Brilliant Black Man reads the racist hate mail from the left.

Not for kids. Find out just how racist the progressive secular left is.

Judge Napolitano: The Constitutional Case Against ObamaCare

Andrew P. Napolitano  is a former New Jersey Superior Court Judge. He is a graduate of Princeton University (where he was a founding member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton) and Notre Dame Law School.

Napolitano sat on the New Jersey bench from 1987 to 1995, becoming the state’s youngest life-tenured judge. He also served as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University School of Law for 11 years. Napolitano resigned his judgeship in 1995 to pursue his writing and television career.

VIDEO: “Anti-War” Protest At White House Featuring Flag Burning, Calls for Socialism, ’9/11 Truth’, Support for HAMAS & Antisemitism

This Ain’t No Tea Party

From: aimaccuracy | April 06, 2010 

On March 20, 2010 there was an anti-war demonstration in Lafayette Square Park, across the street from the White House. AIM went there to see what sort of activity was occurring, and as we show in this video, which was all shot at the scene of the demonstration, it was a mix of 9/11 Truthers, Code Pinkers, socialists, anarchists, and a large contingency of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel zealots.

The Washington Post covered it, but never mentioned the name Obama, though he was clearly a target of the protesters. The group that organized the protest, International ANSWER, claims there were 10,000 people there. Our estimate: 2 – 3 thousand tops, at least prior to the marching part of the demonstration. We didn’t stick around for that part.

One thing for sure, no one burned an American flag at any Tea Party gatherings, but they sure did here. Did you see any reporting about the hate-speech and flag burning? I guess MSNBC was too busy that day.

Washington Post coverage: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010…

Another University Threatened with Legal Action to Follow the 1st Amendment and Own Rules

Case after case after case it is always the same. According to campus administrators if you want to have a university subsidized play about shaving ones private parts and chanting the C^NT word that is fine, but when a student passes out pro-life literature all of the sudden a bunch of phony regulations are applied to said student by the administration.

Of course the 1st amendment is clear that universities get very little wiggle room when it comes to first amendment restrictions. Most universities have rules that affirm freedom of speech, but as is so often the case in hundreds of instances, the university wants to restrict speech by content.

The student tries to talk to administrators to merely enforce their own rules and they berate him. So said student contacts the Alliance Defense Fund and ….:

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — A student told he could not distribute a pro-life newsletter on the campus of Kingsborough Community College will be allowed to do so as a result of a letter sent to the school by the Alliance Defense Fund.

[Be sure to read this letter to see how this student was treated by administrators who are paid 5-6 figures to follow their own rules and exercise good judgment - Editor]

“Pro-life students shouldn’t be discriminated against for expressing their beliefs,” said ADF Litigation Staff Counsel Travis Barham. “In this case, campus security officers and several administrators tried to stop a student from passing out pro-life fliers even though no campus policy prohibited him from doing so. We commend the college for quickly rectifying this situation and affirming our client’s rights protected by the First Amendment.”

On Sept. 24, Joseph Hayon was distributing copies of a pro-life newsletter to passersby outside the KCC cafeteria. He was approached by a campus security officer who told him that he could not “give out fliers on campus” because they did not have an official stamp from the Office of Student Life. However, no school policy even discusses students distributing literature on campus.

After speaking with several campus officials, Hayon was eventually told that he could have a table on campus to distribute his literature; however, he would have to wait eight days to receive the table, he could only used it for four hours at a time, and he could not directly hand the literature to those who passed by.

In the letter sent March 11, ADF attorneys wrote, “To date, KCC has identified no interests that would support its restrictions on Mr. Hayon’s leafleting, particularly since courts readily recognize that peaceful leafleting poses little (if any) risk of disruption. One OSL official indicated that he could not distribute literature because it might ‘offend people.’ Yet the Supreme Court…could not be clearer on this point:  the First Amendment exists to protect offensive speech, and KCC simply cannot silence speech because some people find it offensive. Indeed, this is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment.”

In its response, dated March 16, counsel for KCC said the college would allow Hayon to pass out his fliers freely, without the restrictions it previously imposed.

American Spectator: How Karl Rove Got Barack Obama Elected

Before I dig in here let me say that I like Karl Rove, he has a reputation as a very nice guy who doesn’t have even a whiff of elitism. I have chatted with him a couple of times on Twitter and his reputation holds with me. American Spectator states that anyone who spends any time with Rove finds out pretty quickly that they are in the presence of a towering intellect. Again this is nothing new as Washington insiders have been saying that about Karl since the Nixon Administration.

What makes Karl Rove different, is that towering intellects often give you brilliant rationalizations for failure, Rove is very honest and quite correct about his own mistakes and shortcomings in his political duties.

In fairness to Rove, the failure was not just his. Dan Bartlett at White House Communications had no real communications strategy that I could detect. Scott McClellen was incompetent and Dana Perino, and this hurts for me to say because I am quite fond of Dana who has been so effective as a talking head, was ineffective as a White House Press Secretary because she was trying to nice-nice a hostile elite media that was out to destroy her. The Democratic Leadership and much of the elite media decided that straight up lying to the American people was perfectly acceptable, as well as investing in America’s defeat.

Every GOP professor I know, myself and all my friends complained for years how the Bush White House had no effective communications machine at all, with the exception of the brilliant and brief participation of Tony Snow.

The big crime; they let this situation go on for years.

I can think of several professors here at school who said that I articulated administration policy better than anyone in the administration. Granted political communications strategy is my “thing” and I seem to have a gift for it as several of my professors will tell you, but this is the White House, where the best of the best should have been hard at work. So what happened?

American Spectator:

When I served as a Senior Speechwriter in George W. Bush’s White House, Karl Rove was the bane of my existence. The rule was that no speech could ever go to the President without its first being reviewed by Mr. Rove, and since Karl was an extremely busy man, he often didn’t call in his comments to the Speechwriting Office till eight or nine in the evening. By the time these comments reached me, they often seemed hopelessly cryptic and unintelligible, yet somehow I had to figure out a way to work them into my draft without offending all the other big-shots whose comments I had previously incorporated…And all the while, of course, the President was waiting for his speech.

But despite the grief he caused me, I am one of Karl Rove’s biggest fans. Karl is a truly nice man — modest, personable, and extremely approachable — yet you couldn’t spend more than five minutes with him without recognizing that you were in the presence of a towering intellect. But having just read his memoir, Courage and Consequence, I am forced to conclude that Rove, perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Let me recount a bit of personal history by way of background. About four years ago, around the time when Democrats were heatedly charging that Bush had “lied” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in order to build a case for war (after all, they argued, if the weapons had existed, why weren’t we able to find them after liberating Iraq?), I was having lunch with Dr. Laurie Mylroie, one of America’s leading students of terrorism in general, and Iraqi terrorism in particular. Laurie was beside herself with anger. Why wasn’t the Bush administration citing Gen. James Clapper, the Director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, who said that satellite imagery proved conclusively that shortly before the war’s outbreak, Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria? Why wasn’t it quoting Gen. Georges Sada, deputy chief of Saddam’s air force, or Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s chief-of-staff, both of whom also claimed that Saddam’s weapons had been transferred to Syria? Why was it so tongue-tied, so unsure of itself, so unwilling to answer its critics? Didn’t anybody in the White House realize that if the Democrats’ charges went unanswered, they would fatally undermine the entire case for the war?

By this time, however, I had left the White House, so I had to tell Laurie the truth: Her revelations about Generals Clapper and Sada (though not Ya’alon) were news to me, and I had no idea why the White House wasn’t citing them.

Given this background, readers will understand the mixed feelings with which I reacted to Karl Rove’s assertion, in a chapter entitled “Bush Was Right on Iraq,” that Clapper, Sada and Ya’alon all maintained that Saddam had transferred his weapons of mass destruction to Syria on the eve of the war. On the one hand, I recalled the old saw, “Better late than never.” On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling that history might have turned out differently had Karl spoken out sooner.

To his immense credit, Karl makes no effort to deny that he screwed up, big time. “So who was responsible for the failure to respond [to the Democrats' assault]?” he asks. “I was. I should have stepped forward, rung the warning bell, and pressed for full-scale response. I didn’t. Preoccupied with the coming campaign and the pressures of the daily schedule in the West Wing, I did not see how damaging this assault was. There were others who could have sounded the alarm, but regardless, I should have.”

Rove goes on to call the Democrats’ claim that Bush lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction a “poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency,” and notes that “by July 2005 a majority of Americans — 51 percent — believed that Bush had deliberately misled them.”

This number is quite close to the 52 percent of Americans who voted for Obama in 2008. Maybe that’s just a coincidence — but I doubt it. It seems to me that after full allowance is made for the nefarious activities of ACORNs, RINOs, and other assorted villains of the 2008 campaign, the fact remains that on the most crucial issue facing any president — the issue of war and peace — a majority of Americans believed that GeorgeW. Bush lied to them. Since he was leaving office, they couldn’t punish Bush directly for this unforgivable sin, so they punished the Republican Party by voting for Obama. To the extent that Karl Rove — one of the finest, ablest, most decent public servants I have ever encountered — might have prevented all this from happening by responding more forcefully to the Democrats’ blood libel, he is responsible for the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of the United States.

Lawyer makes April 1st fake post of White House appointment to fool those “political bloggers” but the bloggers could not verify the story and ignored it, but who ran with it without fact checking??… The New York Times.

What can I say folks, on my class new media blog I have been writing about this very issue and now this.

Our friends at Republican Heretic has good coverage of this so here you go.

Republican Heretic reports:

This is pretty priceless. Apparently, a New York personal injury lawyer and legal blogger took advantage of April 1st to post a false story in an effort to prove that political bloggers simply spread rumors and don’t fact check anything. In the fake blog post, he claimed to have been named as the White House’s “official White House law blogger” and sat back to watch the political blogs fall over themselves reporting on the story.

Well, no one did. The bloggers couldn’t confirm the story, so no one ran with it.

Except the New York Times.

Liberty Pundits covers the story:

It’s a good ruse complete with charts and stories.  So the NYT gets wind of it.  Their “fact-checking” department calls both the lawyer and the White House.  Lawyer specifically obfuscates; he confirms NOTHING.  The WH? No one home.   The story has no confirmation whatsoever on any level.

What does the NYT do?  I can’t grab an archived version to link, but here is the cut from Gawker claiming to be the original NYT piece:

After all, as Mr. Turkewitz, a Manhattan lawyer, writes on his New York Personal Injury Law Blog, he is about to be sounding off on all manner of legal issues as the Obama administration’s new White House law blogger.

“Excited about new blogging gig as White House law blogger,” he tweeted this morning. “But hope I don’t have to spend too much time in D.C.”

Spoken like a true New Yorker.

[...]

And as if it couldn’t get better.  The lawyer turns out to be smug prick that learned something he probably didn’t want to know:

The basic idea was this: A bunch of law bloggers would try to punk the political bloggers, whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it. Fact checking hasn’t always been the strong suit of this community.

 

But the political bloggers, to their collective credit, didn’t bite, despite wide dissemination of the story. Not on the right or the left. Instead it was the vaunted New York Times that ran with the story without bothering to check its facts. The Times, of course, had no sense of humor about it when the angry phone call came to me a couple of hours later.

So, he tried to punk us and instead found out that what we’ve been saying about the NYT has been true all along.

This incident speaks volumes about the credibility of the remaining few print media, and why their circulation numbers are plummeting. It also sheds a light into why so many are turning to the internet — and especially blogs — for news and political commentary. Despite the narrative that bloggers don’t bother to check what they’re writing on, it was the bastion of the mainstream media, the grand New York Times, which essentially sets the stage for what the other mainstream media report on, that didn’t bother to properly vet a story.

IRS Chief: Buy health insurance or lose your tax refund

Pelosi said that we would find out what is in the Bill after it became law, now we are finding how much the Democrats lied to us.

Daily Caller: 

Individuals who don’t purchase health insurance may lose their tax refunds according to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman. After acknowledging the recently passed health-care bill limits the agency’s options for enforcing the individual mandate, Shulman told reporters that the most likely way to penalize individuals that don’t comply is by reducing or confiscating their tax refunds.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, Shulman downplayed the IRS’s role in enforcing the recent overhaul of the health insurance industry by claiming the agency would not aggressively target individuals who don’t purchase coverage. He noted that the health-care bill expressly forbids the agency from freezing bank accounts, seizing assets or pursuing criminal charges, but when pressed said the IRS would most likely use tax refund offsets to penalize those that don’t comply with the mandate. The IRS uses refund offsets to collect from individuals that owe the federal government a delinquent debt.

And that restriction can be removed with a tiny one line amendment to a 4000 page bill after the election.

Off-the-Hook Hypocrisy: Rep. Waters (D-CA) Used to Love Vulgar & Outlandish Protest Rallies

Via NEN:

Beck Special: Is there a difference between so called “left wing” and “right wing” dictators?

Communists in Germany voted with the Nazi’s most of the time, originaly Nazi’s praised Stalin.

How many substantive positions did Hitler have that Stalin, Castro etc did not?

Are we on the verge of a great political awakening?

Today I witnessed something that I never thought I would ever see.

I had a conversation with two black progressives and a feminist sociology major. One of the black progressives is a  billing and fund-raising administrator for a catholic hospital. The other I believe was a black studies major. The four of us spoke for almost an hour.

We all agreed that the ObamaCare bill will not only raise the costs of insurance but wasn’t designed to lower them, that the bill amounts to a tax on small business, the producers and job givers, that the health advisory boards will interfere with doctors in some cases even their private insurance patients, and that the ObamaCare bill is not designed to empower us, or empower doctors, but rather will empower government.

I was shocked. Not only that I found four self-proclaimed progressives who actually took the time to read up on the new law, but while admitting that they had an emotional attachment to Obama, they agreed that the facts were the facts, that this bill is bad for us and that Obama and the Democrats have been lying to us.

We agreed that the bill may kill very successful health care programs such as the Indiana HIP program. We also agreed that the ObamaCare bill is a threat to public education because the new law became more deficit friendly on paper because it put a massive unfunded mandate on state Medicaid programs. This means less funding for state-run public universities. Education is the top budget item for most states. We all agreed that the four of us could produce a superior consortium based health reform plan.

We discussed how we all now see the government as something that is becoming so big, greedy and corrupt that it is becoming a threat to our economic liberty and quality of life.

I have never met a progressive who was willing to be this critical of Obama ever, and now I have found four on a left-wing college campus in a single day.

Here on this blog we have reported that for the first time independents are polling farther towards the “right” than Republicans. By “Right” I mean our classic liberal/libertarian with restraint roots that the country was founded upon.

We have reported that polls are showing that more Democrats and Independents are favoring the Tea Party movement. We have reported that on the generic congressional ballot the Tea Party has defeated both Republicans and Democrats. We have reported that only about 1 in 5 believes that the Federal Government is looking out for the people.

All of this is unprecedented in the last 100 years.

We have reported that even traditional Democrats who may favor larger role for government than Republicans or Libertarians, are still people who believe in traditional American concepts such as the rule of law and not the whims of a judge or a president, limited government, and by no means want to see the federal government turn in to a cradle to the grave leviathan state.

This goes to show my friends that education is the key, there are many Democratic voters when given the honest facts are willing to stand up for traditional American philosophy.

The fact that the Democratic party could lose these three self-proclaimed progressives is an indicator of a real political realignment that is coming.

Top 10 Market News Anchor: Local News has a Political Agenda

This is not a surprise to me, but me be a surprise to you.

The Daily Caller:

One cardinal rule of journalism is that reporters shouldn’t give or receive money, favors or services from anyone or any organization connected to stories they report on. In fact, many news organizations require their reporters to sign “pay for play” agreements that expressly prohibit such arrangements. Crossing that line is a firing offense in many news organizations.

So, can someone please explain this? The e-mail below was sent recently by the performers’ union–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)–to its membership. Its membership includes most network correspondents and anchors, as well as almost all reporters and anchors in the nation’s top markets–the very people who are trying to “objectively” report on the evening news, the health care debate in Congress.

The e-mail in its entirety reads:

As the two health care reform bills merge, it’s important to join the labor movement in letting your Representatives know a final bill must include the best pieces of the House bill, which includes a public option to keep insurance companies accountable and does more to make health insurance affordable.

The Senate bill includes a 40% tax on many middle class families’ insurance benefits instead, which would result in higher premiums for some workers and higher out-of-pocket costs. Join millions of your fellow union members in letting your Representatives know that taxing middle-class Americans’ health benefits is not the way to pay for reform.

The AFL-CIO is mobilizing working Americans to let our voices be heard today by joining in the National Call-In Blitz for Health Care Reform.

 Call 1-877-3-AFLCIO (1-877-323-5246) toll-free and urge your Representatives to support working families by voting for health care reform that:

. Does NOT tax our health care benefits;

. Requires employers to pay their fair share; and

. Reduces health care costs -the best way to do this is with a public health insurance option.

Thank you!

Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.

If that bothers you, you should also know that your “objective” network correspondent, roaming the halls of Congress right now trying to ferret out the “truth,” probably pays hundreds, or even thousands of dollars in union dues to AFTRA every year. He or she, in all likelihood, depends on AFTRA for one of those “Cadillac” health insurance plans that is the subject of so much debate. He or she also will receive a nice little AFTRA pension come retirement time, and perhaps most importantly, will depend on AFTRA to help defend, protect or advise them in any serious conflicts, demotions, firings or legal issues with management at their TV station or network.

Now, do you really think your friendly network correspondent is gonna criticize the Senate Democrats’ bill? I got an offer you can’t refuse…

The preceding piece was written by a well-known news anchor from a top-10, big-city news station. The Daily Caller has elected to protect his identity.

Forgotten Study: Sex Abuse in School 100 Times Worse than by Priests

UPDATE – Republican Heretic has more HERE.

Life Site News:

In the last several weeks such a quantity of ink has been spilled in newspapers across the globe about the priestly sex abuse scandals, that a casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that Catholic priests are the worst and most common perpetrators of child sex abuse.

But according to Charol Shakeshaft, the researcher of a little-remembered 2004 study prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

After effectively disappearing from the radar, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by commentators seeking to restore a sense of proportion to the mainstream coverage of the Church scandal.

According to the 2004 study “the most accurate data available at this time” indicates that “nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.”

“Educator sexual misconduct is woefully under-studied,” writes the researcher. “We have scant data on incidence and even less on descriptions of predators and targets.  There are many questions that call for answers.“

In an article published on Monday, renowned Catholic commentator George Weigel referred to the Shakeshaft study, and observed that “The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague” in which Catholic priests constitute only a small minority of perpetrators.

While Weigel observes that the findings of Shakeshaft’s study do nothing to mitigate the harm caused by priestly abuse, or excuse the “clericalism” and “fideism” that led bishops to ignore the problem, they do point to a gross imbalance in the level of scrutiny given to it, throwing suspicion on the motives of the news outlets that are pouring their resources into digging up decades-old dirt on the Church.

“The narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down,” he writes. 

Weigel observes that priestly sex abuse is “a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared,” and that in recent years the Church has gone to great lengths to punish and remove priestly predators and to protect children. The result of these measures is that “six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members.”

Despite these facts, however, “the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young.”

Outside of the Church, Shakeshaft is not alone in highlighting the largely unaddressed, and unpublicized problem of child sex abuse in schools. Sherryll Kraizer, executive director of the Denver-based Safe Child Program, told the Colorado Gazette in 2008 that school employees commonly ignore laws meant to prevent the sexual abuse of children.

“I see it regularly,” Kraizer said. “There are laws against failing to report, but the law is almost never enforced. Almost never.”

“What typically happens is you’ll have a teacher who’s spending a little too much time in a room with one child with the door shut,” Kraizer explained. “Another teacher sees it and reports it to the principal. The principal calls the suspected teacher in and says ‘Don’t do that,’ instead of contacting child protective services.”

“Before you know it, the teacher is driving the student home. A whole series of events will unfold, known to other teachers and the principal, and nobody contacts child services before it’s out of control. You see this documented in records after it eventually ends up in court.”

In an editorial last week, The Gazette revisited the testimony of Kraizer in the context of the Church abuse scandal coverage, concluding that “the much larger crisis remains in our public schools today, where children are raped and groped every day in the United States.”

“The media and others must maintain their watchful eye on the Catholic Church and other religious institutions,” wrote The Gazette, “But it’s no less tragic when a child gets abused at school.”

In 2004, shortly after the Shakeshaft study was released, Catholic League President William Donohue, who was unavailable for an interview for this story, asked, “Where is the media in all this?”

“Isn’t it news that the number of public school students who have been abused by a school employee is more than 100 times greater than the number of minors who have been abused by priests?” he asked.

“All those reporters, columnists, talking heads, attorneys general, D.A.’s, psychologists and victims groups who were so quick on the draw to get priests have a moral obligation to pursue this issue to the max.  If they don’t, they’re a fraud.”

NY Post: Small Businesses Facing 25% Tax Hike

New York Post:

Jobbing small business

The 26 million small businesses in the US — like Eneslow Shoes, headed by CEO Robert Schwartz— are getting buried under an avalanche of new taxes, which include:

* An increase of 4.6% in federal taxes from 35% to 39.6% (expiration of Bush tax cuts)

* An increase in capital gains taxes from 15% to 20% (expiration of Bush tax cuts)

* A new tax of 3.85% on investment income, dividends, rents, royalties mandated in the new health care bill

* An increase in the Medicare payroll tax to 2.35% as mandated in the new health care bill

* In states like New Jersey and others, state and municipal taxes have been raised by the average of almost 2%

 

More:

America’s jobs growth engine is being choked to death.

A record 25 percent increase in the taxes against US small businesses — from costs associated with new health care law, to an increased Medicare tax, increased capital gains taxes and higher state and city taxes — is repealing any ability of these entrepreneurs to add jobs to their payroll.

And the numbers for New York’s small- to medium-sized business are just as harrowing.

By one estimate, the effective tax rate on the 26 million small businesses across the country — which in the past have accounted for more than half of the job growth in the US — has jumped to 50 percent from 40 percent, sucking valuable cash from the businesses.

These dollars could have been used to add to payrolls or make capital improvements — but instead will be siphoned off by Uncle Sam, state and municipal governments.

“The impact of these higher taxes and reduced hiring will be a recovery cycle that will be much longer, be slower to take hold and be without much job growth,” said Al Angrisani, founder and CEO of Angrisani Turnarounds and former US Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Reagan.

A survey of 200 small businesses across the US by the economist found 51.5 percent of business owners in March were concerned about the viability of their businesses — up from 49.5 percent in February. More than eight million jobs have been lost during the current 28-month recession.While a healthy 162,000 jobs were added in March, it was accomplished with the help of heavy government stimulus. Meanwhile, the average length of joblessness rose to 31 weeks and hourly earnings were down, albeit slightly.

In New York, interviews with more than a dozen small business owners by The Post found a group of owners hurting under the weight of the new taxes.

Teresa Kramer, co-owner of Northside Bakery in Greenpoint said she is scared.

“We’d really need to raise our prices by 20 percent to stay even because our profit margins are shrinking as costs keep rising everywhere — for garbage and services, commuter taxes and other taxes,” said Kramer, a Polish immigrant who operates the two-store division of Old Poland Foods. The business employs 20 and rings up annual sales of about $2 million.

Kramer has stopped short of raising prices, at least for now. She added: “We’re producing more bread and product — but we’re still making less and less profit.”

In Manhattan, Robert Schwartz, the CEO of a three-unit shoe store chain, said he has never seen the tax burden this bad.

“This has been as hard as we’ve been hit in my 36 years of running this company,” said Schwartz, owner of Eneslow Shoes, which employs 50 people, including part-timers, on annual revenues of under $10 million. “It’s a tough economy and our costs continue to rise.”

Schwartz, who says he’s putting his salary back into the business in response to the environment, adds that overhead from taxes and other outside charges have become unbearable. “I certainly don’t think the new health care law will save me any money,” he said. “Now New York City wants to develop this paid sick leave legislation that would give employees up to nine paid sick days. It’s ludicrous. It takes the oxygen out of the blood.”

Fran Biderman-Gross, CEO of Advantages, a branding, mass communications and marketing company in Fresh Meadows, said with health care becoming mandatory she envisions more companies switching to independent contractors — who don’t require pricey health benefits — in order to stay in business.

“We created 16 million jobs during the recovery in the Reagan administration by cutting taxes and offering incentives to hire,” Angrisani noted. “Small business tax cuts are not compatible with the philosophy of this administration.”

Don’t Let the Progressive Secular Left Strip Christianity from American History

Big Government.com:

The war on Christianity is a particularly disturbing fight. The battle has been lowlighted over the years by leftists who twist themselves into intellectual knots in an effort to remove Christ from Christmas – which is like trying to remove the wet from water.

But the fact that they’re trying to defy the laws of physics doesn’t stop leftists.

Their war on American culture took a new turn this week, when the city of Davenport, Iowa, at the urging of its civil rights commission, decided to rebrand Good Friday as the “spring holiday.” A certain Baptist minister from Montgomery, Alabama might be shocked to find that civil rights activists these days are devoted to striking Christ from the public lexicon.

The decision sparked a national firestorm – Good Friday, after all, is merely the day that Christians around the nation and the world mark the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The city finally had to reverse its decision.

But if leftists have proven anything, it’s that they’re committed to their zealotry. They’re committed to removing Christ from American history, much like they’re committed to removing Christ from his own birthday.

Personally, I don’t care who you worship, whether it’s Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Buddha or a corn chip with the face of John Lennon baked into it. You’re free to do whatever you please. But you cross the line when you try to rewrite history.

So with Good Friday just hours away, and with Sunday marking both the resurrection of Christ and the anniversary of the assassination of that Baptist minister from Montgomery, it pays to remind folks that Christianity and liberty have marched arm and arm from the very beginning of the nation.

The Pilgrim landing

“Having undertaken, for the Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith and Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the First Colony in the Northern Parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic.” - The Mayflower Compact, Nov. 11, 1620

The Pilgrims sat aboard their leaky little vessel off the coast of Cape Cod when they issued this statement of purpose and the first political contract of the New World. It’s the pact which set in motion the concept of self governance by a people thousands of miles removed from the nearest seat of political power.

The words are enlightening: the Pilgrims, the way they saw it, didn’t just cross the sea to plant a new colony for king and country. They made this faith-filled Biblical sojourn, first and foremost, “For the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.”

The chimes of American freedom

“Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.” – Inscription on the Liberty Bell, from Leviticus 25:10

The Liberty Bell is one of the great symbols of human freedom. Commissioned in 1751 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s charter, it was adopted by American revolutionaries in the fight against King George and by abolitionists in the fight against slavery. Since suffering its famous crack, the bell has been tapped only on rare historic occasions: to mark the invasion of Europe on D-Day, for example, or to show solidarity in the 1960s with those enslaved by Communists behind the Berlin Wall.

The men who cast this bronze paean to freedom certainly would not have passed muster with the PC crowd today. After all, they inscribed upon this great symbol of America words of Biblical liberation that came straight from the Old Testament. Hell, in this day and age, the Liberty Bell would be a violation of somebody’s “civil rights.”

The defense of the nation

“Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation; Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just; And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’” – Fourth verse of the Star-Spangled Banner, 1814

The origin of our national anthem was once a basic piece of education that any child could recite: Francis Scott Key was aboard a British ship during the War of 1812, when he saw Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, and his nation itself, bombarded all night by the mighty British empire. After the onslaught, he was shocked to find that “our flag was still there” and was overcome by patriotic fervor. He captured his emotions in a poem that became the words of our national anthem.

Few people know Key’s story today. So they certainly can’t be expected to know the fourth verse – in which Key attributes the American victory against the world’s mightiest empire to Biblical deliverance. He suggests in our anthem that we should “Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.”

The philosophy of the Founding Fathers

“We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus … There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” – Thomas Jefferson, Oct. 13, 1813

Did you know that the author of the Declaration of Independence was drinking the Jesus Kool-Aid? Did you know that he wrote a tribute to Jesus known today as “The Jefferson Bible?”

Probably not. Because leftists, especially those in academia, have worked diligently to strip the Christian beliefs out of the history of the Founding Fathers, choosing instead to paint them as non-denominational Deists.

Jefferson’s own faith has been hotly debated. He was not a faithful church attendant. But he openly embraced Christian principals and, in his own words, considered Christ, not Locke or Voltaire, “the most sublime and benevolent” philosopher.

“The Jefferson Bible” was finally published after his death with the subtitle “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The tribute to the Father of the Country

“Laus Deo” (“Praise be to God”) – words atop the Washington Monument, completed 1884

George Washington is the Abraham of the American pantheon, the man whose undying faith made him willing to sacrifice everything he held dear in devotion to the cause.

Abraham today is the father of the great monotheistic faiths. Washington is the father of his country and, in turn, the father of the great representative governments and the classical liberalism that came to dominate global political theory in the 20th century. He’s the father of the very same values that the leftists are fighting to undermine today.

The Washington Monument, meanwhile, is our nation’s tribute to its father. It remains the tallest granite structure in the world – 555 feet high – and, fittingly, the tallest structure in the city named in his honor.

The monument’s builders, curiously, put this Latin tribute to God at the very top of the obelisk. It’s in a place that no human can read it – only those who might be looking down from above.

The outsider’s perspective

“The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

When de Tocqueville wrote “Democracy in America,” his definitive study of the early United States, he used the word “democracy” as a synonym for the young nation. He also marveled at the vigorous and often chaotic social discourse in all aspects of American life – which stood in sharp contrast to the structured existences that defined the tired old monarchies of Europe.

We all know today that those crazy right-wing wacko Americans are more likely to attend church today than Europeans. But even in de Tocqueville’s day, “the religious atmosphere of the country” was enough to shock a visitor from the festering cesspool of war, disease and misery that was Europe.

The religious atmosphere of the country wasn’t just something he noted in the hundreds of pages that went on to form his landmark history. It was so prevalent that it was “the first thing that struck” him about the nation.

The fight to end slavery

“Another and better day is dawning; every influence of literature, of poetry and of art, in our times, is becoming more and more in unison with the great master chord of Christianity, ‘good-will to man.’” – Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the preface to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 1852

Stowe’s masterpiece about the dehumanizing indignity of slavery is considered the book that launched the Civil War. Stowe, like many early abolitionists, considered the liberation of the slaves elemental to Christian faith.

No surprise here: the emancipation movement was led largely by Christian fundamentalists … you know, people who might be branded crazy right wingers today. Stowe, herself, was the daughter of a Calvinist minister, using her belief in the “great master chord of Christianity” to fight for justice in America. Not sure they tell you this in the textbooks.

The birth of a national holiday

“I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” – Abraham Lincoln, Oct. 3, 1863

Thanksgiving is the great American festival of bounty – a day when we pause as a nation, smack dab in the middle of the work week, to take stock of our lives and say thanks for our blessings. Sounds fairly Christian, doesn’t it? Well, it should.

A day of thanks was, of course, celebrated by the Pilgrims in 1621. But it became a national holiday upon the Great Emancipator’s urging in 1863, right at the very depths of the Civil War. Lincoln didn’t see Thanksgiving as a secular celebration. He saw it as a day to bow down at the feet of the nation’s Christian God, “the beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

The national battle cry

“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea; With a wisdom in his bosom that transfigures you and me; As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” – Julia Ward Howe, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, 1861

Think of the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the national fight song – the message of Christian hope and salvation meant to inspire our battle weary in times of blood and strife.

It’s no less than a statement of national purpose, penned early in the Civil War, and the battle cry of freedom for the enslaved: Americans sacrificed their young men in battle for the same reasons that Christ was sacrificed on the cross – “to make men free.”

There is no more powerful statement of the liberating power of American Christianity.

The liberation of Europe in the nation’s finest hour

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity … Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.” – President Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer, June 6, 1944

To me, no passage in history does a better job of exposing the radical agenda of modern leftists and their quest to expunge Christianity from the national record. After all, it was just 66 years ago that a devoutly Christian nation sent its sons to liberate an enslaved continent. Nervous Americans on D-Day coped the best way they could, by turning to their Christian faith. Churches across the nation were flooded with worshippers on D-Day, which was a Tuesday.

It was such a stressful time for Americans that the President – a leftist by the standards of his era – issued a call to prayer to console and steel the nation. In fact, these very words, this Democratic president’s Christian prayer, were published smack dab front and center on page one of the New York Times itself on June 7, 1944.

Imagine the leftist hysteria if President Bush had issued a national prayer of Christian faith. Imagine if the N.Y. Times actually published the words without judgment.

It wouldn’t happen today. But just two generations ago – in the finest hour in the history of Western democracy – faith and liberty marched arm and arm in the American consciousness and across the beaches of Normandy.

America’s conquest of the Heavens

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth; And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep; And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light; And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” – William Anders aboard Apollo 8, Christmas Eve, 1968

Anders was the captain of the Apollo 8 mission and he and his team of astronauts (Jim Lovell, Frank Borman) were the first Americans to circle the moon. At the time, no humans had ever broken so far from the bonds of Earth. It was the Apollo 8 mission that gave humanity its first look at itself, with the powerful image known as Earth Rise – the blue marble coming up out of the eternal black void of space and over the horizon of the moon. The photo was taken by Anders on Christmas Eve.

Anders, Lovell and Borman, in their effort to find the right words, turned to Genesis. They took turns reading the first words of the Bible, transmitting the message back to Earth in what was, at the time, the most watched television broadcast in history.

It was a moment that marked a turning point in human history. It also marked a turning point in the war on Christianity. An intolerant atheist, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, decided to sue the government over the reading.

Her suit was tossed out by the Supreme Court. But the government was cowed into submission. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the man, gave himself Communion soon after he and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in July 1969. But his desire to read from the Book of John (“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit”) and broadcast it back to Earth was denied by mission control.

But the history should be known: the faith in the Christian God that inspired the Pilgrims to cross the seas also inspired Americans to become the first and only people to orbit and then land on the moon.

The martyrdom of a liberator

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” - Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., April 3, 1968

Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero celebrated by Americans from all walks of life. His genius is that he used the very words of the Founding Fathers to point out the fact that the nation had failed to live up to the standards they had set in place 200 years earlier.

But just as Christ has been expunged from much of American history, Christ has also been expunged from the civil rights movement.

It’s actually taken a remarkable bit of intellectual dexterity for the leftists to pull off this stunt, considering that the  spiritual leader of the civil rights movement was a Baptist minister. King also happened to lead the most well known and most powerful civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Forty-two years ago this Saturday, King made his last speech the night before he was assassinated. He used his Christian faith to rally the nation to his cause and to stand up bravely in the face of death: “I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” he said with chilling conviction in his faith and his cause.

It’s only fitting, and certainly no coincidence, that the last 12 words that the Reverend spoke in public were the very first words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic – the American battle cry of emancipation in the name of Christ.

Leftists may not like the fact that liberty and Christianity have walked arm and arm across America for nearly 400 years. But their disdain for that history doesn’t give them the right to expunge that history from the record books.

Unemployment rate for young workers highest rate since 1948

Wall Street Journal - The unemployment rate for workers ages 16 to 29 was 15.2% in March, the highest rate since 1948, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

Folks, since 1948, that is when soldiers starting coming home when their enlistments expired at the end of WWII and so many young people had not found jobs yet.

In this regulatory environment with the new taxes on business and the regulatory uncertainty, why would anyone start a business or invest risk capital here now ?

New York Times Paul Krugman Admits: Death Panel “Advisory Boards” Will Be able to Deny Treatments; Will be a “Cost Saver”

The not so surprising reversal now that ObamaCare has passed, and this won’t be the last.

Remember how I have told you how most economists are merely political whores who espouse politically motivated policies and call it “science” and “economics”? Well of all of them Paul Krugman is the worst. As I have stated before it amazes me how much basic economics Paul Krugman has to forget every week to write what he writes. He is a far left ideaologue with a very hateful streak.

Here at IUSB when I took Macro Economics, the first professor who I was going to take the class from was using a textbook by Paul Krugman and when students voiced concern over that the professor’s response was “its ok Krugman won the Nobel Prize”… umm well so did Obama after being in office only 9 days. Needless to say I fired that foolish professor and signed up for the same class with a professor who was a real Milton Friedman trained economist.

So after a year of the Democrats and the elite media calling Sarah Palin and others who examined these advisory boards liars; after saying over and over that it isn’t in the bill, after saying that no bureaucrat will ever come between you and your doctor, after saying there will be no rationing, the elite media king of these liars, Paul Krugman, finally admits some of the truth.

More reversals will come you can be sure. Think about all the lies the elite media and the president’s allies told us in the passed year.

Democrats Find Way to Tax Only White People

The new tax on tanning. If memory serves its 10%. How many Blacks, Asians or Hispanics do you know that regularly go to tanning booths? By percentage its next to none.

Imagine if the roles were reversed. What would the reaction be from the elite media and the race exploiters like Jesse Jackson? What if there was a special tax on drugs that were used to treat sickle-cell or a special tax on products used for people who suffer from shaving bumps (who are mostly black).

Instead of bringing people together as promised, this may be the most polarizing and racially divisive president since Woodrow Wilson.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Progressives can’t get past the Knowledge Problem

Economnics 101 – why central planning of the economy always ends up in corruption and a decline.

The more the planners plans fail the more the planners plan – Ronald Reagan.

By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds via Washington Examiner:April 4, 2010

“If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?” — President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981.

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled “command economies” were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

In his “The Use of Knowledge In Society,” Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can’t possibly be smart enough to make them work.

Hayek’s insight into economics and regulation is often called “The Knowledge Problem,” and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it’s not just the economy that regulators don’t understand well enough — it’s also their own regulations.

This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren’t going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle wrote:

“What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It’s earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings.”So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.

They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves.

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there’s some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!

More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can’t possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what’s more striking is that Waxman’s outraged reaction revealed that they don’t even understand their own area of responsibility – regulation — well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It’s like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there’s plenty of evidence that Congress isn’t a repository of rocket scientists. But it’s just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn’t make much difference.

The United States Code — containing federal statutory law — is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can’t be aware of all the real-world complications it’s producing, it can’t even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it’s doing.

There’s good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We’re governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can’t help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or “better” rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system.

The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don’t know what they’re doing.

If that doesn’t encourage skepticism toward big government, it’s hard to imagine what will. 

Examiner Contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee.

“Better than a Hallelujah” – Amy Grant on Fox & Friends, Easter Sunday morning

Listen to the lyrics closely, great song.

Mark Steyn and Jim Quinn take on the New York Times’ racism and sexism. This is what the Elite Media thinks about you.

This is perhaps the quintessential example of why the New York Times circulation and influence has been dropping for years.  This clip reveals what the elite media really thinks about you; that you are either a Neanderthal or that you are really foolish enough to fall for such obvious propaganda nonsense.

Marxist conflict theorists count on keeping groups at battle to keep themselves in power in the name of “social justice”. In this segment Mark Steyn and Jim Quinn show how the elite media such as the New York Times have all but abandoned discussing or seriously reporting policy facts and consequences and level racial and other conflict theory invective at anyone who would support the very idea of limited government. March 30, 2010.

The more the planner’s plans fail the more the planners plan – Ronald Reagan

POLL: 79% Say U.S. Economy Could Collapse – UPDATED!

If the United States loses its AAA credit rating which is now quite likely according to Moody’s, the economic mess of the last year will look like the good old days.

Fox News:

Most American voters believe it’s possible the nation’s economy could collapse, and majorities don’t think elected officials in Washington have ideas for fixing it.

The latest Fox News poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it’s possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent).

Just 18 percent think the economy is “so big and strong it could never collapse.”

Moreover, 78 percent of voters believe the federal government is “larger and more costly” than it has ever been before, and by nearly three-to-one more voters think the national debt (65 percent) is a greater potential threat to the country’s future than terrorism (23 percent).

This is how it will be as long as we decide to borrow and print money while we have tens of trillions of dollars in coal, minerals, natural gas and oil wealth that the feds keep buried in the ground. And as long as we continue with these anti-wealth policies.

UPDATE –

Amity Shlaes: Obama’s Health Beast Squashes State Experiments (Including Indiana’s)

We hear about Massachusetts’ “RomneyCare” all the time in the news because it is going broke and the cost overruns have been staggering. RomneyCare is similar in several ways to the new federal legislation.

What you never hear about is Indiana’s experiment called “HIP” Healthy Indiana Plan, which has been a great success at gettring people care, keeping costs down and it is completely voluntary. In short, the incentives built into the plan are smart and it works. Of course since the plan was concieved by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels the elite media doesn’t really want to talk about it.

Amity Shlaes:

State attorneys general are filing lawsuits seeking to prove President Barack Obama’s health-care plan is unconstitutional. The litigation takes the spotlight away from something else about the states that matters.

It is that states can be laboratories where the country experiments to ascertain which mix of taxes, incentives and public administration works best when it comes to health care.

Amity Shlaes

Obamacare threatens such experiments by superseding them. In doing so, the new federal program deprives the country not only of the experiments themselves but also of evidence that might cast doubt on the promises of the new legislation.

In few states is the change as dramatic as in Indiana. Several years ago Republican Governor Mitch Daniels and the legislature began wondering about the same questions that preoccupied the framers of Obama’s health-care plan: why so many of the uninsured mob hospital emergency rooms, why citizens turn their backs on preventive medicine, why health-care spending expands, and how you get Americans to be aware of health-care costs.

In response, Daniels’s team created the Healthy Indiana Plan, known as HIP. It was billed as subsidized insurance for low- and middle-income Hoosiers: citizens who suffer from catastrophically expensive illnesses get coverage subsidized by state and federal dollars. The state doubled cigarette taxes to pay for it all. So far, so familiar.

But Healthy Indiana features a few other interesting traits. Joining was voluntary. Participants pay a penalty co-pay if they use an emergency-room for routine health-care needs.

Spending Accounts

In addition, as part of HIP, the state created a health spending account of $1,100 per adult to be used for basic medical needs and preventive care. At the end of the year, patients can roll over what remains in the account. If they have a record of seeking appropriate preventive care, they may also get additional cash from the state for their health needs. Those who don’t get the preventive care do not get those funds.

In its two-year life, Healthy Indiana has proven popular, with some 60,000 Hoosiers enrolling. Ninety nine percent said they would re-enroll.

The preventive component seems to work: Adult HIP members use emergency rooms at a lower rate than adults on standard Indiana Medicaid. They use generic drugs more frequently than the commercially insured. The program hasn’t busted the budget. Some three-fourths of HIP enrollees say they are more likely to seek preventive services. In a state where one in four adults is obese, this is perhaps the most interesting news of all.
Now Healthy Indiana will be overwhelmed by Obamacare, which will have little regard for individual budgeting and incentives. Perhaps Medicaid administrators will cut off the cash that has flowed to Healthy Indiana. Or perhaps the insurance that Obamacare offers will be more attractive and woo away HIP’s volunteers. Healthy Indiana may survive in name. But the experiment, isolating the effect of a certain incentive upon a certain problem, has been aborted.

I happened to be in the Indiana state house the week that it became clear the president’s plan would become law. Unsure of future funding, Daniels was already freezing new enrollment for the plan. Daniels points out that the federal law will force tax increases at the state level in Indiana and elsewhere. That’s because the federal law effectively mandates expansion of Medicaid, whose costs the states help foot.

Amity Schlaes: How the CBO Works & How it is Easily Manipulated

Amity Schlaes is perhaps the greatest living economic historian.

I like how Schlaes describes how the CBO works, they are asked to score what is placed in their box and that includes the assumptions they are asked to make in the request.

For example Ann Coulter once made the following analogy. If Congress proposed a new “green energy bill” that assumed that there was a car that ran on grass and got 1000 miles per gallon of grass the CBO would tell us that our dependency on foreign oil would drop significantly.

Bloomberg News Amity Schlaes:

The question is how can lawmakers get away with their misrepresentation? One answer lies in the structure of the Congressional Budget Office, the government’s official accountant. Its job is to establish an honest price: to tell legislators and voters what a policy will cost in the short, medium and long terms. That CBO work is important because Americans rightly sense that the politicians’ math is rigged.

Amity Shlaes

“Nobody told me you were cheating.

Aww, it’s just a feeling I had.”

Flawed Assumptions

The CBO’s rules make it hard for the group to fulfill its own mandate. You’d think, for example, that the CBO would use its own parameters when it crunches numbers. Instead, the CBO must use the same mathematical assumptions supplied by the very lawmakers who wrote the bill the group is evaluating. No matter how improbable those formulas are.

Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, writing in the New York Times, described the group’s process as “fantasy in, fantasy out.”

CBO rules often preclude common sense. Its forecasters can’t take into account any other legislation when studying the price tag of a proposed bill. That enabled the forecasters costing out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bill to overlook this fact: Medicare spending increases will force tax increases, which in turn will hurt growth.

Political Salesmen

This dynamic is permitted because the answers the CBO supplies make it easier for politicians to sell their bills. They’re happy. And so, for the moment, are voters who are painfully aware that the U.S. federal budget can’t cover new entitlements, yet accept such legislation as a balm for that pain.

“So if I’m right, you got to lie to me

Then I won’t feel so bad.”

The CBO’s structural failure benefits the Democrats this week. Indeed, Pelosi is teaching Republicans something: the bigger the misrepresentation, the greater the credibility with voters. Croon to them a tune about entitlement, and they forget that you’re clearing a path for a tripling of the tax on dividends.

The CBO’s rules are bipartisan — they hold for whatever legislation lands in its in box. Congressman Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, recently put forward a new blueprint for the federal budget. Ryan’s plan is less questionable than Pelosi’s because it’s relatively honest about costs. Ryan points out that the current unfunded part of the Medicare liability is in the trillions.

Feds Approving Bogus Products as ‘Energy-Star Compliant’, Investigation Finds

Fox News:

The federal government has been slapping “energy-efficient” ratings on products that don’t even exist — including a bogus space heater with a duster stuck to it and an alarm clock supposedly powered by gasoline. 

The federal government has been slapping “energy-efficient” ratings on products that don’t even exist — including a bogus space heater with a duster stuck to it and an alarm clock supposedly powered by gasoline. 

These fake products were submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy for approval as part of an undercover investigation by the Government Accountability Office. 

The office wanted to see how easily the feds could be duped, since the Energy Star program used to identify products as energy savers serves as a guide to businesses looking for such modern marvels and the basis for millions of dollars in incentivizing tax credits — including $300 million from the stimulus. 

The products fooled the federal government three out of four times. Of the 20 products submitted for approval, 15 were given the thumbs up. GAO reported that the federal government generally did not ask for critical evidence to back up its claims about how energy-efficient — or real — its bogus products were. 

“Certification controls were ineffective primarily because Energy Star does not verify energy-savings data reported by manufacturers,” the report said. Two of the fake firms even received requests from real firms to buy the products after they were listed. 

Among the products approved was a “room air cleaner.” The product image should have been a giveaway — it showed a space heater with a duster and several fly strips attached to it, looking more like a fire hazard than an energy saver. The EPA approved it in 11 days and listed it on the official Web site, according to GAO. 

The government also approved a “metal roof panel,” a “geothermal heat pump,” and a “gas-powered alarm clock.” The latter was described as a generator-sized clock run on gasoline.

More Businesses Reveal ObamaCare Impact

Via alineofsite.com:

At President Obama’s infamous Summit on February 25, Nancy Pelosi boldly stated that ObamaCare would create “400,000 jobs almost immediately”, 4 million over the life of the bill.  If so, it’s off to a rocky start. 

Prior to the passage of ObamaCare, many experts and organizations closer to the reality of the work place and the San Francisco Speaker of the House predicted serious negative economic consequences from the legislation.  The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) estimated 1.6 million in job loss from ObamaCare along with a $200 billion reduction in GDP.  The Heritage Foundation wasn’t as optimistic as they predicted 5.2 million jobs would be at risk of going away, and 10.2 million jobs would be at risk of slower wage growth and cuts in benefits.   

Below is a partial list of the immediate economic damage report in only the first week in the life of ObamaCare:

Zoll Medical Corp: This bill is a jobs killer,” said Ernie Whiton, chief financial officer of Chelmsford’s Zoll Medical Corp., which employs about 650 people in Massachusetts. Many of those employees work in Zoll’s local manufacturing facility making heart defibrillators.  “We could be forced to (move) manufacturing overseas if we can’t pass along these costs to our customers,” said Whiton. 

 “AT&T Inc. will take a $1 billion non-cash charge in the first quarter because of the health care overhaul and may cut benefits it offers to current and retired workers… The telecommunications company also said it is looking into changing the health care benefits it offers because of the new law. Analysts say retirees could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers as a result of the overhaul.
Verizon: In an email titled “President Obama Signs Health Care Legislation” sent to all employees Tuesday night, the telecom giant warned that “we expect that Verizon’s costs will increase in the short term.” While executive vice president for human resources Marc Reed wrote that “it is difficult at this point to gauge the precise impact of this legislation,” and that ObamaCare does reflect some of the company’s policy priorities, the message to workers was clear: Expect changes for the worse to your health benefits as the direct result of this bill, and maybe as soon as this year.

 Valero Energy Corp, the largest independent U.S. refiner, said on Friday it expected to take a first-quarter charge of $15 million to $20 million due to the tax impact of a new healthcare law. “There will be further tax costs due to the legislation in the future, but we don’t have calculations on those yet,” Valero spokesman Bill Day said in a emailed statement. Valero shares were down about 1.3 percent at $19.62 in midday trading on Friday, bringing their loss this week to more than 3 percent.

 3M Company said today that it expects to record a one-time non-cash charge of $85 to $90 million after tax, or approximately 12 cents per share, in the first quarter of 2010, resulting from the recently enacted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, including modifications made in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 passed by Congress on March 25, 2010. The charge is due to a reduction in the value of the company’s deferred tax asset as a result of a change to the tax treatment of Medicare Part D reimbursements.

 AK Steel Holding Corp., the third largest U.S. steelmaker by sales, said it will record a non-cash charge of about $31 million resulting from the health-care overhaul signed into law by President Barack Obama.

 Caterpillar Inc. said the health-care overhaul legislation being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives would increase the company’s health-care costs by more than $100 million in the first year alone. 

Deere & Company, Iowa’s largest manufacturing employer, said in a statement this morning that the recently-passed health care legislation will cost the company $150 million after tax this year.

 Medtronic: Medical device maker Medtronic warned that new taxes on its products could force it to lay off a thousand workers. 

 Retiree Benefits: As many as 1.5 million to 2 million retirees could lose the drug benefits provided by their former employer because of the tax changes, according to a study by the Moran Company, a health care consulting firm.

 Massachusetts: “A Dire Warning From Bay State Medical-Device Companies That A New Sales Tax In The Federal Health-Care Law Could Force Their Plants – And Thousands Of Jobs – Out Of The Country Has Rattled Gov. Deval Patrick, a staunch backer of the law and pal President Obama.” 

 Colorado:  Steamboat Ski Area officials said Tuesday that the federal health care overhaul could cost their business as much as $2 million a year beginning in 2014.

The health care overhaul includes a policy that would assess a fine, per employee, to large businesses that do not provide health care to full-time workers. The policy’s potential impact is ringing alarm bells with the Colorado ski industry, which has a large number of uninsured seasonal employees who work enough days to qualify as full-time workers. 

 New Hampshire: The state’s seasonal tourism industry is only now beginning to realize that it could get hammered by the new health care reform law. 

 Muncie, Indiana: Just to be clear, we’re not discussing the pros or cons of the health bill; it’s the Christmas tree ornaments that Congress hung off it to assure its passage.  The main one (at least that we know of so far; it takes time to wade through 2,409 pages of legislation) will expand the government’s Pell Grant programs at the expense of private student loan originators such as Sallie Mae.  The result: Under a worst-case scenario, Muncie might lose 700 jobs at its Sallie Mae call center on the city’s north side. A Star Press article on Tuesday said the company might have to cut its 8,600 total workforce by 2,500 workers and reduce its national locations from 25 to about six. It’s unknown how Muncie might fare if the company starts closing offices.

 Fishers, Indiana: Sallie Mae, a major student loan provider, has its largest office in Fishers, Ind…The effects of this portion of the health care bill have concerned several of the 35,000 people employed in the lending industry. Phillip Walsh, a senior director at Sallie Mae’s office in Fishers, said the company will lose approximately 2,500 of its 8,500 jobs.

 State Budget Impacts: Because of the new health care law, Arizona lawmakers must now find a way to maintain insurance coverage for 350,000 children and adults that they slashed just last week to help close a $2.6 billion budget deficit.  Louisiana officials say a reduction in federal money to hospitals that treat the uninsured under the bill could be a death knell for their state-run charity hospital system.  In California, policymakers estimate they will have to come up with an additional $500 million a year to make necessary increases in payments to Medicaid providers.  Across the country, state officials are wading through the minutiae of the health care overhaul to understand just how their governments will be affected. Even with much still to be digested, it is clear the law may be as much of a burden to some state budgets as it is a boon to uninsured consumers.

Obama in Campaign: “The first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.”

Another broken promise. As we have said before we have TONS of these. Obama will say anything to please the group that is in front of him. He is a typical Chicago politician.

Via Fight Foca:

Last year before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Barack Obama told pro-abortion activists: “The first thing I’d do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.”

FOCA would establish the right to abortion as a fundamental right (like the right to free speech) and wipe away every restriction on abortion nationwide.

FOCA will do away with state laws on parental involvement, on partial birth abortion, and on all other protections.

FOCA will compel taxpayer funding of abortions.

FOCA will force faith-based hospitals and healthcare facilities to perform abortions.

Al Sharpton caught in straight up lie by Bill O’Reilly over the Tea Party smears. UPDATE – Washington Post Admits Error in Reporting of Event!

In the video Bill O’Reilly catches Al Sharpton in a straight up lie.

Sharpton said that he new the tea Party crowd was yelling racial epithets at the black member sof Congress because he saw the tape, the truth is that there were cameras of all kinds all over that staged setup incedent and not one word of any such type can be found. Andrew Breitbart has offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who can prove it happened. So far no takers.

The good stuff is form 2:50 to 4: 46. Sharpton is straight up busted.

Imagine if a Republican were caught in such a lie. How would the elite media react.

What I would like to know is, why would Bill O’Reilly take the word of a politician over a dozen video’s of the event?

USA Today:

Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., told a reporter that as he left the Cannon House Office Building with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader of the civil rights era, some among the crowd chanted “the N-word, the N-word, 15 times.” Both Carson and Lewis are black, and Lewis spokeswoman Brenda Jones also said that it occurred.

Multiple video’s posted here, on youtube and at Big Government.com, prove beyond doubt that there were no such chants or slurs and especially not 15 times.They all lied.

John Lewis also said on Oct. 11, 2008 that John McCain was a racist inciting hate like George Wallace who tried to keep black children from being educated. No one believed such nonsense. Lewis isn’t the first good man to be totally currputed by the beltway mentality who will say anything to satisfy the want for power and he wont be the last.

O’Reilly won’t say it but I will, John Lewis you made it up for political gain. THE PROOF –

UPDATE – Washington Post:

Two black Democrats, Reps. André Carson of Indiana and John Lewis of Georgia, said protesters subjected them to racial epithets. The episodes were recounted for days in Post stories and columns. Much blame was directed at Tea Party activists.

But many readers, echoing conservative broadcasters and bloggers, insist the reports were exaggerated or that the events simply never took place.

Post reports were “based on no proof at all and without even offering any evidence,” District reader Clarice Feldman charged in an e-mail.

Conservative commentator and blogger Andrew Breitbart has accused Lewis and Carson of fabricating claims of racial epithets to “create the impression that the ‘tea party’ movement is racist.” He initially offered $10,000 to the United Negro College Fund for video evidence of the slurs. It’s now $100,000. “They didn’t expect someone would challenge them on this,” Breitbart told me. “What idiot would challenge John Lewis,” a civil rights movement icon? “Well, I’m that idiot.”

YouTube videos show the spitting incident took place as Cleaver and other black lawmakers passed through a gantlet of rowdy protesters on the steps outside the Cannon House Office Building. Amid booing and chants of “kill the bill,” Cleaver is seen reacting as he passes screaming protesters. He turns, points an accusing finger and appears to chastise one, who is shouting nonstop. As he continues up the steps, Cleaver uses his hand to wipe a protester’s saliva from his face.

Cleaver was hit with spit, but whether it was deliberate is very much in question. The video suggests he was unintentionally sprayed by the screaming protester. The distinction is significant because it fundamentally changes widespread media characterizations of what occurred. The Post and other news organizations left the impression of a despicable, premeditated assault. With videos of the incident so prevalent on liberal and conservative Web sites, and with the question being so widely raised in the blogosphere and on cable channels, The Post was remiss in not providing clarity by quickly dissecting what happened. (Cleaver’s office did not return repeated calls seeking comment for this column.)

Busted: Elite Media Quoted Sources to “Racial Epithets” BEFORE those sources reported it themselves… UPDATED!

Members of Congress have stated that Tea Party people were “chanting racial epithets 15 times”  as the article below states and links to, but the problem is that there are a dozen video’s of those members of Congress walking through the Tea Party crowd and it didn’t happen, so of course they, and the elite media, just said it did anyway. Now we have evidence that some in the elite media had the story in hand before the event even took place. – See the update for the timeline. The evidence is getting stonger by the hour.

Via Big Government.com:

The American Thinker did an outstanding job describing the events on March 20th, when democratic members of Congress in Washington DC were reportedly taunted by tea party activists with racial and sexual slurs. It appears from the timeline of the events that this race-baiting story was in the works before the Black Caucus members paraded through the tea party crowd on Capitol Hill.

Now Doug Ross found this—–

McClatchy released their story on the reported attacks on the Black Caucus members at 4:51 PM EST. The McClatchy reporter William Douglas refers to Huffington Post contributor Sam Stein as a source in his article.

But… The Huffington Post did not post their article until 4:56 PM EST:

Amazing.

It looks like the democratic-media complex was working on this story before it even occurred.

…If it even occurred.

The Black Caucus members and democratic-media complex STILL have not provided any proof that the N-word was said once, let alone 15 times, as Rep. Andre Carson claimed.

Andrew Breitbart has more.

UPDATE – The first reporter “reported” it 4 minutes after Representative Carson left for his stroll towards the Tea Party crowd. DirectorBlue has the timeline. Check the link for more updates.

Reminder – John Lewis also said on Oct. 11, 2008 that John McCain was a racist inciting hate like George Wallace who tried to keep black children from being educated. No one believed such nonsense. Lewis isn’t the first good man to be totally currputed by the beltway mentality who will say anything to satisfy the want for power and he wont be the last.

THE PROOF:

Fox News Record Ratings: Holds top 13 programs on cable

Washington Examiner:

Fox News currently hold the top 13 rated program slots in the first quarter of 2010 drawing its largest total day audience averages in the network’s history according to TVNewser.

Yes, even ‘Fox and Friends’ has higher total day ratings than the MSNBC’s top program ‘Countdown with Keith Olberman.’

This news is particularly troubling to the left as the cable news juggernaut has actually gained viewers, while CNN and MSNBC ratings are down.

The network also received high marks in a January poll conducted by the PPP foundation that showed Fox News as ‘the most trusted television news network.’

Let us put this in perspective, NBC’s Keith Olberman is so fringe that he only has almost 400,000 viewers. The conspiracy theorist nut Alex Jones has almost 2 million on his radio program.

CNN ratings down 40% in a year. ABC, CBS tanking as well.

Politico:

The future of CNN, never exactly bright the past couple of years, suddenly looked dire this week when ratings came out showing a 40 percent decline in prime-time viewers since 2009. 

Jon Klein, the network’s president, has consistently defended its down-the-middle news strategy, despite the increasingly large ratings leads opened up by MSNBC and particularly Fox, with their ideological slants and big personalities. 

So is it time for a radical rethinking of “the most trusted name in news,” the network of Larry King, Anderson Cooper, Campbell Brown and Wolf Blitzer? We asked a dozen or so prominent media watchers, former industry executives and CNN personalities for their recommendations.

Down the middle? CNN has been wall to wall racial invective against Tea Party and those hwo oppose ObamaCare etc. Only the worst of the Kool-Aide drinkers wants day after day of that. Anderson Cooper has been calling Tea Party participants sexual names. Its silly. CNN has lost a ton of its audience, most of it going to Fox News judging by the record ratings.

NY Times:

With buyouts and layoffs in progress, the mood at ABC News cannot be good. It was probably not enhanced by the ratings report for the first quarter of the year showing that the network’s evening newscast, “World News,” had sunk to the lowest numbers the program has had in a first quarter since the People Meter was introduced by Nielsen in 1987.

The same situation prevailed at CBS, where the “Evening News” also hit a new low for the months of January through March.

NBC did get some ratings from the Olympics coverage.

What Happened to the “Green Jobs” Economy? Solar Panel Plants Fleeing United States

While some panel production is staying in the US, most is fleeing, but with the new steep obamacare taxes and mandates and a new energy tax being proposed in Congress by Democrats, who knows if even that little bit will stay.

But good news, the worlds largest solar panel plant is being built… in DUBAI.

Washington Post:

BP closing Maryland solar manufacturing plant

Saturday, March 27, 2010

BP will close its solar-panel manufacturing plant in Frederick, the final step in moving its solar business out of the United States to facilities in China, India and other countries.

Just 3 1/2 years ago, in an announcement widely hailed by Maryland officials and promoters of “green jobs,” BP unveiled a $70 million plan to double output at the facility and erected a building to house the production lines.

But on Friday the company said it would lay off 320 workers and keep only a hundred people involved in research, sales and project development. BP said laid-off employees would receive full pay and benefits for three months, followed by severance packages and job-placement assistance. The company, unable to sell or lease the building, will tear it down.

NASDAQ:

GE To Close Its Solar-Panel Manufacturing Plant In Delaware

By Yuliya Chernova, Of DOW JONES CLEAN TECHNOLOGY INSIGHT

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- General Electric Co. (GE) plans to shut down its only solar-panel manufacturing facility, as it found that prices for panels fell below production costs, Clean Technology Insight has learned.

“On October 23 we announced the restructuring of our solar business to employees and our intent to close the Newark [Del.] facility,” said Milissa Rocker, spokeswoman for the company, in an interview.

BP Solar International Inc., part of BP PLC (BP), announced in April that it would close panel production in Frederick, Md., and in Madrid, eliminating 620 positions. It also is drawing more on outsourced manufacturing through Chinese suppliers.

Evergreen Solar Inc., meanwhile, said on Wednesday that it will move solar- panel assembly from its Devens, Mass., factory, to China next year. Energy Conversion Devices Inc., a maker thin-film solar panels, has also slowed production in Michigan even as it plans to start production in China.

Schott Solar Inc. shut down production at its 15-megawatt solar-panel production facility in Billerica, Mass., in July.

At least we still have that solar panel plant in Mississippi.

Solar-panel farm runs into bureaucratic roadblocks

Government is just sooooo efficient isn’t it?

USA Today (Hat Tip HotAir):

The company proposed a 2,000-acre solar farm, named Beacon, on fallow agricultural land on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert. The site has the great desert sun but is on degraded land near a freeway, an auto test track and old buildings.

The site “is exactly where solar should be,” says David Myers, head of conservation group Wildlands Conservancy.

But two years later, NextEra still awaits permission to begin construction from the California Energy Commission, which grants permits on such projects after environmental reviews. Time is running short, not only for NextEra but for several dozen green-energy projects in California. Ground must be broken on them before year’s end to get federal stimulus funds worth 30% of the projects’ cost. …

Yet the sheer number and size of the California projects, especially a dozen huge solar farms unlike anything regulators have reviewed in 20 years, is stressing agencies and stakeholders alike. No other state has so many huge solar projects in the pipeline. Billions of dollars in stimulus funds ride on whether the permitting process can be sped up without sacrificing California’s stringent environmental standards.

No corners are being cut, regulators say. But some environmentalists fear that the tight deadlines will lead to projects that could’ve been better with more time. And companies say that some projects, like NextEra’s, have suffered delays born of inefficient permitting.

Real nice huh… with efficiency like this maybe we should trust the government with our health care …

Winston Group Survey: Tea Party are people who want to see economic results

Wait, you mean these folks are people just like you and me? Looks like the elite media lied again….

The Winston Group found nothing extreme or racist about the Tea Party at all.

The Winston Group:

Behind the Headlines: What’s driving the Tea Party Movement?

New polling data examines the demographics and political philosophy behind the Tea Party Movement

In one of the most extensive looks to date at just who Tea Party activists are, how they think, and the ideas that matter to them, the report found that 17% of the people polled considered themselves “part of the Tea Party movement” and more than four in ten Tea Party members said they were either Independents or Democrats.

In three national surveys, done for New Models from December 2009 through February 2010, 57% of Tea Party members called themselves Republicans, another 28% said they were Independents, and 13% were Democrats. Two-thirds of Tea Party members identify as conservatives but 26% say they are moderate and 8% described themselves as liberal.

Tea Party members prioritize job creation over deficit, spending, and tax issues. However, they view these items as critical precisely because they are seen as a means to reducing unemployment and improving the economy. Tea Party members are very dissatisfied with the current direction of the country, the policies of the administration, and those currently in office, and as a result the Tea Party movement is breaking heavily in favor of the Republican Party. This is a movement defined by its focus not just on the policies of economic conservatism but on the desired economic outcomes.

Hate on MSNBC – Ed Schultz

This is a video you have got to see.

Thanks to Bob Parks.

Illinois Democrat on ObamaCare: I don’t worry about the Constitution

Citizen journalists doing what Katie Couric isn’t competent enough to do….

Via our friends at HotAir.com:

All things considered, this clip’s more depressing than the already legendary Hank Johnson clip from last night. Like Madam Speaker, not only does he regard the novel and crucial constitutional issue involved to be beside the point, he almost seems irritated to be asked about it. Reason 8,293,511 why Americans now feel such utter contempt for their representatives.

Oh, and he might be surprised to know that O-Care really doesn’t insure everyone. I didn’t realize that point was still in dispute, least of all for a guy who’s read the bill, ahem, three times.