Saturday, April 19, 2014

AS ONE WHO HAS NEVER INDULGED IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND THE LIKE, IT'S STILL HARD TO REFUTE THE "COINCIDENCES" NOTED HEREIN: WHAT'S MORE, MOST NORMAL PEOPLE CONSIDER THIS KIND OF STUFF BEYOND THE PALE, SIMPLY COULD NOT HAPPEN IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. BUT ONE HAS TO ASK, HAVE ANY OF THESE ASSERTIONS BEEN REBUTTED OR REFUTED ANYWHERE? NOTE: CLICK ON THE YOUTUBE LINK ON THE BLACK SQUARE TO SEE THIS VIDEO.

Apr192014

An Amazing Collection of Coincidences

Maybe the election of an ultra-radical, anti-American ideologue with no serious qualifications as President of the USA, and then his re-election after years of conspicuous failure to advance the national interest, aren’t the result of a conspiracy to destroy our country. Maybe it is all just a series of coincidences:

Other than a picture of Paul Ryan being used to represent Jack Ryan, nothing here jumps out as obviously wrong. It should keep the national media busy for years checking into all these inter-related cans of worms — except that the leftwing media establishment is part of the story. It has been instrumental in placing and keeping Obama in power by stampeding low-information herd voters in his direction. One day maybe we will learn what other coincidences link Obama to those in control of the MSM.

More info at The Obama Timeline.

HERE'S A GUY WHO'S SO HOOKED ON THE OBAMA/COMMUNIST KOOLAIDE THAT NOTHING WOULD SATISFY HIM BUT A REBIRTH AND RETURN OF THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF THE USSR. FURTHERMORE, BLOW LOVES THE PLANTATION AND ITS SECURITY, TAKE HIM OFF IT AND HE CALLS AL SHARPTON AND JESSE JACKSON FOR HELP. WELCOME T THE DIVERSE WORLD OF THE DEMOCRATS.

Obamacare Bashing or Bust

APRIL 18, 2014

Charles M. Blow

Thursday, President Obama delivered a compendium of positive news about the Affordable Care Act:

■ Eight million people have signed up for private health insurance.

■ Thirty-five percent of those signing up are under 35 years old.

■ The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that the cost of the law will be $100 billion lower than expected and will significantly shrink the deficit over the next 10 years.

“This thing is working,” the president said. But it rang more as a lamentation than a proclamation. The health care law is a staggering achievement by this president and the Democrats and is likely to be viewed by history as such, but Republican opposition to it has been so vociferous and unrelenting that the president has been hard pressed to find a message that can overcome it.

Republicans repeat the same complaints, regardless of their veracity: Obamacare is bad for the economy and bad for Americans; it’s an unwelcome expansion of government by an overreaching president; it’s failing and will never work.

As Obama said Thursday:

“I find it strange that the Republican position on this law is still stuck in the same place that it has always been. They still can’t bring themselves to admit that the Affordable Care Act is working. They said nobody would sign up; they were wrong about that. They said it would be unaffordable for the country; they were wrong about that.”

He continued:

“I know every American isn’t going to agree with this law, but I think we can agree that it’s well past time to move on as a country. ...”

But the president knows well that Republicans have no interest whatsoever in moving on. They’ve hitched their wagons to stop-Obama stallions and their plan is to race forward to Election Day.

The president smartly articulated the frustration that much of the opposition to the law in public opinion polls is “attached to general opinions about me or about Democrats and partisanship in the country generally.”

The president’s poll numbers took a hit during the health care rollout and have never fully recovered. The law also caused Democrats in general to lose their advantage in voters’ preference for control of Congress, according to a CNN/ORC poll conducted in December. Furthermore, most Americans disapprove of the health care law.

The Republican plan is simply to hold tight to last year’s disapproval and drag it forward to this year’s election. And that just might work. Democrats have so fumbled the selling of the health care law’s advantages, both moral and economic — faltering and stammering when they should have been steadfast and resolute — that they have acquiesced the debate to Republican opposition.

Rather than fight back with facts, too many Democratic politicians tucked their tails and ran away from the law, or, worse yet, joined the attack.

In addition to the effectiveness of Republican attacks and the anemia of Democratic support for the law, the demographics of midterm voters also bode well for Republicans.

Midterm elections generally skew older and whiter, and Republicans are counting on this skew to give them an electoral advantage. According to a Washington Post/ABC poll released at the end of last month, whites and elderly people are the least likely to support federal changes to the health care system, yet most elderly people are beneficiaries of another, quite successful government health care program: Medicare. And 77 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are white.

Even if Obamacare were not a factor, history suggests that this midterm election would still be a tough one for Democrats. As The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza pointed out in February:

“The party of a re-elected president tends to get walloped in the following midterm election. Since 1912 (that’s when the House expanded to 435 seats), the president’s party has lost an average of 29 House seats in the following midterm election.”

The health care law is working, insuring millions of Americans at far less a cost than what was previously estimated. But this civic victory may well contribute to a political defeat in November, unless Democrats can upend historical precedent and change the profile of the people who vote in off-year elections.

Our elections have been severely altered by a corporatist Supreme Court, maleficent voter ID laws and gerrymandering run amok. In the face of it all, can Democrats gather the gumption to say, “Enough”?

REJOINDER TO O'S CLAIM THE DEBATE OVER ACA IS OVER:

At the Weekly Standard, Jeffrey Anderson provides a useful reminder of what is important in this context:

[I]n truth, all of this talk about enrollment numbers is beside the point. Back when the Democrats defied public opinion and rammed Obamacare into law using the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator Aid, the Louisiana Purchase, and all the rest of the unseemly gimmicks they employed, opponents of Obamacare didn’t claim that the reason why the health-care overhaul would be bad was because it wouldn’t hit the coverage numbers the CBO projected. (If anything, opponents argued that Obamacare would surpass those numbers, as employers would dump people into the exchanges against their will, thereby costing American taxpayers even more than the CBO was projecting.)

No, Obamacare isn’t bad because it didn’t hit 9 million in Obamacare-compliant exchange purchases, nor because it didn’t include 39 percent young adults among its purchasers. It’s bad—horrible, actually—because it requires private citizens to buy a product of the federal government’s choosing for the first time in our nation’s entire history; because it funnels unprecedented amounts of power and money to Washington, D.C. and away from everyday Americans; because it incentivizes employers not to hire people and to cut hours for millions of people they’ve already employed; because it bans millions of people’s health insurance policies (except when Obama lawlessly un-bans them); because it causes people who like their doctors not to be able to keep their doctors; because it raises health costs; because it requires young people to subsidize maternity coverage and pediatric dental care for 60-year-olds who have no need or desire for such coverage; because it effectively bans doctors from expanding existing doctor-owned hospitals or building new ones, makes it difficult for doctors to stay in private practice, and tries to corral them into hospitals where they can more easily be controlled; because it will raise federal spending by a projected $2 trillion over its real first decade; because it will cut projected Medicare funding by a whopping 10 percent over that same decade, siphoning that money out of Medicare to (partially) pay for Obamacare; because it particularly goes after Medicare Advantage funding; because it stifles medical innovation; because it disrespects religious freedom; and because it mandates communal funding of abortion.

In short, it’s bad because it raises health costs, undermines liberty, costs jobs, and seeks to put American medicine under the control of the same folks who brought you healthcare.gov.

And then there is this:

It might seem surprising, therefore, that Obama would have chosen to declare victory yesterday, imperiously proclaiming that “the repeal debate is and should be over.” In reality, however, his words might actually be true—just not in the way he intended. The American people hated Obamacare even before the Democrats willfully passed it, they hate it now, and they never stopped hating it in between. There’s strong evidence that the debate is, indeed, over—and that Obama and his allies have lost.

According to Real Clear Politics, since July 4, 2009, 458 polls have been taken on Obamacare. Twenty have shown Americans liking it, five have shown ties, and 433 (95 percent) have shown them disliking it. Perhaps even more strikingly, 299 (65 percent)—including the five most recent polls—have shown Americans opposing Obamacare by double-digits.

Anderson invites the customary thought experiment: “Imagine if Republicans were so stubbornly pushing something that was so evidently unpopular—and then had the gall to declare the debate over (in their favor).” My imagination isn’t that good, and I doubt yours is either.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

CLEARS THE AIR SOMEWHAT: A reasonable bureaucrat HERE makes a very good presentation on how to reform the existing system. My caveat is the system is wrong to begin with because as long as its there, as long as it exists, people will figure out how to take advantage and game it. Don't see why everyone wasn't better off when churches and civic organizations were the dominant players in welfare because at least then someone besides a bureaucrat or faceless official was involved with the players and could rally ordinary people to the effort of helping those in need. As it is now the bureaucrats et.al. have a stake in perpetuating the system (it is their livelihood!) and politicians obviously always want to buy and secure votes hence their is no real incentive to change.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Monday, April14, 20F

IT TAKES A STRONG STOMACH TO GET THROUGH THIS ARTICLE WITHOUT LOSING IT ALL. IT'S A CONFIRMATION OF ALL WE SUSPECTED WAS HOW WASHINGTON AND THE DEMOCRATS OPERATE:

Divorce Beltway Style

Column: The Democratic breakup that exposes Washington’s rotten core

Tony, Heather Podesta / AP

BY: Matthew Continetti
April 11, 2014 5:00 am

“I see lobbying,” Tony Podesta has said, “as getting information in the hands of people who are making decisions so they can make more informed decisions.” Last week the information Tony Podesta was giving was the divorce complaint he had filed in D.C. Court against his wife Heather. The hands receiving that information belonged to a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, who made the “informed decision” to report on it. Later in the day Heather, who is also a lobbyist, informed the Postthe text of her counter-suit. It published a follow-up.

The documents, which you can read below, did not become available to the rest of us until yesterday. They tell stories not only of a May-December romance gone sour, but of how obscene wealth can be amassed through rent-seeking and influence-peddling in Washington D.C., and of the hoary means by which the princelings of the capital and their consorts maintain and grow that wealth. They tell stories not only of an ugly divorce, but of the power of lobbying, of how one family maneuvered to the center of the nation’s dominant political party, of the transactional relationships, gargantuan self-regard, and empty posturing that insulates, asbestos-like, the D.C. bubble.

That the broken couple now uses the tools of their trade—the phone-call to a friend, the selective leaking of documents, the hiring of attorneys, the launch of a public-relations campaign—against one another is more than ironic. It is fitting. Tony and Heather Podesta reached the pinnacle of wealth and influence in Barack Obama’s Washington. Now they, like he, are in eclipse.

The stories begin in the fall of 2001. She was in her early thirties, working at a trade association, and on the rebound. Her second marriage had just ended. A friend, Dorothy Robyn, a Democratic policy wonk, suggested she meet Tony Podesta. Tony was decades older than she, and had been married once before, but he was young at heart. He took her to the opera for their first date. On the way, the story goes, they stopped by one of his homes to pick up a car. She noticed his art collection. “I don’t know why it is,” Tony said, “but I have artworks where the women have no heads.” The next day she sent him a note. It was signed, “Woman with a head.”

The woman with a head was Heather Miller, and soon she and Tony were in love. They moved in together. When they married, in April of 2003, Tony was 59, and Heather was 33. Nancy Pelosi witnessed their vows, as did Patrick Leahy, and Ed Markey, and Bill Richardson, and countless other Democratic bigwigs. According to the Post, which has chronicled the ups and downs of the Podestas’ relationships and careers, the noted D.C. chefs and restaurateurs Roberto Donna and Kaz Okuchi “personally cooked for the guests.” This was no ordinary wedding.

And Tony Podesta was no ordinary man. A longtime Democratic aide, a counselor to Teddy Kennedy, Tony had been one of the capital’s most powerful lobbyists for some time. As his lawyers would later put it, “‘Podesta’ was a widely recognized and well-respected name in the lobbying industry at the time of the marriage.” The lobbying firm he had established in 1987 was powerfully connected. His younger brother, John, was President Clinton’s chief of staff. Tony Podesta owned art and wine and real estate in Italy, in Australia, in northern Virginia, and in D.C. He was a major Democratic donor, a force to be reckoned with, and a cut-up, a character who wore loud neckties and red Prada shoes. “The Pope wears Prada,” he is known to say, “and so do I.”

Heather changed her name—something she had not done in her previous marriages—to Heather Miller Podesta. She emulated her spouse, developing, in the words of the Post, “a penchant for flamboyantly patterned dresses.” She joined the company, began lobbying. She picked up Tony’s art habit, and together they amassed a collection of more than 1,300 pieces. She set to work, renovating their six bedrooms, six-and-a-half bathroom home in Northwest D.C. off of Massachusetts Avenue, overlooking the Rock Creek Parkway.

She wanted, her lawyers would say later, “to create a uniquely beautiful architectural space for the dual purposes of having a wonderful home in which to live and promote their shared interests, both professional and personal.” The renovation took three years and cost millions of dollars. The “marital residence,” where they promoted their shared interests in holding parties and fundraisers for Democratic politicians, and housed immense wine and art collections, is estimated to be worth some $5.6 million. Concerned about income inequality? The Podestas are the One Percent.

They would visit their apartment in Venice, Italy, up to a dozen times a year, hosting Janet Napolitano, entertaining passersby such as Reps. Shelley Berkley and Eliot Engel, “even,” the Post once breathlessly intoned, “Teddy Kennedy.” They’d open their homes to tours, so people could enjoy the art, could witness the spectacle of their wealth. One story they liked to tell took place in 2004, when the guests at their northern Virginia home, near Lake Barcroft, walked into a bedroom festooned with the works of Katy Grannan, “a photographer known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents’ suburban homes.” The guests were shocked. But oh, how Tony and Heather laughed.

In 2007 Podesta Matoon became the Podesta Group. Heather formedHeather Podesta + Partners, establishing two prongs of the Podesta family empire. The third prong was the Center for American Progress, founded in 2003 by John Podesta, who would oversee President Obama’s transition team in 2009, and join the Obama administration as a senior adviser in 2014. The Podestas had become the most important non-elected family in the Democratic Party.

In 2009, with the inauguration of Obama and the dawn of unified Democratic control of Washington, business boomed. Revenues at Tony’s firm close to doubled, and revenues at Heather’s firm increased by 50 percent. The money has continued to roll in. The Podesta Group had some $13 million in lobbying income in 2013, sporting clients such as Lockheed Martin, Wells Fargo, U.S. Airways, Walmart, and the National Biodiesel Board. Heather Podesta + Partners made some $4 million, lobbying on behalf of health companies, the American Beverage Association, Brookfield Power, DeVry University, and others. A portion of that money was recycled, contributing to Democratic campaigns, opening up avenues of influence: Tony gave some $45,500 in 2013, all to Democrats; Heather some $95,798 to Democrats, Democratic committees, and liberal groups.

As government expands, extending its reach to every aspect of business, every sector of the economy, private citizens and corporations require sherpas to lead them through the mountains of regulations and tax provisions, to discover exemptions and special favors and other forms of relief or favoritism to improve the bottom line. And who better to act as sherpas than the relatives of the Democrats who impose the regulations and tax provisions in the first place, who better than the lively proprietors of a family business operating in the luxurious and morally uncomplicated world of the caste of limousine liberals who dominate politics, culture, news, and finance.

Corporations give to Democratic politicians, avoiding the scrutiny of liberal attack dogs in the media and nonprofit sectors, and enjoying the ego boost that comes with being on the “right side of history.” Then those corporations hire the Podestas to get them out of the Rube Goldberg traps the Democrats have enacted into law. John’s innovation was to establish a corporate-funded think tank where the burdensome policies would be concocted, and whose staff would go on to man the regulatory agencies that put their wool-headed ideas into practice. And to whom do the corporations turn when they find themselves on the receiving end of all this uplift, all this do-goodery, all this progress, hope, and change? Why, to the man in the red Prada loafers, and to his flamboyantly patterned wife.

It was in 2009 that the Washington Post dubbed Heather Podesta the “It Girl in a new generation of young, highly connected, built-for-the-Obama-era lobbyists.” The appellation was bestowed in a lengthy and fawning “Style” profile, which acted as a sort of advertisement for her lobbying firm. Heather Podesta lamented in the piece that the onrush of business, the peals from health insurance and green energy companies looking for special treatment under the new Democratic dispensation, had interfered with her and her husband’s international travel. Whereas they used to visit Venice up to a dozen times annually, Podesta said, “Now we only maybe get there six times a year.” The poor dears.

The next year, Washington gadfly Tammy Haddad reported on Heather’s fortieth birthday for Politico. “Attending a Tony Podesta party is a pretty good way to start a new year,” Haddad wrote, “but a party to celebrate his wife Heather’s 40th birthday at their new showcase home is a great way to start a new decade.” It was downhill from there. Like Elvis, with whom she shares a birthday, Heather Podesta, Haddad said, had “become a rock star in the Washington power scene as a top lobbyist.” There were red-velvet cupcakes. An Elvis impersonator gyrated for guests. Democratic Congressman John Larson and “Terry Lierman, chief of staff to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, took a tour of the provocative and sometimes whimsical artwork with Jane Oates, John O’Leary, Conrad Cafritz, and Hilary Rosen.” Also there was Jonathan Silver, “the Energy Department’s new money man,” who gave the American taxpayer Solyndra, and who coordinated strategy with John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.

Those winsome days have passed, however. The couple separated a month before Obama’s reelection. Their marriage’s denouement, as related in their divorce filings, is like a retelling of The War of the Roses. He says that in March 2013, months after they had separated, she asked for money to “purchase a multi-million dollar residence for herself,” and he agreed to pay half of the down payment. What he did not know at the time was that she was seeing another man. She says he’s prevented her from accessing the database that keeps track of the art collection. He says she changed the locks on the Venetian flat. She says he’s trying to get rid of the art before the court divides it between them. He says she forced the “cancelation of a scheduled exhibition at the Australian embassy.” She wants the Kalorama house, half the art, and “an equitable division of the parties’ other marital property, including the value of each party’s lobbying firm, retirement accounts, securities, business assets, tangible personal property, including jewelry, wine collection, and all other marital property.” He just wants to be rid of her.

If Heather Podesta has a flaw in the eyes of Washington it is that she is entirely too honest about the mechanics of lobbying. When she launched her independent company in 2007 it was with the slogan, “We know people.” Dianne Feinstein once canceled a fundraiser organized by the Podestas, thePost reported years ago, after she got wind that the invitation read as follows: “The prix fixe includes the Select Committee on Intelligence for the first course followed by your choice of Appropriations, Judiciary, or Rules Committees.”

Heather Podesta’s court filing is just as direct. “As a married couple who both lobbied,” it reads, “they strategically cultivated their public image, and worked to build the ‘Heather and Tony Podesta’ brand for the success of their shared enterprise.” Now that shared enterprise is no more, the Heather and Tony Podesta brand is damaged, and all the years of strategic cultivation is in danger of coming undone. This “married couple who both lobbied” is sundered, revealing a political culture of pettiness and greed, and reminding us that there are few things as revolting, intellectually, morally, and ethically, as the “Washington power scene.”

Read both Podesta divorce filings below:

Tony Podesta Divorce Filing by WashingtonFreeBeacon

FOR A LITTLE MORE INSIGHT IS KEVIN WILLIAMSON'S TAKE HERE..

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CAIR'S EVOLUTION AND ROLE IN THE JIHADISTS' EFFORTS ON BEHALF OF ISLAM.This sickening tale of deceit and perfidy should be required reading by all journalists, at least.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

THE INSIDIOUS INFLUENCE OF THE RADICAL LEFT: Hard to know exactly how the hard left came to control so many disciplines in academia however this is how they operate in politics and many other areas of our society.

THE SIMPLE SOLUTION TO A VEXING PROBLEM:

It was interesting for me to hear your talk given to Cato this past week, broadcast yesterday. As a Swiss, I support what you are saying.

I am a citizen of both Switzerland and the United States. I attended university in the US at the Univ. of Texas and the Univ. of Pennsylvania, and have BSChE and MBA degrees from those schools dating 1965 and 1967 respectively. I am retired. I live in Switzerland, but I travel in the US to visit some family and to attend symposiums, like that for example at Hillsdale College this past January. While Manager of Engineering at Bechtel Corporation’s office in Kingsport TN, I recruited often at your campus in Knoxville during the years 1987 through 1991. At that time, your university was unique in visiting and asking companies like Bechtel, Tennessee Eastman, Mead and others in the East Tennessee area simple but profound questions on a more or less annual basis. For example, “What should our graduates know and know how to do to be of greater immediate worth to your organizations?” In other words, “value added” questions. It will not surprise you to know that I hired young men, and a few young women, as engineering graduates from UT-Knoxville. Their strengths outside of academics: apprenticeship experience and an early appreciation of our challenges as private companies.

Here is why your short talk was of interest to me. We here in Switzerland have an educational system that bifurcates young students during their early teenage years between those which will pursue higher education as “Akademikers” (engineers, medical doctors, etc.), and those who will attend trade schools and become professional persons favoring more manual skills. As they progress in cantonal secondary schools, all receive sound historical, literature and art appreciation foundations. Students read classic books. All (including the future Akademikers) experience (largely unpaid) apprenticeships. The respect achievers have within the society is largely the same. We have here, in Nidwalden, a 2% unemployment rate. My opinion: the United States has a high structural unemployment rate (including a low ‘labor participation rate’) due to a seriously flawed educational model beginning with Kindergarten. You are losing an understanding of the founding principles of your country, such as what is the Natural Law. The role of parents in your system is no longer understood or deemed important. Study the Swiss model. It has practical answers that serve a free people and a free society based on private enterprise. There is no occupational or religious coercion. But, there is a well defined Judeo-Christian societal role of parents; of teachers, advisors, testing authorities and of course the students. There is no “Common Core”. Our cantons are all somewhat different in their academic curricula for the primary and secondary levels because the cantons are different. But they are united in the objective that as young men and women approach maturity, they complete rational paths that yield life skills having value within the society, and for which their remuneration is based on “the market”.

I would be pleased to try to answer any questions you might have. I love the United States, and it pains me to see a problem there that could be fixed, but requires a sustained effort to change attitudes toward trades, and the important role of parentage.