I guess until our Whip-wielding House Dominatrix either wins or loses, we’re going to keep talking about Obama’s miserably un-American health care reform proposals. What sort of America do we want, Mr. President? Let’s just say, “not one with you and your cronies deciding what’s best for health care”.

UPDATE: ObamaCare has a 3.8% tax on investment income; further downward pressure on the ability of the economy to create wealth.

UPDATE II: Hennessey is taking the bill apart piece by piece. Its not a pretty picture:

…Spends money on doctors in 2013 and 2014, but leaves out the permanent fix, as expected. This means there’s another $300-ish B of Medicare spending that is not counted in this bill. So much for true deficit neutrality…

…Adopts a version of the President’s proposal for feds to regulate health insurance premiums in addition to States. Secretary of HHS could “review potentially unreasonable premiums and may take corrective actions, such as requiring the insurer to pay a penalty, denying or modifying the premium or ordering the plan to pay rebates to consumers.” What is a potentially unreasonable premium?? Congratulations, AHIP. You have made your industry a federally regulated utility. Have fun with that.

UPDATE III: ObamaCare will crush the middle class:

The hardest hit won’t be those earning more than $250,000 a year–the group that he says needs to “pay their fair share.” Rather, it’s families whose combined annual income is around $100,000 who could be crushed under this plan.

These folks will be too “rich” to qualify for ObamaCare’s subsidies, but probably too poor to easily afford the pricey insurance that the president’s plan forces them to buy.

Many of these $100K families will be obliged to buy a policy costing an average of $14,700 for the mid-level, “silver” health plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates. After income taxes, they’ll be spending almost a quarter of their net income for health insurance.

This is not a bug, its a feature – its the way to pressure the middle class in to agreeing a single payer plan.

UPDATE IV: Catholic sisters come out against ObamaCare (PDF).

He keeps on like this, and we’ll start talking him up for President in 2012:

Gov. Chris Christie will propose a constitutional amendment limiting annual property tax increases to 2.5 percent when he introduces a budget Tuesday that will seek fundamental changes in spending at every level of government, according to administration officials with knowledge of the plan…

…The governor’s $29.3 billion budget will shave $2.9 billion off state spending from last year, about a 9 percent drop. The cuts include reductions in aid to municipalities and school districts, said two officials, who spoke to The Star-Ledger on the condition of anonymity ahead of the speech.

Imagine if we had a President who had the guts to cut our national budget by 9%. That would work out, next year, to about $325 billion. We’d still spend more than $3.2 trillion, so its not like we’re asking for granny to be thrown out on the street. But at least some attempt at stopping the bleeding – some attempt to avert complete fiscal disaster.

But, we won’t get any of that. If anything, Obama will spend even more than projected – and as his policies flounder, we can expect revenues to continue to drop, meaning an even worse deficit. We don’t have a President who even understands the concept of setting priorities – a President who understands there is a real limit to the amount of debt we can carry, and we’re pretty much already there.

Governor Christie, on the other hand, has shown rare courage ever since he took office. We’ll now see if he has the grit to carry this out. He faces a Democrat-controlled legislature and there will be legal challenges, especially to his proposed cuts in education. If he has the courage, he’ll stare down these challenges and emerge as a tribune of the people…and set himself on a fast track to higher things, if not in 2012, then at some point.

Seems the President wants control over higher education, too:

…A few days ago, another Secretary of Education—Lamar Alexander—inveighed in WaPo on what the folks at Department of Education “haven’t told us.” Senator Alexander notes that DOE plans to borrow from the Fed at a 2.8 percent interest rate, lend to students at 6.8, and splurge with the difference with a massive new spending program. He reports that the Congressional Budget Office has lowered the estimated savings from kicking out the private lenders from $87 billion to something like $47 billion. Some 2,000 private lenders will be forced out of this business. Services to students driven by industry competition will be eliminated in favor of typical federal bureaucratic “efficiency.” And those “educators, engineers and computer scientists—the backbone of the new economy”? They will be spending years longer and paying lots more to pay back loans that are actually being used to fund Congressmen’s favorite edu-pork programs.

The effort to shoehorn the direct lending program into the health care reconciliation bill seems odd on its face. CBS News suggests that the maneuver is prompted partly by Democrats trying to get on top of the wave of student protest over college costs that surfaced during the March 4 campus demonstrations. But CBS also thinks that the Democrats are just grabbing an opportunity that might not come again. “Reconciliation,” if it works, is a way of short-circuiting all the inconvenience of having to line up sixty votes for a controversial measure. Why not slide as much unpopular legislation as possible into one giant, unpopular, economy-ruining, budget-busting, anti-democratic bill?…

It will be quite the boondoggle, if it goes forward. Attentive readers will know my opinion about student loans: they are a scam. A way for colleges and bankers to get rich off of the foolish actions of youngsters suckered by tales of easy money once they’ve got a college degree to their name. All those ads you see on TV about getting a computer programming degree or becoming a chef – financed by student loans…and how many kids do you think really get all that much out of it?

Aside from that, however, what we have here is an attempt by Obama and his Democrats to have full control over a major portion of funding for higher education. Now instead of a scam, we’ll have a government pork-barrel scam. Favored groups will get more loans; favored colleges will find the skids greased…Congressional pet projects will get funded on the side. To top it all off, the Democrats will get kids in college where they can be propagandized by the ignorant, narrow-minded, junior-league Leninsts who run the education show.

Its all a win for Democrats. Not so much for education, the kids or the United States of America. As per usual, the problem here is that government is involved, at all. Government merely distorts – and never in a good way. Someone is always having a rake off. Someone is always misappropriating funds. Someone is always putting out substandard product. Its just the way it is because its all other peoples’ money. It is our economic life, but its play cash to them.

Education is a grand thing – and anyone who is determined to obtain it will do so. We don’t need government setting the agenda or providing the funds. Let the kids work at it; let their parents help; let good souls find the means for a hard working kid to get in to a decent school…but keep government out of it. Education is for free people – not for government monopolies.

Good news:

Mark R. Levin, president of Landmark Legal Foundation, today issued a warning to the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives about the possible use of the so-called “deem and pass,” “self-executing,” or “Slaughter Rule” to enact H.R. 3590, the legislative version of President Obama’s healthcare proposal that has been previously approved by the Senate. If this tactic is employed, Landmark will immediately sue the President, Attorney General Eric Holder and other relevant cabinet members to prevent them from instituting this unconstitutional contrivance.

“Landmark has already prepared a lawsuit that will be filed in federal court the moment the House acts. Such a brazen violation of the core functions of Congress simply cannot be ignored. Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution is clear respecting the manner in which a bill becomes law. Members are required to vote on this bill, not claim they did when they didn’t. The Speaker of the House and her lieutenants are temporary custodians of congressional authority. They are not empowered to do permanent violence to our Constitution.”

With Nancy performing as House Dominatrix I do expect them to pass this dog of a bill. But I’m delighted to see the legal challenge all set to go – and, of course, I look forward to November’s results.

UPDATE: Idaho will challenge any individual mandate

That is the amount of debt increase and the number of days it took Obama to do it

The latest posting from the Treasury Department shows the National Debt has increased over $2 trillion since President Obama took office.

The debt now stands at $12.6 trillion. On the day Mr. Obama took office it was $10.6 trillion.

President George W. Bush still holds the record for the most debt run up on his watch: $4.9 trillion. But it took him over four years to rack up the first two trillion dollars in debt. It has taken Mr. Obama 421 days.

Weren’t the liberals on and on about fiscal responsibility?

Oh yeah, forgot: that was just campaign BS.

Perhaps:

The Obama administration’s row with Israel over settlements has prompted some analysts to wonder whether it seeks “regime change,” a new government that can make peace with the Palestinians.

However, the analysts doubt that President Barack Obama’s administration, which has made Arab-Israeli peace a national security priority, will achieve anything if it has indeed adopted such a strategy.

In unusually harsh words, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday that his right-wing government’s plans to build new settler homes in … Jerusalem sent a “deeply negative signal” about Israel’s ties to its top ally.

“Is this about regime change, or is it about (Israeli) behavior modification?” asked Aaron David Miller, a Middle East peace negotiator in past Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Because either way, it’s going to be a rocky ride,” Miller told AFP…

Whatever you do, Israelis, do not vote in a surrender cabinet in order to please Obama. Pressure will build for an Israeli surrender because Obama – astoundingly – believes in the Neville Chamberlain approach. That is, he believes if we can just sit down with our enemies and go through our problems with a pencil, we can reach an agreement.

As to why Obama and Co would believe this, I cannot say – other than to suggest that the liberal mind has propagandized itself in to simply taking it on blind faith. This is not the same as, say, Christian faith – which does have its supports in experience and history – no, this is just stubbornly believing something is true in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

The fact is that you can’t make peace between opposites. The Israelis have no designs upon Moslem lands, they live in freedom and have no insane proposals to, say, wipe Syria off the map. The Moslems, on the other hand, don’t live in freedom (for the most part – it is rising in Iraq and you’ll note that Iraq doesn’t spend a lot of time on the issue of Israel or the Palestinians); they have definite designs on Israeli land and, at least a selection of them, are seeking a second Holocaust. Where is the place for peace?

Until the bulk of Islam renounces such things and lives in freedom, there can be no peace. There can be an armed true – there can be expedients to get through the day to day, but there can’t be peace. The only proper course of action for Israel is to look after its security and its own people – if this causes heartache in Islam, then that is entirely Islam’s fault. If they’ll change their ways, then objections can be entertained and negotiations started.

So, ignore Obama, Israel. Let him get up on his high horse. Remain firm – your friends will be back in power soon.

Calling in Hollywood to burnish the “settled science” of global warming:

Keeping the public looped in on what scientists are discovering has never been easy. For one thing, the traditional explainers – journalists – can distort, hype, or oversimplify the latest breakthroughs. But the need to communicate science broadly and clearly has never been more urgent…

…One effort, announced at the meeting, will recruit Hollywood to help scientists tell their stories. NAS and the University of Southern California will team up to draw on USC’s expertise in film, TV, websites, and video games. The partnership will be the first between a federal agency and a film school.

“Entertainment media has been pretty much untapped as far as science literacy goes,” Dr. Fink says. A huge portion of the public doesn’t go to science museums or watch science programming on TV, she says. “Those are the eyeballs we’re trying to capture.”…

Are they kidding? No, I’m afraid they’re not. Either they are stupid, or they think we are. While Hollywood is a lot of things, “truth factory” has never been among them. Even when Hollywood tells a “true” story, its still modified for dramatic effect. Remember, you have to make war exciting – so you don’t concentrate on the logistical build up, the endless training and the long periods of inactivity…such things, which are vital in war (and, indeed, are often decisive), don’t make for good movies. And so when a war picture is made, its all about the action.

If you’re going to try to present climate science in movies, then what are you going to do with your one to two hours? Concentrate on the data, mathematical calculations and comparisons with past events? No – you’re going to show huge storms, polar bears on ice flows…all with dramatic, threatening music and thirty second sound bites of alarmist predictions. Because you want people glued to the idiot box or theater seat.

In short, what we’ll get might rate as excellent entertainment, but not something worth while for decision purposes. But that, of course, is what is wanted. They want people entertained – propagandized; primed to believe certain things…convinced that the smart and good looking people are all on board for anthropogenic global warming. That will make it easier for Gore to sell carbon credits and grant-mongering scientists to keep the money flowing in.

It won’t work. The people are wise to this sort of thing. This is the last, desperate effort of a con artists to save the scam.

It is the subject of the moment, isn’t it? Trouble is, even the best of bloggers can only write so much about it – so, have at that issue here, as well as anything else which comes to mind.

Nothing like stating the obvious:

U.S. employers won’t hire enough workers this year to lower the jobless rate much below the level of 9.7 percent reached in February, three Obama administration economic officials said today.

The proportion of Americans who can’t find work is likely to “remain elevated for an extended period,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, White House budget director Peter Orszag and Christina Romer, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in a joint statement. The officials said unemployment may even rise “slightly” over the next few months as discouraged workers start job-hunting again.

“Slightly”? Depends on how you define that – I guess if it goes up from 9.7 to 11.2 that would be “slightly”, in some minds. And it won’t be so much discouraged workers returning to the market but the fact that private sector jobs continue to contract. I checked my local Sunday paper – about 120 jobs listed, half of them garbage (you want to be a dancer or a nail technician? How about timeshare sales?). We’ve got 13% unemployment – 120 jobs won’t do the trick.

These clowns just don’t know what to do. They’ve printed, borrowed and spent like no tomorrow and according to their training, the economy should be booming now. Its not, and they can’t explain why. Of course, the very concept that government -which has to take its money from the people – can spend money to get an economy moving is asinine. But its dogma for most economists and all liberals.

Until we start implementing policies which allow for wealth creation in the United States, we’ll get no where. But, we can’t do that – we start building wealth here in the United States and China won’t be able to export shoddy, sub-priced goods to us to get the money to buy more bonds to finance Obama’s spending.

Normally, I’d keep this to my Nevada blog, but this is just too much – and too illustrative of the sort of nonsense we’re going to have to battle against in our Republican party:

Republican presidential adviser Sig Rogich said in an interview televised today that he is supporting the re-election of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid because replacing the most powerful member of Congress while the state is in the worst recession in memory is a bad idea…

…Rogich, a long-time Republican operative and George H.W. Bush adviser, is co-chairman of the “Republicans for Reid” campaign.

Replacing Reid, “is just wrong, it’s just not the smart thing to do,” he said.

“We’re in protracted water negotiations with Arizona, with (Sen.) John McCain at the table, Utah, with (Sen.) Orrin Hatch, (Sen.) Dianne Feinstein representing California, and Colorado,” Rogich said. “Who would you like to have at the table? A junior senator or a newly elected senator…”

This is RINOism at its worst – he’s selling out the people of Nevada and the United States because Reid is better positioned to keep the pork flowing. That’s it – its what RINOs want…just a piece of the Democrat action. As long as Harry lets some of the swag head towards the likes of Rogich and his friends, its all good.

Those who tell us to compromise are telling us to give up our views and get with the program. Not for them is the clarion call of America’s Founders – nor the courage which preserved this nation through perilous times.

I’ve got some news for the RINOs: We don’t want to be part of a program which takes the sublime ideals of the Declaration of Independence and mixes them with the diseased imaginings of warmed-over Marxism…the sterling qualities of George Washington do not mix well with the junior-league Leninists running the Democrat party.

Half a loaf is, often, better than none – but I won’t have our loaf mixed with refuse from the liberal sewer.