Oh Happy Day! Twenty-six states have joined Florida in suing the federal government over Obamacare. That makes 27 states total.
The only answer to our debt problem, well there are more but this government-run health care is priority number one that has to go. To repeal and replace it is the road out of the economic ruin and the decimation of quality health care for our citizens.
Repeal it, the alternative already exists.
Continue reading Majority Of States Join Suit Against Obamacare
There have been times with this blog software when comment features have been turned off. Not by myself, but some quirk in the software that the WP people don’t seem to acknowledge. I just went back to check the comment settings again, only to find that the stink’in box that says ‘commenters must be signed in to comment’ was checked. That means that no one can comment since you are not signed in.
That is not the way I intend to run The Lunch Counter. THIS IS.
But it does explain why there hasn’t been a comment entered in quite awhile. That checkbox is now unchecked. Again.
The comment feature is supposed to be set so you can comment on your first visit without having to go through any sort of registration BS.
Sorry for any inconvenience this ‘feature’ may have caused you. If you find that the problem has resurfaced, I’d appreciate your letting me know using the email form on the ABOUT page.
Most people I’ve heard comment about President Obama’s speech at what was supposed to be a memorial service thought that what the President said was fitting and appropriate. The only thing that turned off people, including myself, about the event was that the crowd there treated it more like an event than a solemn memorial service.
Speaking to that popular reaction, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs commented . . .
“I will say that I read the speech several times and thought that there wouldn’t be a lot of applause if any. I think many of us thought that. But I think there was a celebration, again, of the lives of those who had been impacted. Not just at that grocery store but throughout the country. And I think that, if that is part of the healing process, then that’s a good thing.”
There is a reason too why the audience got pumped up like it did. What I don’t see a reason for is why anyone in the administration, including Robert Gibbs was surprised? What is even more amazing is how the [APPLAUSE] sign on the jumbotron went totally unreported if not unnoticed by the media.
The jumbotron had the President’s text of the speech on it. OK. Including an [APPLAUSE] prompt. What? Here’s the picture of that, and the story that goes with it.
In the least reported story with the largest audience possible, try this. As to why the service happened when it did you have to consider the time it takes to get the t-shirts printed. You know, the ones that were put on the seat-backs. The message ‘Together We Thrive’ came from Obama’s Organizing for America website. The ‘event’ was planned more as a political rally for Obama than a memorial service for the victims, survivors, and their families. The motivation? Let’s just say, like his former chief of staff said, you don’t want to let a crisis go to waste to advance your political agenda. Or in this case, your ratings in the polls.
For argument’s sake, everyone who thinks that the media would have turned their heads if an R were president raise your hand.
Links:
On November 2, 1983, Republican President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in the White House Rose Garden making the Birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, 
Jr. a national holiday. The bill first came up for a vote in 1979, but the Democrat-controlled US House of Representatives refused to pass the legislation. The first national celebration of the holiday in honor of Dr. King took place on January 20, 1986 and is celebrated on the 3rd Monday in January. In his remarks on signing the bill Reagan said: “Dr. King had awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, ‘Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone.'”
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday 
Commission with the mission of overseeing the observance of the MLK holiday was created in the bill signed by Reagan.
In May 1989, Coretta Scott King was made a member of the commission for life by Republican President George H. W. Bush.
Democrats today are trying to usurp Dr. King’s legacy, when it was the Democrats who Dr. King was fighting. See the below article for details.
* * * * * * * *
By Frances Rice
Character assassination. That’s the tactic used by Democrats in the 1960’s to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Republican who was fighting the Democrats and trying to stop them from denying civil rights to blacks.
The relentless disparagement of Dr. King by Democrats led to his being physically assaulted and ultimately to his tragic death. In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King’s leaving Memphis, Tennessee after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a “trouble-maker” who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Prior to his death, Democrats bombed Dr. King’s home several times. The scurrilous efforts by the Democrats to harm Dr. King included spreading rumors that he was a Communist and accusing him of being a womanizer and a plagiarist.
An egregious act against Dr. King occurred on October 10, 1963. With the approval of Democrat President John F. Kennedy, Democrat Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy – President Kennedy’s brother – authorized the wiretapping of Dr. King’s telephone by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Wiretaps were placed by the FBI on the telephones in Dr. King’s home and office. The FBI also bugged Dr. King’s hotel rooms when he traveled around the country.
The trigger for this unsavory wiretapping was apparently Dr. Kings’ criticism of the Kennedy Administration, according to the author David Garrow in his book, “Bearing the Cross”. The justification given by the Kennedy Administration publicly was that two of Dr. King’s associates, including David Levinson, had ended their association with the Communist Party in order to work undercover and influence Dr. King. However, after years of continuous and extensive wiretapping, the FBI found no direct links of Dr. King to the Communist Party.
The unrelenting efforts by Democrats to tarnish Dr. King’s reputation continued for years after his death. To his credit, Republican President Ronald Reagan ignored the Democrats’ smear campaign and made Dr. King’s Birthday a holiday.
Today, while professing to revere Dr. King, Democrats are still trying to tarnish his image by making remarks that diminish his civil rights achievements and continuing to claim that Dr. King embraced Communism – a system that is secularist and socialist.
In reality, Dr. King was a Christian who held deeply religious beliefs and was guided by his faith and his Republican Party principles in his struggle to gain equality for blacks. He did not embrace the type of socialist, secularist agenda that is promoted by the Democrat Party today, which includes fostering dependency on welfare that breaks up families, supporting same-sex marriage and banning God from the public square.
An understanding of who the real Dr. King was can be gained from a glimpse of Dr. King as a young man who participated in an oratorical contest when he was 14 years old. The title of his speech was “The Negro and the Constitution” which had the following sentences: “We cannot have an enlightened democracy with one great group living in ignorance…We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flout the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule….”
If Dr. King were still alive, he would be slandered by Democrats in the same way that they smeared him in the 1960’s and demean all black Republicans today.
Bio: Frances Rice is a lawyer, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and Chairman of the National Black Republican Association. She can be contacted at: www.NBRA.info/
As an addendum to this post, Deficit Commission And Debt Ceiling Sleight Of Hand, below is a picture that ought to get your attention. It was a major factor in the mid-term elections. Believe it, or not.
No matter the spin about spending out there, our national debt has now surpassed, or on its way to soon surpass, our GDP. Put simply, we’re spending, and continue to spend, more than we make.
Anything wrong with this picture?
Have you heard the latest game playing out in some Democratic circles? Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) is suggesting that our representatives break with over 200 years of tradition of sitting within their own political party to listen to the State Of The Union address by the President and instead, mix up the seating without regard of political party.
Responding to Sen. Udall’s idea, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) said . . .
“I appreciate Senator Udall’s thoughtful suggestion and believe it is worth serious consideration. We need to look for more ways to be bipartisan. This morning I spoke with Democratic Whip Hoyer and Senator McConnell about the proposal and we will discuss it further next week. After this tragedy, it’s important for our country to see that we all stand together as Americans and this could be one way to demonstrate that.”
Well, I don’t see a need to be bi-partisan. That’s why there are elections. If the minority party sees the light, or has a change of heart, then they can show their support by supporting legislation proposed by the majority party. And if they don’t, they can count on their boss, the American people, to re-hire or fire them at the ballot box. That’s the way it works.
Faking ‘bi-partisanship’ creates legislative mud instead of solving problems. The location of where they will sit has nothing whatsoever to do with bipartisanship and everything to do with theatrics.
Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD5) has another take on it.
“a gesture like this won’t make partisanship disappear, nor should it — democracy is built on strong disagreements between the parties.” But he added that it would “help end the political theater of repeatedly seeing one side of the aisle rise in applause, as the other sits still.”
An observation is in order. It is Democrats that are proposing this idea. Where is the pressing need to veer from tradition, and for such a nonsensical reason? And why now?
The media, as represented by New York Times writer Michael D. Shear, has another angle on this seating change.
In the wake of the shootings in Tucson and calls for greater civility in political discourse, the symbolic move could minimize the imagery of one side of the chamber’s standing en masse to applaud, while the other side sits on their hands.
Another observation. It is apparent that the purpose of this charade is to mask from the American people the results of the November election. The American people deserve to see the changes they made at the ballot box and not mix it up into some sort of political soup. Remember what the President said at his first meeting with Republican leaders after his election? He said ‘elections have consequences.’ Actually, a lot of people have said that, but coming from President Obama himself gives him all the motivation he needs to start showing what he calls bi-partisanship, by actually doing the will of the American people. Because since the election, President Obama has denied that his party’s shellacking had anything to do with his policies.
In his letter, Udall added . . .
“The choreographed standing and clapping of one side of the room — while the other side sits — is unbecoming of a serious institution,” he wrote. “And the message that it sends is that even on a night when the president is addressing the entire nation, we in Congress cannot sit as one, but must be divided as two.”
What this statement and his idea says to me is that he and his party have no intention of doing the will of the people. The SOTU is the President’s platform to set the stage for the coming year. The power to do the will of the American people is in his hands, regardless of where our representatives sit. And the American people deserve to see it in black and white. Or if you will, left and right. And that is what these Democrats don’t want the American people to see.
For those who believe that reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, or anything like it, will reduce violence, consider this.
The Fairness Doctrine was in place from 1949 to 1987. In the “era” of the Fairness Doctrine we saw the following:
Not one of these murders or attempted murders were connected in any way to everything that the Left would like to attach to right-wing talk radio.
Where ‘hate talk’ is concerned, Air America Radio and its derivatives wrote the book on it. They believed that the more vulgar and hateful they would get, towards their political opponents, would build an audience. Spewing hate like they did merely drove them out of business.
Not that they have mellowed (Mike Malloy), but the popular tactic now on the Left is to just do whatever they can to discredit, call names, and make personal attacks to conservatives whose ideas they cannot deal with. Doing that spares them from debating in the arena of ideas, where they lose every time.
The fact that they just got a ‘shellacking’ in the mid-term elections just infuriates them, causing them to go all out to attack those whom they fear most. It also distracts the public from the dismal shape the economy is in after all this so-called stimulus.
A lot has happened since my previous post last week. Everything that can be said and was expected to be said over the Arizona shooting last week has been said. It’s just too bad that a legal carrying citizen wasn’t around to minimize the killing that that nutjob did. I know our prayers are with the survivors and families affected.
That said, The queen and I did some R&R in the Smokey Mountains in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, TN. Make that the snowy Smokey Mountains. Which is why the blog took a rest. We enjoyed our time away immensely even though so many eateries we wanted to hit were closed due to the 6 inches of snow on the ground. They really are not equipped to handle snow there.
Returning, the bad news is that the Tastykake Baking Co., the makers of those delicious little cakes and pies, is in a financial jam. They’re already late loan payment is due today. Anyone want to buy a little gold mine? Run right that is. Not in its present form.
Tasty last week said fourth-quarter earnings were below expectations, partly because production efficiencies at its new Navy Yard plant hadn’t materialized.
That ‘production efficiencies’ hadn’t materialized is an understatement. Their move to the Navy Yard made their already awkward production system even worse.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed (fast Eddie) Rendell said that the state would loan them $1 million if they needed it. I know his heart is in the right place on this offer. This offer was not made as a back door government takeover. But rather as a bridge to better days if they can fix their problems. After all, Tastykake has been in business since 1914. Every person in the tri-state area grew up loving Tastykakes. Especially the butterscotch krimpets. Mmmmm
Here’s hoping they can find an investor.
Link: Deadline For Tastykake
UPDATE: Tasty Baking wins reprieve, new debt financing
UPDATE 11/17/2012: That ‘production efficiencies’ did not materialize at the new facility in the Philadelphia Navy Yard, as I said above, is an understatement. But I was way off as to the reason. Press reports at the time failed to mention that there was a successful union takeover five months earlier. More on this later.
Congressman Rob Woodall (R-GA7) introduced the FairTax on the first day in session. It is still called H.R. 25. ? I thought it would be assigned a different number but, I guess not.
The FairTax effectively kills two birds with one stone. Make that three birds. 1) It will be an economic stimulus like no other in the world, without increasing our debt. 2) It will be totally progressive and will eliminate all taxation for the poor via the prebate. 3) No more filing tax returns, no need for the IRS. And because the FairTax will expand the tax base (the number of people currently paying taxes) from only working Americans to every person within the borders regardless of citizenship, the individual shared burden couldn’t be more ‘fair.’
The biggest advantage and stimulus will be evident with every paycheck you receive. Under the FairTax, your gross pay will be your net pay, exclusive of any state taxes of course. That’s because under the FairTax, all the federal income taxes you are currently paying will go away. The term ‘take home pay’ will be a thing of the past. You actually get to keep what you make. And you don’t need an accountant or tax lawyer to help get it for you. How fair is that?
And one more, which will be the biggest obstacle to overcome, and explains why H.R. 25 never made it out of the Ways and Means Committee under Charlie Rangel (D-NY15). The FairTax would end the taxing power currently held by politicians in Washington, and shift that power back to the people. Taking the ‘tax hammer’ away from Washington means no more leveraging tax breaks for campaign contributions.
The other good news here is that it begins with 47 co-sponsors. That’s more than in previous sessions when first introduced. And, among the sponsors is a Democrat, Dan Boren [D-OK2]. That’s a first too.
Meanwhile, contact your representative and ask him or her to become a co-sponsor, if they are not already. Tell them you support it and want them to do likewise.
Use this link to easily find your congressman’s phone number -> http://bit.ly/contactcongr
OR
Use this link to send them a quick email. -> http://bit.ly/ftcongress
“When They Feel the Heat, They Will See the Light” – Herman Cain
Link: to H.R. 25
In a nutshell, the propaganda wing of the West Wing is still saying ‘the economy is now on a sustainable growth path.’ New unemployment claims rose 18,000 last month. And the four-week average of unemployment claims is 410,750.
The number of people continuing to receive unemployment benefits fell by 47,000 to 4.1 million in the week ending Dec. 25, the department said. That doesn’t include millions of long-term unemployed who are receiving extended benefits from the federal government . . . {emphasis added}
and
Bad weather can also make it harder for laid-off workers to apply for benefits.
So I guess we can expect more. But hey
[A]pplications are far below their peak during the recession of 651,000, reached in March 2009.
All of which sort of belies the headline of the story. “Jobless claims rise, but positive trend intact; Economist: The jobs market, ‘the recovery’s caboose, is starting to catch up‘”
In their mind, the fact that there was only 410,750 new jobless claims last week is good news.
Considering the retail industry is reporting disappointing results in December, there isn’t going to be a whole lot of hiring going on any time soon. This is because the retail industry depends on the last 6 weeks of the year to turn the loss they carry all year into what they expect will be their year-ending profit. Thus the term Black Friday. This year, we had a Black Friday in name only, because if the ink is in the black, it isn’t to the point that any hiring will be going on until next Christmas season. Compounding the business climate is that fact that the FUD Factor is still alive and well. Another not insignificant condition that forces businesses take the cautious route.
Don’t worry, be happy.