect Hillary Clinton, you WILL get more of the same; you WILL get a smaller pie with the largest players – who each paid the system for the privilege of remaining the largest players – having the giant share.  And you WILL get fewer jobs, fewer opportunities, and lower wages as a result.

THAT is what is wrong with Hillary Clinton’s economic plan, just as it was wrong with Obama’s economic plan.  Because it’s the same damn tired plan that is nothing more than a watered-down version of Marxism.

 

When Will Full-Of-Crap Liberals Who Believe Democrats Are With The Little Guy And Against The Big Guy Wake Up And Grow Up?

I wrote an article damning Diane Sawyer for being a leftwing propagandist who used her interview with Gabrielle Giffords to demonize Sarah Palin.  And I got this response:

Diane Sawyer is about as Right-Wing and Conservative as it gets. She never met a big business she didn’t let take her up the rump.

The issue here isn’t how Sarah Palin was defamed and demonized; it’s not even about how Diane Sawer defamed and demonized Sarah Palin.  The issue is the idiotic notion that “right wing” or “conservative” people are in bed with big business, as opposed to the assertion that liberals are above such vile behavior.

Idiocy in general pisses me off; and when it’s liberal idiocy it pisses me off even more.  So I responded:

Oh, is that the definition of right wing?

So Barack Obama, who is in bed with GE, is right wing? And when Obama gave one of his donors $535 million in government money (after giving the auto company billions upon billions of dollars that we’ll never get back) that went down a black hole that was right wing? When Obama played the same game you’re playing to demonize conservatives while touting Jon Corzine – who has proven himself to be more of a scumbag than ANYBODY – was that “conservative”?

Here’s something interesting for your consideration: Wall Street “fatcats” have fared FAR better in just 2 1/2 years under Obama (raking in $83 billion) than they fared under Bush in EIGHT years ($77 billion). Which means that apparently Obama is actually vastly more “conservative” than Bush was, on your truly asinine view of reality.

You truly are ignorant, Mr. You Say. You have the most naive concept of “liberalism” imaginable. Every time I talk to a liberal, I walk away shaking my head in amazement at what fools you people are.

As a conservative, I want small, limited government that embraces laissez faire capitalism. Government and business aren’t in bed together under a conservative system; government isn’t taking in huge money from business because government has put itself in the position to make or break any business or any industry which forces businesses to make these giant political payoffs. No, it is YOUR LIBERALISM that guarantees that a giant big government that has all kinds of power can dictate all kinds of influence over business – and that business will therefore necessarily spend billions and billions of dollars to try to influence such an all-powerful government. I know that many Republicans cave in under a system that was “fundamentally transformed” by FDR and government unions running amok in every branch of government; but the fact of the matter is that we conservatives want government influence OUT of business and business’ crony capitalism OUT of government – while you liberals want more of both.

Lastly, Barack Obama has taken more money from Wall Street than ANYBODY in the history of politics. You know, the most liberal Senator who became the most liberal president.

Wake up and grow up, YouSay.

Let me take a moment to elaborate.

Barack Obama handpicked Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, as one of his senior economic advisers.  And not only is G.E. subsidiary NBC shockingly biased to the left (with cousin MSNBC being even more shockingly liberally biased), but G.E. has taken every crony capitalist advantage of the numerous liberal government regulations (such as the new government ban on cheap incandescent bulbs) to make itself rich.  G.E. has also taken extensive advantage of Obama’s green energy bullcrap to produce billions in nearly useless green gizmos at massive taxpayer-subsidized expense.  And on top of that Obama’s economic adviser paid ZERO taxes and sent one-fifth of its jobs to China.

I know, I know.  How “conservative” of Obama.

So what else did “conservative” Obama – who only cares about little people and not at all about great big giant companies or filthy rich donors – do?

He gave $535 million to one of his donors to piss away before going bankrupt.  And of course the Obama regime also structured the loan in such a way that the American people would end up holding the bag rather than Obama’s friends.

Wow!  Obama must be a conservative Republican!  No one else would ever do anything like that!

Then there’s the recently revealed fact that Jon Corzine decided – very much like the liberal he is – that he could make better use of $630 million in investor money without their knowledge or consent than the investors could.

Jon Corzine ripped a bunch of little people off, pure and simple.  Jon Corzine created the fourth largest bankruptcy in American history.

And what had Obama said about this arrogant little weasel?

Here’s what Mr. Obama said in October 2009 while stumping for Mr. Corzine’s re-election bid as the Democratic governor of New Jersey:

• “You’ve had an honorable man, a decent man, an honest man, at the helm of this state. … He’s fought for what matters to ordinary folks.”

• “People…say, ‘You know, I was saving up all my life. …. Suddenly, because of this financial crisis, I may have to go back to work.’ “

• “Jon knows these are challenging times. This is why he got into public service. He didn’t do it for the paycheck.”

• “This crisis…came about because of the same theories, the same lax regulation, the same trickle-down economics that the other guy’s party has been peddling for years.”

• “Jon’s got the mop and he’s cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.”

“One of the things you’ve got in Jon Corzine is somebody who tells it to you straight,” Mr Obama said.

Obama vice president Joe Biden said even more:

“I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said Jon, what do you think we should do,” Biden said. “The reason we called Jon is that we knew that he knew about the economy, about world markets, how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew. It was because he had been in the pit — because he had been in the furnace. And we trusted his judgment.”

Well, that’s got to be proof-positive that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are a pair of evil conservatives.   Surely only a conservative would stand behind a man who would steal hundreds of millions of dollars from little people.

Either that or all of the bumper sticker slogans that stand in stead of liberal “thought” are totally full of crap, that is.

Then there’s the factoid about the Wall Street “fatcats”:

The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data.

Wall Street firms — independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They earned more in the first 2¹/₂ years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show.

So Obama is publicly denouncing Wall Street “fatcats” and claiming to stand with the little guy against said fatcats while in reality he’s rewarding them four times more than Bush ever did.  A very “conservative” thing to do for a mindless liberal imbecile, I might add.  Which only adds to the confusion surrounding the fact that for some reason these selfsame Wall Street fatcats gave Obama more campaign money in 2008 than they had ever given to any presidential candidate in the history of the planet:

The audacity is breathtaking.

The president has raised more money from Wall Street through the Democratic National Committee and his campaign account than any politician in American history. This year alone, he has raked in more cash from bank employees, hedge fund managers and financial services companies than all Republican candidates combined.

Even poor Mitt Romney was outraised by the Obama money machine at his former employer, Bain Capital, by a margin of 2 to 1.

It is a campaign operation whose wheels are greased by Wall Street bundlers like MF Global former chief, Jon Corzine. These financiers are so good at what they do that the Center for Responsive Politics reports that Obama’s Wall Street fundraising will “far surpass 2008 in terms of raw dollars and as a percentage of what he raises overall.”

That’s saying a lot considering that Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008 raised more money from the financial community than any other politician in American history.

According to Reuters, Wall Street accounted for 20 percent of the president’s campaign funds because of a massive cash haul from Goldman Sachs, AIG, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup.

You can start to understand why I have such naked contempt for liberals.  Every single thing they believe is nothing more than a self-serving, self-righteous hypocrite lie.

Take yet another example that is currently going on all around us: the “99 percenters versus the 1 percenters.”  Just how stupid is that?  I, for one, earn nowhere NEAR $250,000 a year.  And yet I am hardly with those Occupy morons – just as the vast majority of the nation is not with them.  On the other hand, look who IS with them and tell me if you actually believe that the American Nazi Party represents 99 percent of the American people.

Again, as a conservative, I don’t want a government so big and powerful – and having so much power to tax and regulate and make or break – that businesses must kowtow to such a government and attempt to bribe their way to favors.  That’s what liberals want.  They’re the ones who want an all-powerful government that doles out benefits and decides who wins and who loses.  They’re the ones who created the present favoritism-based patronage system in the FDR years.  And they’re the ones who are fighting the “good fight” to ensure that that patronage system doesn’t change one iota.

Wake up and grow up, Democrats. And stop spouting your demagogic Marxist class-warfare lies. Because the actual facts point a damning finger at YOU.

Update 4/23/12: Just to further document how incredibly corrupt Barack Obama is, Jon Corzine is STILL bundling campaign cash for him.

AP-Reported FACT: U.S. Economy The Worst Since The LAST Time We Let A Socialist Run It

The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:

U.S. Recovery’s 2-Year Anniversary Arrives With Little To Celebrate
First Posted: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET Updated: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.

After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

[…]

But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:

— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

[…]

Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.

[…]

Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.

“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”

Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.

The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.

How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.

Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:

“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”

The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???

WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s?  WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?

And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama???  And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:

Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”

But here’s the truth:

FDR prolonged — not ended — great depression

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

[…]

”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared.  So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.

These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums.  Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology.  There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.

I can simply re-cite my conclusion from a previous article to find a particularly laughable example of this phenomena:

I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather.  And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.

Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???

It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure.  It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.

The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein.  The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.

The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”

The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.

There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading.  Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements.  The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford.  And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes.  Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs.  Folsom provides the official data to back it up.

Check out this fact from page 127 of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%.  Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues.  By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%).  Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected.  Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits.  And they created millions of jobs in doing so.

And guess what?  Regulations mandating higher wages are STILL killing jobs now that Obama is doing it.

And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN.  Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations.  They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money.  And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone.  Just like they did with FDR.

Here we are today, with “the New FDR,” Barack Obama.  Who is the top dog on Obama’s economic team?  Why lo and behold, it is none other than GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, crony capitalist extraordinaire whose big corporation has REPEATEDLY benefitted from a cozy insider relationship with big government.  And consider how Obama literally took big auto makers GM and Chrysler away from their legitimate shareholders and gave them to big unions.

Regarding “crony capitalism,” I made a sweeping statement in a previous article:

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  What did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

I stand by that sweeping statement.  People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people.  As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:

But rigid opposition from Democrats – especially Democrats like Senator Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie and Freddie and dirty crony capitalism outfits like corrupt Lehman Bros. than ANYONE in his short Senate stint – prevented any “hope and change” of necessary reform from saving the US economy.

The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Times pointed out:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM.  It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.

The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”  It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.”  Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are.  But Wallison is nonpartisan

Barack and Michelle Obama have a documented personal history of crony capitalism:

The Chicago way is a very, very ugly way.  And Obama has been in it up to his eyeballs.  Chicago is a dirty place filled with dirty politicians – and Obama was perfectly at home with all the dirt.

That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle.  This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office.  And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.

Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:

Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.

I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.

Take a look at what’s happening to small businesses, which create at least half of all the jobs in America, under Obama.  How about the fewest new business startups since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it:

Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.

And we can tie this right back to crony capitalism, as Obama has created a system in which larger businesses are protected against the threat of competition from smaller businesses:

Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations  for their  own industry because they know that they can handle all of the  rules and  paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can.   After all, a  large corporation with an accounting department can easily  handle filling out a  few thousand more forms, but for a small business  with only a handful  of employees that kind of paperwork is a major  logistical nightmare.

When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has  made the  process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses  that it is  hardly worth it anymore.  Things have gotten so bad that more  small  businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or  independent  contractors.

So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses  have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do  whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time   employees.

And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help?  Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Business points out that small businesses are planning to SHRINK rather than EXPAND their payrolls under Obama.  From the New York Times:

A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011

In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.

That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.

The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.

While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.

“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.

So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?

And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.

An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs.  That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits.  And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden.  Just to name a few.  The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.

Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too.  Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008.  Did Obama make it better?  Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.”  Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.

The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job.  Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.

Snow A Real Damper For Global Warming, But True Believers Are Insulated In A Leftwing Cocoon Of Lies

I got a response to an article I wrote titled “Global Warming ‘Scientists’ Admit Purging Their Raw Data” from someone referring to himself as “Mechanical Engineer.”  Here’s how he lectured me:

The data that was thrown out was not the only data that was collected around the world.

Take some time and rather than read some idiot’s opinion, do your own research. If you have any intelligence, there is only one conclusion – the atmospher [sic] is geating [sic] warmer. WAKE UP AMERICA. Scientist [sic] are scientist, not lying politicians and not ignorant columnist [sic].

Corporations do not care about you or the environment, so the last thing they would want is for the people to have knowledge.

“The ten warmest years on record have all occured [sic] since 1995″

For starters, you can visit NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmopsheric [sic] Administration). I’m trying to teach you to fish!! let’s see if you starve America ?!!!

And here is my response:

Mechanical Mind,

You might be great at teaching people to fish. If so, please stick with it. You’re sure not good at teaching people to think.  All you can do is recite the pseudo-scientific propaganda that someone poured into your head.

Your “science” is ideology, and whenever the science gets in the way of your ideology, so much the worse for your “science.”

We went from “global warming” to “climate change” because we clearly WEREN’T warming, and “climate change” provided the left with the rhetorical device to entirely deny their previous arguments and to essentially actually argue that it’s so damn cold because it’s so damn hot. And it was “justified” “scientifically” by “researchers” who were saying to one another stuff like:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Then you find out that the “trick” of “hiding the decline” was even more insidious than merely camouflaging the fact that it’s not getting warmer, but rather the very heart of their case in terms of proxy reconstructions of data.

So much for your “Scientist are scientist [sic], not lying politicians and not ignorant columnist [sic]” remark.

And with all due respect for your “science” and your sneering contempt to conceal the fact that you have been disproven time and time again, it is all complete BULLCRAP:

In 2000, global warmers shrilly assured us that “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

The problem with that “scientific” prediction based on the “fact” of global warming is that it turned out to be completely FALSE:

Ski resorts’ woe: Too much snow
Fierce storms that closed roads on key weekends prevented many potential visitors from driving to the slopes this season
May 21, 2011 | Hugo Martin

California ski operators often complain that they don’t have enough snow. This year, they’re complaining that they had too much.

Mountain resorts saw a 12% decline in skiers and snowboarders this season compared with the previous one, with attendance falling to about 7.1 million, according to the California Ski Industry Assn., the nonprofit trade group for the state’s major winter sports areas.

Your mantra that “corporations do not care about you or the environment” reveals your real problem: you are a socialist. You might be some hybrid consisting in part fascist, part Marxist, and pure distilled fool.

Socialists do not care about you, the environment, or anything but their total power and control over the masses. And they use naked indoctrination to GET that control.

As for the mainstream media that have bought the global warming lie hook, line and sinker – because pseudo-scientists like YOU taught them how to “fish” – I pointed out in a comment just yesterday:

A Soviet correspondent once said of the American mainstream media, “I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world — in the field of advertizing — and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency … Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious … I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours … and we tend to disbelieve ours.”

And it is a rather easy thing to document that those “experts” are entirely leftwing:

Walter Lippmann – who shaped progressive “journalism,” said, “The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.” He referred to democracy as “the manufacture of consent” and said citizens “are mentally children.” He said:

“In the absence of institutions and education by which the environment is so successfully reported that the realities of public life stand out very sharply against self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class…”

Meanwhile his progressive pal Edward Bernays said things like:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It is the LEFT that wants to erect an elite class that rules the lives of the rest of the people. By whatever means necessary, including propaganda and lies. It is the LEFT that wants to erect a giant omnipotent state that replaces God. It is the LEFT that wants to create a world in which everyone has to come to THEM to get the basic essentials for existence and thus control those existences.

It is the left that is telling all the lies.

For the record, mechanically clueless, you just parroted one of those lies that were passed from global warming alarmist “scientists” to their parrots in the mainstream media which has since been entirely refuted. It is a LIE that “the ten warmest years on record have all occured [sic] since 1995.” And thank God for the “idiots” – as you would have called them – who forced the correction after “science” bowed down before leftist ideology.

1934 is now the hottest, and 3 others from the 1930’s are in the top 10. Furthermore, only 3 (not 9) took place since 1995 (1998, 1999, and 2006). The years 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 are now below the year 1900 and no longer even in the top 20.

Sorry, Mr. Sneering Ignorant Liberal, but your “facts” just got flushed down the toilet with the rest of the fecal matter.

I am increasingly alarmed by the stupidity and ignorance that is coming out of our university system.

The power of the university used to be to teach students how to think.  Students learned a diverse range of subjects that not only broadened their academic range, but forced them to apply what they learned and forced them to research and express their ideas about what they had learned.

It was too tempting for liberals – who progressively purged conservatives from academia via tactics that were frankly Stalinist.  So nowadays professors simply tell students what to think, require them to fill their minds with blatant propaganda, and then force them to spit that propaganda back out in order to get the approval of a decent grade.

It’s just no wonder that we end up with minds and thinking like “Mechanical Engineer’s.”

Obama Keeps Attacking Businesses, Yet Keeps Demanding They Create More Jobs While He Attacks Them

It’s not all that unlike a drunk husband punching his wife in the face every day while constantly saying she needs to love him more:

Editorial: Dems Blame Business For Own Bad Policies
Posted 07:02 PM ET

Economy: President Obama says he wants businesses to “step up” and hire more. If he’s really sincere about wanting more jobs, he should stop demonizing and punishing American corporations for their success.

‘Companies … (are) making a lot of money,” President Obama told a town hall meeting Thursday, “and now’s the time for them to start betting on American workers and American products.”

But the fact they’re not “betting” more isn’t their fault. It’s Obama’s — and his Democrat allies in Congress. Their tax-and-spend policies have pushed our nation to the brink of financial ruin, creating uncertainty and an unstable investment environment for companies.

The president let his true feelings slip later Thursday, telling a laid-off government worker there’s “nothing more important” than working for the government. He then blamed “huge layoffs” in government for our current job ills. So why do businesses have to “step up”?

There are, as a matter of record, 418,000 more government jobs today than when the recession began, as noted by the National Review’s Jim Geraghty. And face it, government “jobs” are mostly a waste, far below the private sector in productivity.

Even so, Democrats have in recent weeks implied repeatedly that companies are somehow unpatriotic for refusing to invest the $2 trillion in cash on their books.

But what sane company would invest at a time when it’s in the government’s greedy cross hairs? Or when both the White House and Congress repeatedly criticize “millionaires and billionaires,” and threaten to crush small businesses — the engines of job growth — with higher taxes and new regulations?

As Obama spoke about jobs Thursday, oil CEOs were being grilled by Senate Democrats at a hostile hearing. Their crime? They’re making fat profits. Time was, profits were a sign of success. Today, far-left Democrats think “profit” is a dirty word.

For the record, oil companies’ profits are up because oil prices have soared. This isn’t due to “speculators,” but to the White House’s foolish policy of keeping hundreds of millions of barrels of offshore oil off-limits — driving up prices and boosting foreign dependence.

Instead, the White House subsidizes money-losing alternative energy sources, none of which is ready to replace our current energy supply. Prices can only go up.

Then there’s Boeing, one of America’s great companies. It wants to open a $2 billion factory in South Carolina, creating thousands of new jobs. A cause for celebration by the White House? Hardly.

The National Labor Relations Board has charged Boeing with a labor-law violation because South Carolina is one of 22 right-to-work states. If you look at which party gets union donations, you’ll understand why.

Fact is, we’re 7 million jobs short of where we were when the recession began, there are eight unemployed people for every job opening and, despite April’s gain of 244,000, we still aren’t creating new jobs fast enough.

Yet Obama & Co. continue to play games, destroying jobs and blaming others for the economic carnage.

I learned today that the oil companies receive 13% of the tax subsidies for the energy industry.  And produce 67% of all the energy America uses.  All the other energy sources combined – including all the “green” energy sources the left loves so much – receive 87% of the tax subsidies.  Even though they produce only 33% of all the energy America uses.  So Democrats want to drive the producers of two-thirds of our energy out of business and reward the remaining third of our energy with massive tax subsidy boondoggles.

And apparently businesses are supposed to say, “Hey, that’s brilliant!  We need to climb on board THAT kind of brilliant-mobile!!!”

Of All The Democrats Running For Office, NOT ONE OF THEM Admits To Voting For ObamaCare In Ads

There are some major condemnations against ObamaCare in the recent past.  The first major one may have been the announcement by many major corporations that they would have to take billions of dollars in write downs due to the new requirements that were going to be imposed on them.  Given that Obama had promised that businesses were going to love his new health care system, this was bad.  That was made even more glaring when the National Small Business Organization joined the lawsuit against ObamaCare.  Didn’t Obama assure us that small businesses in particular would love his beloved new health care system?

Then there has been the continual trickle of news that now at least 22 states are actively suing the imposition of ObamaCare on them, and a total of 38 are seeking to pass legislation to block its impact on their citizens.  That can’t be good, can it?  And how can this be, given how wonderful ObamaCare is supposed to be?

Then there came the revelations that the central, fundamental promise of ObamaCare was a lie:

Administration Defends Health Law Despite Medicare Report Hiking Nation’s Tab
Published April 23, 2010
FOXNews.com

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday defended the new health insurance law after a report from its own Medicare services agency showed the provisions will increase the nation’s health care tab over the next 10 years instead of bringing costs down.

The sobering assessment by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services concludes what Republicans had warned about during heated debate — that the double-counting of Medicare spending — as both savings and as a means to shore up the debt-ridden government fund for seniors’ health care — means the cost is unrealistic.

The analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs, raising projected spending by about 1 percent over 10 years, or $311 billion, up from the $222 billion previous estimated.

Other studies are confirming that, yes, health care will be more expensive because of Obama’s meddling, and Americans will spend more out of their pockets.

Now getting caught in such a huge, fundamental lie is clearly bad.  But there you have it.

But we STILL haven’t plumbed the depths of the fallout yet.  Because now we’re seeing that not only do the numbers bear out that Democrats lied, but so also does their own actions.

Take this abandonment of central promises:

Dems retreat on health care cost pitch
By BEN SMITH | 8/19/10 4:55 PM EDT  Updated: 8/20/10 3:31 PM EDT

Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to “improve it.” […]

Now one of the foremost Democrat experts in heath care, who wrote part of and pushed for and voted for the ObamaCare “reform,” is now saying he doesn’t want anything to do with the monster he helped give birth to.  That’s right, Ron Wyden voted to pass that bill before he decided to try to protect his state from the bill he voted for.

And thus we keep sinking to the bottom of the sewer.  Because now the reality of ObamaCare and the fundamental lies that got this awful, heinous, evil collection of 160 new death panel bureaucracies passed silently scream at us.

Silently because most Democrats aren’t saying anything; they’re just walking away from the despicable new boondoggle they imposed on an American people who never wanted it and loudly said they never wanted it.

There are 231 Democrats running for national office [219 Democrats for the House of Representatives, and 12 Democrat Senators as incumbents], and NOT ONE SINGLE ONE OF THEM IS RUNNING A SINGLE AD ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THEY VOTED FOR OBAMACARE.

9/05/2010
Not one Democrat in House running ads saying they supported Obamacare

Dems are unwilling to run on their votes for Obamacare.

At least five of the 34 House Democrats who voted against their party’s health care reform bill are highlighting their “no” votes in ads back home. By contrast, party officials in Washington can’t identify a single House member who’s running an ad boasting of a “yes” vote — despite the fact that 219 House Democrats voted in favor of final passage in March.

One Democratic strategist said it would be “political malfeasance” to run such an ad now.

Democrats have taken that advice to heart; it appears that no Democratic incumbent — in the House or in the Senate — has run a pro-reform TV ad since April, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) ran one.

Most of the Democrats running ads highlighting their opposition to the law are in conservative-leaning districts and considered the most endangered. They’re using their vote against the overhaul as proof of their willingness to buck party leadership and their commitment to watching the nation’s debt. . . . .

Democrats are running away from their own very own signature legislative accomplishment in a matter identical to cockroaches who are running away when the kitchen light is switched on.

You’ve got grim analyses such as this one, you know, by the people who were RIGHT ALL ALONG in saying that ObamaCare would cost FAR MORE than government functionaries said it would all along:

The bottom line is that you will lose your health care under this legislation, if not your job, your country as they bankrupt America, and maybe ultimately your life or the life of a loved one. All that to make dreamy, emotionalized, liberals happy, even though many of them are not happy because the socialism in the bill is not overt enough. Moreover, the promises made to the American people to pass the bill are shown in the study to be thoroughly false. This pattern of calculated deception, however, did not fool the American people, only members of Congress, many of whom will now pay with their jobs as a result.

Now, you can decide for yourself whether all the folks who were wrong before are right now, or whether you should believe a guy like Peter Ferrara who was right, and who says that these people STILL haven’t told you how bad ObamaCare will really be.  Me, I’m going with Pete.

This may be our last chance as a nation.  We either give Republicans enough power (by which I mean control of both the House and the Senate) to repeal and replace ObamaCare, or we may well go the way of the Dodo bird as a law that is so fundamentally terrible that even Democrats refuse to be associated with it begins to eat our nation like cancer.

Why They Are Dangerous: Liberal Justices Make Case Against The Constitution

The liberal justices pretty much say, “Screw the Constitution, except for the nonexistent “penumbra and emanations” parts of it that we can make up.”

The nonexistent right to murder your own baby that exists nowhere in the Constitution?  Check.  The clearly stated 2nd Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear arms (which) shall not be infringed”?  Well, the liberals say they don’t like it, they don’t want it to be there, so screw that right.

The Declaration of Independence makes it crystal clear: rights come from our being created in the image of God.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights

These are natural rights.  The Constitution doesn’t grant them to us; we have them naturally from God, regardless of where we live or what government we have.  And if a government doesn’t allow these natural rights to be expressed, the people have the right to remove that government.

Elena Kagan doesn’t give a damn about natural rights.  For her, they are meaningless.  Government is god; rights come at the whim of Big Brother.

That philospophy flies in the face of Abraham Lincoln’s view.  He believed that the Declaration of Independence DECLARED the foundation of and purpose for the Constitution, saying:

“I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?”

Our most fundamental rights derive from God.  They most certainly DON’T derive from government, or from the ideological whims of a bunch of half-wit morally idiotic liberal judges.

The fact that Kagan doesn’t believe that the Constitution itself derives from a more fundamental and more powerful authority, that there is no foundational moral law which itself stands above the Constitution, is why she believes that the government should have no power outside of it.  Which is why she believes that the government may have the power to dictate that you must eat your fruits and vegetables.

Another question which is emerging is exactly what constitutes judicial activism?  Is it violating the Constitution and imposing ones’ will upon it, or is it reversing a terrible decision that had violated the Constitution?

To Democrats, it is the latter:

Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, his voice dripping with sarcasm, said that for Republicans accusing Democrats of judicial activism, “I have two words for you: Citizens United,” the shorthand name of the campaign-finance case.

Democrats point to what they claim is a nearly century old Supreme Court principle limiting corporations from rights that American citizens clearly have, such as the right of free speech.  And that stare decisis makes overturning that ruling sacrosanct.

But their problem is that those who view corporations as having the same free speech rights as persons under the law has a nearly TWO century precedent supporting it:

In the United States, corporations were recognized as having rights to contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts entered into by natural persons, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, decided in 1819. In the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, the Supreme Court recognized that corporations were recognized as persons for purposes of the 14th Amendment.^[1][2]

From the railroad case:

In an 1886 tax dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state of California, the court reporter quoted Chief Justice Morrison Waite telling attorneys to skip arguments over whether the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause applied to corporations, because “we are all of opinion that it does.”

Why does violating “sacrosanct” stare decisis for “a nearly century old” precedent qualify as “judicial activism,” but violating a nearly TWO HUNDRED YEAR-OLD precedent not count as judicial activism?

Let’s set aside that we on the right have the oldest precedent on our side, such that the stare decisis argument becomes utterly null and void.  Let’s consider the merits of the case itself.  Heritage responds to that by pointing out:

However, those criticisms ignore the fact that the Austin decision on independent expenditures and the part of the McConnell decision on electioneering communications were outliers in the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. The majority’s actions in Citizens United did not constitute judicial activism, but rather upheld basic First Amendment protections against unlawful encroachments by Congress. It is not judicial activism when a judge overturns two relatively recent decisions that were wrongly decided and that are in conflict with a long line of other precedents—particularly if the decision corrects constitutional errors. If this were not true, then the same critics of the Citizens United decision must believe that Plessy v. Ferguson[15] should still be the law of the land today and racial segregation should still be considered “constitutional” since under their slanted and sophomoric definition, the justices of the Supreme Court engaged in judicial “activism” in Brown v. Board of Education.[16] After all, the justices in Brown overturned Plessy and repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine as unconstitutional—and arguably did so when they decided subsequent cases striking down similar policies by recalcitrant jurisdictions that acted contrary to Brown and its progeny.

Which is to say that the Citizens United case wasn’t a case of judicial activism, in which judges literally invented out of their own warped minds by “penumbras and emanations” a right that had never existed.  It was, rather, a case of constitutional strict constructionists restoring the constitutional principles that had existed prior to a bad law (Austin) being enacted by a group of judicial activists.

You want REAL judicial activism?  How about the liberal justices who voted to overturn the 2nd Amendment guarantee of the individual right to keep and bear arms simply because they don’t like it?

Let’s look to see the vapid legal arguments “justifying” these four moral idiots’ votes:

Gun Shy: Four Supreme Court Justices Make Case Against Constitutional Rights
Jacob Sullum

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities as well as the federal government. Judging from their objections, the four dissenters were still reeling from the court’s landmark 2008 decision recognizing that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.

In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If “the people” want to ban handguns, they say, “the people” should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.

What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.

Likewise, Stevens defends “state and local legislatures’ right to experiment,” while Breyer is loath to interfere with “the ability of states to reflect local preferences and conditions — both key virtues of federalism.” Coming from justices who think Congress can disregard state decisions about the medical use of marijuana because a plant on the windowsill of a cancer patient qualifies as interstate commerce, this sudden concern about federalism is hard to take seriously.

Another reason to doubt the dissenters’ sincerity: They would never accept federalism as a rationale for letting states “experiment” with freedom of speech, freedom of religion or due process protections. Much of their job, as they themselves see it, involves overriding “local preferences” that give short shrift to constitutional rights.

Second Amendment rights are different, Breyer says, because “determining the constitutionality of a particular state gun law requires finding answers to complex empirically based questions.” So does weighing the claims in favor of banning child pornography or depictions of animal cruelty, relaxing the Miranda rule, admitting illegally obtained evidence or allowing warrantless pat-downs, dog sniffs or infrared surveillance.

When they decide whether a law or practice violates a constitutional right, courts cannot avoid empirical questions. In cases involving racial discrimination or content-based speech restrictions, for example, they ask whether the challenged law is “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest” and is the “least restrictive means” of doing so.

But unlike equal protection or freedom of speech, Stevens says, “firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.” How so? “Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders,” he explains, “they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims.”

Every right can be abused, with results that are immoral, illegal or both. Freedom of speech can be used to spread hateful ideas, promote pernicious political philosophies, slander the innocent or engage in criminal conspiracies. If there were no potential for harm from exercising a right, there would be no need to protect it, because no one would try to restrict it.

The dissenters’ most frivolous objection is that making states obey the Second Amendment “invites an avalanche of litigation,” as Stevens puts it. Every day we hear about cases in which people argue that the government has violated their rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth or Eighth amendment. Neither Stevens nor Breyer wants to stop this “avalanche.” Only when the Second Amendment is added to the mix do they recoil in horror at the prospect that Americans will use the courts to vindicate their rights.

I have to laugh that the author of the above piece recoils in horror at the prospect of the Supreme Court voting to ban books because, if they do [read ‘when’], they’ve got a “book banning” advocate in Elena Kagan.

Justice Stevens does not have to worry that his home would be broken into by “home invasion” attackers who storm into a house and terrorize and murder the occupants in the home.  If he did, do you think he would still argue that the ability of a homeowner to protect himself and his family with a gun was somehow nullified by the fact that the criminals could have a gun, too?

Elena Kagan’s mentor was Justice Thurgood Marshall, who once famously said, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up” (see Deborah L. Rhode, “A Tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall: Letting the Law Catch Up,” in the 44 Stanford Law Review 1259 (1992).

WHAT IF WHAT THE JUSTICE THINK IS RIGHT IS REALLY DEAD WRONG?!?!?!

Activist judges have repeatedly throughout history justified slavery, segregation, and racism, abandoning the plain sense of the Constitution in order to impose their views upon the text.  Let’s not forget that it was Democrats who fought to impose slavery, and it was judicial activists who bound the country up with laws that took the bloodiest war in American history to overcome.

What did Thomas Jefferson say about the threat of Supreme Court Justices imposing their own will upon the Constitution and imposing laws on the nation based on nothing but their own wills?

“This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114

“The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other.  But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.  Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
—Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277

I don’t hear Jefferson praising “you do what you think is right and let the law catch up” as defining the role of our Supreme Court Justices.  In fact, I hear him turning in his grave over the abomination that Barack Obama’s and Elena Kagan’s philosophy is inflicting upon the nation.

[Note: I used the same quotes above in responding to the LAST abomination to the Supreme Court that Obama appointed].

Our Constitution is being poisoned by the left.  One day it will die, and they will be able to erect the Marxist-fascist state they’ve always dreamed of.

How long it will be before that evil day comes – which will undoubtedly occur in a 5-4 decision – is entirely up to you.

ObamaCare Already Rearing Its VERY Ugly Head

You’ve got to be amazed at the Democrats’ arrogance, incompetence, and ignorance.

They are apparently having their version of Casablanca’s Captain Renault moment: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Only, in this Democrat-retelling, Captain Renault instead says, “Gambling?  There’s no gambling going on here!  It’s just gaming, not GAMBLING!  Why, it’s nothing more than two parties engaging in a predictive enterprise, in which the accurate prediction is rewarded in a monetary transaction.  But gambling?  You’re a violent racist to call that ‘gambling’!!!

Oh, my goodness.  I think you just spat on me!  It’s just the kind of thing you haters who attack us as “gamblers” would do!”

MARCH 27, 2010
The ObamaCare Writedowns
The corporate damage rolls in, and Democrats are shocked!

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.

As Joe Biden might put it, this is a big, er, deal for shareholders and the economy. The consulting firm Towers Watson estimates that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion, unless corporations cut retiree drug benefits when their labor contracts let them.

Meanwhile, John DiStaso of the New Hampshire Union Leader reported this week that ObamaCare could cost the Granite State’s major ski resorts as much as $1 million in fines, because they hire large numbers of seasonal workers without offering health benefits. “The choices are pretty clear, either increase prices or cut costs, which could mean hiring fewer workers next winter,” he wrote.

The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.

The Democrats passed their totally partisan bill (the only bipartisanship was in the “Hell no!” vote, with 34 Democrats joining every single Republican).

The New York Times reported that Obama’s core promise was his pledge that he would transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, move beyond the divisive politics of Washington, and build a new governing majority that brought Democrats, independents and Republicans together.  And now we know that his fundamental, core promise was just a total lie, a massive lie of the devil.  Not only did he not try to become a unifying figure, as he cynically and deceitfully promised, but he became the most polarizing president in the history of the nation.  And that broken promise is now erupting into open rage like we have never seen in this country.

Obama is trying to demonize Republicans for the anger, but HE WAS THE ONE WHO PROMISED TO BE A TRANSCENDENT FIGURE.  HE WAS THE ONE WHO LIED.

Democrats have obfuscated every fact with spin and lies, and every single truth teller they could not bribe or intimidate they have tried to destroy.

Democrats can pass a pile of stinking lies on a 100% partisan ideological vote, but what they can’t do is make that pile of stinking lies that comprise ObamaCare actually work.  The Democrats health care law is already an open disaster, and it will continue to grow into a bigger and bigger disaster no matter how many congressional kangaroo courts they hold to demonize businesses who reported that their costs will skyrocket under this evil bill.

Obama said if you liked your health care you could keep it.  ABC was reporting that that promise was questionable back in July of last year.  Now it is a proven lie.  It was just another whopping lie of the devil all along.  Businesses are taking hits in the millions and even in the billions of dollars.  And one of them after another is going to start dumping their retirees into Medicare as the cost of offering private insurance plans soar under ObamaCare.

Obama’s reckeless spending is simply staggering.  The CBO is reporting that it is a gigantic $1.2 TRILLION more than Obama said it would be.  And they are reporting the terrifying news that the federal debt will soar to 90% of Gross Domestic Product.

Business costs are soaring.  AT & T will take a billion dollar hit because of ObamaCare.

As bad as that is in dollars, the bigger hit may well be the one taken by Caterpillar, because it shows the abject hypocrisy and fraud of ObamaCare.  Last year Obama said that “you can measure America’s bottom line by looking at Caterpillar’s bottom line.” And now that same Caterpillar is taking a $100 million hit due to ObamaCare.  Now that same Caterpillar is saying, “From our point of view, a tax increase like this cannot come at a worse time.”

That means fewer jobs for Americans.  A LOT fewer jobs.  And no denials by our Democrat version of Captain Renault can change that with his sputtering denials.

And there are other hidden provisions that are starting to leap out of this bill that Democrats passed, but apparently never bothered to read.

Now we’re finding that Americans are going to take a hit as high as $2,000 under another dark tunnel provision in ObamaCare.

“The damage is coming sooner than expected.”

That’s the nutshell summary of ObamaCare.

Obama Democrats Pull Out All Stops To Bail Out Auto Industry Carcass For Union Leaches

You remember Bill Clinton’s view of Obama, that he has the “political instincts of a Chicago thug“?  Well, we got another chance to see why that’s so today.

President Bush attempted to be the gracious host at the White House, and got a fork thrust in his eye for his trouble.  Barack Obama – with a lot of media assistance that crossed the line into blatant propaganda (for one relevant example, Chicago Tribune writer John Kass described the media’s utter refusal to examine Obama’s Chicago political connections) – portrayed himself as floating above one of the most corrupt political environments in American history in some kind of butterfly-like manner.   But you just don’t play in a filthy playground without getting dirty.

So President Bush meets with Barack Obama in a private meeting between just the two of them – and next thing you know details are emerging that President Bush is quid pro quo demanding “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” in exchange for his support for any bailout of the automakers.  We saw the use of the most potent political weapon in any American politician’s arsenal: the anonymous “leak.” And so, “Asked if the leak affected what appears to be a very smooth transition so far, the senior Bush aide said, ‘It won’t affect what we have to do … but it was disappointing. I think the Obama folks will be backing off this pretty soon.'”  And “Podesta did just that later in the day.”

Obama claims that he didn’t have anything to do with the leak intended to paint Bush into a corner on the auto bailout.  But someone on his staff sure did.  And let us not forget that Obama is pushing for that bailout that his little “leak” puts pressure on Bush to grant.  Automakers already received $25 billion in federal loans, and now they want another $25 billion.   And Obama wants to give them your great great great great grandkids’ money as a payoff to the union leaches who need the rotting carcass of the automakers to feed off of.

Democrats have spent most of the last two years demonizing corporations in order to portray themselves as caring about the little guy as opposed to Republican meanies who cared only about big corporations.  It played very well into their overall “class warfare” strategy.

They’ve gone after whole industries, and they’ve singled out major American corporations to such abuse and demagoguery that they pulled out of the United States altogether.  As a Human Events article described one such event:

How would you feel if as an owner of a business you were hauled into Congress so the world could see you portrayed as a villain? How would you feel if you were grilled on national television by Sen. Carl Levin (D.-Mich.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D.-Calif.) waving subpoenas to the cameras? Wouldn’t your stomach churn hearing advocates of terrorists’ rights such as Democrat Senators Ted Kennedy (Mass.) and Pat Leahy (Vt.) accuse you, an American family man with a business, of high crimes against America? Perhaps that is how many American CEOs are beginning to feel.

What if your company’s name had, through liberal demonization, become synonymous with evil? The phrase “Halliburton” has been morphed here into a pejorative by liberals and the media. Certainly, that must be one of the reasons Halliburton has packed its bags, decided to relocate outside America and declare “I’m out of here.”

And they won’t be the only ones who decide to head for greener pastures that actually want their jobs and their tax contributions.

Democrats have done a pretty good job demonizing the US car industry, as well.  Their constant ravings about forcing American automakers to make even more concessions to unions, about hitting their bottom line more and more with demands for health care and compensation packages that cost them more than $1300 per car over their Japanese rivals, about forcing them to develop more fuel efficient cars and smaller, “greener” cars when the aforementioned inequalities make it impossible for such cars to be profitable for US automakers, has led to the desperate state that they are in now.  When you are saddled with massive structural labor costs, it is incredibly difficult to make a profit with smaller, less expensive cars.

The American auto industry quit being car makers a long time ago.  What they have long-since become are socialized pension providers for unions who managed to build a few cars on the side.

And now Democrats are about to impose “Card Check” to take secret ballots away from workers in an attempt to force even more unionization on corporate America.  It’s a terrible idea for business that is almost certain to become law given total Democratic control of the government.  You show me a unionized industry, and I will show you an industry in crisis.

Why do Democrats want to bail out the automakers?  Because they want to bail out the unions that overwhelmingly support them.  If the automakers go the way of the dodo bird, the unions will be going right along with them.

Democrats have loudly decried “corporate welfare” by even reducing their income tax burden; so let us now demand that they hang on their own petard when it comes to giving a TAXPAYER HANDOUT to the tune of billions of dollars to a union shop.  Let the automakers fail; everyone who supports Democrats knows that economies are built from the bottom-up anyway, right? Let’s put the theory to the test and let the big boys go under and see if the “bottom” can still move “up” without the people who create jobs for them.

AP Rips Obama Infomercial On Facts, Honesty

By and large, the media has utterly failed to analyze Obama’s fanciful rhetoric to check for facts or for honesty.  Study after study has shown a profound mainstream media bias favoring Obama and attacking McCain.  A prominent ABC journalist called this bias “a very, very dangerous game … with the Constitution.”

A brand new study by the Project for Excellence in Media came out yesterday with absolutely devastating results on rampant media bias.

We’ll quickly be able to see the media bias, as people appearing on Obama’s infomercial – such as Roberta Johnston, Larry Stewart, and Mark and Melinda Dowell – either get their lives microscopically investigated the way Joe the Plumber did or not.  The media witch hunt (a.k.a. “investigative journalism“) into the life of Joe the Plumber – who drew a vicious media backlash for merely asking Obama a simple question outside his own home – was an unprecedented intrusion into a private citizen by a media machine that was determined to dredge up dirt on him.  If they go after Obama infomercial’s citizens the same way (can she really only afford to buy half a gallon of milk?  Did that mother buy herself a pair of shoes rather than buy snacks for her children?) I’ll be very much surprised.

Still, every so often some reporter actually tries to be fair.  And in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s $3 million infomercial spectacular, in a campaign in which Obama is outspending McCain 4-1 after Obama broke his promise to accept public financing, a little bit of objectivity is better than nothing at all.  So it was refreshing that Associated Press writer Calvin Woodward finally took a critical look at claims that Obama has been making with virtually no media scrutiny for months:

WASHINGTON – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was less than upfront in his half-hour commercial Wednesday night about the costs of his programs and the crushing budget pressures he would face in office.

Obama’s assertion that “I’ve offered spending cuts above and beyond” the expense of his promises is accepted only by his partisans. His vow to save money by “eliminating programs that don’t work” masks his failure throughout the campaign to specify what those programs are — beyond the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

A sampling of what voters heard in the ad, and what he didn’t tell them:

THE SPIN: “That’s why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year.”

THE FACTS: His plan does not lower premiums by $2,500, or any set amount. Obama hopes that by spending $50 billion over five years on electronic medical records and by improving access to proven disease management programs, among other steps, consumers will end up saving money. He uses an optimistic analysis to suggest cost reductions in national health care spending could amount to the equivalent of $2,500 for a family of four. Many economists are skeptical those savings can be achieved, but even if they are, it’s not a certainty that every dollar would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower premiums.

THE SPIN: “I also believe every American has a right to affordable health care.”

THE FACTS: That belief should not be confused with a guarantee of health coverage for all. He makes no such promise. Obama hinted as much in the ad when he said about the problem of the uninsured: “I want to start doing something about it.” He would mandate coverage for children but not adults. His program is aimed at making insurance more affordable by offering the choice of government-subsidized coverage similar to that in a plan for federal employees and other steps, including requiring larger employers to share costs of insuring workers.

THE SPIN: “I’ve offered spending cuts above and beyond their cost.”

THE FACTS: Independent analysts say both Obama and Republican John McCain would deepen the deficit. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Obama’s policy proposals would add a net $428 billion to the deficit over four years — and that analysis accepts the savings he claims from spending cuts. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, whose other findings have been quoted approvingly by the Obama campaign, says: “Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next 10 years.” The analysis goes on to say: “Neither candidate’s plan would significantly increase economic growth unless offset by spending cuts or tax increases that the campaigns have not specified.”

THE SPIN: “Here’s what I’ll do. Cut taxes for every working family making less than $200,000 a year. Give businesses a tax credit for every new employee that they hire right here in the U.S. over the next two years and eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Help homeowners who are making a good faith effort to pay their mortgages, by freezing foreclosures for 90 days. And just like after 9-11, we’ll provide low-cost loans to help small businesses pay their workers and keep their doors open. ”

THE FACTS: His proposals — the tax cuts, the low-cost loans, the $15 billion a year he promises for alternative energy, and more — cost money, and the country could be facing a record $1 trillion deficit next year. Indeed, Obama recently acknowledged — although not in his commercial — that: “The next president will have to scale back his agenda and some of his proposals.”

There are some facts to consider about Barack Obama’s health care plan that he failed to tell you last night:

One thing is extremely important to understand: Obama’s health care plan is modeled on the Massachusetts plan.  How are things going there?  Well, in the three years of the program’s existence, the tiny state is now already facing cost overruns of over $400 million.  Does that sound like a rousing success?  Massachusetts is facing a projected 85% increase in its costs by 2009 – which should set up a serious red flag that such programs are MASSIVELY underfunded.

Barack Obama’s health care plan is estimated to cost $1.6 trillion in 10 years.  But that doesn’t take into account the very sort of cost overruns and cost increases that are even now plaguing the very state that Obama is basing his own plan upon.  What is going to happen to our economy given the extremely real likelihood that Obama’s massive national plan runs into similar issues?  Do you believe our economy is strong enough to bear the brunt of these massive cost increases in this current climate?

In the aftermath of the unpopular $850 billion bailout of the economy, it is extremely relevant to question what Obama would do in light of a $1 trillion annual federal budget deficit and an over $10 trillion national debt.  That said, you’d probably want to hear about Obama’s sponsering of an $845 billion Global Poverty Act:

Sen. Barack Obama, perhaps giving America a preview of priorities he would pursue if elected president, is rejoicing over the Senate committee passage of a plan that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars in an attempt to reduce poverty in other nations.

The bill, called the Global Poverty Act, is the type of legislation, “We can – and must – make … a priority,” said Obama, a co-sponsor.

And it is also critical to realize that while Obama promises to provide alternative energy which will free us from dependence on foreign oil, his plan will produce nowhere near enough energy to even begin to end our dependence on foreign oil.  Obama has been part of the Democratic trifecta with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and you simply cannot trust them to dramatically increase our production of domestic oil, which we desperately need.  Gasoline and heating oil have dropped recently, but it is only a matter of time before OPEC cuts its production in order to drive the prices back up, and the very real possibility of a crisis in the Middle East could cripple us at any moment.

It’s too bad that Woodward didn’t more critically examine Obama’s tax plan, and questioned whether it was a good idea to dramatically increase taxes on capital gains, and on corporations and businesses during a time when we need more jobs and a stronger economy.

All that said, it’s good that at least one journalist from one publication took a stab at taking a critical examination of Obama’s infomercial promises and claims.