Monthly Archives: July 2011

Friday Follies for July 29, 2011

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Wow!  Another week has gone by and we still don’t have a solution to the debt crisis.

Good.

The democrats are incapable of curbing their spending.  They can’t.  If they stop with their various payoffs to special interests and dependency groups, they’ll lose their power.  Also, Obama’s socialist plans would come to an end.

Can’t have that.

I’ve lost count how many ‘Pub plans have been submitted. Three? Four?  How many have the dems and Obama submitted?  Zero.

They think the ‘Pubs will cave as usual.  It’s beginning to look like they will.  McConnell’s “Plan B”, that he foolishly announced while the House plan was being negotiated, sunk any further efforts.  Why?  It gave Obama and the dems what they want.  Higher debt ceiling. An extension past the upcoming federal election and any cuts would be determined later—read that as never.

Boehner’s plan is a little bit better.  It only runs through the end of the year.  It counts on future cuts that he and his plan cannot enforce.  It does have some cuts this year but the actual amount is yet to be determined.  Some say $1billion, others say less. No one really knows and the worse of all is that it only cuts THE AMOUNT OF INCREASE!  No real cuts.

As far as I’m concerned, Boehner and the establishment ‘Pubs have zero credibility.  At least there are some Tea Partiers in the house standing by their commitments. 

I was listening to Laura Ingraham on the radio this morning.  She was attacking the Tea Party for having the guts to stay true to their constituents.  Ann Coulter has been doing the same.  

A Pox on both of them.

What we are seeing is the formation of a third party.  The establishment pubs are showing they are no better than the dems. It’s not about saving the country, nor about limited government, nor about conservatism.  It’s solely about political power and not looking bad to some nebulous voting blok.

The Republican Party is about to go the way of the Whigs.

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It seems there is one area of education that must observe immigration law—the University of Northern Virginia, a private, for-profit school that boasts it is the largest private university in the country.  Too bad the state operated and funded schools don’t have the same requirement.

Dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided offices at the University of Northern Virginia’s Annandale campus Thursday.
The University of Northern Virginia is an unaccredited, for-profit private university that calls itself the most popular American university for students from India. Thousands of students are registered at three locations in northern Virginia.
Agents have removed boxes of documents from a building on Little River Turnpike where the university leases two suites.

The university temporarily can’t accept any foreign students, reads a notice posted on the door of the offices. UNVA students must leave the country immediately if they are unable “to continue to attend classes and maintain their active status in a manner required by federal government regulations,” the notice reads.
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Here’s something I found happening in the Czech Republic.  They want to ban the Communist Party.  If we did that here, we’d be banning the democrat party.
 
By KAREL JANICEK
Associated Press
PRAGUE (AP) — They’re the Czech Republic’s fourth-largest political party, but the hardline Communists could soon be outlawed if the center-right government has its way.
It’s more than two decades since communism collapsed here, but the survivors and ideological heirs to the party that ruled from 1948 until the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 are under increasing political pressure.

The party, which is vehemently opposed to NATO, brands opponents “terrorists” and maintains friendly ties with the ruling Communists in Cuba, China and North Korea.
Unlike most other communist parties in the region that have joined the left-wing mainstream, the Czech party has maintained its hardline stance.
Supporters of the ban say it is a direct successor of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, whose members killed more than 240 political prisoners while thousands of other opponents died in prisons.

With the killing of political opponents aside, they sound just like members of the democrat party.  They have advocated harm to their opponents, though, on numerous occasions.
***
As the economy worsens, who is being hurt worse?  Apparently, many are those who voted democrats into office.

African-American Middle Class Eroding As Unemployment Rate Soars

By
Published July 28, 2011 FoxNews.com
The unemployment situation across America is bad, no doubt. But for African-Americans in some cities, this is not the great recession. It’s the Great Depression.
Take Charlotte, N.C., for example. It is a jewel of the “new South.” The largest financial center outside of New York City, it’s the showcase for next year’s Democratic National Convention. It was a land of hope and opportunity for many blacks with a four-year college degree or higher.
According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, in Charlotte, N.C., the unemployment rate for African-Americans is 19.2 percent. If you add in people who have given up looking for jobs, that number exceeds 20 percent, which, according to economists Algernon Austin and William Darity, has effectively mired blacks in a depression.
Of course if you ask them, they’ll claim it’s all a racist plot not the purposeful mismanagement by their own party.
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This weekend will be interesting.  Will the Tea Party hold out and force changes in Boehner’s plan to include some real spending cuts?  Will they take up another plan such as that put together by Rep. Connie Mack and endorsed by Sen. Rand Paul?

That’s the question. What will happen between now and next Tuesday, August 2nd? We’ll have to wait and see.

Revolt!

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“Get your a** in line.”
If the events of this last week tell us anything it is that we need more Tea Partiers in both houses of Congress and that the old establishment ‘Pub pols must go. The removal should start with Boehner and McConnell. I admit that Boehner has shown some spine in his refusals to allow any tax increases (maybe), but as far as actual cuts, he’s been the usual establishment wimp.

Boehner’s proposal yesterday didn’t meet his pledge for more cuts in spending that the increase of the debt limit.  When the CBO exposed the flaws, $800Billion over ten years instead of $1.2Trillion and only $1Billion in cuts this year, Boehner was quick to “revise” his scheme.  To what, we don’t know.  It’s a repeat of Pelosi’s, “You have to pass it to see what’s in it.”

Tea Party Activists Revolt Against Boehner Amid Debt Crisis

As House Speaker John Boehner frantically pieces together a plan to rescue the nation from financial disaster next week, members of the Tea Party movement who helped propel Republicans back into power last fall are calling for his head.
“Boehner must go,” Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips said in his blog on Wednesday, calling the speaker a “big government Republican” who “worships at the altar of massive spending.”
“We need a speaker who is a leader. We need someone with courage and vision. Boehner has none of those qualities. He is not a leader,” Phillips wrote. “John Boehner simply wishes to be the manager in chief of the welfare state. His vision of the GOP and the speakership involves golfing, drinking and not rocking the boat.”
 Boehner’s response was, “Get your a** in line.”
 
By:
Washington (CNN) – House Speaker John Boehner leveled tough words at fellow Republicans Wednesday, telling conservatives who are unhappy his bill doesn’t go far enough to “Get your ass in line.”
Boehner’s admonishment came during a closed-door meeting, during which House GOP leaders sought to rally support for their debt bill, according to two Republican sources who attended the meeting.

The Ohio Republican told members he was working hard and didn’t want to turn around and not see an army behind him.

 Yes, Boehner needs to go.  There are some that say he must be replaced as speaker with someone with true conservative principles, Representative Allen West would be good.  At least he stands behind his words. After Schultz attacked West, he responded by saying she’s, “not a lady,” and was, “vile.”  Of course, the dems get upset when a ‘Pub doesn’t just stand there and accepts insults without responding.

I have been unhappy with Marco Rubio because of some of his comments in the past.  However, he has the guts to stand up to the dems and uphold his conservative principles.

I repeat.  Boehner must go.  I sincerely hope the Ohio Tea Party runs someone against Boenher come the next primary.  Boehner is unfit to hold office.

Implosion?

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The Imperious President

I’ve been scanning the headlines and noticed they’ve taken a marked shift in the last few days.  Obama’s intransigence in the debt talks is hurting—him!  He’s continued the usual dem/lib tactics of blaming conservatives for everything while ignoring the fact that there has been a number of proposals that increased the debt limit and it has been Obama that has blocked every one.  He even blocked a plan submitted by Harry Reid!


The shift isn’t for Obama nor for the dems.  Here’s just a short sample of headlines that attest to the shift.

More Americans unhappy with Obama on economy, jobs

(Drudge headline for above: WASHPOST/ABC: Blacks, liberals flee in droves…)

Sanders: Would be ‘good’ for Obama to face primary challenge

One of the Senate’s liberal stalwarts suggested over the weekend that President Obama could benefit from a primary challenger over the next year.

AP:  widest wealth gap between US whites, minorities

“What’s pushing the wealth of whites is the rebound in the stock market and corporate savings, while younger Hispanics and African-Americans who bought homes in the last decade, because that was the American dream, are seeing big declines,” said Timothy Smeeding, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who specializes in income inequality. 

The dem/lib scheme to push minority home ownership, the Community Reinvestment Act, to many who could not afford them, is the primary reason why the “minorities” have seen their assets decline or disappear completely.  When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac forced banks to issue loans to those who’d not otherwise qualify for those loans, that requirement led to the failure of the housing market.

Such policies and others similar to them have NOT made one of the dem/lib core groups happy.

Poll: Obama losing support from base

President Barack Obama is losing support from his base, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Tuesday that finds his backing from liberals and African-Americans has plummeted.
The percentage of liberal Democrats who strongly support the president’s job policies has dropped in the past year, from 53 percent to 31 percent, the poll shows.
Here’s another similar headline. No, the future isn’t bright for Hispanics either.

Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest

WOODBRIDGE, Va. — Hispanic families accounted for the largest single decline in wealth of any ethnic and racial group in the country during the recession, according to a study published Tuesday by the Pew Foundation.
The study, which used data collected by the Census Bureau, found that the median wealth of Hispanic households fell by 66 percent from 2005 to 2009. By contrast, the median wealth of whites fell by just 16 percent over the same period. African Americans saw their wealth drop by 53 percent. Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent.  
The future isn’t bright for Obama.  Nor is it bright for democrats. 

Exiting the sinking ship? Ark. Dem. US Rep. Mike Ross won’t run again

With somewhat curious timing, Arkansas Democratic Rep. Mike Ross has announced that he will not run for reelection in 2012. One year ago today, Ross was part of a congressional delegation that was 5-1 Democratic: both the state’s U.S. senators, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, and three out of its four congressmen—Ross of the 4th district, Marion Berry of the 1st district and Vic Snyder of the 2nd district—were all Democrats.
But Berry and Snyder decided to retire rather than run for reelection in 2010, and both were replaced by Republicans. Lincoln was defeated by John Boozman, then the state’s only Republican in Congress, by a breathtaking 58%-37% margin. Now Ross, who as a Blue Dog leader and member of the Energy and Commerce Committee played a high-visibility game on Obamacare, has announced he’s quitting. Ross was reelected by a solid 58%-40% margin in 2010, one of the few Blue Dogs to do so well, and although redistricting reportedly made his district a little less Democratic he obviously hs the capacity to run ahead of his party. But Arkansas, the most Democratic Southern state in the years when Bill Clinton was running, voted 59%-39% for John McCain and against Barack Obama, and no one thinks that opinion has moved in Obama’s direction since.
The future isn’t bright for the dems. Their numbers are imploding. But…if the GOP caves during the debt limit talks, it won’t be bright for any of us.

The Liar

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I came across this article from the Washington Times. It supports some of my observations I posted yesterday.  Take a look, read yesterday’s post if you haven’t already and then see what you think. For my part, I agree with the Washington Times.

CURL: Is Obama a pathological liar?

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

“Mendacity is a system that we live in.”
– Brick, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”

In the weird world that is Washington, men and women say things daily, hourly, even minutely, that they know deep down are simply not true. Inside the Beltway, we all call those utterances “rhetoric.”
But across the rest of the country, plain ol’ folk call ‘em lies. Bald-faced (even bold-faced) lies. Those folks have a tried-and-true way of determining a lie: If you know what you’re saying is patently false, then it’s a lie. Simple.
And lately, the president has been lying so much that his pants could burst into flames at any moment.
His late-evening news conference Friday was a tour de force of flat-out, unadulterated mendacity — and we’ve gotten a first-hand insider’s view of the president’s long list of lies.
“I wanted to give you an update on the current situation around the debt ceiling,” Mr. Obama said at 6:06 p.m. OK, that wasn’t a lie — but just about everything he said after it was, and he knows it.
“I just got a call about a half-hour ago from Speaker [John A.] Boehner, who indicated that he was going to be walking away from the negotiations,” he said.

Not so: “The White House made offers during the negotiations,” said our insider, a person intimately involved in the negotiations, “and then backtracked on those offers after they got heat from Democrats on Capitol Hill. The White House, and its steadfast refusal to follow through on its rhetoric in terms of cutting spending and addressing entitlements, is the real reason that debt talks broke down.”
Mr. Boehner was more blunt in his own news conference: “The discussions we’ve had with the White House have broken down for two reasons. First, they insisted on raising taxes. … Secondly, they refused to get serious about cutting spending and making the tough choices that are facing our country on entitlement reform.”

… 

The negotiations just before breakdown called for $800 billion in new “revenues” (henceforth, we’ll call those “taxes”), but after the supposedly bipartisan plan came out — and bowing to the powerful liberal bloc on Capitol Hill — Mr. Obama demanded another $400 billion in new taxes: a 50 percent increase.
Mr. Boehner was blunt: “The White House moved the goalpost. There was an agreement, some additional revenues, until yesterday, when the president demanded $400 billion more, which was going to be nothing more than a tax increase on the American people.”
But Mr. Obama, with a straight face, continued. “We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”
The truth: “Actually, the White House was walking back its commitments on entitlement reforms, too. They kept saying they wanted to ‘go big.’ But their actions never matched their rhetoric,” the insider said.
Now, Mr. Boehner and the real leaders in Congress have taken back the process. He’ll write the bill and pass it along to the president, with this directive, which he reportedly said to Mr. Obama’s face in a short White House meeting Saturday: “Congress writes the laws and you get to decide what you want to sign.”
Watching the one-third-of-a-term-senator-turned-president negotiate brings to mind a child spinning yarns about just how the living room lamp got broken. Now, though, the grown-ups are in charge; the kids have been put to bed. Ten days ago, the president warned the speaker: “Dont call my bluff.”
Well, Mr. Boehner has. He’s holding all the cards — and he’s not bluffing.

Go to the Washington Times and read the entire article.  It’s a good read.

I’ve raked Boehner over the coals before, especially on his support for the last Continuing Resolution that was passed last Spring.  I do applaud his actions this last week and for upholding his promise of no new taxes, no tax hikes and cutting government spending.

The Puppet

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Has anyone really analyzed Obama’s behavior?  We have been able to observe quite a bit this last week and weekend.  There appears, if we are to believe various reports, several proposal made this last week in the debt limit talks.  Each one was torpedoed by Obama.


The pattern would be this.  After discussion a proposal would be made. Obama would agree. Everyone would shake hands and the meeting ends. Then later, Obama would have a presser or press release and change his agreement.  It’s as if, he’d make an agreement, then go off and make some calls, come back and break the agreement.  

Someone else is making the decisions.  This scenario was repeated several times this last week.  Finally Boehner had enough and said that further discussions would be held without Obama.

Since before the election, contrary to the propaganda of the State Media, there were numerous questions concerning Obama’s competency.  His record of voting, “Present!”, in the Illinois legislature should have raised eyebrows.  The State Media ignored them. Obama’s political record was one of not making waves and skirting all opportunities to make a decision.

Then there was his educational records—all sealed. His so-called participation in the Harvard Law Review, couldn’t be verified either. It was all hearsay.  Even his books were ghost-written.

Why should we expect anything different once he was in the White House?  The answer of course is that it isn’t.

Supposedly, Harry Reid, took a proposal to Obama yesterday, Sunday, created by the Senate dems.  It included cuts but no new or higher taxes.  Obama nixed it. 
Obama appears to be incapable of making a decision.  Anything he does must be approved by someone else.

The next question is who is pulling Obama’s strings?  Well, I’m not sure.  But one common subject keeps coming to the surface—unions.  
One item that was under discussion in the talks was a ‘Pub requirement to limit union activity with Air Traffic Controllers.  It appears that the union wanted to allow a binding agreement with only a 50% vote.  Not a vote of all the employees affected. No, just 50% of the ones who voted.  What this meant that if an election to force Controllers into a union and an election was held, only half of the voters were needed to make a binding agreement. In other words of all the ATC employees across the country, if only four voted and two agreed to the union, ALL the Controllers would be unionized.
Obama’s bosses couldn’t have that blocked. 

Look at the growth of unionism since Obama’s election.  The UAW took over GM and Chrysler by force of government enforcers.  Look at the activities of SEIU. Look at the spread of public service unions.  It would appear that the only group that is really doing well in this current economy is unions.

Now, I could be wrong.  But if you examine the evidence and Obama’s contradictions, some one is pulling his strings to the detriment of the country. Who is the Puppetmaster?

I think it’s the unions.

Bush and Obama

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Just feelin’ snarky today.  Smartest president…heh!

Friday Follies for July 22, 2011

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I’ve posted the Friday Follies so often that I’m considering making it a regular feature.  Let me know your thoughts, please?

***

I took the Tahoe in yesterday for its quarterly oil change and yearly inspection.  Afterwards, I stopped at one of my favorite greasy spoons, “TJ’s”, for lunch.  TJ’s is a typical working class diner. Yesterday the clientele included some elderly ladies out for a group lunch, a couple of cops from the city PD across the street, and a number of construction/maintenance/lawn care workers who’d dropped in for lunch.  In other words, a typical crowd.

At the table next to me were three men, Grandpa, Son and Grandson as I discovered.  Apparently they were a small family business, roofers, I believe.  Grandpa and Grandson were arguing.  Grandpa was cutting back on health coverage keeping only liability and Workman’s Comp insurance. (Apparently they had a number of crews working with a couple of dozen employees.)

The Kid didn’t understand why it was necessary.  Grandpa said they had to do it, next year would be too late.  The Kid brought up something he’d seen on MSNBC. The conversation went on like this.

Kid: **mumble, mumble** MSNBC, ** mumble, mumble **.
Grandpa: “You mean MFNBC.”
Kid: “No, M. S. N. B. C.”
Grandpa: “Bull s—, it’s MFNBC and I don’t mean Mighty Fine, either!”

The table with the three elderly ladies cracked up.

***

The debt limit impasse continues.  Good.  I’ve noticed that in all the rhetoric, the cuts being mentioned are cuts in the rate of increased spending. 
I sincerely hope Mitch McConnell has won his last election. He’s unfit to hold office.  
Boehner appears to have grown some spine.  I remember his cave on the last Continuing Resolution and I said he was unfit then.  That’s still my opinion but maybe, just maybe, he’s grown some spine.

I’ll not hold my breath.


***
The Shuttle Atlantis returned yesterday from the International Space Station.  With that return ended NASA’s manned space program.  Michael Ramirez had this to say.


Glenn McCoy joined in.

***

The libs and dems continue to say that businesses are hoarding their cash.  All that is needed for recovery is for them to release some of that cash and add new employees.  They ignore the fact that it just isn’t that easy.

From Lisa Benson.
***

With the completion of the Census, states are reviewing their Congressional district boundaries.  Missouri lost a seat and our ‘Pub legislature redrew the House boundaries.  Whatta ya know!  Dem Russ Carnahan (D-MO-3) lost his district.  His home now resides in the district currently held by Democrat Lacy Clay.  Clay is black and his district includes St. Louis.  Bye, bye, Carnahan!

North Carolina is doing the same.  In 2000, the democrat state legislature created the infamous string districts—districts that ran along Interstate Highways and other heavily black areas to insure elections of black democrats.

North Carolina is doing like Missouri—merging the “safe” democrat districts.  They are keeping the Gerrymandering from 2000 to block any federal interference.  But the new dem/’pub ratio will be towards the ‘pubs.

Ahhh, what goes around, comes around.  Karma at its best.

***

Y’all have a cool and safe weekend!