davintosh

Here’s a good read by Dan Kennedy on the Business & Media Institute website. An excerpt:

Mrs. Obama… reportedly has a staff of 22 assistants. Yes, I said twenty-two. (Previous First Ladies’ dedicated staffs were in the single digits). Michelle’s little army includes a Chief of Staff costing $172,000 a year; a Deputy Chief of Staff at $90,000; a Director of Policy and Projects at $140,000; a Director of Communications at $102,000; a Deputy Director of Scheduling at $62,000; two Social Secretaries – mysteriously, one at $65,000, one at $64,000; an Associate Director of Correspondence at $45,000, an Assistant to the Social Secretary at $36,000, and more, in total consuming $6.3-million annually thus $25-million during her 4-year term. Not to mention a make-up artist and hair stylist.

Kennedy took the occasion of the scolding tone of President Obama to bring this up; when he said that a trip to Vegas wasn’t the wisest move “when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices. It’s time your government did the same.”

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black…*

*not a racist comment.

I’d heard rumblings of Nancy Pelosi’s boorish attitude before, but this news just takes the cake. Since stepping into the position of Speaker of the House, the bill for Madame Speaker’s air travel is pushing the $3 million mark, with well over $100,000 in just in-flight food & booze. Then there was the staggering bill for the monstrous Congressional presence at the Copenhagen Climate Summit…

She has been using Air Force aircraft and personnel to jet back and forth between Washington, D.C. and her home in San Francisco, plus has made several overseas junkets (for who knows what)… But traveling alone isn’t much fun, so she has her usual entourage tagging along, plus any number of her family members, plus whatever Congressional delegation needs to come along, plus their own entourages, plus security…

And when asked about the extravagant use of taxpayer funds for travel, Pelosi’s defense is along the lines of, it’s all necessary for the person third in line to the Presidency. Can she justify all of the travel and expenses? Has she reimbursed the DOD for any of those expenses? If Denny Hastert had pulled the same stunts, would there be the near deafening silence from the mainstream media about it? I think not, on all three counts.

Not my words, but the words of highly respected economist, Dr. Arthur Laffer from an interview published on Human Events.

“Obama is a fine, very impressive person. He really is. Unfortunately, everything that he is doing in economics is exactly wrong. He is a crappy president,” Laffer said.

Dr. Laffer had a lot more to say in that interview about the state of the country’s economy and how the Obama Administration’s economic policy is affecting it. Although Laffer didn’t have much nice to say about the current policy, his is not your run-of-the-mill partisan mudslinging. He’s also written some scathing reviews of Bush Administration spending decisions, especially the bailouts in 2008. He may not be a totally unbiased source of info, but he is consistent in calling bad economic policy as he sees it. And he has some solid credentials backing up what he says.

President Obama told Diane Sawyer in an interview recently, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” I would so love for him to be a really good president, but if he continues on his present course, I forsee him being more of a crappy one-term president.

Human Events Interview
“Get Ready for Inflation and Higher Interest Rates” — June 11, 2009, WSJ
Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich — May 18, 2009, WSJ
“How to Fix the Health-Care ‘Wedge’; There is an alternative to ObamaCare” — August 5, 2009, WSJ

Great article about the shooter in last Thursday’s massacre at Ft. Hood over at NYTimes.com.

With all that has been discovered about this ordeal and the guy behind it — Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan — it’s amazing that there is so much handwringing over whether to call it an act of terrorism or not. The media and the politicians seem to be going way out of their way to avoid stating the obvious, seemingly motivated by out of an over-developed sense of political correctness.

The good news is that he was denied the reward he was likely seeking from a ‘martyr’s’ death; he was shot four times, and survived. Even though to him, being held by infidels is a punishment worse than death, I’m not sure if that’s quite enough.

Guess this makes it official; Barack Hussein Obama (mmmm, mmmm, mmmm!) being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize means that the Nobel Peace Prize means absolutely dick. i.e. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing.

It was bad enough when the prize was awarded to Al Gore, who at that time was singularly undeserving of such an award, but Barack Obama? What has he done to deserve this prize? Nothing that I can think of, unless he leads a secret life of which the public is largely unaware (oh wait, we still don’t know much about what his work as the editor of the Harvard Law Review, nor do we know anything of the grades he earned at Harvard.) According to one Reuters article, he deserves it for “… offering the world hope and striving for nuclear disarmament”? I guess you could say that his naive striving for nuclear disarmament gives hope to some, like Iran, North Korea, China and Russia (who surely were all laughing in their sleeves at his “… dreams of a world without weapons…” while “… right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.”)

The prize surely isn’t for his leadership at the nation’s capitol when it comes to bipartisan cooperation, nor for his leadership in his dream of universal healthcare… All of that has left the nation even more polarized than when he (mis)took the Oath of Office in January. And the prize can’t be for his leadership in the role of Commander in Chief, as troop morale is at an all-time low in Afghanistan, exacerbated by the lack of clear mission goals and confusing rules of engagement that leave them poorly equipped to even defend themselves in the face of an enemy unafraid to hide behind civilians…

But according to the Nobel Prize Committee, he gets the prize because, “Very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” So it’s all about celebrity. I laugh, as do many when they first heard this news. The only hope inspired in me by Obama is that his agenda for this country fails, and by the grace of God and the arrogance & incompetence of the Democrats in Congress, thus far it has.

Since the Nobel comes with a cool $4 million bonus, I wonder whether the Obamas will be inclined to “share the wealth” with the country. Something tells me that ain’t happening.

Saw this on today’s Patriot Post, and thought it interesting in light of the President’s proposed healthcare ‘reform’. Emphasis mine.

We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass. And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin. Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult, we are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people.

— Ronald Reagan

The speech from which that quote was taken was given on February 6, 1977, but you’d think that he was looking through time to today. I guess what it really means is that the initiatives being promoted by Barack Obama and his sidekicks in Congress are nothing new; it’s all been tried before. One side note: Reagan referred “our party” two times in this quote, referencing of course the Republican Party. These days it seems as though the Republicans are trying harder to be the me-too, “Democrat-lite” party than anything resembling what Reagan envisioned. In trying to build the fabled “big tent” the party has abandoned anything resembling principled positions, running around with one finger in the wind and another somewhere else trying to woo one demographic or another. Reagan was a conservative in principle and in practice, something we haven’t seen in the leadership of the Republican Party for a good decade. Who will be this generation’s Ronald Reagan?

Why is it so difficult to understand that conservatism works every time it’s tried?

President “Tennis Match” Obama is prepping right now for a speech to a joint session of Congress, which will of course be beamed far & wide for all of us to see. The purpose, according to the President, is to help us all to know…

… exactly what I think will solve our healthcare crisis, they will have a lot of clarity about what I think is the best to move forward. So the intent of the speech is to, A, make sure that the American people know exactly what it is we are proposing, B, to make sure that Democrats and Republicans understand that I am open to new ideas, that not being rigid and ideological, but we do intend to get something done this year.

So, “what I think will solve our healthcare crisis” and “what I think is the best to move forward”… Thus far since taking office, what he thinks is best doesn’t line up very well with what history has proven to be best for the country. I hope he does better than that. And is it just me, or does B contradict A just a little bit? I mean, if he’s gonna let us know exactly what it is that’s being proposed, is it safe to assume that the leaders of the House and Senate are going to get it right and not throw their pet projects in there? I don’t think that’s a safe assumption at all. He seemed to be pretty clueless about what was in HB 3200; will his dulcet tones make all the difference and soothe us into complacency so we’ll just bend over and take it in the rear? Or will those tones convince Congress that they need to just ignore public opinion and pass what he thinks is best for us?

I won’t likely be listening in — I’ll just read the transcript of it later. Listening to that voice for that long will definitely exceed my ewww factor for the day, and besides, what he’s going to say is pretty predictable, judging by what I’ve read from people who’ve been given a preview of what he’s going to say.

The problem is that the guy hasn’t got much credibility left; HB 3200 is the only legislation that has been made public, and there are huge inconsistencies between it and what he says is “in the plan”. I just don’t buy anything he has to say on the subject.

He’s already telegraphed what he ultimately wants to see in healthcare reform legislation, and that’s a state-controlled healthcare industry with a massive bureaucracy overseeing it and huge tax increases to pay for it. I’ll be the first to admit that there are problems with the healthcare system, but it’s not so broken that we need this kind of cure. And he may be telling the truth in saying that he’ll settle for less, but that’s what he and the rest of the statists in Congress will be working toward, if only through small increments. They say there are 40-some million people in the US without healthcare insurance; even if that’s true (and those figures are highly questionable) is it worth screwing up the system that works pretty darned well for the other 260 million of us who do? Even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says they can’t pull it off the way they’d like to; any healthcare reform they pass now will leave more people uninsured in five years than we have now, and will cost far more than Congress and the President say it will; in the end we’ll have tax increases and healthcare rationing. There’s no way around it. And I for one do NOT want some bureaucrat deciding whether my kid is worth the expenditure of the Government’s precious and limited healthcare resources. And the President has the temerity to tell us the idea of “death panels” is ridiculous… It’s only a logical next step down the path he wants us to go.

I think President Obama suffers from a bit of guilt that he wants to assuage on a grand scale; he says that, “… the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough.” I admire his desire to help those who need help, but this plan of his won’t. And there is plenty of evidence to show this plan to be little more than a pretext for other things he wants to accomplish that will work just as poorly, and leave a terrible legacy for us all to endure.

There was a lot of hullaballoo over President Barack Obama’s webcast address to schoolkids that was scheduled for today. Lots of people on the right decided to keep their kids home from school to keep them from being made to hear what he had to say — one talk show host made mention that today was “Take Your Kid To The Doctor” day — and still others of the opposite political persuasion (no trackbacks or links from me) chose to blast the Right for voicing concerns about it.

I just listened to Obama’s speech, read through the text of what was on his teleprompter as he went, and all I can say is, ‘meh’. He followed the script pretty well, but I still don’t see why all the fuss over his oratory style. Double-meh. It was filled with good advice, and was the kind of rah-rah speech that kids in school get all the time (or they should); stay in school, respect your teachers, pay attention, etc… The same sort of things I tell my boys when they start slacking & letting their grades slide. This one stands apart in that it’s coming from the President of the United States and was intended to be piped in everywhere via webcast; can’t recall any previous president doing anything other than visiting a handful of schools & delivering the same type of speech in person.

This one also stands out in that it showcases our Glorious President’s narcissism; he uses the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ no less than 60 times in the speech. He seemed to set himself up as the example of how far someone can get in life through hard work, discipline and a dedicated family. And don’t forget that in spite of the knowledge that kids get the same type of pep talk from their parents and teachers, he somehow thinks that telling kids,

… I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

… will make them do better? As if his golden voice and rapturous tones will make the difference, and get the kids to perform. If it works to inspire some kids to do better, great. But it’s just a little too creepy for me, and I’d say the same if it was George W. Bush that was doing the talking (Reagan? I would be ok with that though!) I have to admit that when I tell my own kids those same things they often don’t listen; hearing it come from a respected teacher or family member usually has more traction. But since when did this become the purview of the POTUS? There seems to be someone who thinks the President can pull off what so many others can’t; it’s either a bit of narcissism on Obama’s part, or his staff and the adoring crowds that fill the bureaucratic positions in school systems across the country thinking a little too highly of him.

I just hope this doesn’t become a regular thing; Obama’s image being beamed into every US classroom on a regular basis is just a little too reminiscent of the portrait of Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro being displayed in classrooms and homes. Add to that the thought of something like the ridiculous I Pledge video being shown along with it an address from Obama… (shivvvverrrrr) Too creepy for me, thanks.

Congress’ August Recess is turning out to be quite interesting. Many Representatives and Senators supporting the Obamacare legislation that’s being ramrodded through Washington have gone home to their constituents & have held “Town Hall Meetings” to help sell the plan to all of us… But it looks like the less-than-cordial reception they’re getting is taking them a bit by surprise. Here’s a video clip of Senator “Agile” Arlen Specter, the Senate’s newest Democrat, & Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius at one such meeting in Philadelphia:

This is fantastic… At least I think it is. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) the President and the leadership of the Democrat majority in both houses of Congress don’t seem to share my excitement. Nancy Pelosi & Steny Hoyer co-authored a post on USA Today criticizing those who would dare to oppose Obama’s health care plan, labeling them as ‘Un-American’. Well, if that’s how the word is defined, call me un-American as well. The funny (sad) thing is that the Democrats were complaining about being labeled un-American & unpatriotic back during the Iraq war; they said then that it was their duty as American citizens to stand up against an administration that was going against the will of the people. Isn’t that exactly what’s going on now, or am I missing something? The big difference between then and now is that their grandstanding actually put the country and our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at risk. Now it’s their proposed health care reform that’s putting us at risk.

The problem of course, is that Obama and his sycophants in Congress & elsewhere see this as an either/or issue; they offer their version of health care reform, and act as though we either choose between that or the dreaded status quo. Their plan is the best plan — Period. End of discussion. — and no other plan should even be considered. They seem to be holding these Town Hall Meetings more to ‘educate’ the masses and explain to us that they have only our best interests at heart rather than how you’d expect such a meeting to operate, where they’re open to hearing people’s concerns about the health care reform plan and answer questions. We just need to trust them! The problem is that many of us have seen the contents of the bill that “three House committees have passed” already, and we have found much of it to be unacceptable. I’m afraid the level of trust they think they should have just isn’t there.

And all the while Obama is also out there trying his darnedest to sell this package, and his credibility problem is growing even faster than Pelosi’s. He’s out there naming the things in the bill that people are having trouble with, like Federal Health Boards, and end of life counsellors, and the lie about being able to keep our current insurance, and much more, trying to convince people it’s all not true. That it’s not in his plan, when it actually is in the House plan. I can’t figure out if he’s talking about the House version of the plan or some other plan. If he’s got another plan, the rest of the country would sure like to see it; it must be pretty special for him to keep it so secret. So as far as this un-American is concerned, President Obama is lying through his teeth every time he tells us that something isn’t in the plan when we can recite to him chapter and verse to show him where it is in the plan.

Adding to his credibility problem is his attempts to distance himself from what he’s said in the past about his strong support of a single-payer health system; he said it numerous times during the Presidential election campaign and earlier. Yet at every opportunity he says this health plan is not about a single-payer health system and he’s not a proponent of such a system. All you’ve got to do is go to YouTube and type in Obama single payer health care to hear his own words on the subject. Did he change his mind? I don’t know, but I really doubt it. Even his cronies, like Barney Frank, are on record saying that the House plan, with it’s Public Option and provisions to eliminate private options, is a prelude to a single-payer health system. And every time Obama denies it his credibility drops even further.

The Democrat leadership — which is of course being echoed by the mainstream media — is saying that these meetings are being overrun by “angry mobs” that are not only encouraged by the RNC and talk radio to show up and cause trouble, but bussed in and paid for their troubles. Right. (Isn’t it funny how the Democrats accuse the Right of doing the exact things that they are known to do?) Nothing could be further from the truth; these people are hearing what Congress is up to and are truly concerned, and are voicing their frustration about Congress plowing ahead with this plan in spite of the strong opposition they hear from their constituents. I’d be right in there making noise if Tim Johnson or Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin were to hold such a meeting here. These ‘disruptions’ at the Democrats’ Town Hall Meetings are only a taste of what members of Congress can expect to hear from people across the country on this subject if Congress presses ahead and passes this legislation in spite of what they hear from us. I believe our form of government is still known as a Representative Republic, where Representatives are elected to go to Washington to Represent the will of the people; not to go there and decide what’s best for us, based on what the President tells them, what to do.

I’ll admit that the health care system in the US needs some help, but it’s not so far gone that it needs the complete overhaul that Obama and Co. are prescribing. There are other options, and they are acting as if there are only two; go with their nebulous plan or do nothing. If we go with their nebulous plan, with the government in charge, the cure will surely be worse than the disease. In my opinion doing nothing would be by far the more preferable choice, and I’m not alone in that assessment; far from alone.

Maybe this hullaballoo is a good thing overall; we get to see their true colors. Too bad they can’t be at least a little truthful about it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to send an email to flag@whitehouse.gov and turn myself in.

Our not-so-esteemed President gave a press conference last night about his aspirations for reforming the health care system. He’s apparently encountering more opposition than he expected — well deserved opposition I might add — and felt the need to address all us little people in middle America to tell us why it’s such a high priority. He’s getting some push-back — well deserved push-back I might add — on his insistence that it needs to be passed through both houses of Congress before the August recess.

Well hold on there, bucko.

The case he laid out, very unconvincingly, is that the root cause of the economic crisis is the umpteeen million people who are without health insurance:

… even before this crisis hit, we had an economy that was creating a good deal of wealth for those folks at the very top, but not a lot of good-paying jobs for the rest of America. It’s an economy that simply wasn’t ready to compete in the 21st century, one where we’ve been slow to invest in clean-energy technologies that have created new jobs and industries in other countries; where we’ve watched our graduation rates lag behind too much of the world; and where we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren’t any healthier for it. And that’s why I’ve said that even as we rescue this economy from a full-blown crisis, we must rebuild it stronger than before.

And health-insurance reform is central to that effort.

Oh, please. The same old leftist rhetoric about the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor, who get poorer every day. “It’s just not fair!” And what a pack of lies; we spend more on health care than any other nation but we aren’t any healthier for it? Baloney. Americans live longer and have more access to better health care than any other society on the face of the planet, but for him and the Democrats in the House and Senate, the whole nation is going to hell in a handbasket without the federal government jumping in and taking control of the entire health care system in America.

What drives me crazy is that he lied through his teeth last night, and nobody in the mainstream press is calling him on it. In the past he’s said on a number of occasions that if you have health insurance and you like your current coverage, you can keep it. Then last week the content of the bill that’s in the House got out, showing that if you change jobs or your employer decides to stop providing group health insurance, or even if the coverage changes, you’ll be mandated by law to buy into the single-payer system he’s trying to ramrod through. But then in last night’s opening comments, he phrased things a little differently, trying to make it sound like what he said before, but not so far from the truth;

If you have health insurance, the reform we’re proposing will provide you with more security and more stability.

It will keep government out of health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it. It’ll prevent insurance companies from dropping your coverage if you get too sick. It will give you the security of knowing that if you lose your job, if you move, or if you change your job, you’ll still be able to have coverage.

So now it sounds the same as what he’s said before, using similar terms, but adding others to change the meaning completely. How’s that for ‘honesty’ and ‘transparency’.

Then later, when answering a question from a reporter, he said the following, which totally contradicts what he said earlier about keeping insurance that you’ve already got;

I want to cover everybody. Now, the truth is that unless you have a — what’s called a single-payer system, in which everybody’s automatically covered, then you’re probably not going to reach every single individual, because there’s always going to be somebody out there who thinks they’re indestructible and doesn’t want to get health care, doesn’t bother getting health care, and then, unfortunately, when they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room and the rest of us have to pay for it…
… So the plan that has been — that I’ve put forward and that — what we’re seeing in Congress would cover, the estimates are, at least 97 to 98 percent of Americans. There might still be people left out there who, even though there’s an individual mandate, even though they are required to purchase health insurance, might still not get it, or despite a lot of subsidies, are still in such dire straits that it’s still hard for them to afford it…

So the plan is to get everybody on the single-payer system. And not just get them on it, mandate it. Oh and of course, you’d charge them for it.

But the biggest deception in the whole thing is how the thing is going to be funded. He talked about how costs are going up and coverage is going down and thousands of people are losing their health coverage every day and 47 million people have no coverage at all… But a recurring theme was that he’ll be able to pay for it through creating and enforcing new efficiencies in the system and using technology in new ways to eliminate duplicated services… I call BS on that. Since when has anything overseen by the federal government been described (accurately) as efficient? There is just no way that you’re going to keep providing the same level of care to more people and have it cost the same or less than it does now. But that’s what he’s saying he can do. And I say he’s full of it.

The only way he’s going to be able to pull that off is if the ‘efficiencies’ he’s talking about involve rationing care and allowing his proposed “Health Advisory Boards” to dole out treatment only to those the board deems worthy. Let’s say you’re in your late 60’s and you’re diagnosed with cancer. Your doctor runs your paperwork through the Health Advisory Board and they look at your life history and your family history, taking note that you’ve lived a full life, and that people in your family don’t typically live beyond their 70’s. Is it really a wise expenditure of precious health care resources to attack your cancer aggressively if it’s only going to extend your life a few more years, when you’re sure to die from something else? Think of all the children that could be helped with that money!

And what of people like Sarah Palin who find out early in a pregnancy that their child has Down’s Syndrome or a heart condition or some other malady that will likely require extended medical care throughout life. “Wouldn’t it just be easier to abort now? What kind of quality of life would you be giving your child?” Of course, that abortion would only be a proposed option at first, but how long until that Health Advisory Board is granted the power to mandate that abortion? It’d only be a matter of time.

The thing is, I don’t believe most people see the need for the wholesale overhaul of the health care system as it’s being proposed by Obama and the Democrat leadership in the House & Senate. Sure, there are shortfalls in the system, but it’s nowhere near as bad as they say it is. And the cure they propose would surely be worse than the disease; that has been shown to be fact, and not just partisan propaganda. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that the proposed health care reform will raise costs and increase the deficit by $240 billion in the first ten years.

As I see it, there are two primary problems with the health care system in this country and its rising costs; that people who are insured are insulated from the actual cost of their care, and doctors spend too much time in CYA mode, making sure they don’t get sued. People pay $x for their health insurance plus their deductible and co-payment for office visits, so it matters little to them if they visit the doctor once a year or 30 times a year. If their kid has the sniffles, off they go to the doctor where the doctor runs several tests to rule out one dread disease or another, and before you know it, diagnosing Junior’s sniffles just cost $500 or more. But mom’s insurance covers it, and she’s out her $15 office visit co-payment plus maybe a percentage of the total for her deductible, but it’s far less than the $500. But if mom had to pay for all that herself, she might think twice about going to the office, and see if Junior gets over it on his own. And if there were some meaningful tort reform, the doctors could spend a little more time using the common sense that God gave them instead of ordering superfluous tests and expensive drugs to treat common maladies that the human body is perfectly capable of surviving with no medical intervention.

No, I don’t think that President Obama can pull this off. I don’t think he garners enough of the respect of the House & Senate Democrats and their leadership to get everything he wants in this bill, nor to even get it passed. And the push to get it passed by August is just ridiculous. He hasn’t even read or apparently been briefed on the current bill — he’s admitted as much himself — nor have many of those who are voting on it. Our senior Senator from South Dakota has already said he plans to vote for it; has he read it? I would bet a pile of money he has not, and he really doesn’t care what kind of fallout he gets from signing it either, because he’s got five years left of his term, and chances are he’ll retire after that.

If I’m wrong and this travesty of a bill does pass and become our new way of doing health care in the US, we will have change a-plenty, but not the kind of change any of us want.