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.

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.

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.

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.

Post-Summit Stuff

Ronald Reagan would have been proud of congressional Republicans yesterday.  The healthcare summit was a draw according to MSNBC, which means the Republicans won, and won big.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

• The President was petulant, condescending and tense.  His idea of "bi-partisanship" appears to be to tell any given Republican who was speaking "those are all good points", and then to immediately dismiss them and move on.  He diminished his office by playing emcee to the room, and made himself look a little silly by singlehandedly talking longer than all the Democrats combined, and all the Republicans combined.
• The comparisons of President Obama to Ronald Reagan as a "Great Communicator" need to end, and end now.  Obama is very literate, and speaks well.  Reagan was a little less smooth as a speaker, but he was convincing whenever he spoke, and able to persuade others to his point of view.  Obama has zero ability to convince others, which is why he fails whenever he tries.  From last year's trips to Copenhagen to try to win the 2016 Olympics for Chicago, to try to get a deal on global warming, to his campaigning for Democrat candidates in races in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, Obama is on a losing streak of epic proportions in terms of personal persuasion.  He may be a great talker, but he is far from being a great communicator.
• Harry Reid looked as if he was chewing on a lemon and had a grassburr in the seat of his pants all day.  But then, that's pretty much how he always looks.  Nancy Pelosi is a worthless, lying sack of horse dung, and I literally celebrate every time her party is stupid enough to put her in front of television cameras.
• The Republicans, much to my surprise, showed up well-prepared with factual information and real ideas for real reforms that would actually improve healthcare delivery in the U.S. while lowering costs.  Naturally, each and every one of those ideas were rejected out of hand by the President and the other Democrats in the room, given that their goal here is to create a new, massive dependent class of Americans, not to in any way improve the system.
• Paul Ryan was especially impressive, easily the most serious and best-prepared person in the room.  His critique of the budgetary shenanigans contained in the Democrat plan were utterly understandable to the average person and thus devastating to the Democrat cause.
• It didn't hurt anything at all that the Rs were also able to bring real medical doctors to the table in the form of Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.  These two guys debating nitwits like Turban Durbin and San Fran Nan just is not a fair fight.
• The sad thing about all of this is that there really is a need for real, good faith reforms in the U.S. system of healthcare delivery.  Unfortunately, such reforms cannot happen at the federal level so long as radical leftist ideologues occupy the White House and the majority in congress.  And so we are left with the current stalemate.  Any real reforms must continue to happen at the state level on a piecemeal basis.  Obamacare is dead - Democrats will not be able to force the monstrosity through on a "reconciliation" strategy.

It is dead.  RIP.

Have a great Friday.

Some Stuff To Consider

The latest Rasmussen survey  on the Texas gubernatorial race shows incumbent Rick Perry running away from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison by a 48-27 margin.  9/11 truther candidate Debra Medina has slipped since her revelation on the Glenn Beck Radio Program a couple of weeks ago, now coming in at 16%.  This is too bad, since for a while there she was providing some actual suspense in this race, with everyone wondering if Sen. Hutchison could manage to even finish second after the horrid and ridiculously stupid campaign she has run.

Disclaimer:  I have long been a fan of Sen. Hutchison for a variety of reasons I will not go into here.  But I have lost pretty much all respect for her and the morons who are running her campaign after the nit-witted campaign she has presented to Texans this year.  In fact, I really find myself at this point rooting for Medina to make a comeback and edge her out for second place.

Seriously, Sen. Hutchison has for the last few weeks been running radio ads featuring a guy with a folksy Texas drawl (I think it's the guy who does the Whataburger commercials) complaining about Gov. Perry's "fancy roadside parks".  I swear I am not making this up - Sen. Hutchison and her campaign's "brain trust" (Pictured at the beginning of this piece) think they're going to defeat a 10-year incumbent Governor who has never in his life lost a race for elected office by complaining about roadside parks.

In light of all of that, no magnitide of defeat will be too much for Sen. Hutchison to suffer in this election.  She gets what she deserves.

Elsewhere, the news is all about today's Healthcare Summit, at which President Obama will get a 3 hour photo-op while ignoring any suggestions for real, sensible reform offered by the Republicans who are stupid enough to actually show up.

George Will  has a very nice op-ed piece about it all today.  His opening paragraph is right on point:

Today's health policy "summit" comes at a moment when, as happens with metronomic regularity, Washington is reverberating with lamentations about government being "broken." Such talk occurs only when the left's agenda is stalled. Do you remember mournful editorials and somber seminars about "dysfunctional" government when liberals defeated George W. Bush's Social Security reforms?

Meanwhile, our favorite simpering half-wit com-symp op/ed writer, E.J. Dionne apparently woke up yesterday and realized that the liberals are in the process of losing a large swath of young people exactly as they did in the 1980s.  This comes as a surprise only to E.J.  Pity him an his existence.

I love this story , in a tragic sort of way.  So let me get this straight:  a killer whale has already killed two people, and we're somehow supposed to be surprised when it kills a third?  In a sane world, this whale would have long ago either been put out to sea or put down.  Instead, our frivolous, simpleton-minded society somehow believes the beast is just misunderstood, and should be protected.  Even this woman's own sister is quoted as saying the victim “would not want anything done to that whale” because she loved the animals like children.

Well, guess what, sis?  Killer Whales aren't children, and they're called "killer" whales for a reason.

Idiot.

Have a great Thursday.

So Much for the "Pivot to Jobs"

Y’all remember way back in January – yes, a whole month ago – when the word out of the White House was that President Barack Obama was going to finally, at long last, really, truly get serious about dealing with the economy and implementing policies designed to create jobs? He was, according to his army of professional prevaricators – otherwise known as the mainstream news media – going to perform a “pivot to jobs”, a fancy dance move that would promenade away from his single-minded focus on the frivolity of cap and trade and healthcare nationalization, and dosey-doe to a new (for him) pursuit of policies designed to create real jobs.


So what has changed in the President’s behavior since that barrage of White House talking point parroting by the lapdog media?

Nothing.

If you got up early on Sunday morning and logged onto RealClearPolitics.com as I did, the very first headline you saw was a link to a transcript of the President’s Saturday morning YouTube address, demonstrating what he is clearly focused on today. The headline read “It’s Time to Move Forward on Healthcare”. Huh? Beg pardon? Say what?

Did I misread that? Is it a typo? Did it really say “It’s Time to Move Forward on Jobs”, or “It’s Time to Finally, at Long Last, to Focus on the Economy”, or “It’s Time For Me To Get Serious About Doing My Job”, or “It’s Time For Me To Drop My neo-Fascist Dreams”?

No, I had it right – it really does say “It’s Time to Move Forward on Healthcare”. Hooboy.

So I clicked on the piece to see if the headline was misleading. I thought, you know, the address might have been more focused on jobs and the economy, with just a passing mention about healthcare that was latched onto by a headline writer at RealClearPolitics. But no, the entire piece is about healthcare nationalization. I mean that literally – every word of the speech is solely focused on socializing 1/6th of the U.S. economy. It reads like a speech the President would have made last July – chock full of the ad hominem attacks on and demonization of healthcare providers we have so come to know and love from this President. We’re right back to boogeyman politics. Ok, really, we never left.

So much for the “pivot to jobs”.

Seriously, this should not come as a surprise to anyone – we’ve said all along this guy is not going to change. He has no clue what to do about the economy, and doesn’t much care. He has no clue how to go about creating jobs, and why would anyone expect otherwise? This is a man who has never been involved in a job-creating endeavor in his entire life – he has spent his entire adult life as a political agitator and a politician. His mentors in life have all, without exception, been men of the radical left. He is constitutionally incapable of changing his behavior, and has no desire to change it in any event – he is what he is, a man seeking the creation of a neo-fascist American state.

Oh, well, it could’ve been worse – the President’s Saturday address could have been all about cap and trade. Hmmm, why do I suspect that will be his topic in the coming weeks?

So the White House and the Democrats in congress remain focused on healthcare nationalization. They’re holding a summit on February 25th dedicated to healthcare nationalization. They’ve invited Republicans to attend, and will no doubt reject out of hand any Republican idea that would not lead directly to nationalization of 1/6th of the economy. The White House, after leaving it entirely up to congress to write various healthcare nationalization bills over the last 14 months, is going to post its own healthcare plan on its website on Monday. An anonymous source tells Fox News that the White House plan will be based on – guess what? – the current Senate bill, only without the bribes to Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska in exchange for their votes.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! The White House obviously believes that the only reason why the overwhelmingly liberal voters of Massachusetts elected a Republican last month to fill that state’s vacant senate seat was due to the backroom deals surrounding the senate healthcare negotiations, and that all those polls taken since showing upwards of 60% of Americans opposing healthcare nationalization are meaningless.

So, you might ask, why does this President remain myopically focused on what is so obviously a political loser of a policy? Because healthcare nationalization is not about “fixing” the healthcare system, it’s about creating the most massive new dependent class of Americans since FDR’s New Deal.

This President has not abandoned his goal of “transforming America”, which he repeated hundreds of times throughout his presidential campaign. He wasn’t kidding when he said that, nor was he resorting to hyperbole. His true, undying goal is to transform this country into a neo-fascist state, and the only way to make that happen is to render as many Americans as possible dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods and their healthcare. This is why the only “jobs” he has even attempted to create are government jobs, why his regulatory agencies focus on making it harder and costlier for anyone to create a private sector job, and why he refuses to abandon his unpopular plan to nationalize healthcare.

There is no mystery here, folks. This President is extremely transparent, and he has been telling us for a couple of years now what he really plans to do to this country. It’s time everyone started taking him at his word.

The Monday Morning Mass Hysteria

All you need to know about Barack Obama, part 6,593:  When speaking to a military audience, he does not know how to pronounce the word "corpsman". Either that, or he thinks everyone in the navy is a zombie (for all you humorless liberals, that would be a walking corpse).

After spending an entire year killing any chance of passing a healthcare nationalization bill by holding all negotiations in secret and shutting Republicans out of the process completely, the White House has decided to actually hold a public meeting on the subject - right out in the open, with TV cameras in the room!  - and even invite some evil Rs to attend.  I'm sure it'll be a fabulous success.

Yeesh.

Some guy who writes for the Nashville Post is whining that Sarah Palin has somehow "hijacked" the Tea Party.  What a terrible way for a writer to waste his one shot at national exposure.  Somebody give this clown a Kleenex.

If you hate your local TV weather guy, just be glad you don't live in Baltimore.  I think this may be the same guy who wrote the silly piece about Palin and the Tea Party.  He has a long commute.

Our favorite liberal bed-wetting columnist, E.J. Dionne, has written something completely senseless about about how passing a healthcare bill is like renovating a kitchen. Or something like that.

Finally, just in case you live under a rock and missed it, WHO DAT????

The Thursday Morning Thrill Ride

Wow.  You miss a couple of days blogging and all hell has broken loose.  Where to begin...

How about here.  Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, after having spent the last year desperately attempting to set herself up as the 60th vote for the Obama healthcare nationalization plan, suddenly finds herself down by 23 points to a Republican opponent in her bid for re-election.  So now she gets religion, and asks the President when he's going to start fighting back against those evil liberals in his own Party.  This would be comical if it weren't so damned pathetic.

Back in December, I wrote in my newspaper column that it was very clear to me at that time that, unless the President radically shifted his legislative and regulatory agenda back from the far left to the center of the political spectrum, both houses of congress would clearly be in play and subject to a GOP takeover this November.  I also admitted I was out on a limb with that projection, and that the national punditry would take a little while to reach a similar conclusion.  That realization among the pundit class has now begun in earnest, with this piece from an AP writer being the latest evidence of this transitional thought process.  If the AP, which has been firmly in the Obama tank for the last 2 years, has writers coming very reluctantly to this conclusion, you now the polling data is very, very compelling.

This is important news - Democrat Collin Peterson, Chairman of the House Ag Committee, has now introduced a bill that would deny EPA the ability to move to regulate "greenhouse" gases under its entirely fraudulent "endangerment finding" published in late 2009.  Rep. Peterson is extremely influential among farm state Democrats, who make up about 40 votes in the House, enough to get a bill passed with solid Republican support.  We continue to see rising support in the Senate for similar legislation among "moderate" Democrats who, like Sen. Lincoln, see their polling numbers fading rapidly under the steady leftwards assault on the economy and our freedoms by the Obama Administration.


This one actually surprises me a little bit.  The President actually had a pretty good day last Thursday when he went to a GOP caucus retreat and had a semi-free flowing Q and A session with members of the loyal opposition.  And he did well - I mean, the man is not competent at much, but he can debate when he's been properly schooled beforehand.  So when I saw early yesterday that a group of pundits and bloggers from across the political spectrum had sent a petition to the White House to make these kinds of sessions a regular periodic event, I half expected the Administration to at least give lip service to wanting to explore the possibility.  But these guys are clearly the most inept and clueless bunch we've had ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since at least the Carter Administration, so I suppose it should not surprise me that they are choosing to forego an opportunity to make their guy look good on TV 2 or 3 times a year.

I know you will all be shocked to hear this, but the Obama Commerce Department has been dummying up fake unemployment numbers in an obvious effort to prevent the published rate of unemployment from rising above 10%.  As we mentioned on Monday, the Administration has already demonstrate its willingness to fake these economic indicators by having to revise its third quarter GDP estimate downwards twice, ultimately taking it all the way down to 2.2% from an initial estimate of 4.6%.  I'm laying odds that the 5.7% 4th quarter GDP estimate published last week will ultimately be revised downwards to somewhere south of 3.5%.

And then I came across this. This does not bode well for any of us.  Maybe we all ought to consider taking up golf. 

Have a great Thursday.