The contortions and obfuscations of facts and history as relates to this administration and its attempt to railroad health care legislation upon all of America is laughable. Well, it would be funny if it weren’t so serious.
What’s worse is how the media gives it all a pass. Unfortunately for America, the media watchdog died last year.
Events of the last two days epitomize the shucking and jiving I’m talking about.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, for two days in a row, refused to reconcile the barring of C-SPAN from these final and all important deliberations to show the American people the openness that Obama promised when he was a candidate. Obama said on eight occasions he would use C-SPAN cameras ‘so the American people can see what the choices are.’ But Gibbs did it by saying he already answered the question and, that there has been a lot of open discussions. See the transcripts HERE. They’re out of this world.
Then there is the response of Speaker Pelosi, when asked about President Obama’s rejection of C-SPAN’s specific request and his promise to use C-SPAN while on the campaign trail and in Presidential debates. She flat-out laughed in the reporter’s, and your face. Saying ‘There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail.’ And it gets better, or worse. She adds ‘there’s never been a more open process.’ What was impressive about that statement is that she said it with a straight face.
No doubt the administration is circling the wagons here. Betraying the public trust is not a trivial matter. Question is, are we seeing acts of desperation, or is the Democratic leadership showing its true colors?
How does the Democrat plan to run the health insurance and health care industries cover 30-40 million more people and reduce the deficit by $132 billion? The short answer is it doesn’t do that in and of itself.
I’m reminded of a saying that I first heard in statistics class. Figures lie, and lairs figure. According to the CBO, it does it by over $1 trillion in Medicare cuts and tax increases. That’s how. It cannot do it without enslaving the economy and the people with a government-run plan. That is, presuming the American people will want to be enslaved in that way.
If that’s not a prescription for economic disaster and the destruction of the best health care system (as bad as it is) in the world, I don’t know what is. The only success story here is that the government will be taking the giant leap in remaking America into the socialist/Marxist model that the Obama administration so worships. Hip Hip, Ho-ray! Or is it Ho-Ho-Ho?
Less Health Care For More Money: What’s The Catch?
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column about John Brodniak of Oregon, who developed a cavernous hemangioma, causing him great pain as blood leaks into his brain.
According to Kristof, Brodniak can’t get medical help because we don’t have universal health care. Senators who vote against ObamaCare, Kristof said, are morally equivalent to someone who would walk past a man “writhing in pain on the sidewalk.”
The Obama administration is scrambling to get something, anything, passed that they can call health care reform. But it’s not because your health is so lousy and you’re going to die. According to surveys, most Americans, somewhere over 80% of them, are satisfied with their health care and health insurance situation. The emergency seems to be in the mind of the President to get something passed, else he’ll lose face with his rhetoric of the last year and a half.
Today, President Obama just had a pow-wow with Democratic senators and the two Independents to try and convince them to vote for this debacle of a health care bill. Today the President said that Americans want more affordable health care that will reduce the deficit. And he’s right. We do. Problem is, the bill in Congress won’t do either.
The irony is that he vowed not to vote for a bill that wouldn’t reduce cost and reduce the debt. He’ll sign it if it gets to his desk, through lies and deception, with help from lazy if not uninformed constituents still awestruck by the man who reads a great teleprompter, all with help from a media willing to let it all go unchallenged.
Paramount in this health care bill is the power and control that shifts from the folks to the government. That’s the goal. Not our collective health.
Another example is the way the President proposes to deal with the economy. Rather than the people making their own choices with their own money through reducing taxes and providing tax incentives for businesses to expand and hire, the President does just the opposite. Not only that, but HE is picking the winners and losers. HE as in the government. The government takes over industries and companies left and right. The government chooses to sell cars (and payback the UAW), so they have a cash for clunkers program that was an utter failure and had no long term effect on either the economy or the industry. Now, HE decides that manufacturers of caulking compound need an economic boost, not THE FOLKS in general, just these people. See the pattern here? Does Obama look anything like a little dictator? So the point of picking the Cash for Caulkers program is for the green-ness of it. It won’t help or stimulate the folks or the economy. Like putting air in your tires, it’s a good idea providing they are under-inflated, but it won’t do squat to make our economy recover, which ought to be his number one priority. Caulking a leaking window seal is a good idea, but if you don’t have a job or are working two jobs already to keep from losing your home, you’re not going to have money to spend on house maintenance, presuming you have a leaky house to begin with. And if you did, it won’t do anything for your job security.
Doing projects like that should come after we realize some economic recovery in the old fashioned free-market driven way. Not because we have a President who likes to act like a King who tells the people what he wants them to do.
President Obama, who has never run a business or made a payroll, says the ‘fat cats’ don’t get it. It’s Obama that doesn’t get it. Well, I’ll have to sort of take that back. What he does get is that socialism, and economic social justice works better for him. Because all that he has done and wants to do, will do only that. He said he didn’t like the Constitution. From what he is doing to America, it is obvious. He will remake America, to be just like Europe, and worse. His economic plan for America is a model for the global scale with his Cap & Trade scheme. More social justice, only for the world. And of course, current and future generations of Americans will pay for that too, if he gets his way.
Democrats in the Senate hit a snag Sunday in getting the 60 votes necessary to take over the health care industry. Thank you Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) for your NO vote. America dodged a bullet today, but the fight over the direction of America is not over yet.
Still saying that by cutting Medicare by half a trillion dollars, and increasing the number of people covered by 40+ million people will decrease cost and increase quality of care, the plan turned down today would have added millions more people to the plan by lowering the age of eligibility from 65 to 55, and still maintain that costs will come down and quality of health care be improved.
And, it conspicuously has no tort reform. In short, it will do the opposite of what it is claimed to do. The dirty little secret here is the administration doesn’t care as much for people’s health care as it does for the power of controlling it.
And speaking of power and control, check this website that offers ten different uses of power and control. From how to revive the economy to improving health care, President Obama and his administration fall neatly into number seven.
7. Power is often exerted by people who believe they have the “answers” but lack the patience for others in their lives to come to a consensus or agreement on what an appropriate course of action should be. The “power play” is using the position of authority or status to get your way with total disregard for the feelings or ideas of others. Control is often exerted by one who believes he has the “answers,” yet also believes that no one in his environment will listen to him. The “control play” is the refusal to reveal any ideas, thoughts, emotions, attitudes, beliefs or alternative problem solutions, so as to avoid expected or anticipated rejection.
A senior member of the United Nations climate change movement shut down a journalist at a climate change news conference in Copenhagen for asking about the leaked emails and deleted data. It was enough to make Hugo Chavez (the hemisphere’s idiot) proud.
It didn’t happen in Communist China, Iran, or Venezuela. It happened at a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.
Professor Stephen Schneider, who is a senior member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had two armed UN security guards to order cameraman Ian Foster to stop recording. The guard then threatened to take away the camera and expel the film crew from the conference.
Was it a gotcha question? Of course it was. But it was also a legitimate question that should be addressed. I mean really. How can you talk about Tiger Woods without also talking about his blond infidelity? How can President Obama talk about his administration without also talking about Bush?
How Professor Schneider handled the question, by removing the member of the media, just follows along the M.O. of the leaked emails. It’s called an inconvenient truth. Somebody ought to make a movie about that.
In one of the latest slap in the face to taxpayers, did you know that stimulus dollars, 6 million of them, were used to stimulate multi-millionaire and Hillary Clinton campaign pollster Mark Penn?
As for Mark Penn’s $6 million. That was pure and simple political payback. Not a job stimulus by any stretch of the imagination.
Hearken back to the last campaign. After it was clear that Hillary was not in contention, she made the statement that her campaign was in the hole for millions of dollars and that she would support Barack Obama if he would pay off her campaign debt. Well, it looks to me that this is just what happened, only I had to pay it with ‘stimulus’ dollars, not Barack Obama with his campaign dollars.
From my perspective, the only change I see that came to Washington with Obama’s election was that Chicago politics moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And I’m sick of it.
For an administration that SAYS they are going to be open, read bills, deliberate bills on C-Span, and make bills available online for the public to see, doesn’t it just take the cake that a bill has to be introduced to force some transparency? H.R. 4219 will open the books on the so-called job stimulus. Well, that is if it will ever see the light of day.
It’s long past time for some transparency here, before we go one step further. Time to pull the administration’s pants down and take a look.
See press release below over auditing the spending of the stimulus money, or more correctly, our money, our kids’ money, and their kid’ money.
Miller Press Release on Audit of Stimulus, December 9th, 2009
Miller, Wilson, Kingston, and Souder Demand Audit of Stimulus Funds
(Washington, D.C.) – Congressman Jeff Miller (FL-01), Congressman Joe Wilson (SC-02), Congressman Jack Kingston (GA-01), and Congressman Mark Souder (IN-03) today demanded an audit of stimulus funds. Just this morning, reports showed that Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster, received $6 million in stimulus money to preserve three jobs. Furthermore, the Administration still hasn’t thoroughly addressed the major discrepancies and inaccuracies of reporting on Recovery.gov. With the Government Accountability Office stating that one out of every 10 jobs created by the stimulus are also fake, it’s high time for Congress to act. The National Commission on American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will create a bipartisan commission to investigate the effects of this “stimulus” bill.
Congressman Jeff Miller: “In my home state of Florida 52 jobs were created in the 34th Congressional District, according to the Recovery.gov website. 46 jobs were created in District 00. However, these districts simply don’t exist. How can the Administration expect us to trust their dubious jobs created numbers when they can’t even manage their own website? We need an audit of this spending immediately.”
Congressman Joe Wilson: “It’s time for Congress to demand answers on behalf of the hardworking taxpayers that we represent. The misnamed stimulus is one of the largest spending bills in our nation’s history and it is critical that American taxpayers receive adequate answers as to the whereabouts of stimulus funds. I can not fathom how Hillary Clinton’s pollster received $6 million to preserve just three jobs when that could sustain dozens of South Carolina’s families for life. I urge Speaker Pelosi to consider our legislation to ensure full accountability of every stimulus dollar spent.”
Congressman Jack Kingston: “What do you get for $18 million? The Obama Administration’s website that creates phony congressional districts and fishy jobs numbers. It’s time to pull back the curtain and get some of that transparency and accountability promised on the campaign trail. Until this Administration can provide the American people with an accurate accounting of their record breaking spending scheme, Congress should dry out the trough.”
Congressman Mark Souder: “Not only has the stimulus failed in its goal of reining in rising unemployment, the published report tracking the funds revealed imprecise statistics, nonexistent congressional districts and significantly overstated the number of jobs created. I am pleased to join Congressman Joe Wilson on this important legislation to put an end to this unaccountable stimulus spending spree. During this time of economic recession, Hoosier taxpayers deserve to know where and how their dollars are being spent.”
H.R. 4219, the National Commission on American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (text can be found here) will create a ten member panel, appointed by the President and Democrat and Republican leaders in the House and Senate, will investigate how many jobs have actually been saved or created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (P.L. 111-5); the circumstances in which those jobs have been saved or created; and, the effectiveness of measures taken to prevent the improper payment of funds. Following the investigation, the Commission will make recommendations on what changes could be made to save or create more jobs and what steps can be taken to prevent the improper allocation of taxpayer dollars.
Weeks after climate-gate breaks the man-made global warming farce, or from their perspective, the man-made global thermostat adjustment plan, the focus turns to Copenhagen. All this as the Marxists of the world see their last best chance to cripple capitalist societies (mainly the United States of America) about to come tumbling down around them.
Delegates converged Sunday for the grand finale of two years of tough, sometimes bitter negotiations on a climate change treaty, as U.N. officials calculated that pledges offered in the last few weeks to reduce greenhouse gases put the world within reach of keeping global warming under control.
. . .
despite unprecedented unity and concessions, industrial countries and emerging nations need to dig deeper. “Time is up,” de Boer said. “Over the next two weeks governments have to deliver.”
Translation, all the non-industrialized countries are doing fine in their pledge to reduce emissions, now all the UN needs is hundreds of billions of dollars out of the rest of us.
Other highlights of the upcoming conference are . . .
Some were arriving to the summit on trains splashed with a green stripe to symbolize efforts to reduce the convention’s carbon footprint. One train carried 450 U.N. officials, delegates, climate activists and journalists from Brussels and more trains were leaving from other European capitals.
Environmentalists have warned that emissions commitments were dangerously short of what U.N. scientists have said were needed to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6F). {emphasis added}
It’s not just a matter of the scientists getting political or being influenced by this environmental movement. It’s that the genesis behind the so-called environmental movement as pertains to ‘man-made,’ and ostensibly man-correctable, ‘global warming’ is the anti-capitalist Marxists left over from the Cold War. Well, that other people that think that, for the right price, they can lower sea level and global temperature.
Things like that are best left to the Almighty. And I don’t mean Barack Obama.
I think the person who obtained and leaked those emails should get the Nobel Peace Prize for Science next year for all the lives he will have saved by stopping this global transfer of wealth from happening.
If the peoples’ welfare were their paramount motivation, then they would be calling for the spreading of freedom around the world, replacing the despots and dictators that feed off of their people.
Remember how the home mortgage crisis became the reason the Obama administration wanted to apply $350 billion to, allegedly, provide a financial bailout, rescuing the economy and the suffering homeowners who fell (as the story goes) victim to Wall Street? That represents the second half of TARP that Bush started, and Obama continued in a re-branded form.
Only about 20% of that $700 billion of that ‘stimulus’ money has been spent, and only a fraction of the $785 billion ‘economic stimulus’ package that followed has been spent, creating instead a slush fund that would make Bernie Madoff jealous. But back to the mortgage ‘crisis.’ $75 billion was to be for solving that problem. To date, only a fraction of that has been spent, and what has been spent has gone to . . . Wall Street. Not main street.
The ‘cure rate’ for the troubled mortgages is getting worse, not better. And there are more foreclosures to come. Way more. Now there is another alleged ‘stimulus’ program coming to do what the first stimulus didn’t. They want to give more money to Wall Street.
Somewhere along the line, I missed the part where the administration admitted that what they’ve done has not worked. No, that won’t happen. Doing so would not exactly exude public confidence about the administration’s ability to control health care, almost 20% of the private sector economy. How many times must we hear the President say how saving these homeowners is his top priority before we start laughing at him?
None? Out of 651,000 “trial” modifications none have turned into a permanent repayment plan?
What’s worse, Bank of America has only 14% of their “eligible” loans in a trial modification. Citibank has 40% under trial, and JP Morgan/Chase 32%.
All in all, only 20% of those “eligible” have been offered, accepted, and are in a trial but zero percent – zero – have actually turned into a permanent loan modification that the homeowner can count on.
The administration program requires banks that received federal aid from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, as well as mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower monthly payments for borrowers at “imminent risk” of default.
That’s some “requirement” eh? Zero percent completion from June to October? That’s five months, and the “trial” period is supposedly 90 days, so this means that either (1) nobody did anything for the first two months, or (2) not one borrower successfully completed a trial between June and now.
If the Obama Administration and Treasury was serious about this “help” they would be seeking indictments.
There are only two States in the United States that are not operating in a deficit, if not technically bankrupt. Montana because of their rich oil resources, and North Dakota, because of their implementation of a State Bank, the Bank of North Dakota.
Because most people are not economists and may well just fall asleep trying to read up on it, you can learn in this post and in one podcast all you need to know to understand why and how part of Dr. Farid A. Khavari’s platform as Governor of the State of Florida, the Bank of the State of Florida (BSF), will work.
How Floridians can have 2% fixed rate 15 year mortgages and how the State of Florida can make billions by providing them
A cornerstone of the economic plan is to create a Bank of the State of Florida. We will put the power of modern banking to work for the people of Florida, not for Wall Street.
Over the years, interest has been the biggest cost most families had. When you pay interest to the bank, that means less money for your family. Reducing interest costs can save a family hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Let’s take a $100,000 mortgage, for example. With a 30-year fixed rate 5.5% mortgage, your monthly payment is $567.79 and you will pay $104,404.40 in interest on that loan.
With a 2% fixed rate 15-year mortgage, your payment would be $643.51, the total interest would be only $15,831.80 – and the mortgage would be paid 15 years sooner! You save 88,572.60 in interest. If you then make 15 years of payments to yourself with 5% interest from the Bank of the State of Florida, you will have more than $160,000 after taxes in your account—just by having your mortgage from the Bank of the State of Florida.
How can we do this? It’s called “fractional reserve banking” and this is how all the banks do it. If you have $100 in reserves, you can loan out $900 or more. That means you collect interest on $900 but you pay interest on only $100 at most. If the bank pays you 2% for your CD and lends it at 5% on 9 times as much money, you can see this is a really good deal – for the bank.
Now our Bank of the State of Florida does not need to be greedy. It is not going to get involved in shenanigans like bundling and selling mortgages, taking out weird insurance policies and general practices that have caused the mess we are in today. When we make a mortgage, that asset remains right on our books and the paperwork is right there on file. We are going to pay good dividends and the highest rates in the market for long term deposits. We are going to loan out 9 times our reserves. And we are going to make billions of dollars for the State Treasury while we save Floridians a trillion dollars—and that trillion dollars becomes many trillions in Florida’s economy.
Let’s say we pay 5% for our $100 and loan out our $900 at 2%. We pay out $5 in interest, and we take in $18 in interest. Can we make money at that? You bet we can.
We could make the $3.6 billion we are short this year on just a couple of million 2% mortgages. We can do even better on 3 – 4% commercial financing and vehicle loans.
And all the money the bank earns goes directly into the State Treasury, to work for Floridians, not to Wall Street.
Where do we get the reserves? The State of Florida has billions invested with Wall Street. 5 or 6% guaranteed looks pretty good these days compared to a 50% decline in the stock market. Look at what long-term bonds are paying, look at CD’s—we will have no problem attracting all the long-term deposits we need to get started, simply by paying good rates.
Now look what happens. With a 2% fixed rate 15-year loan, the buyer has paid off over 11% of the principal within 2 years. That means we have more than enough reserves to make a new mortgage for someone else, without having to pay interest for the reserves! (In comparison, a 5.5% 30-year loan takes 7 years to pay 11% of the principal).
Now some people might think that low interest rates will just raise the price of homes. That would be true if the 2% loan was for 30 years. But the payment on the 2% loan for 15 years is a little bit higher than the payment for 5.5% 30 years, so this tends to hold prices down. It also tends to eliminate speculation that messes up the market every time. As long as prices are stable, we can offer mortgages with low down payments, so home ownership can be as easy as paying rent.
What the Bank of the State of Florida does is transfer hundreds of billions of dollars away from Wall Street directly into the pockets of Floridians by reducing interest costs… and it puts hundreds of billions into the State Treasury, too. We will have stable, fair prices for homes and take 15 years of slavery out of the process of owning a home.
Consumer financing is another area where Wall Street and the big banks are costing us way too much. Banks charge huge interest on credit cards, for example, where the cost of money to the bank is really zero. If a family has $10,000 in credit card debt at 25% interest, that’s over $200 per month in interest alone. At 6%, the monthly interest is only $50. This family could reduce monthly payments by $50 and pay off the debt years sooner. The State earns billions of dollars per year while saving Floridians billions and billions more.
The Bank of the State of Florida will earn billions of dollars per year for the taxpayers of Florida, not Wall Street fat cats. At the same time it will reduce interest costs and save Florida families hundreds of thousands of dollars per family. Who needs that money more? You or Citibank?
The Bank of the State of Florida can handle checking accounts and ATM’s too. The other banks will have to become competitive, and there is no reason why they cannot.
Couldn’t the federal government do the same thing? Actually, the federal government could do even better and they could do it immediately at huge benefit to the U.S. Treasury. Do you think we should wait around for them to do it? We can have this program in effect in Florida within a year, at no cost to the State.
