ObamaCare is Gonna P*ss You Off!

Transcript: "There’s a story in Le Journal de Montreal yesterday that said incontinent Quebecers, with serious incontinence problems, that’s people who have to get up to go to the bathroom 12 times per night, have to wait three years for treatment. That’s 12 times a night, 365 times a year, for three years for a routine half-hour procedure for which in the entire province of Quebec, only two urologists will perform it, can perform it."

Reminiscent of an earlier post, another cheery glimpse into the future of American healthcare. But wait, there's good news! The makers of Depends undergarments are coming out with men's and women's styles, promising a much more comfortable fit!

Steyn Eviscerates Letterman

Re: A Boor and a Coward - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online:

Re: A Boor and a Coward [Mark Steyn]

I agree with Victor on David Letterman's "explanation" of his joke.

It's very difficult to be a state ironist, which is the role America's establishment comedians have volunteered themselves for. If you're going to do jokes about statutory rape and to trash families of leading politicians, Jim Treacher points out that the president's brother, Samson Obama, has been banned from the United Kingdom because of attempted assault of a 13-year-old girl.

So now that the Tiffany network has opened up this promising new seam of comedy gold, wouldn't it be way cooler if Letterman had joked about Sarah Palin's daughter getting raped by Obama's brother? That'd be hilarious, right? Not just 'cause it's a bipartisan rape gag but because it would be — what's the word? — "edgy." You know, like they used to say about Dave three or four decades back . . .

POW!!!

NCR, Wacker, Volkswagen Clearly Didn't Take TARP Money

Southern States Poach Businesses Amid Downturn - WSJ.com: "When NCR Corp. started looking late last summer to move from its hometown of Dayton, Ohio, economic development agencies in the South pulled out all the stops in a bid to lure the 125-year-old company best known as a cash-register manufacturer."

After deciding to build a customer-services center near Atlanta last year, the company last week said it would relocate its 1,250-employee headquarters to the area and open an ATM factory in Columbus.

The Southeast has attracted an array of corporate facilities recently. In February, Asbury Automotive Group Inc., a major chain of national auto retailers, relocated to metro Atlanta from New York. In recent months, Tennessee announced three projects, all valued at more than $1 billion each, by units of Wacker Chemie AG, Volkswagen AG and Hemlock Semiconductor Group. North Carolina last week welcomed a new Apple Inc. data warehouse.

...If they had, President Obama could have simply gotten on the phone and nixed these deals, that move jobs from "blue states" to "red states," just as he did with General Motors a couple of weeks ago. Mark my words, this administration is committed to creating ever more ways to insinuate the federal government into private businesses, so that it may wield veto power over their economic decisions. Do you realize the amount of power we are centralizing in this White House? It makes the designation of any previous adminstration as an "imperial presidency" outright laughable.

Imagine Breaking Up The United States - WSJ.com

Imagine Breaking Up The United States - WSJ.com: "Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society."...

The anti-federalists lost their battle, but history, in certain respects, has redeemed their vision, for they anticipated how many Americans have come to feel about their nation’s seat of federal power. “This city, and the government of it, must indubitably take their tone from the character of the men, who from the nature of its situation and institution, must collect there,” the anti-federalist pamphleteer known only as the Federal Farmer wrote. “If we expect it will have any sincere attachments to simple and frugal republicanism, to that liberty and mild government, which is dear to the laborious part of a free people, we most assuredly deceive ourselves.”...

In a globalized economy transformed by technological innovations hatched by happily-unguided entrepreneurs, history seems to be driving one nail after another into the coffin of the big, which is why the Obama planners and their ilk, even if they now ride high, may be doomed to fail. No one anymore expects the best ideas to come from the biggest actors in the economy, so should anyone expect the best thinking to be done by the whales of the political world?...

So why not America as the global leader of a devolution? America’s return to its origins—to its type—could turn out to be an act of creative political destruction, with “we the people” the better for it...

I actually do not think it is necessary for the US to be broken up into multiple regional republics in reaction to the current frightening federal government power grab. We need only restore the rule of law and the rights of the states set forth quite clearly in our US Constitution. This could be achieved rather rapdily and peacefully if even a few states began to demand their Constitution rights and prerogatives be restored.

However, we are headed at breakneck speed down a road where the socialists and the big government accolytes in the Democrat party are expoiting their temporary ascendancy to try and emasculate the states and ensure a permanent federal leviathan. If they succeed in spreading the tentacles of federal power into states too deeply, a Consitutional option may elude us. In which case, a breakup is almost inevitable.

I cannot think of anything which will drive us there more rapidly than forcing fiscally responsible and productive states to fund the excesses and failed policies of failing states. The Democrats think they can do anything they want because they control the House the Senate and the White House. They should think twice before assuming that Americans are going to sit still for having their pockets picked by Washington to fund a transition to an America that our Framers would not recognize. In fact, to an America more like the sclerotic European Union than the United State of even fifteen years ago.

Rule of Law - Tales of the Undead

Judge Orders Auction in a Rebuke to Delphi Plan - WSJ.com: "A U.S. bankruptcy court Wednesday sided with a group of Delphi Corp. lenders who said a government-led plan to sell the auto-parts maker's operations to a private-equity fund trampled on their rights.

Judge Robert Drain ordered Delphi to hold an auction and allow bids to challenge the government-brokered sale to Platinum Equity. 'What's so special about Platinum?' asked Judge Drain. 'They're just guys in suits. Why can't the other guys in suits just pay more?'"

Bob Drain for Chief Justice! Common sense and respect for the rule of law - he could never be confirmed.

Flash Forward to US Healthcare's Future

The NHS is bleeding to death, and the time to operate is now - Telegraph: "Many people would have been rather confused yesterday when they switched on the Today programme and heard that the health service is basically bankrupt. Apparently, the NHS needs another £10 billion from the taxpayer to survive in three years' time (put another way, just less than the cost of paying for the entire police service).

Listeners would have been forgiven for thinking: hang on, hasn't the NHS had a lot of extra money already? And they would be right. After a decade of historic spending increases, the NHS budget has more than doubled, from around £45 billion to £105 billion. The service has 41,800 more doctors and 84,700 more nurses. To say the NHS has never had more resources is an understatement: it is in a wonderland of extra money, on a scale that its leaders never expected. Quite amazing, then, that it is coming back to the taxpayer cap in hand."

The only explanation for moving in the direction of Britain on health care is a lust for government power.

Another Big Step Down the Road To Banana Republic Status

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Judicial Error: "'There was a time when we would have called this a scandal,' wrote former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in an e-mail. He points out the UAW contributed $4 million dollars to Obama's campaign in 2008, and $24 million to Democratic candidates since 2000.

He's right. This is little more than a socialist wealth redistribution scheme that rewards political cronies at the expense of others.

More than robbing the rich to give to the poor, it takes from the politically unconnected to give to the politically connected.

Contrary to stereotype, most bondholders aren't millionaires like Thurston Howell III, clipping coupons and living the high life. No, they're cops and teachers with pensions in places like Indiana who must now subsidize autoworkers from their own pockets."

Welcome to the ObamaNation and crony capitalism.

More Americans Want to Cancel the Shamulus Than Want to Keep It

The Weekly Standard: "Forty-five percent (45%) of Americans say the rest of the new government spending authorized in the $787-billion economic stimulus plan should now be canceled. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 36% disagree and 20% are not sure."

Once again, despite media attempts to cover it up, there is brain activity in the American populace at large.

Shamulus

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Europe's Lesson: "Earlier this year, the White House predicted the jobless rate would top out at 8% if Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus package. Well, since then, 1.5 million jobs have been lost, and unemployment just hit a 26-year high of 9.4%. So, by the administration's own yardstick, it hasn't worked at all."

What a surprise. Of course, from the Obama administration point of view, this is not a failure. They get to expand government power and control over the economy, and they get to drag out the recession that is serving so well to justify their power grab.

Slow Learners - But Not Brain Dead

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Europe's Lesson: "last weekend, a Gallup Poll showed most Americans for the first time view President Obama unfavorably when it comes to 'controlling federal spending.'"

Duh!

Rule of Law Staging a Comeback?

High Court Stymies Quick Sale of Chrysler - WSJ.com:

The U.S. Supreme Court threw the sale of Chrysler LLC to Fiat SpA into uncertainty while it decides whether to hear an appeal of the deal.

..."The U.S.-brokered sale of Chrysler, by forcing senior secured lenders to write down their loans to the auto maker, broke with longstanding tradition concerning rights in a bankruptcy: Senior secured lenders usually are paid in full before lower-priority creditors receive anything. This time, a United Auto Workers retiree health-care trust got a 55% equity stake and $4.5 billion note for its about $10.5 billion unsecured claim while Fiat stands to get an initial 20% stake."

I am probably too giddy to think clearly, but I don't see how a review by the Supreme Court could allow this pernicious deal to stand. And if they ruled on the legality of using TARP funds for an auto bailout, that would be too wonderful to imagine.

Post-Racial Flim-Flam

Sotomayor and the Politics of Race - WSJ.com: "The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America's first black president, and a man promising the 'new,' we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed."

...the Sotomayor nomination shows that Mr. Obama has no idea what a post-racial society would look like. In selling himself as a candidate to the American public he is a gifted bargainer beautifully turned out in post-racial impressionism. But in the real world of Supreme Court nominations, where there is a chance to actually bring some of that idealism down to earth, he chooses a hardened, divisive and race-focused veteran of the culture wars he claims to transcend.

President Obama is not afraid to say one thing and do another on race matters - because he is sure he will not be called on it. Let's call his bluff. We may not stop Sotomayor, but we'll shine some light on his hypocrisy.

Obama's Voodoo Health Economics - WSJ.com

Obama's Voodoo Health Economics - WSJ.com: "Two-thirds of annual health spending increases are the result of the rapid development and use of new medications and devices, according to the CBO. But, as the CBO reminds us, these innovations 'permit the treatment of previously untreatable conditions.' If you had a heart attack in the 1980s and made it to the hospital you had only a 60% chance of living a year. Now your chance is over 90%. No one wants 1980s medicine at 1980s prices. And in 10 years, no one will want 2009 care."

Let Obama "reform" our healthcare, and in ten years we WILL have 1980's medicine, but at 2019 prices.

Latest Obama Apology Tour Already Bearing Fruit!

IBDeditorials.com: Editorials, Political Cartoons, and Polls from Investor's Business Daily -- Cairo Candy: "Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for instance, immediately called the Obama speech 'sweet and beautiful talks to the Muslim nation . . . that will not create a change,' adding that Israel is still a 'cancerous tumor in the heart' of the Muslim world."

Wait a minute, didn't anyone tell the Ayatollah that Obama's middle name is Hussein and that he lived for a while in a muslim country?

Mark Steyn - The Empathy Emperor Has No Clothes

What price our pseudo-empathy? - Mark Steyn Opinion - Macleans.ca: "Er, well, alright. But what does it boil down to in practice? Then-senator Obama voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts because the nominee said he saw the judge’s role as that of “umpire.” The President wants someone less hung up on the rule book. He likes to cite the case of Lilly Ledbetter, who sued Goodyear Tire for discrimination but ran up against the pesky old statute of limitations. An “empathetic” judge would presumably say, “Screw the statute of limitations.” Strange to hear the same folks who complain that Bush disregarded the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution at Gitmo (both charges untrue, by the way) simultaneously hailing the ability to disregard inconvenient laws as the indispensable attribute of a Supreme Court justice."

Another great bit of writing that lays bare the vapidness of President Obama's criteria for Supreme Court justices.

Shameful - Posturing and Pandering Masquerading as Leadership

Charles Krauthammer - Barack Obama's Israeli Settlements Canard - washingtonpost.com: "Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: 'The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,' thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements."

Let's hope that, as so often is the case, he doesn't really mean what he says.

How Can You Tell He's Playing Fast and Loose? Part 23

Obama Shifts on Coverage Mandate - WSJ.com: "President Barack Obama said he is open to requiring nearly all Americans to have health insurance, clearing one hurdle in Congress's effort to draft a health-care bill.

During his presidential campaign last year, Mr. Obama opposed then-Sen. Hillary Clinton's idea of a health-insurance mandate on individuals. He argued it would put too much burden on low-income families."

...his lips are moving. Mr. Obama is reportedly also leaning toward taxing employer provided health benefits - a position that was proffered by John McCain, over which Obama demagogued McCain repeatedly.

Obama Wants To Expand Program That Drove Americans' Grocery Bills Up By $5 - $8 BILLION in 2007

Ethanol's Grocery Bill - WSJ.com: "Ethanol raises food prices because millions of acres of farmland and three billion bushels of corn were diverted to ethanol from food production. Americans spend about $1.1 trillion a year on food, so in 2007 the ethanol subsidy cost families between $5.5 billion and $8.8 billion in higher grocery bills."

The beauty of being a leftist is that you never are called to task for the "unintended consequences" of your noble deeds. Ethanol is a completely discredited "alternative energy" strategy. It is strictly designed to buy votes in the corn belt and contributions from mega-agribusinesses. The linked article talks about both EPA and CBO reports on the folly of ethanol as a gasoline alternative.

On top of the cost to the taxpayers of all the subsidies, we are paying BILLIONS more in our grocery bills. Where's the empathy in the administration for Americans struggling to pay their rising food bills?

The WSJ sums it up well:

As public policy, ethanol is like the joke about the baseball prospect who is a poor hitter but a bad fielder. It doesn't reduce CO2 but it does cost more. Imagine how many subsidies the Beltway would throw at ethanol if the fuel actually had any benefits.

If the above is true, why do the Dems continue to push this policy? I think you know the answer - every interference in the economy is a chance for statists to use YOUR money to buy votes and influence, and to further regulate your behavior and circumscribe your freedoms.

Sad, Nowadays You Find More Truth in Pravda than in the NYT

American capitalism gone with a whimper - Pravda.Ru: "It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people."

A Russian perspective on the Obama administration. Read the whole column.

What's Good For The Dems Is "Good" for GM

Busy Not Running GM - WSJ.com: "President Obama announced the bankruptcy of General Motors yesterday before GM's CEO even spoke, and the feds will soon own 60% of the company. But whatever you do, please don't think the government is now running GM."

This post goes on to describe how Obama, just a day ago, was on the phone assuring Detroit's mayor that GM would remain in Detroit. A great example of the largess that can be doled out when a government is in control of a major corporation. Other examples already seen or soon to be seen:

Forcing the banks you control to accepts a cram-down bankruptcy settlement so you can transfer their financial interests to your union cronies

Doling out ownership interest in GM and Chrysler to the UAW in preference to creditors (including retirees, pension funds, thrifty individuals) who are contractually owed better treatment under the law.

Ordering GM not to import cars into the US from its foreign operations

Providing specific tax advantages to consumers for buying one specific car (the Volt) from one specific manufacturer (GM)

Locking in union wage agreements that are still not competitive with the rest of the world

Probably sweetening union wage agreements when they come up for renewal during the next election cycle

Passing laws and regulations to try and force US consumers to buy the cars that Obama motors builds, but that no one wants

Doling out $10's of Billions more year after year to try and keep these companies afloat

Forcing Obama Motors to buy American parts and materials, even when they are not competitive in the marketplace

I could go on almost forever...