Back to Basics

Grim reaper photoshop credit: Manly Rash

I said yesterday in my Beltway Chainsaw Massacre column that the GOP needs to track the Obama jobs death toll and tell the victims’ stories far and wide.

But there’s no need to wait for the GOP. I’ll keep doing it right here.

The first story of the day comes from the Fort Worth Star Telegram in Texas, where a health insurer called Health Markets has laid off 70 workers and expects up to 180 more as it braces for the costs of Obamacare and other government mandates:

HealthMarkets, the North Richland Hills-based seller of health insurance, laid off 70 employees this month and expects to trim 180 more positions by the end of the first quarter of 2011, according to a recent federal filing.

In the Securities and Exchange Commission filing, HealthMarkets blamed the layoffs on “dropping enrollment levels experienced by the company’s insurance subsidiaries,” along with national healthcare reform and “related legislative developments.”

HealthMarkets provides insurance plans to the self-employed, individuals and small businesses.

The second story of the day comes from the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts, where a local hospital will slash about 50 full-time jobs:

About 50 full-time jobs will be eliminated at the HealthAlliance Hospital — Leominster Campus, and one of two planned expansion projects may be cut back.

Mary Lourdes Burke, chief communications officer for the hospital, said yesterday the job cuts do not mean 50 layoffs, because some were vacant positions that will not be filled, and some were positions that had hours reduced. Also, she said, some union contracts required moving employees into other posts.

Loathsome cowboys

How’s that Summer of Recovery working out for you? Continuing my series on the White House War on the West, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s attack on the economy, and the White House land lock-up (Part 1, Part 2) and ocean grab, here is the latest on Barack Obama’s deliberate job destruction policies.

According to the WSJ, the administration forged ahead with its junk science deepwater drilling ban despite knowing it would cost 23,000 jobs.

Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Marcia McNutt, an Obama administration science adviser, commented on the corporate culture of BP in a memo sent to Michael Bromwich, the administration’s new top offshore oil exploration regulator, on June 28.

Critics of the moratorium, including Gulf Coast political figures and oil-industry leaders, have said it is crippling the region’s economy, and some have called on the administration to make public its economic analysis. A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects…

Sound familiar?

Just last month, you’ll recall, the TARP inspector general reported on how the capricious Dealeragate mandates of Obama’s non-expert auto experts deliberately destroyed jobs in the name of “shared sacrifice” to appease Big Labor.

Then there are more and more Obamacare job-killing stories piling up like this one:

Assurant Health is eliminating 130 jobs at its offices in Milwaukee and Plymouth, Minn., by Oct. 1 as the health insurer prepares for changes under federal health care reform.

“Apres moi le deluge”, “After me, the flood” and though attributed to the French King Louis XV, historians believe it was actually said by Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour. The last members of the monarchy spent France into the poorhouse until they had their heads separated from their bodies via the guillotine.

People have noticed the same eerie disconnect from the suffering of the populace as Barack and Michelle Obama party on. There has been a succession of vacations topped off by Michelle in Spain on the U.S. dime. Keeping track of the vacations, about seventeen this year, has become a media pastime.

Twenty months into his first and last term, President Obama, has wasted a trillion dollars we didn’t have on a stimulus package that was little more than a wish list of pet projects for Democrat congressmen and bailouts of the teacher’s unions whose members would otherwise have to join the long lines at the unemployment office.

People noticed.

Obama has had notably little success in foreign affairs, failing to draw the line with the Russians on issues of defensive missiles in Europe, managing to insult the British in a dozen ways, and being mocked by the Iranian leaders as they get ready to fire up a nuclear reactor.

People noticed.

When he finally decided what to do in Afghanistan, he made the announcement at West Point, including a date when the new infusion of troops would leave. The cadets slept through the speech and the Taliban circled their calendar for 2011.

Yea that economic recovery is going great. Nobody but pinheads in D.C. and Wall Street are surprised. We have been saying for the better part of 2 years that the economy sucks. Obama spent a trillion dollars in wasted “stimulus” on local government improvement projects. Nothing was done for those small businesses that create real productive jobs.

Now it seems big corporations are sitting on TONS of cash from massive cost cutting. They aren’t hiring. Why? Because the idiots in D.C. hate capitalism. Their policies are killing this economy. Health care “reform”. Finance “reform”. Bailouts. Impending higher taxes.

If these news laws were so great then why are Democrats not running their campaign extolling their virtues. Not a single one that I have seen or read about brags about how great these policies are and how they should be the platform from which they are re-elected or elected. No, they can only talk about race and blame Bush. That is their platform.

On the other hand we have folks in the GOP like Rep. Paul Ryan coming up with great plans to get the country back on track. Yes it’s true despite what the left-media wants leads you to believe. The GOP has rightfully been the party of NO. I love that they have said no for the last 18 months. They have plans but they don’t fit the agenda, the narrative, of the liberal left so they are dismissed and ignored.

So now we have proof that Obama-nomics are a failure. We gave him a TRILLION dollars of our money to fix the Bush problem. We gave him bailout money. We let him give money to your neighbor to buy a car. We let him pay off the unions. His statist Keynesian spending spree has not worked. The economy that he inherited from Bush still exists. He has done nothing to fix it. Obama is a failure.

I don’t think the weak and indecisive Jimmy Carter’s presidency was as far down the road to self destruction as is Obama’s. After all, by his second year, all Jimmy could lay claim to is giving the Panama Canal to the Chinese, among some of his other global ‘peace initiatives’.

Carter is, however, a classic example of the liberal mindset. One of the most obvious failings that Barack Hussein Obama has in common with Jimmy, is the absolute tone-deafness they have with regard to the American people.

It was over for Carter when he went in front of national television, to piously proclaim that Americans had to make do with less. That we should turn down our heaters and we should put on sweaters instead. Americans don’t like being lectured, most especially when the lecturer is seen as weak and indecisive… another strong similarity between Obama and Jimmy.

I’ve written about Jimmy Carter’s virulent anti-semitism before. Obama’s is none the less virulent, for all that he tries to cover it over with rhetoric and banal platitudes. Carter was anti-American in that he refused to acknowledge American exceptionalism and held the globalists’ opinion that no country should be more prosperous than another, and that economic stagnation was to be our lot.

Historians will look back at the Obama presidency and postulate about when his star’s light diminished. I could be flippant and say the minute his presidency started, but in fact I believe it was with the first stimulus. A lot of people didn’t like the way that whole thing was engineered. Then along came the health care issue and that’s when the other two wheels came off the Obama wagon. The American people figured out that what they thought was a new kind of politician was actually the embodiment of the worst of the old Chicago ward politics of last century, wrapped in the doctrine of extreme leftist ideology and a visible contempt for this country and its founding principles.

There are many out there who are openly questioning just who and what Barack Obama really is. No president in history has had his background so obscured, scrubbed and sanitized as this one has. His ‘affinity’ for all things Muslim, when the country is just coming to realize the depth of the danger we are in from this pernicious ‘cult of death’, only serves to heighten the public’s suspicion of his hidden agenda.

Obama has just about nailed his own lid shut with the endorsement of the now infamous Cordoba mosque. It was another startling display of contempt for the people of this country. The people of America are getting ready to speak in no uncertain terms. We don’t want Barack Obama’s agenda… not at all… not even a tiny bit.

Anyone who has spent any time at all arguing with a more liberal minded person on issues relating to the powers of the federal government knows the old Liberal Three Step. The dance has been around for the better part of the last century and is the tried and true way for people who have no respect for individual liberty, limited government and our Constitution to justify any and every duty they want government to undertake. Once again we are watching this dance being performed over the issue of Obamacare.

The first step in the Liberal Three Step is to cite the “general Welfare” clause of Constitution whenever a liberal has a “great idea” he or she wishes to implement. They claim that the “general Welfare” clause is such a broad grant of power, because it says the word “general”, that it gives the federal government near unlimited authority to do whatever Congress or Presidents can dream up. Of course this flies in the face of the truth not to mention the Tenth Amendment.

The first argument I heard for Obamacare (socialized medicine) was this “general Welfare” clause argument. And I heard it often. But it is easily shot full of holes.

First of all our founding fathers specifically stated, on numerous occasions, that the “general Welfare” clause was not a broad, carte blanche grant of power to Congress enabling them to pass any law they saw fit. Alexander Hamilton, who is often misquoted and often misrepresented as some sort of screaming big government liberal, said in Federalist 83, “The plan of the convention declares that the power of Congress, or, in other words, of the national legislature, shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority, because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd, as well as useless, if a general authority was intended.”

Hamilton further discussed this later on during the debate over the concept of a national bank saying, “the foundation of the Constitution is laid on this ground: ‘That all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved for the States, or to the people.’ Whence it is meant to be inferred, that Congress can in no case exercise any power not included in those not enumerated in the Constitution.”

James Madison, who is considered the father of the Constitution and the preeminent authority on the document for his time, said in both Federalist 41 and 45 that Congressional powers under the “general Welfare” clause were limited. In the later document he explicitly called them, “few and defined.”

Thomas Jefferson in his 1817 letter to Albert Gallatin said on the issue, “Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated.”

If eighteen months ago someone asked you to write a political plan more likely to rile up the American people and throw them into the arms of the Republican Party, it’s hard to imagine anything that would be more successful than what the Democrats have done over the past year and a half.  Not to mention what they plan to do.

Between ObamaCare, the stimulus, civil rights for terrorists and suing Arizona for trying to control its illegal immigration problem, they have been pushing voters to the GOP with both hands.  But in just a few months comes the coup de grace: a massive tax increase – right in the middle of a recession.

Back at the beginning of the decade when Bush and the Republicans were pushing for tax cuts Democrats instinctively fought the idea, (it’s unnatural to them).  While they couldn’t stop the tax cuts entirely, they did have enough clout to insist upon a sunset provision, and as of right now those cuts will expire on December 31st.

So much for a Happy New Year.

Of course this will occur after the coming elections, (by design), but the increases are likely to have their greatest political impact in 2011 and 2012, which means that they will become an issue for Obama’s re-election campaign.

So, what taxes are going up?  It’s quite a list.

Of course, individual income tax rates will go up.  Ten percent goes to fifteen, (up by fifty percent!); twenty-five goes to twenty-eight; twenty-eight goes to thirty-one; thirty-three goes to thirty-six; and thirty-five percent goes up to almost forty.

In January 2007, when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took control of Congress, the unemployment rate was 4.6% and the national debt was $8.6 trillion. Today, unemployment is 9.5% and the nation is $13 trillion in debt.

Pelosi and Reid have tried to convince voters they inherited all the debt from President Bush, but it was their bailouts, takeovers and power grabs that have blown the budget for years to come. These bills were written by Democrats and made law with Democrat votes.

The only thing that changed when President Obama took office is that the Democrats’ economic agenda went from bad to worse. The Democrats have made the big-spending Republicans they knocked out of power in 2006 look like bean counters.

The first failed stimulus bill written by the Democrats to issue $600 checks so America could go shopping was crowned with the mother of all government handouts when President Obama signed his $787 billion stimulus bill in 2009. The Democrats topped that off with yet another “jobs bill” worth $18 billion, last March. Three stimulus bills and trillions of dollars later, what do American taxpayers have to show for it? Three straight years of job losses.

The Pelosi-Reid 2008 stimulus also approved $300 billion in new loans for the Federal Housing Authority for risky, subprime borrowers and authorized Treasury to start buying shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in July 2008.

In the fall of 2008, with an assist from then-presidential candidate Barack Obama who left the campaign trail for Washington to help broker the deal, Democrats wrote the $700 billion TARP bill to bailout banks that couldn’t balance their books because of the trades they made on shaky housing loans.

When Republicans tried to block the second $350 billion installment of the TARP funds from being released in January 2009, the Democrats stopped them, even though there was little accounting for how the first $350 billion was spent. To this day, the public doesn’t know where all the TARP money has gone.

The Obama administration then gave Fannie and Freddie, organizations at the center of the financial meltdown, unlimited access to government coffers on Christmas Eve 2009. Today Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee half the nation’s mortgages, worth about $5.5 trillion. Experts estimate it will take between $389 billion to $1 trillion tax dollars to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat. After all these housing bailouts, more than a million homes are expected to be foreclosed this year–a record high.

The biggest debt bomb, however, didn’t come until 2010. It took the Pelosi-Reid Congress years to write their budget-crushing, 2,300-page health care takeover. When they were done, taxpayers were on the hook for more than $2.6 trillion to pay for the new federal health care entitlement by the year 2023.

Okay, the Missouri Senator didn’t phrase it exactly that way, but that’s what she said.

On Tuesday, Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance.

Naturally, that’s just because most voters didn’t understand the product and are incapable of wrapping their heads around the totally awesome creamy goodness that is Obamacare:

McCaskill said she understood what Missouri voters had been trying to say about the healthcare reform law for which she had voted in the Senate. But the centrist senator downplayed the vote as a result of heavy Republican primary turnout and a lack of education about the effects of the law.

“I certainly noticed the vote on Prop C, the healthcare law, and: message received,” she said Wednesday in a conference call with state reporters.

“I think there has been … a lot of noise about the mandate that people have gotten so focused on that they don’t realize that there’s going to be more access and affordability and more choices,” she said.

It’s too bad the Senator doesn’t understand that even us rubes, hicks, hayseeds, simpletons and peasants have asked ourselves a very simple question that answers itself: If everybody’s going to like it so much, why does it have to be mandated?

President Obama, once adored by the unwashed masses as The Omnipotent One, is now known as The Impotent One.

Things have gotten so bad for Obama that voters are no longer hesitant about challenging the president, even on his birthday which is August 4.

This year’s birthday message to Obama comes from the great state of Missouri where the people sent our fascist poser a message that roughly translates to, “Get stuffed—sir!”

At issue was ObamaCare, Democrats’ attempt to take health care out of the hands of individual citizens and deliver it as another part of life that is dictated by the government.

And why not? What with the great successes of the federal government in managing Social Security, Medicare, the federal deficit, unemployment, and other issues of great importance, why not include health care as an issue that government controls?

However, the people of Missouri beg to differ as reported at Yahoo.com, in part:

“WASHINGTON – Missouri voters’ overwhelming opposition to requiring nearly all Americans to buy health insurance puts one of the least popular parts of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law back in the political crosshairs.

“Even if the vote sets no legally binding precedent, it will help mobilize foes of Obama’s agenda in the fall midterm elections, and that could make a difference in some states with close congressional races that could decide the balance of power in Washington.