Obama's Untold Stories

According to a recent article in Politico, politicians live and die by storylines. Here are seven storylines that Obama and his team don't want the public to absorb:

1. Obama thinks he's playing with Monopoly money.
2. Obama, with his background in academia, has no connection with real people.
3. Obama believes in (and uses) Chicago-style political thuggery.
4. Obama has no real moral courage.
5. Obama sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.
6. Obama has no more political power -- and possibly less -- than Nancy Pelosi.
7. Obama is in love with the man in the mirror.

Healthcare and the States

A quick update to my post on November 24 regarding Democrat healthcare reform legislation. According to the latest column.by Dick Morris, the extra cost that will be incurred by Texans -- read "higher taxes required so that Democrat can claim a lower cost for their legislation" -- is estimated to be $2.8 billion. Don't fool yourself into believing that a state income tax is not on the horizon if this happens.

How does it feel knowing that we Texans will pay nearly three billion dollars so that Democrats can pay back their political special interest groups?

Global Warming Fraud Exposed

Okay, I wanted to let this story mature a bit before I commented on it. In a nutshell: a hacker obtained e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – a world-renowned climate change research center.

The unguarded e-mails suggest a couple of things. First, that global warming alarmist scientists around the world manipulated data to support their contention that mankind is responsible for global warming which result in global disaster. One e-mail refers to a “trick” being employed to massage temperature statistics to “hide the decline” (in global temperature.)

Other documents indicate a conspiracy to intimidate and/or blackmail editors at science journals into refusing to publish articles from global warming skeptics. The point that skeptics are "not published enough" in scientific journals has been one of the main arguments made by global warming alarmists. One excerpt:

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

One article asks if this is "the final nail in the coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming." Don't count on it. Once politicians get a whiff of a chance to control and tax citizens, it's hard to get them to face reason. What should be an earthquake in the scientific world will likely not get much play in the mainstream media.

More Democrat Deception

In a recent column, Dick Morris discusses healthcare legislation.

The Democrat healthcare legislation in both the House and Senate have been promised to us as providing healthcare to more people "without raising your (middle class) taxes." (Supposedly rich people are footing the bill.) Everything about this legislation smells to high heaven, but Democrats are using a couple of tricks to fool the public.

One trick they are using is to transfer part of the cost to states. Both the House and the Senate bills require that states cover a larger percentage of their people under Medicaid. The House bill requires states to give Medicaid to those whose incomes are less than 150 percent of the poverty level; the Senate version is 125 percent. For most states, this means covering more people.

California, for example, which only covers families earning up to 100 percent of the poverty level, would have to increase its Medicaid spending on poor people by 50 percent under the House version. The federal legislation does not provide funds to cover the entire increase, so what will states have to do to pay for the shortfall? Increase taxes. Washington DC politicians will get the credit for something state governors have to pay the political price for.

The other trick Democrats are using is to push actual implementation of the healthcare legislation back to 2013 (2014 in the Harry Reid Senate version.) Of course, this lets Obama run for reelection before the actual effects of the legislation are felt. More important than that, however, is the fact that taxes to pay for the healthcare will be increased right away.

This trick dilutes the "ten year cost" of the legislation which the Congressional Budget Office uses to calculate a bill's budget impact. If you get money for four years without any expenses, it makes any plan look pretty good, even if the way Democrats are explaining the plan is inaccurate. So any numbers we are told regarding the "budget neutralness" of the legislation are based on deception.
John McCain compared it to buying a house and making mortgage payments for four years before you can move in.

As alarmists do with global warming propaganda, Democrats are deceiving the public. That deception should be the topic of debate before anyone ever considers the legislation.

The Wacky Media

The Associated Press ran a story about a loophole in the huge tax increases on tobacco that Congress passed last spring. Apparently, the tax on "roll your own" tobacco was increased from $1.10 to $24.78 a pound. The loophole is that pipe tobacco, similar in texture and consistency, was spared the monster increase, taxed at a mere $2.83 a pound. Tobacco companies, being both alert and wily, pulled the "roll your own" tobacco off the shelves, repackaged it as "pipe tobacco" and put it back on the shelves, where smokers could buy it without the onerous tax.

Here's where the AP threw me: "Tobacco companies say they're just trying to find a legal way to stay afloat after being saddled with an enormous tax increase. But both the Obama administration and some in Congress say they'll try to come up with a distinction between the tobacco types, closing a loophole that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year."

That last phrase is odd. The loophole is actually saving taxpayers (i.e., smokers) hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They don't have to pay an exorbitant price (tax) for tobacco. The only entity that it's "costing" money is the government and, by extension, politicians. What's "costing" taxpayers is those same politicians spending money like drunken sailors. Unfortunately, the AP doesn't approach subjects with that outlook.

Taking America Down

It's pretty clear from his actions while in office that Barack Obama believes that America got too big for its britches while George Bush was in office. If we consider the hypothesis that his goal is to take America down a notch -- in all possible ways -- then his continued apologies for America's actions, his weakening of our intelligence network, his weakening of the missile shield in eastern Europe and his latest faux pas, bowing to the emperor of Japan, all make sense. His efforts to lower America's reputation and standing in the world are consistent with the idea that Barack Obama, along with a good many other Liberals in the Democrat Party, want America to become subservient to international powers.

Here is Obama's behavior compared with that of other world leaders:

Interesting Thoughts

A twofer:

In his column "Fox Fever -- The Latest Pandemic" Larry Elder gives a bit of perspective on the supposed Conservative bias at Fox News.

In her column "Election 2009: Change I Can Believe In!" Ann Coulter makes a pithy observation: "...Conservatives are more popular than Republicans. By contrast, Liberals are less popular than Democrats. When Conservatives take control of the Republican Party, Republicans win. When Liberals take control of the Democratic Party, Democrats end up out of power for eight to 12 years."