The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble

IHeartAGW | May 30, 2011 at 11:02 am | Reply

"Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side. (…) The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. (…) Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula." (Excerpted from Mein Kampf) As the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment was to Nazi Germany, so is WaPo and other media elite outlets to the Green Nazi movement. WaPo is following the Nazi propaganda playbook to the letter.

http://junkscience.com/2011/05/30/washpost-freedom-of-information-act-not-for-skeptics-use/

Palin Roadtrip

Sarah Palin will hit the road this Memorial Day weekend on a tour of the Northeast -- with a stop in New Hampshire -- aboard a red, white and blue bus emblazoned with the words: "One Nation Under God, Indivisible, With Liberty & Justice For All."

Sarah - you rock!

 

 

 

 

PALIN ROADTRIP

Governor Palin Hits 3 Million on Facebook

Ian: In case you missed it, the Governor crossed the three million mark on Facebook last night. If you haven't done so already and if you are able to do so, please consider donating a symbolic $20.12 (or more) to her PAC to celebrate the milestone. Click on the banner that you see above to make the contribution to her PAC. In any event, here's the morning thread.

"As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully."

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, December 23, 1791

"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."

Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, December 19, 1776

"It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf."

Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, December 19, 1776

"Now is the seedtime of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now, will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound would enlarge with the tree, and posterity read in it full grown characters."

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Texas Adds 732,000 Jobs in the Last Decade

Low taxes keeps and grows business -- which means JOBS

Texas Adds 732,000 Jobs in the Last Decade, and No Other State Has Created More Than 100,000

1:45 PM, MAY 25, 2011 • BY MARK HEMINGWAY

Single PagePrintLarger TextSmaller Text

I wrote a five-part series on Texas's breathtaking economic achievements earlier this year so this didn't come as a surprise to me, but a lot of people will probably find this stunning:

The inventory of private-sector jobs in Texas increased by 732,800 between April 2001 and the same month this year, according to an On Numbers analysis of new federal employment data.

No other state registered an increase of more than 100,000 private-sector jobs during the decade. Only 19 states and the District of Columbia posted any gains at all.

At the link, there's even a breakdown of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Again, Texas's formula for economic success is a fairly simple one: Keep business regulations to a minimum, keep taxes low, and keep organized labor in the public and private sector in check. It's easier said than done, but Texas's relative success is fairly definitive that the heavy handed big government approach to taxes and regulation is dooming the economies of blue states.

Medicare costs more than 10 times the proposed cost

Medicare

By Neal Boortz

How did the promises of what Medicare was going to cost us when we were being sold on these programs square up with the actual cost experience over the years?  Glad you asked!  Here are some examples:

• When Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) was passed in 1965 we were told that the cost of the program 25 years later, in 1990, would be $9 billion a year.  The actual cost?  $67 billion.

• The entire Medicare program was made law in 1967.  At that time we were told that it would cost $12 billion by 1990.  You already know where this is going, don't you?  By 1990 the cost was $110 billion per year.

• How about the Medicare home benefit program?  That was passed in 1988.  At that time we were told that the cost just 5 years later would be $4 billion per year.  The actual cost?  Try $10 billion .. more than twice what we were told.

There has NEVER been a government medical benefit program in this country that actually cost less or close to what the politicians told us it was going to cost when they were trying to get that program passed.  The goal is to pass the program – telling whatever lies are necessary to do so – and to keep the program on the books -- again telling whatever lies are necessary – until enough people become dependent on the program to insure voter support for the politicians who protect it. 

Are you getting the picture here?

Obama's Road to Bali

This is just ridiculous!
We should let him go, then pull Air Force 1, and leave him there. If he wants to come back, give him a skiff or a row boat, just like the Hope/Crosby movie. Maybe he can go scuba diving for treasure to pay off the debt.

Vacationer-in-Chief Plans Trip to Resort Island of Bali

ABC News' Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) reports:

Bill Clinton to Paul Ryan on Medicare Election: 'Give me a Call'

May 25, 2011 2:27 PM

The day after the stunning upset in the special congressional election in upstate New York, Rep. Paul Ryan is a man under fire. 

But ABC News was behind the scenes with the Wisconsin Congressman and GOP Budget Committee Chairman when he got some words of encouragement none other than former President Bill Clinton.

"So anyway, I told them before you got here, I said I'm glad we won this race in New York," Clinton told Ryan, when the two met backstage at a forum on the national debt held by the Pete Peterson Foundation. But he added, "I hope Democrats don't use this as an excuse to do nothing."

Ryan told Clinton he fears that now nothing will get done in Washington.

"My guess is it's going to sink into paralysis is what's going to happen. And you know the math. It's just, I mean, we knew we were putting ourselves out there. You gotta start this. You gotta get out there. You gotta get this thing moving," Ryan said.

Clinton told Ryan that if he ever wanted to talk about it, he should "give me a call." Ryan said he would.

"You shouldn't draw the conclusion that the New York race means that nobody can do anything solve the rising Medicare costs," said during his speech. "I just don't agree with that.  I think you should draw the conclusion that the people made a judgment that this proposal in the Republican is not the right one.  I agree with that, but I'm afraid that the Democrats will draw the conclusion that because Congressman Ryan's proposal, I think, is not the best one, that we shouldn't do anything and I completely disagree with that."

In an interview with ABC News, Ryan stood by his budget and his proposal to alter Medicare and make it more financially solvent.

I asked Ryan about Republicans nervous about what their vote for his budget will hurt them in the 2012 election.

"This is not the time to go wobbly," Ryan said. "They (Democrats) are going to run these attack ads at us regardless.  This is a time for leaders to be leaders. This is not a time for us to follow our fears, this is a time to lead because if we don't address our countries fiscal problems we are going to have a debt crisis and the people who are going to get hurt the first and the worst are the people who need government the most, the elderly and the poor.

Ryan's attitude: Game On.

Watch World News with Diane Sawyer for more of our day with Paul Ryan.

ABC's Gregory Simmons and Arlette Saenz contributed to this report.

laugh of the day!

http://www.rte.ie/news/av/2011/0523/media-2963651.html

Ryan's fantastic response to the biased question from D. Gregory

good news

Spain Socialists Suffer Heavy Election Losses: Malkin

Our next president has written a great op-ed

Obama Misery Index hits a record high

By Mitt Romney
Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - Updated 43 minutes ago

E-mail   Print   (380) Comments   Text size   Share   

The unemployment rate has just fallen one-tenth of a percent, from 9 percent to 8.9 percent. Of course, it is indeed progress, and it is being celebrated in the White House as such. But the celebrations bring to mind what a wit once said: An "acceptable" level of unemployment means that the government economist to whom it is acceptable still has a job. Today, as we move into the third year of the Obama administration, we do not have anything resembling even such an "acceptable" level of unemployment. Far from it. As of this month, 14 million Americans can't find work.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he hung the Misery Index around Jimmy Carter's neck. It consisted of the sum total of unemployment and inflation. Today, we have a different set of ailments. Instead of unemployment coupled with inflation, we have a toxic blend of unemployment, debt, home foreclosures, and bankruptcies. Their sum total is what we can call the Obama Misery Index. It is at a record high; indeed, it makes even the malaise of the Carter years look like a boom. Unemployment has fallen, but it's fallen to a level that is still, by any historical marker, a national disaster. To suggest it as an achievement is to engage in what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called "defining deviancy down."

Where should we go from here? Having spent my career in the private sector, I know a thing or two about how jobs are created and how they are lost. The most important lesson I learned is that there are three rules of every successful turnaround: focus, focus, and focus. Turnarounds work when the leader focuses on what's most important. President Obama did just the opposite: he delegated the jobs crisis to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and he went to work on his own priorities, like cap and trade and government-run health care.

I hope we don't have to wait two years for a new president to fix things, but I fear we might. What the occupant of the Oval Office needs to do, and do now, is focus on getting Americans back to work.

Take taxes. Our employers pay the highest rates in the world, tied with Japan, and higher than such societies top-heavy with government as Italy and France. Our small companies are hit particularly hard. If employers are going to start investing and hiring, we must reduce the burden. We can offset the lost revenue by ruthlessly eliminating corporate loopholes and the special deals that reward political influence and punish productivity. We also need to stop taxing companies that make money overseas if they want to bring it home. Encouraging companies to keep money abroad makes zero sense. As much as one trillion dollars kept abroad may be at stake; a sum that size invested here would create hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of good, permanent, private-sector jobs.

Our out-of-control fiscal policies are also impinging directly on the labor market. The failed stimulus program cost around $800 billion. Obamacare is going to cost another trillion. The denizens of the White House appear not to know it, but employers and entrepreneurs worry a good deal about the federal deficit and the federal debt. They look at the future and see that the government's spending binge will mean higher taxes, higher interest rates, and a much weaker dollar.

All these things are the direct enemy of long-term investment. The climate of uncertainty they create has an indirect but no less damaging effect on confidence. Historically, federal spending has ranged between 18 and 20 percent of GDP. Today it has soared to near 25 percent. If we want our politicians to end their free-spending ways, we need to establish an iron-clad ceiling on federal spending, setting it at a fixed percent of the GDP.

These proposals may sound wonkish, but let's keep in mind what is at stake. Behind the unemployment statistics is a lot of heartbreak. Unemployment means children who can't go to college; marriages that break up under the financial strain; young people who can't find jobs and start their lives; and men and women in their fifties, in the prime of their lives, who fear they will never work again. Then there are the job fairs where thousands of people are showing up to compete for a few openings that probably are not as good as the jobs they held two years ago.

Unless President Obama changes course, these job fairs, with their day-long lines of unemployed seeking nothing more than a chance to earn a living, are going to be seen as his Hoovervilles. "I'm the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him," President Hoover once ruefully complained. Obamanomics, which at extraordinary cost has accomplished extraordinarily little, is earning our president his own dubious place in our history books.

who enforces the rights of artists?

Many good points, but I don't like the assumptions you are making as a starting point.

I assume that most people are honest and would, especially if they recognize it, act honestly.
That's my starting point.  Then I assume that there are dishonest people or downright thieves. My theory is that the dishonest will go to any means to take what they are going to try to take. That would include removing the copyright.  The honest would not do that, unless they have already paid for the article. For the most part, I believe there are way more honest than dishonest people.

wrt: images.
I agree in principle that if a business (like Walgreens) wants to voluntarily, as a business practice, enforce a policy that if there is a copyright, they should ask for some form of ID.  But the mechanism they use, having us show a letter that is signed, seems a bit spotty, and wouldn't have a uniform enforcement. One place might take that, others might not even ask, and yet again others might need more proof.

Do you know if this is a government mandate, or simply a practice that most photo businesses use because they believe it is the right thing to do?  I choose to disagree with the policy if it is a government mandate, but will be glad to go along with it if it is a policy of any individual business (it's their business alone). Government has no business sticking their nose into this in this form. However, if an individual feels they are wronged, they should be able to take recourse as with any case of theft of tangible assets.

Here's an idea: I would be more supportive of this idea, IF, and only if, when I upload the image to their web site, that they would IMMEDIATELY inform me that the image is copyrighted, and that I will need proof that I own the copyright, or that I have permission from the owner.  Then when I'm building my shopping cart online, I can decide then and there that I need to either remove it from the cart (if I don't have permission) or go get the permission.  Yet they didn't do that, they only informed us when we showed up at the store: LAME.

Here is an example of my objection to the base idea: Let's say I am a small business want-to-be. I want to start up a photo printing service. I borrow and invest into printing equipment. I advertise. I begin to get customers.  Now then, Big Government tells me I have to invest way more into specialised software to make sure digital copyrights aren't infringed... Ha -  That added overhead puts me out of business. I know this is an simplified example, but it's this kind of soft tyranny that adds up over time, and becomes onerous. A little tyranny here and a little tyranny there, and pretty soon all our freedoms are basically gone. I want the freedom to have a simple business that prints photos. I am only the middle man.

There are other examples where it is less clear. Weapons manufacturers came to mind. You understand that analogy.

But I have to go back to my point that I am assuming that most people are honest, and the few that are not are the exception rather than the rule. So if 1000 people print my photos, I'm assuming that 999 of them did so either because I told them they could, or because I gave it to them, or because I didn't copyright it, or because I sold it to them. The 1 that did not is the dishonest one. And that 'loss' that I suffer is not necessarily all that great. I can soak that up, and I can stomach it, because I much prefer society be free than secure.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" -- Benjamin Franklin

My point of including this quote is to say that I personally prefer liberty to security. If congress passes a law that forces every individual to check for digital signatures in every image that passes through our inbox, is shown on our screens, or that we in any way show or send to someone else, then we loose quite a bit of liberty (our time is worth something). And to tell you the truth, I wouldn't put it past Pelosi, Reid or Obama to pass such a law.

wrt: music...
There is a larger percentage of today's kids, for instance, who seem less cognizant that they are or are not authentically obtaining music that should be paid for. This is because they are not taught this by their parents for one, but more importantly, it is the computer that has made this happen the way it has happened.  In the old days you had to buy a physical object. Today you can copy. I've got this huge collection of LPs that I bought when I was young, and now it collects dust. Today the big record companies want us all to buy them again.  Well if we never bought them in the first place, then we should. Otherwise no.

One of the problems today is that the mechanisms for buying music are much more restrictive. I bought my daughter a bunch of music for her iPod, then a few months later, something went wrong with the computer, and it 'forgot' her music. We couldn't get that music back again. It happened twice.  So I ended up paying for the same songs over and over. That's flat out wrong. I miss the days when you bought a physical LP or CD. Then you'd still have it.
That's one reason why honest people bypass signatures (legitimately I might add).

So while I like the iPod, I don't like they scheme they have for determining you've bought something. There has to be something better (I still like CDs better). Jeez, you don't even get a receipt when you buy it, or at least not something that is easily used to restore your song if your computer or iPod crash.

"Freedom doesn't mean an absence of laws or regulations." - you are correct sir, but it's the enforcement of those laws that is the discriminating factor in our disagreement. I say we enforce ownership the same way we do for physical items. If someone steals my computer, I call the cops. If someone steals your art, you call the cops. How can it be otherwise, else the owner of abstract 'data' (not even on your own hard drive) has some sort of abstract ownership that spans the galaxy of disk drives for that particular pattern of 1s and 0s. That's discriminating to those of us who own physical items.  Let's go back to your statue analogy. Sincerity derives from lack of wax. So the artist who chisels out a magnificent statue without wax has created a work of art, a masterpiece that will fetch them lots of lira, their fortune being secure in that no thief can steal their statue unless we see it gone. Why does that artist have less recourse than the digital artist? The physical art covers only one item as it stand before him/her, or his thief. The cops can locate that one item, track it down, recover it, apprehend the perpetrator, and make amends, or not. But somehow the digital artist owns infinitely more copies of his art, copies that he himself didn't even make, and somehow that is a crime against his artist, because the original is still on his hard drive. So I see it as being an extremely qualitative argument that you are making on this kind of theft.  I can ramble on and on on this subtle distinction, but it's late, I'm tired, so I'll stop.

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:28 PM, <thoughtsonartownership> wrote:

 
Let's say 1,000 people steal your photos or your songs. Calculate the costs of suing each one considering lawyer's fees and your time. I can guarantee you that you wouldn't have a single second to create another picture or song, since you would be totally consumed with everything BUT your art. 
 
The solution of "just suing" everyone in sight is simply no solution. Filing a lawsuit in general is no trivial matter and not something to be entered into casually. The courts are always a last resort to solve any business issue. Only those that never sat in depositions, waded through pages of testimony, calculated strategy with attorneys, dealt with the potential legal fees vs. the chances of winning a lawsuit, and faced the prospect of proving/disproving an assertion would ever believe this to some proverbial walk-in-the park or an answer to any problem.  Suiing anyone is always a last resort and to be avoided at all costs - especially for an artist of limited means who would rather be spending his/her time creating music, photos, paintings, etc. 
 
Freedom doesn't mean an absence of laws or regulations. The Uniform Commercial Code of our law, far from being restrictive, fosters commerce since people can trust that they can conduct business and be assured of the expected responsibilities of each party and the assurance that if there are violations, they can have a reasonable chance to recover any money and/or damages.  The same goes for contracts.  There is both a restrictive and enabling aspect of them relative to the behavior they support and discourage.
 
What type of freedom would you have as an artist who had absolutely no assurance that you could benefit from your craft and attempt to earn a decent living without being ripped off by unscrupulous people - unless of course, you intended to spend the bulk of your time in court?  It may seem like some affront to have to get a release form for a copyrighted photo, but if such an action discourages at least some theft of intellectual property, I might say it is having some positive effect.  I would suggest taking it one step further, and have an online database indicating someone's ability to grant such privileges, much like an encryption key for software.  I don't know how to make it work practically, but I suspect someone will figure it out.
 
BTW, if thieves could sell their pirated goods to a local Retailer, and the police could not catch them in the act, would you be ok with the Retailer  selling the contents of your house that the thieves walked off with? Would you expect the Retailer to not deal in stolen goods?  If the Retailer said, "Sorry, - it is not my business to enforce your rights to own/keep your property"? The notion of "Property Rights" is one thing that sets our nation apart and a key aspect of our Founding Fathers' vision for our nation.  Diminish that and you weaken everything you claim to support...

---

From: Indy

This is just a discussion on the merits of making every single citizen an enforcer of artists rights.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/netpbm.htm

This package does not maintain a digital signature. There are others like it that do not.

If a crook comes to your house, who's fault is it you are robbed?

• the crook?
• you?
• a bystander who saw him walk up to your door and go in?
• the police?

I say the crook is at fault.  Why should a business have to enforce your rights?

If a crook really wants to steal, they will go out of their way to do so. They need only use a program like the above which won't maintain that signature.

who enforces the rights of artists?

This is just a discussion on the merits of making every single citizen an enforcer of artists rights.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/netpbm.htm

This package does not maintain a digital signature. There are others like it that do not.

If a crook comes to your house, who's fault is it you are robbed?

• the crook?
• you?
• a bystander who saw him walk up to your door and go in?
• the police?

I say the crook is at fault.  Why should a business have to enforce your rights?

If a crook really wants to steal, they will go out of their way to do so. They need only use a program like the above which won't maintain that signature.

Real Unemployment 18%, The Big Government leaders are lying to you

If you include as unemployed those people who applied for a job in the last six months rather than just the past four weeks, discouraged workers, and people working part time who wish to work full time, the real unemployment rate is not the headline rate of 9 percent, but almost double that: It approximates 18 percent.

Oil Co Profit Margin less than 10%, yet ignorance is rampant!

Wow, what a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance:

From the letters-to-the editor section of The Naples Daily News.  Here's a gem from yesterday's paper.  Sit down before you read this:

Editor, Daily News: Until I read Jack Tymann's guest essay, I thought the $4.94 gasoline price had absorbed every available erg of popular anger. Tymann's defense of the oil companies should warrant an explosion of outrage. Unfortunately, here in Naples we appear to have an acquiescent and oblivious public. In Florida and across the nation it is inevitable that there will be a public revolt. Nationalizing the oil industry abolishes the economic power of the oil companies. It will enable the government to provide for the common welfare. Presently the oil companies are exploiting the people and their profits seem like thievery. The oil companies constitute a clear and present danger to democracy and must be put under state control. Nationalizing the oil companies means hiring managers at fair salaries, not the average $10 million annually for each CEO. Take the profits and revenues from their private pockets and use them for the public good. Use their profits to pay teachers and provide for state budget health-care needs. Make the oil companies non-polluting energy resources to deal with global warming. Now they are responsible for the destruction of the environment and the reason for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the militarism of this country. Some will rage socialism or worse. But nationalization is in the tradition of democratic and capitalistic countries everywhere. — H.H. Hermann

Amazing!

Worldwide market forces are causing the price of oil and gasoline to raise. In the USA, stimulus, QE1 and QE2 are causing inflation, thus commodities are pricing much higher. Look no further than Big Government to see why prices are high.

Donate now!

Wrecked the USA.

SackObama.com

Now I get it.

The reason for Trump and the birther business is to give Obama a fundraising gift.

Obama should thank Trump!

With T-shirt, Obama camp raising money off birth certificate controversy

By Shawna Thomas, Domenico Montanaro, and Mark Murray

The Obama reelection campaign is raising money off of the controversy surrounding President Obama's birth certificate.

The Obama reelection campaign is selling a T-shirt (above) to anyone who donates at least $25.

With a donation of at least $25 to the Obama campaign, donors can get a long-form birth certificate T-shirt.

The "limited edition" T-shirt on the front proclaims, "Made in America" beneath a picture of the president. On the back, is a picture of the long-form birth certificate. 

The president released his long-form birth certificate on April 27, trying to put an end to the conspiracy theory that he was not born in the United States. (For the record, again, the president was born in Hawaii.) Obama trumpeted the release of the birth certificate in a video that accompanied is stand-up routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

In 2008, the Obama campaign often used merchandise as a way to raise money/build its donor base. After all, anyone who donates $25 for this shirt is a potential donor who can give more money during the election cycle.

NYTimes: The Need for Greed

I guess the leftist editor of the New York waste of Times must have been asleep...

Get a load of this New York Times column: "The Need for Greed."

H.L. Mencken

A quote from a book on H.L. Mencken ... "Mencken: The American Iconoclast" by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers:

"By the mid 1930's, thanks to the New Deal, all that self-reliance had changed prompting Mencken to declare: 'There is no genuine justice in any scheme of feeding and coddling the loafer whose only ponderable energies are devoted wholly to reproduction.  Nine-tenths of the rights he bellows for are really privileges and he does nothing to deserve them.'  Despite the billions spent on an individual, 'he can be lifted transiently but always slips back again.'  Thus the New Deal had been 'the most stupendous digenetic* enterprise ever undertaken by man …. We not only acquired a vast population of morons, we have inculcated all morons, young or old, with the doctrine that the decent and industrious people of the country are bound to support them for all time.  The effects of that doctrine are bound to be disastrous soon or late."

Check out the answer Mencken gave to someone who asked him "But Mr. Mencken, what would you do about the unemployed?"  His answer?  "We could start by taking away their vote."

Another Mencken quote: 

"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." 

Hmmm. 

*Digenetic:  of or relating to a subclass of termatode (worms) in which sexual reproduction as an internal parasite of a vertebrate alternates with asexual reproduction in a mollusk." 

Study: Obama's Stimulus Cost 595,000 Jobs: IBD

Study: Obama's Stimulus Cost 595,000 Jobs: IBD

Palin on Pelosi's Obamacare Waivers: "This Is Corrupt":  "Unflippingbelievable! No, wait, it is believable," - Palin

Rand Paul: Smackdown!: WretchedNet

Democrats Use Foreign Money to Influence American Elections: RS

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  A Black Republican's Thoughts on Obama

  www.youtube.com

  This is a rant that is featured with Bob Parks on Black & Right of NMATV

  
  
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  Please visit my website http://machosauceproductions.com/ Where you can get my book, PAPER, INK, & WHAT I THINK *MACHO SAUCE T-SHIRTS *20 LB. SLEDGE CD ( If ...

Medicare Trustees: ObamaCare will not lower costs

Barack Obama on December 15,2009:

"We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care.  Families will save on their premiums; businesses that will see their costs rise if we do nothing will save money now and in the future.  This plan will strengthen Medicare and extend the life of that program.  And because it gets rid of the waste and inefficiencies in our health care system, this will be the largest deficit reduction plan in over a decade."

The Medicare Board of Trustees on May 13, 2011:

The 2011 annual report from the Medicare Board of Trustees casts doubt on the ability of the ObamaCare health reform law to achieve significant health care costs a reduction, stating it is "very uncertain" whether the sweeping reform will succeed in reducing health care costs.

The report, released Friday, said that an improved financial outlook reported for Medicare depended on the ability of ObamaCare's cost-savings experiments to bear fruit – an outcome the Trustees found unlikely.

A little logic for your brain in the morning...

You said yesterday that you've been using logic lately.

Well read these facts, and apply a little logic.

Here's the truth about how Obama's stimulus plan worked out for us.

Economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor have studied the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the purported stimulus bill) with great rigor. Earlier this week, they reported their findings in a paper titled "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled." The paper is dense and rather lengthy, and requires considerable study. Here, however, is the bottom line:

Our benchmark results suggest that the ARRA created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment. The majority of destroyed/forestalled jobs were in growth industries including health, education, professional and business services.

So the American people borrowed and spent close to a trillion dollars to destroy a net of more than one-half million jobs. Does President Obama understand this? I very much doubt it. When he expressed puzzlement at the idea that the stimulus money may not have been well-spent, and said that "spending equals stimulus," he betrayed a shocking level of economic ignorance.

This chart, from Conley and Dupor's report, shows how goods-producing industries have completely failed to benefit from ARRA and the Obama administration's other misguided policies; click to enlarge:

Via Greg Mankiw.

It's time for BIG TIME Government cuts, including entitlements!

This is from Mark Steyn.

Under the 2011 budget, every hour of every day, the United States government spends ...

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Medicare and the Social Security trust are running out of money sooner than the government had projected.  Social Security will now run a permanent yearly deficit.

If health care is a right, then are doctors slaves?

Senator Rand Paul's Interesting Point: If health care is a right, then are doctors slaves?

Nurses and other health care provers too.

FT: Google close to settling U.S. drug ad probe

I wonder why the MSM is hiding this story?  Is Google also their darling?

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/05/12/google.drug.probe.ft/index.html?eref=edition_business

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Google is close to settling a federal criminal inquiry into its acceptance of advertisements
• Took ads from companies selling unlicensed pharmaceuticals, according to sources
• This week Google announced it had reserved $500 million to resolve a U.S. probe
• Many of the drugs advertised are counterfeit, raising intellectual property issues

(FT) -- Google is close to settling a federal criminal inquiry into its acceptance of advertisements from companies selling unlicensed pharmaceuticals, according to a person involved in the case.

The leading search engine disclosed this week that it had reserved $500m to resolve an unspecified US justice department probe into its advertising practices, with speculation quickly turning toward counterfeit and unapproved drugs.

The Wall Street Journal reported late on Thursday that the pending deal would resolve an investigation of drug ads by the US justice department, with participation of the Food and Drug Administration and the federal prosecutor in Rhode Island. A person familiar with the matter confirmed the talks to the Financial Times.

The justice department, FDA and Google all declined to comment.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been changing their policies under pressure from licensed pharmacies, major drug makers and the FDA to do more to filter out ads that tout prescription medications, often ostensibly from Canadian companies but manufactured in China, India and elsewhere.

Many of the drugs advertised are counterfeit, raising intellectual property issues. The FDA and the Drug Enforcement Administration have also complained about a public health threat, because some US consumers have died from drugs bought online without a prescription.

The issue has been complicated by varying international laws. It is illegal to import unlicensed drugs into the US, but not illegal for Canadian firms to sell them. Companies that manufacture the knock-offs may not be violating the laws of the places where they are based.

The search engines were thought to have legal risk. A section of the 1996 Communications Decency Act protects internet service companies from being held accountable for virtually any content provider by users or advertisers, but there is an exception for federal criminal cases. The search engines in 2007 paid $31.5m to resolve justice department objections to ads run for online gambling firms.

Online drug sales have been one of the largest sources of income for cybercrime gangs. A large percentage of unwanted commercial e-mails touts such wares, and viruses often steer infected personal computers to such websites.

© The Financial Times Limited 2011

Another Tax the Rich Idea

There's just not enough money from the 'Rich' to take.

It's a spending problem.

By Neal Boortz

Democrats just won't give up on this; especially during an election year.  They know that people who might easily be talked into voting Democrat are, economically ignorant.  The newest idea?  A 3% surtax on all earned incomes higher than $1,000,000 per year.   

There are about 139,960,580 tax payers with positive AGI in 2010.  Only 0.2% of taxpayers earn a million dollars or more, meaning that there about 279,921 households will be target with this wonderful new bash-the-rich surtax.  Let's assume that all of these households earn pretty much around the $1 million mark (because let's face it, there are a lot more people earning close to a million than close to a billion).  With a 3% surtax on $1 million, that comes out to $30,000 for every household -- assuming they earn $1 million – and that's not considering any tax breaks that might get in the way.  Multiply the number of households earning a million (279,921) by the surtax ($30,000) and you get 8,397,630,000 … so about $8 billion.  How fast do we spend money does our bloated federal government spend in a day?  Try $3.7 trillion dollars.  That turns out to be about $10 billion per day, and that means that the wonderful 3% surtax on the evil rich would bring in enough money to operate our government until just about dinner time on only one day.

Let's really give the left a wet dream … let's just tax all AGI above $1,000,000 at 100%.  After all, nobody really "needs" more than a million a year, right?  And after all, with the Dear Ruler in office, it's all about from each according to their ability and to each according to their need.  So let's just take it all.  And just how long would that run our government?  About three days. 

You should also consider the fact that many taxpayers will magically change their earning habits to bring that total under $1 million in order to escape the extra tax.   But this isn't about funding government … this is about stirring up class envy and trying to convince the dumb masses that what were facing is not a spending problem .. it's simply a taxing problem, and all we have to do is get the evil rich to "pay their fair share" and everything will just be fine. 

What if we just taxed the billionaires …. Not just taxed them but took away everything that they earned and made them sell all of their assets?  From Investors Business Daily:

According to the Forbes 400, America has 400 billionaires with a combined net worth of $1.3 trillion. Congress could confiscate their stocks and bonds, and force them to sell their businesses, yachts, airplanes, mansions and jewelry. The problem is that after fleecing the rich of their income and net worth, and the Fortune 500 corporations of their profits, it would only get us to mid-August.

Also consider that the top 1% of taxpayers earned $1.6 trillion in 2010.  These are households earning over $380,000 a year.  Even if we took all of their wealth earned in 2010, we would be unable to fund our government for one year, as we will spend $3.7 trillion.