"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions.... Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.'" Marcus Tullius Cicero
Obama's winter vacation hypocrisy
By Thomas Lifson
Is
Barack Obama entirely lacking in self-awareness, or does he simply
think that his intended audience will believe anything he says? Maybe
both. Otherwise it is hard to explain away the obvious irony inherent in
a president from Hawaii on a long winter vacation in Hawaii blasting his political opponents for going "home for the holidays." Dave Urbanski writes in The Blaze:
As his approval rating hovers around 40%, it is clear that the only people who buy what he is selling are just not paying attention. The rest of us are laughing.
While President Barack Obama continued what the New York Times called a "real and rare vacation in Hawaii," he used his Weekly Address to accuse Republicans in Congress of going home for the holidays while less-fortunate Americans suffer. (Bold added):
Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow Americans lost a vital economic lifeline - the temporary insurance that helps folks make ends meet while they look for a job.Republicans in Congress went home for the holidays and let that lifeline expire.
As his approval rating hovers around 40%, it is clear that the only people who buy what he is selling are just not paying attention. The rest of us are laughing.
Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians for 2013 List by Judicial Watch
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, released its 2013 list of Washington's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians." The list, in alphabetical order, includes:
- Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH)
- CIA Director John Brennan
- Senator Saxby Chambliss
- Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
- Attorney General Eric Holder
- Former IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller / Former IRS Official Lois Lerner
- Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano
- President Barack Obama
- Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)
- Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
- Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
- Outgoing Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) / Incoming Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D)
- Former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
- National Security Adviser Susan Rice
House Speaker John Boehner has apparently become a master at what Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer calls the “Tollbooth Strategy.” As Schweizer explains in his new book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets: “You pay money at a tollbooth in order to use a road or bridge. The methodology in Washington is similar: if someone wants a bill passed, charge them money to allow the bill to move down the legislative highway.” According to Schweizer, Boehner apparently used the Tollbooth Strategy to collect more than $200,000 in political donations from executives just days before holding votes on bills critically important to their industries....
Sweet deal for the sugar industry
By Sean LengellWhile Congress is still shaping a new farm bill that will set federal agriculture policies for the next five years, at least one item is almost certain to remain intact in the final draft: the sugar program.
...But a growing coalition of fiscal conservatives, free marketers and environmentalists, along with with the powerful food-manufacturing industry, say the federal policy aimed at helping sugarcane farmers is archaic and unfair, and vow to continue their fight.
"The sugar program is the most Soviet [style] centrally planned of all the agriculture programs," said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning Washington think tank. "It really is astounding."
To help protect U.S. sugar growers from foreign competition, the Department of Agriculture regulates the flow of imported sugar. Pro-sugar policy advocates say that without such a move, the U.S. market would be flooded with inexpensive foreign sugar, putting the estimated 142,000 U.S. sugar industry jobs at risk.
And with the governments of mega-sugar producers like Mexico and Brazil subsidizing their industries much more than the U.S., advocates say American farmers would be at a serious disadvantage without federal help.
"The global sugar market is the most distorted commodity market in the world," said Phillip Hayes of the American Sugar Alliance, a staunch supporter of U.S. sugar policy. "We can compete with Mexican sugar producers -- we're far more efficient than Mexican sugar producers. [But] we cannot compete with the Mexican government."
The USDA also provides loans to sugarcane and sugar beet producers and processors that guarantee a minimum price. Sugar producers and processors have the option of repaying the loan with sugar or selling their sugar on the market if the going price is higher than the loan amount.
Funny money: How student loan profits make Obamacare look good
By Grae StaffordCato education
scholar Neal McCluskey revealed how a little-reported feature of the
Affordable Care Act uses shady accounting to hide its overall cost.“The change in student loans was part of Obamacare — and why was it part of Obamacare?” McCluskey said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller. “So that the profit they were supposedly making from the student loans could then be plugged into how much money
would come from Obamacare, so it didn’t look like it cost as much.”In the last days of Obamacare’s formulation, the projections had student loans
folded into them to make them not seem so expensive.“At the last minute, they said, ‘Look, let’s take what was then called the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, make it part of healthcare and then we can make the budget numbers come out right… [W]e will take these projected profits
from the student loans, and we will say that’s part of Obamacare.’”McCluskey warned that this fiscal conjure trick could lead to problems in the future.
“It’s very dicey to look at federal profits on student loans, and say they will make those profits, and to know why they are doing it and what the money is being used for,” he said. “To follow the smoke and mirrors of budgets
— especially Obamacare — is impossible.” Nearly Two Thirds of 2013 Government Waste, Fraud Came from HHS
By Edwin MoraThe estimated amount of taxpayer-funded payments that the federal government doled out through fraud, waste, and errors slightly decreased in 2013 to $106 billion from $108 billion the previous year, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
On Dec. 31, FederalTimes.com reported the estimated government-wide improper payments dollar figure for fiscal 2013, citing Frank Benenati, an OMB spokesman as the source.
Benenati did not provide a breakdown of the 2013 payment errors by government program, saying that information would not be available for weeks, according to the FederalTimes.com article.
However, an analysis of government financial data by Breitbart News found that the Department of U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) was the primary driving force behind all federal payments considered improper in fiscal 2013.
Extending Unemployment Benefits Means Extending Unemployment
By Joel B PolakPresident Barack Obama has made extending unemployment benefits his #1 policy priority for 2014, in service of his attack on inequality. It is a theme that served him well in his 2012 re-election campaign. Republicans are responding by demanding budget cuts to offset the additional spending that extended unemployment benefits would require. Both sides are missing the key empirical point: longer benefits lead to higher unemployment.
That point was made by economist Robert Barro back in 2010, when he calculated that the extraordinary step of extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, rather than a more modest 39 weeks, had kept unemployment 2.7% higher than it would otherwise have been. The reason? Incentives matter. People are more likely to seek jobs, or to start their own businesses, when they know that they can only collect unemployment for a short time.
Democrats, and the Obama administration, argue that because the average time of unemployment has been far longer during this recession/recovery than in most, longer unemployment benefits are needed. Yet they mistake the cause of longer unemployment for the remedy. In fact, Barro pointed out, longer benefits actually subsidize unemployment--which is why Europe, with its generous benefits, has suffered a chronically high jobless rate.
The White House plans to sell its proposal by highlighting the sorrowful stories of those who have been out of work for months on end and who stand to lose their only source of income. Democrats are even arguing that cutting back benefits would cost jobs by reducing consumer spending. The truth is exactly the opposite--which is why GOP willingness to accept extended benefits if they are paid for is politically and morally inadequate.
Congress to force Obamacare reporting issue
By Rick MoranRepublicans in the House are tired of the administration treating information about the progress of the Obamacare rollout as if it were a national security issue. A bill will be introduced next week mandating weekly reports from the administration on how well Obamacare is doing.
The Hill:
Members will consider the Exchange Information Disclosure Act, which Republicans say is needed because the Obama administration has failed to offer details about ObamaCare participation levels.....The problem for the White House is that they are basically only releasing information that reflects positively on the president and the ACA. Since the good news is few and far between, days or even weeks can pass without much illuminating information.
Since the launch of the troubled website in October, the administration has offered sporadic updates about participation. But those updates have mostly frustrated Republicans who are seeking more detailed data, and who are also pressing for more information about what officials are doing to fix the websites various problems.
The bill up next week, H.R. 3362, would address both complaints. First, it would require weekly updates on the number of unique website visitors, new accounts, and new enrollments in a qualified health plan, as well as the level of coverage. All of this data would have to be provided on a state-by-state basis.
Secondly, it would require a weekly update on efforts to fix problems people have had logging into the website and enrolling in coverage. Reports detailing all of this information would have to be submitted to Congress every Monday until the end of March 2015.
It would seem logical that the administration has this information somewhere. After all, they're very concerned about the success of Obamacare and would want all the information possible to deal with problems that arise as well as tout successes that occur. But it's inexcusable that they are treating information that Congress needs to evaluate the program as if it were part of a political campaign.
One more indication they don't know the difference between governing and campaigning
Leftism: A Radical Faith
By Bruce A RiggsMuch of the political history of the extended twentieth century is that of massive extinctions of citizenries by their dictatorial governments. Take the engineered mass starvations, torture chambers, firing squads, and gulags of Lenin and Stalin; Nazi gas chambers; Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge killing fields; the genocides of Mao's "Great Leap Forward"; and the tyrannical North Korean Sung dynasty, and one will find that over one hundred million people have been slaughtered.
Systematically murdering millions to create an imagined earthly Eden is clearly irrational. In this sense, leftist ideology has the look of a religious inquisition.
...For the past eighty-plus years, America has been heading toward such an elitist tyranny in accordance with such socio-political contrivances as "New Deals," "Great Societies," "Fundamental Transformations," and the steady, piecemeal abrogation of the Constitution. We have not yet reached the "Heil Hitler" or "Hail Stalin" state, but we're getting closer with the hope-and-change nihilism of Critical Theory and arbitrary Postmodernist relativisms (e.g., "situational ethics").
It is asserted here that this coercive faith has the character of an endemic narcissism. It is an arrogant faith led, and largely populated, by a relentlessly aggressive, power-obsessed political class dedicated to imposing an egalitarian minimalism ("social justice") on the world.
...In the broadest terms, this narcissistic entity is America's left-wing political establishment and the purveyor of an authoritarian collectivist faith. It is a faith largely populated by those in the high-visibility, look-at-me intellectual professions of politics, the arts, teaching, journalism, and various political foundations. All are professions inordinately able to shape the public mind both short- and long-term. As such, it is a propaganda-intensive collective that includes the left-biased "news" media and the TV and film industries.
It is further asserted that the operating ethic of this narcissistic confederacy runs from feel-good, busybody, liberal condescension (we know what's best for everyone) to the arrogance of the more radical ("progressive") wing, for whom the ends justify the means. Implicitly, such an ethic reflects an overriding need for power and control, which, along with lying, is a trait characteristic of pathological narcissism.
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