Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Costs of American Fascism

Back in the first term of George W. Bush, yours truly penned a series of columns that posited that the Republican Party, then in control of all levers of power as the Democrat Party is today, would do the country a great service by moving towards a market-driven, private-sector-based system of universal healthcare. 

The reasoning then was that there was a growing mood among the public that something needed to be done to improve the delivery of healthcare services to those who either did not have health insurance provided through their employment or could not afford to purchase it themselves.  This line of thought further concluded that, if the Republicans did not seize their moment in power to move the nation to some form of market-based universal delivery of health services, then the Democrats would move the nation to a ruinous government-based form of the same thing the next time they assumed absolute power.

Predictably, the Republicans did nothing in this regard, and the nation now stands saddled with the worst-case scenario:  a nationalized system of healthcare delivery based upon the fascist model (private ownership, government mandate and control) preferred by the nation's first outwardly fascist congress and President.  

This is undeniably what Obamacare amounts to – there is no logical, fact-based argument to the contrary, though there is plenty of dissembling, name-calling and lying from the President and his supporters.

You begin with the unprecedented mandate that everyone must purchase a healthcare policy.  The President and his army of liars like to reply that this is no different than the mandate to buy auto insurance, something only a blatant liar or an oaf who flunked his Logic 101 course would attempt to argue.  You are forced to purchase auto insurance in order to engage in a privilege – the privilege of driving an automobile – and we have always paid all manner of fees in order to engage in privileges in this country.  The mandate on health insurance is the first time the federal government has imposed a mandate on citizens for the simple fact that they are alive.  If you take in breath on a regular basis, the federal government now says you must purchase health insurance.  If you do not purchase health insurance, you will be fined.  If you refuse to pay the fine, you will be thrown in jail.

This is the very essence of fascism.  Benito Mussolini would be proud.

Obamacare will have a depressing effect on the economy in the short run, and ruinous effect in the long run.  It received a 10-year "score" from the Congressional Budget Office of "just" $984 billion only due to the fact that it imposes its new taxes immediately, but does not implement its budget outlays until 2014.  Thus, you have 10 years of Obamacare taxes counted against just 6 years of outlays.  Its mandate that any business employing more than 50 people provide them with healthcare insurance will ensure that thousands upon thousands of small businesses will never grow beyond 49 employees, and many of those who currently exceed that number will lay enough off in order to get themselves under that threshold.  That process has already begun.

Where larger businesses are concerned, we've already seen announcements from Caterpillar that Obamacare will impose a new cost of $100 million on that company in its first year, and from AT&T that its cost will be more like $1 billion.  What do companies do when they incur massive new costs?  They increase the prices they charge to their customers, and they lay people off.

Continuing on the fascist model, the Democrats in congress next move into bullying and intimidation mode.  This morning, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman announced he will subpoena CEOs from these and other large companies to explain their calculations to his committee next month.  See, their announcements do not fit into the approved story line, and any deviation from that storyline must be discredited and punished.

On the insurers themselves, the government now imposes mandates that they allow parents to carry their kids on their policies until age 26, and that they can no longer screen applicants for pre-existing conditions, among other things.  So what will happen there?  Well, both mandates will dramatically increase costs to healthcare insurers, and so the rates they charge will naturally go up as a result.  The anticipation of these higher rates is largely the basis for the cost estimates from companies like Caterpillar and AT&T.

This is not rocket science here, folks.  It is all very, very easy to predict.

Finally, the Obamacare army of liars love to compare this atrocity of a bill to Social Security and Medicare, and predict it will ultimately become as well-liked by the public as those prior entitlements.  Let's note that both Social Security and Medicare are currently actuarially insolvent and will be completely broke within the next decade.  Let's also note that the combined un-funded liabilities of those two massive programs that must somehow be paid by future generations of Americans is upwards of $50 trillion.  That's Trillion with a "T".

Those two programs may be popular, but the reality is they are well on their way to bankrupting this nation.  Obamacare will just speed that unhappy process along.

The Liberal Zoo welcomes you all to Fascist America.  Hope you enjoy the stay, but be sure to meet all your mandates.

Friday, March 26, 2010

On Losing Your Wallet

So I lost my wallet on Sunday.  Credit cards - gone.  Social Security card - gone.  Driver's license - gone.  Lost it on my way to Lake Charles for a three day stay at L'auberge Du Lac.  It was purely a business trip, I assure you.  Luckily I had some cash and my passport on me, so I was able to go ahead and check in.

What I am finding out is this:  cancelling and replacing your credit cards is a cinch.  Took me about an hour and a half altogether to replace 5 cards.

Replacing your driver's license is no different today than it was 40 years ago.  Drive to an inconveniently located Texas Dept. of Transportation office.  Wait in line 30 minutes for a disgruntled state bureaucrat to look at your insurance card and passport and tell you to fill out a form at a table where there are pens on chains.  Find out that none of the pens on chains have any ink in them, and borrow a pen from the Scottish guy in front of you who just moved to Houston from Aberdeen.  Nice guy - he tells me not to be too upset - it works the same way in Scotland.

Fill out the form and stand in another line for another 30 minutes, before another disgruntled low-talking bureaucrat who speaks English as a third language calls you over, looks at your paperwork and says something completely incomprehensible.  Get a dirty look from the disgruntled low-talking bureaucrat when you respond with "huh?".  Lean in very close to her and listen intently as she mumbles "take off glasses, stand in front of blue screen", and then try to smile as she takes the most god-awful photo that has ever been taken of you in your entire life, or at lease since the last time you had to replace your drivers license.

Listen very intently again as the disgruntled low-talking bureaucrat mumbles "eleven dollar", and count out the bills.  Take your receipt and ask how long it will take to get the license in the mail.  Recoil in shock at the utter futility of it all when she replies "thirty, forty-fi day".  



Run out of there in utter despair knowing that this is what my healthcare service is going to be like for the remainder of my life now that the system has been federalized.

I just cannot wait for my visit to the Social Security office next week.  I'd rather have dental surgery without anesthesia.

Monday, March 22, 2010

The Politics of Frivolity, Revisited

NRO's Planet Gore blog  has a story today that perfectly illustrates the theme of my "Politics of Frivolity" piece from a couple of weeks ago.  Here is an excerpt:


My old stomping grounds for about 15 years (Alexandria, Virginia) is insisting on moving forward with a project to spend 173,000 scarce taxpayer dollars in these lean times — even as taxpaying families are setting aside the frivolous and even what they consider basics — on a new "green roof" to replace a 13-year-old roof with no history of problems and a 25-year life expectancy. The other $200,000 is being paid for by all taxpayers through the EPA. OK, mostly by future taxpayers.

If Alexandria doesn't spend the $173,000 they don't have, you see, they won't qualify for EPA giving them $200,000 the federal government doesn't have. So they have to do it. They won't get that bag of money from the federal government if they don't undertake this expenditure.

Healthcare Nationalization - A Post Mortem

Ok, so what do we know in the wake of the healthcare nationalization vote that took place in the House of Representatives on Sunday?  Here are a few things:
  •            We know there is no such thing as a "pro-life" Democrat in Washington anymore.  Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak and a few others in the Democrat caucus like to put up the pretense of caring about unborn children in order to retain their seats representing borderline Republican districts, but at the end of the day, they abandoned their "stand on principle" (as Stupak put it) for a toothless, meaningless executive order that will be thrown out of the first federal court that considers it.


  •            We already knew the so-called "moderate" Blue Dog" Democrats were as useless as you-know-whats on a boar hog, and they proved it yet again, happily providing Nancy Pelosi the number of votes she needed to ram this atrocity of a bill through the House.  They have now played this kabuki dance in which the Speaker counts Blue Dog heads until she has the necessary number of votes (they probably draw straws, or play "rock/scissors/paper to see who has to vote with her), and then lets the remainder vote against whatever disgra ce happens to be on the floor at the time for more than a decade now.  It will all come to an end in November, as pretty much all the members of this worthless fake caucus will face defeat in their bids for re-election.  Their constituents have figured out the game.  The nation has never seen a group of politicians more deserving of defeat than this particular bunch of frauds.


  •         We know that, at the end of the day, Speaker Pelosi could get 216 votes in favor of a bill that would fill the Potomac River with raw sewage if that became a top priority on President Obama's fascist agenda.


  •          We know that the President has no clue what is actually in this bill.  He demonstrated that very clearly in his interview with Fox News Anchor Brett Baier last Wednesday.


  •          We know that the Democrats as a Party have no regard for the Constitution of the United States.  Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida stated this loud and clear for all to hear when, during a meeting of the House Rules Committee, he proudly stated "Rules?  There ain't no rules here!  We make 'em up as we go along."  Rep. Hastings, by the way, is one of just six federal judges to have been impeached from office, having been convicted of fraud and bribery charges in the 1980s.  That this criminal now sits as one of the senior Democrats on the House Rules Committee is perhaps the most appropriate committee assignment in congressional history.

And so we go on, a nation forever changed.  The United States of America is now destined to become a socialist welfare state on the model of failing Western European nations like France and Spain.  This has been the goal of socialists/fascists masquerading as Democrats for decades, and Sunday was the biggest leap they have yet take down that road.  They know that, in the long run, a government that controls the people's healthcare decisions controls their lives.  Attaining that goal was, in their view, well worth the electoral Armageddon they will face at the polls this November, and in 2012.


The truly interesting part of this whole process to me is listening to the President and his supporters in congress and the news media speculate about what a political disaster it would be for him and the Democrat Party in general had they failed to implement healthcare nationalization legislation.  I find this whole discussion fascinating, if irrelevant, because the reality is that, for proponents of this stain upon American democracy, the outcome was ultimately of no consequence at all – the damage to their political futures had already been done long before Sunday, and there is no going back.

They have now allowed this corrupt, disgraceful process of bullying, lying and vote purchasing to remain on public display for almost a full year now.  I cannot remember a time in my life when such a high percentage of ordinary Americans were so tuned in and appalled by the machinations of congress.  There will be no recovery from that for leftist Democrats in Washington. 

This November will be a political slaughter.  November 2012 will most likely be more of the same, and Barack Obama will probably be a one-term President as a result.  It's what will inevitably follow as the government steadily gains control of every aspect of our daily lives that should make us all cry for the futures of our children and their children.

American Fascism was born on Sunday.  President Obama and Nancy Pelosi took a giant leap towards their goal of turning this great nation into just another banana republic.  Somewhere, Hugo Chavez is smiling.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

A Nation on the Brink of Fascism

So here we sit on Saturday morning, seemingly a day away from President Obama realizing his dream of destroying our constitutional democracy and replacing with a sort of fascist, benevolent strongman banana republic form of government. The President obviously dreams of ruling over America in the same fashion in which Hugo Chavez has ruled over Venezuela for the last decade, putting in place a socialist/fascist utopia without having the suffer the inconvenience of answering to a free and curious news media, or of legitimately moving his policy preferences through a complex and difficult legislative process.


After all, He, Obama, is The One, and The One is right, The One is all-knowing, and The One and should have his way.

Certainly, the President has already achieved his dream of not having to answer to a free and curious news media, as all the major leftist news organs who dominate this nation's media long ago dove into the Obama tank of Kool-aid and have been swimming around in it with blank, timid smiles on their faces ever since.

The lone exception to this happy circumstance for The One came on Thursday, when Fox News anchor Brett Baier conducted the first legitimate media interview the President has ever been subjected to in his entire political life. Baier was everything a real news reporter is supposed to be: He asked tough questions, he followed up when the President obfuscated or tried to shift focus, he interrupted when the President tried to filibuster, he repeated questions Mr. Obama tried to avoid until the President was forced to give something resembling a real answer or admit he had no idea what the answer was.

In other words, unlike every other member of the nation’s news media who has interviewed the President since he became a candidate back in 2007, Baier conducted himself like a real news reporter who had attended a real journalism school. Sadly, he will almost certainly remain the lone exception to rule in today’s lapdog media, and the President will almost certainly never take another interview on the Fox News Channel.

So the major media having long been completely co-opted to tell the Obama tale the way The One wants it told, the President was left only to find a way to circumvent the Constitution and the legislative process it envisions. That desire was satisfied for The One by one Louise Slaughter, the Chairman of the House Rules Committee, who last week presented The One with the now famous “deem and pass” solution to his quandary. This would allow members of the House who are reluctant to vote in favor of the atrocity of a bill the Senate passed last December to “deem” it having passed without having to actually vote on it.

But that wasn’t all – the President and his gang of Chicago thugs helped move the Democrat Party’s fake “deficit hawks” along by strong-arming the Congressional Budget Office to issue a fake score on the bill that pretends to show it actually cuts the deficit! No one really believes that to be the case, of course – I mean, if they did, why not just multiply every provision in the bill by, say 8, and thus cut the deficit 8 times more than it already does? – but the fake score allowed fake “conservative” Democrats to claim to their constituents back home that they voted for the bill on the grounds that it is fiscally responsible. Oh wait, silly me – I just said “voted”. Obviously, that’s wrong, since they’re not “voting” on the bill at all.

See how elegant this all is? The One has, through all this procedural chicanery, essentially installed himself as the nation’s de facto dictator, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid serving as his congressional enablers. If he can get healthcare nationalization done without a real congressional vote, who is to say he can’t do the same with cap and trade, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and anything else on his radical fascist agenda?

Of course, the problem The One now faces is that his term as de facto dictator expires this November, when Republicans will make huge gains in congress as a direct result of the extra-constitutional actions he has taken during his first year in office. That is, of course, unless The One and his gang of Chicago thugs figure out a way to subvert the electoral process in the same way they’ve subverted the legislative process.

Don’t kid yourself into thinking that those efforts are not already underway.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Runaway Scrape

March 13 is a little-noted date in Texas history - the date in 1836 when General Sam Houston, his 400 man army and hundreds of terrorized Texas citizens began their retreat from General Santa Anna's Mexican Army.  This strategic retreat lasted more than five weeks, until Houston decided to camp his army near Lynch's ferry on the San Jacinto River on April 19. 

Two days later, after Santa Anna had assembled his own army of more than 1,000 across the plain that is now known as the San Jacinto Battleground, Houston led his men in a mid-afternoon siesta time surprise attack, routed the Mexican army, and secured independence for the nation of Texas from Mexico.

The Runaway Scrape is the equivalent in Texas history to the winter at Valley Forge endured by Washington's Revolutionary Army.  The spring of 1836 was miserable in Texas - unusually cold, fraught with heavy rains that turned roads into almost impassable mud, and rivers into boiling cauldrons.  The Texian army lacked proper equipment and clothing, and moving any amount of men across the Texas terrain during that season was a near-impossibility.

The Scrape began at Gonzales, Texas, where Houston had chosen to asseble his rag-tag army, and await news of the battle of the Alamo.  Interestingly, although Gonzales lies only about 80 miles from San Antonio, it took a full week after the Alamo fell on March 6 for the news to travel to Gonzales in the person of Susanna Dickenson, one of a handful of Alamo occupants who was spared by Santa Anna's 'no quarter' doctrine.  By that time, Santa Anna had divided his army with his cousin, General Martin' Perfecto de Cos, sending Cos south with about 500 men, and taking the remainder with him to the east, towards the Texas border with Louisiana.  Immediately upon hearing from Mrs. Dickenson, Houston began moving his own army east, staying just ahead of Santa Anna until he and his war council decided to make a stand at San Jacinto.

Houston has been often derided as a poor general and even a borderline coward in some quarters for mounting such a long and miserable retreat in the face of an enemy.  But the reality is that the Texian Army would have lacked any element of surprise had it chosen to stay and fight in Gonzales, and that the Runaway Scrape, at the end, became one of the great enablers of Texas Independence.

So, for a Texan, March 13 is a day well worth remembering.  God Bless Texas.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Some Stuff to Consider

First a disclaimer:  In my entire adult life, I have never engaged in a birthday party ticklefest with other full-grown men.  Just in case anybody was wondering.

Seriously, you almost have to feel sorry for Congressman Massa.  He is obviously a very confused individual who cannot bring himself to publicly admit to his sexual orientation.  His interview with Glenn Beck is one of the most skin-crawlingly uncomfortable episodes I can remember witnessing.  The reality that Mr. Massa actually thinks anyone believes a word he said is a very sad indicator of his utter lack of fitness for serving in congress.  Then again, being abjectly out of touch with reality appears to place him right in the mainstream of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But enough of that sad and sorry spectacle.  On to more important matters...

Professor Mark J. Perry, at his excellent Carpe Diem blog, contrasts the economic performance of California and Texas.  One state is heavily unionized and dominated in government by mindless leftist cretins.  The other is a right to work state dominated in government by low tax conservatives.

Guess which state has a vastly more healthy economy?  The only drawback to this is that many of the cretins fleeing California for greener pastures are coming to Texas, which is seeing more than 1,000 people move within its borders every day.  Shit, they've already ruined formerly wonderful places like Montana, New Mexico and Colorado - can't they leave the Lone Star State alone?

We have been saying for some time that this Administration and Democrat congressional leaders are attempting to transform America from a constitutional democracy to a strong-arm fascist form of government.  Nowhere has this reality been more starkly borne out than in this morning's report by Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner that San Fran Nan is now planning to create a "rule" that will allow her to "deem" the senate healthcare bill to have been "approved" by the House without first requiring the House members to actually take a vote on the bill!

This is an extraordinary perversion of the legislative process, even for a shameless creep like Pelosi, who has made a career out of perverting the process in the House.  These people - Pelosi, Obama, Reid, et al - are literally a threat to the very existence of this country.  Wake up, folks, before it's too late.

On the Great Climate Fraud front, it should come as a surprise to no one that the reliable fellow travelers in the tired, dying, dinosaur leftist news media are beginning to rally to one final push in defense of Pope Al Gore and his minions in the Church of Global Warming.  See this USA Today puff piece as today's prime case in point.

These people will not go down without a fight, and their bones will continue to rattle long after they are buried.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A Nation Recoiling From the Politics of Frivolity

Is America rinally recoiling from the politics of frivolity?


We’ve written a great deal about the Great Climate Fraud in recent months, as the cultish Church of Global Warming (CGW) has entered its inevitable decline in credibility with the scientific community, policymakers and the public at large. The revelation last fall of hundreds of emails detailing an organized commission of outright fraud by some of the leading fake “scientists” who have promoted the Warmist religion has had the same effect on the CGW as the revelation of emails detailing an organized effort to manipulate U.S. natural gas markets had on Enron a decade ago.

Citizens in the United States, Great Britain and across the free world have begun recoiling at the idea that they’ve been had by a bunch of two-bit charlatans. Ok, make that a bunch of trillion dollar charlatans, but charlatans they are. In the most recent Pew survey on public attitudes towards major issues, the percentage of Americans who believe human activity is the cause of climate change fell to an all-time low 34 percent. Climate change ranked 21st out of 21 issues surveyed in terms of public concern, with just 28 percent still laboring under the belief the matter is cause for major congressional action.

Politicians with those kinds of numbers keep themselves busy looking for other lines of work. Public policy issues with that low level of public concern seldom become the subject of successful legislation to address them. Thus we have simultaneously seen over the last few months the collapse of leftist efforts to enact cap and trade legislation targeting carbon dioxide, as well as growing bipartisan congressional opposition to efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to severely hamstring the economy by implementing command and control regulation over carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases”.

What is happening here is that the public is beginning the process of rejecting the politics of frivolity. And frivolity is exactly what the CGW and really environmentalism in general have become.

Over the past 30 to 40 years in America, many good and positive things have been accomplished in the name of environmentalism, since the implementation of major pieces of legislation like the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Automobiles no longer belch out plumes of black smoke as they run down the road; the emissions from coal-fired power plants have been dramatically reduced, although they are still the dirtiest things around; emissions from oil refineries have been cut by a factor of 9 and more; cities no longer are allowed to flow their sewage into the nation’s waterways; important and significant animal species like the Whooping Crane and the Bald Eagle have been brought back from the brink of extinction. All of these and more were good and worthy goals that were worth taking on, and the nation is a much cleaner and safer place as a result.

But, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting de-legitimizing of world socialism, the worthiness of the environmental movement in general began to change, as leftist activists of all stripes came to the conclusion that the best way to advance their radical agenda was under the guise of “environmentalism”. Suddenly, beginning in the early 1990s, proposals for listing species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) moved away from species, like the Whooping Crane, whose very existence was truly threatened, to animals like the Sage Grouse native to Wyoming and Colorado, which literally exist in the millions (and even have an open hunting season dedicated to them), but whose listing under the ESA on the grounds of decreasing habitat would result in massive economic and societal disruption.

Environmentalist activities under the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) began to take on a similar profile of proposing “solutions” designed to cause maximum cost and economic disruption possible. Under NEPA, the EPA can require the conduct of hugely costly environmental impact studies whenever a citizen raises concerns about almost any potential environmental impact that could allegedly result from some economic activity. Such studies typically cost millions of dollars and can take years to complete. These NEPA provisions have been systematically used by radicals around the country to delay and increase the cost of all manner of infrastructure projects. In Texas these tactics have been used to dramatically increase the time and cost of major highway project on I-35 north of Waco and I-45 north of Houston. One seven mile stretch of road on I-35 has now taken more than 14 years to reconstruct, and is still unfinished.

Examples of this sort of abuse of the provisions of these major federal acts are legion, and the public invariably becomes incensed once the abuses are revealed, despite the best efforts of the leftist news media to cover them up. This has never been more true than the last two years, as a nation mired in a major recession begins to realize that it can no longer afford to tolerate such mindless frivolity in the name of “environmentalism”.

Of course, there has never been a more frivolous environmental policy proposal than the current efforts by congress and the EPA to either legislate or regulate control of carbon dioxide emissions. To understand exactly how frivolous such proposals are, all you really need to know is that carbon dioxide makes up only about 4% of all so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions. Of that 4%, human-based emissions amount to around 3.4%, meaning that, in the now-failed Waxman-Markey legislation, congress proposed to cost the U.S. economy more than $2 trillion over 8 years to attempt to marginally reduce what currently amounts to around 13/100ths of 1% of greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the Waxman-Markey bill has failed, the EPA now proposes to cost the economy even more than that under its heavy-handed, Soviet-style regulatory system.

This is rank frivolity that a nation mired with trillion dollar-plus annual budget deficits as far as the eye can see simply cannot afford or tolerate. The recent polling data indicate that most citizens outside of the hard-core radical left have come to that realization. You can expect that shift in attitudes to show up in a big way in this November’s congressional elections.

The frivolity of the liberal zoo has fallen into a state of unrecoverable ill repute.