Building A Head of Steam

I hear a low rumble across the land, a steady build-up of steam that grows with each passing day. It began with the same sounds of discontent heard across America every four years by those unhappy with the results of an election that decides who will become President. But something is different this time, after this short post-inaugural period, that defies precedent. Whilst half of the nation moves ahead with either blind hope, complete ignorance, or inward glee at how our country is being "fundamentally transformed" as Obama promised he would, the remaining populace, whose views are ignored by the main stream media outlets, slowly boils. Every move made by this administration and this Congress in its 4 week infancy adds fuel to the fire.

The hopes that Obama would govern from the center, in spite of his past, have been dashed. Talk of transparency, of the most ethical White House ever, of a post-partisan leadership style that would reach across the aisle, of centrist campaign themes to woo moderates, all dashed. Just Words! Just Speeches! Obama mocked talk of his "social-is-tic" views during the campaign, and yet to those who know history, his actions speak oh-so-loudly of his core beliefs. Within his first 28 days in office, our new President has laid the framework for universal healthcare, redistribution of income, increased entitlement programs, decreased national security, and most of all, big government spending with trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. All the while, the sickly economy from which The One was to save us, reels in response to his every move.

Meanwhile, those whom the media chooses to ignore, those who see the writing on the wall in bright red ink, are filled with a sense of dread. They know these are not normal times, that theirs is not normal partisan angst. They sense a cataclysmic shift in the very foundation of the government, from which the country may never recover. They are angry, scared, confused; they feel powerless, their views unrepresented. And as the scope and power of their feelings grow by the day, so do their numbers, as more people take off the rose colored glassed and actually look over the precipice to which we are being led.
They know what others before them in history have done to alter the course of their fates. But they are, as of yet, unsure of what to do, how to act. There comes a time when one realizes that not to act is to acquiesce, and subsequently burden one's children and grandchildren with the consequences of one's failure to make a stand. At what point, if ever, will the courage of the disaffected kick in? An eruption is brewing. We have the power to harness it's energy with coordinated effort, or we can let it explode unchecked and let the chips fall where they may.

Burn After Not Reading

Turns out that not one Congressman or woman had the opportunity to read the 1000+ page Spendulus Bill that will push this country into untrodden debt territory. Never mind the fact that the 48 hours of public disclosure never came to fruition. Please pass the wine. I'm sure gonna need it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvnwOjDjnH4

Porky Tidbits In the Spendulus Plan

This isn't everything folks; just a little taste of the bacon.

$160 million to pay “volunteers” at the Corporation for National and Community Service.
$45 million dollars for the removal of fish pas.sage barriers.
$248 million to buy furniture for the Department of Homeland Security.
$25 Million shall be available for tribal alcohol and substance abuse drug reduction assistance grants
$150 million for “producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish”
$50 million for habitat restoration and other water needs in the San Francisco Bay Area
$198 million to compensate Filipino World War II veterans
$125 Million for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority
$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
$650 Million for Digital Converter Box Program, coupons and converter box installation.
$1 billion for the Census Bureau
$40 Million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Operation of Indian Programs
$954 Million to carry out the immunization program
$15 billion for boosting Pell Grant college scholarships
$87 million for a polar icebreaking ship
$1.7 billion for the National Park System
$1 billion for community-development block grants
$4.2 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities”
$650 Million to the Forrest Service for hazardous fuels reduction and hazard mitigation activities in areas at high risk of catastrophic wildfire
$545 Million for Indian Health Services
$100 Million for the Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control Grant Program
$850 million for Amtrak
$150 million for the Smithsonian
$300 million for energy-efficient-appliance rebate programs
$4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for “youths” up to the age of 24
$55 million for Historic Preservation Fund
$7.6 billion for “rural community advancement programs”
$150 million for agricultural-commodity purchases
$1.368 Billion for grants or loans for energy retrofit and green investments in as.sisted housing
$1.5 Billion for NASA, Science, Aeronautics, Exploration, and Cross Agency support.
$198 Million for School Lunch Room EQUIPMENT
$ 9 Billion for ‘Broadband Technology Opportunities Program’
$1.256 Billion for NOAA, Operations, Research, Facilities, Acquisition, Construction and Management
$300 million for Violence against Women Prevention and Prosecution Programs’,
$545 Million to carry out chronic disease, health promotion, and genomics programs
$60 Million to carry out environmental health programs
$50 Million to carry out injury prevention and control programs
$40 Million for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to carry out research activities within the National Occupational Research Agenda
$40, Million for the National Center for Health Statistics
$390 Million Dollars for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund
$600 Million Dollars for acquiring motor vehicles with higher fuel economy
$400 million for hybrid cars for state and local governments
$34 million to renovate the Department of Commerce headquarters
$500 million for improvement projects for National Institutes of Health facilities
$44 million for repairs to Department of Agriculture headquarters
$350 million for Agriculture Department computers
$88 million to help move the Public Health Service into a new building
$448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters
$200 Million to the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund Program
$200 Million for direct loans and grants for distance learning and telemedicine services in rural areas
$6 billion for university building projects
$4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
$200 Million for developing and implementing a nationwide Integrated Wireless network supporting Federal law enforcement
$1.2 Billion for TSA procurement and installation of checked baggage explosives detection systems and checkpoint explosives detection equipment
$2 billion for renewable-energy research ($400 million for global-warming research)
$2 billion for a “clean coal” power plant in Illinois
$6.2 billion for the Weatherization As.sistance Program
$3.5 billion for energy-efficiency and conservation block grants
$3.4 billion for the State Energy Program
$200 million for state and local electric-transport projects
$1 billion for the manufacturing of advanced batteries
$1.5 billion for green-technology loan guarantees
$8 billion for innovative-technology loan-guarantee program
$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects
$4.5 billion for electricity grid
$89 billion for Medicaid
$30 billion for COBRA insurance extension
$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
$20 billion for food stamps
$380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children program
$2 billion for federal child-care block grants
$79 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (for bailing out your local politicians overspending)
$145 billion for “Making Work Pay” tax credits
$83 billion for the earned income credit
(largely welfare now defined as a tax cut)

Free Down Payments for Idiots

Seems like some people never learn. The same mentality of making home ownership an option for anyone with a pulse, regardless of ability to pay, and which was the spark that ignited the firestorm called the economic collapse is baaaaaccccckkk. Indeed, Obama is now mulling ways in which those individuals who bit off more than they could chew, who bought houses with no down payments, and crazy ARM's, can stay in their houses through loan modification programs. So if you are one of the lucky ones who bet the ranch to buy a home above your means, and now the place is worth less than what you owe, Uncle Sugah is coming along to save the day. If you are a nitwit who chose to buy a less impressive abode to ensure that even with a job loss, you'd be safe with the mortgage payments, you get to finance the gambler's bet.

I understand that the banks and economy are looking for any way to shore up the housing market. I also get that there are some people, as there always have been, who through no fault of their own are in dire straits. But the ethic of rewarding lack of personal responsibility has become so endemic in this country that we risk reaching a tipping point. If the message continually sent out to businesses, government, and the public is "Don't worry, we'll pick up the tab", at what point will responsible individuals feel like dupes, and join the party?

"WASHINGTON -- President Obama's administration is considering spending taxpayer dollars to cut monthly payments for homeowners on the verge of foreclosure, according to two people briefed on the proposals.

The deliberations came as lawmakers prepared to enact a new tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time homebuyers that is intended to boost the ailing housing market.

Details of the plans to aid troubled borrowers were not final but were expected to be unveiled in the coming weeks, according to the people who declined to be identified because the details were not yet complete. The effort would be part of a plan to spend $50 billion on foreclosure prevention and establish national standards for modifying home loans.

The administration has several ways it could spend money to stem foreclosures.

It could follow a proposal by Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., who wants to give banks an incentive to reduce borrowers' payments by having the government absorb some of the losses should loans fail again."

So if someone bought a $500,000 house with no down payment, with an interest only ARM, and the house is now worth $400,000, that person is now underwater, meaning he/she owes more on the house than it's worth. The new plan will allow the government to step in and provide that individual with a $100,000 to incentivize them to not walk away from the property. To me, that sounds like a free down payment on the home, albeit after the fact, that that individual did not have to sacrifice for years to save, as a responsible homebuyer would have done.

"Government could also direct federal dollars to loan modifications. If a lender, for example, agreed to reduce a borrower's rate, the government could subsidize a further interest rate drop.
Still, deciding who would qualify would be a challenge, especially as foreclosures continue to soar. More than 274,000 U.S. households received at least one foreclosure-related notice last month, according to RealtyTrac." Inc.

In many places, the market is still over-priced. Are we going to once again artificially prop up housing prices, creating the same problem that got us into this mess in the first place? And for what? Recent statistics show that most homeowners near foreclosure who have had their loans modified eventually default anyways. So are we accumulating yet more national debt to simply put off the inevitable?

America is no longer the land of the free and the brave. It is the land of "I want it free" and the duped.

$550 Billion Run on Banks?

According to Rep. Kanjorski (D-PA) during this interview on C-Span, there was a run on US Money Market Funds starting at around 11:00 a.m. on September 18th, 2008, in which during a two hour period $550 Billion dollars simply disappeared. Reports have surfaced of individuals who lost $100,000 from their money market accounts. Bloggers are abuzz over this story, and conspiracy theories abound. Immediately after this event, President Bush held a news conference with Hank Paulson at his side, in which he stated that our country was in the midst of a financial emergency. Money market accounts were frozen, and the FDIC upped the insurance from $100,000 to $250,000 per account. And then TARP was born.

Copy and paste this into your browser, and pay attention to Rep. Kanjorski's words at about the 2:20 minute point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMu1mFao3w

What does it mean? Is this guy another gaffe prone Biden clone, who just spouts off nonsense to hear himself talk? Or did something really happen to the markets that day that nobody is talking about? Were US financial institutions hacked into, or was there a concerted effort by certain individuals and governments, such as George Soros or Saudi Arabia to deliberately tank our economy and create the October Surprise (even though it was September) that often throws a wrench into the outcome Presidential elections? Certainly Obama benefited from the economic collapse with a Republican in charge, and the narrative of the race went from one of excitement about the new face from Alaska, terror, Iraq, and an economy with a minor cold, to ECONOMY! ECONOMY! ECONOMY!

I am not an economist or a financial wizard, and I'm certainly not privy to the goings on of the powers-that-be behind closed doors. So I don't know what to make of this. Perhaps it will debunked as conspiracy theory hoo-hah, and the babbling of a crazy old Pennsylvania Congressman. But in this strange new Land of Obama, I am becoming more skeptical of government with each passing day, and there is very little that would surprise me anymore.

Another Dem Conflict of Interest? Who Woulda Thunk It?

I've mentioned Senator Debbie Stabenow's (D-MI) effort to revisit the "Fairness Doctrine", which is designed purely to shut down conservative talk radio. Here's an interesting little tidbit about her involvement in the talk radio sphere.


An excerpt from Camille Paglia's article on salon.com:

"One of the nuggets I've gleaned from several radio sources is that Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, who has been in the aggressive forefront of the campaign to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, is married to Tom Athans, who works extensively with left-wing radio organizations and was once the executive vice-president of Air America, the liberal radio syndicate that, despite massive publicity from major media, has failed miserably to win a national audience. Stabenow's outrageous conflict of interest has of course been largely ignored by the prestige press, which should have been demanding that she recuse herself from all political involvement with this issue."


Golly, I am shocked! Shocked, I say, that a Senator would put her own interests ahead of the the Constitutional Right to Free Speech! Unfortunately, that is the direction we are headed- total destruction of the document upon which our nation was founded. We the People are all that stand between our government and it's efforts to completely dismantle the US Constitution for political gain. Are we going to stand for that? Whilst the veterans and people who fought in WWII are rightfully called "The Greatest Generation", another truly great generation will be the one which has the will to stand up and oppose the enemy within which poses even greater danger to our nation.

America's New Health Dictatorship

Little known to virtually every American until this article was posted yesterday, is the inclusion of a National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the Stimulus Package. Sounds innocent enough, right? Obama has been talking about converting medical records to electronic records for some time in an effort to streamline medical care. The real purpose of this new healthcare nominee, however, is far more sinister, and was purposely slipped into the Stimulus Bill without fanfare, without discussion, and without the knowledge of the American people. And it, perhaps more than anything in that bill, will effect the lives of every American more than any of us can imagine. Seniors, in particular, are in the cross hairs of this brave new Obama health care world.

I have a special interest in this topic as I worked in biotechnology for 18 years, and my husband is a physician. I also have relatives and friends in Canada and England who live under the universal healthcare umbrella. The systems are wholly designed on cost-effectiveness models of providing health to a wide variety of individuals, under a strict bureaucracy which dictates which medicines and technologies are worth providing to specific groups, based on certain criteria, such as age. Rationing is inherent to the system; otherwise it is simply too expensive to provide. This will be more problematic in a country of 300 million people of various races and ethnic backgrounds. Every day, scientists find genetic differences in the way that individuals respond to medicine. Under this new regime, we will all be treated as the same based on whatever group in which the government decides to place us. If a particular cancer drug may work for you, but it is experimental, or too expensive, too bad. You'll get the drug the government says you'll get, regardless of whether it will actually work to cure you. You think HMO's are tough to deal with; try changing the government's mind about the effectiveness of the newest drug before your child dies of a cancer that it may have cured.



Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey

Commentary by Betsy McCaughey


Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. These provisions reflect the handiwork of Tom Daschle, until recently the nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Senators should read these provisions and vote against them because they are dangerous to your health. (Page numbers refer to H.R. 1 EH, pdf version).

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.

New Penalties

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Elderly Hardest Hit

Daschle says health-care reform “will not be pain free.” Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them. That means the elderly will bear the brunt.

Medicare now pays for treatments deemed safe and effective. The stimulus bill would change that and apply a cost- effectiveness standard set by the Federal Council (464).

The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K. board discussed in Daschle’s book. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of the treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for younger patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly, such as osteoporosis.

In 2006, a U.K. health board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took almost three years of public protests before the board reversed its decision.

Hidden Provisions

If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes the Senate in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face similar rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.

The stimulus bill will affect every part of health care, from medical and nursing education, to how patients are treated and how much hospitals get paid. The bill allocates more funding for this bureaucracy than for the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force combined (90-92, 174-177, 181).

Hiding health legislation in a stimulus bill is intentional. Daschle supported the Clinton administration’s health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. “If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it,” he said. “The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol.”

More Scrutiny Needed

On Friday, President Obama called it “inexcusable and irresponsible” for senators to delay passing the stimulus bill. In truth, this bill needs more scrutiny.

The health-care industry is the largest employer in the U.S. It produces almost 17 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Yet the bill treats health care the way European governments do: as a cost problem instead of a growth industry. Imagine limiting growth and innovation in the electronics or auto industry during this downturn. This stimulus is dangerous to your health and the economy.

(Betsy McCaughey is former lieutenant governor of New York and is an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Betsy McCaughey at Betsymross@aol.com