Clouded

I'll take "corrupt" for $800, Alex:

Americans' Image of "Federal Government" Mostly Negative: "PRINCETON, NJ -- More than 7 in 10 Americans use a word or phrase that is clearly negative when providing a top-of-mind reaction to the federal government.

A Sept. 20-21 USA Today/Gallup poll asked respondents what they would say 'if someone asked you to describe the federal government in one word or phrase.' The accompanying chart shows the results in graphic form, with the words or phrases displayed according to how frequently they are mentioned.

Additionally, the complete list of verbatim responses to the question, along with basic demographic information on respondents, is available here."

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Peas In O Pod

Wow. WTWT.

H/T New Zeal.

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Perhaps You Thought You Missed Something...

Nope.

Actually, it's a little more complicated than this makes it appear. The simple interpretation of the D's voting against it is an indication that there's a war within the D party about this bill and they can't get their act together even though they have the numbers to pass whatever they please. And there's lots of truth in that.

But the real reason it was so close was the D nays were able to make the best case to Pelosi that they were in the most danger of defeat this fall if they couldn't go out and have evidence to support their lies that they were against the bill.

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Mental Midget Meltdown

All at your expense of course...

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It's A Frozen Wasteland

Complete with the finally located Gore-acle. What could be better entertainment for all us idiots who don't understand science idiot watermelon wanna-be totalitarians.

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2.29 Lies O Minute

Psychopath or complete ignoramus? Or both?

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Burn 'Em

What the media doesn't want you to know about the recent partial strike-down of McCain-Feingold.

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The Miracle Truck

Dear GOP—
PLEASE Let Scott Brown Give the response next week to Obama’s State of the Union Address…

…In his truck.

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Corrupt And Drunken Jack-sses: EPIC FAIL 2009

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Corrupt And Drunken Jack-sses

Remember when Dorothy learned that the wizard was just a nitwit behind the curtain?

Here is one of them.

Time to throw them on the dung heap of history.

Oh. And at what employer exactly is it out of bounds to be fired for showing up to work drunk? Why none other than the District of Corruption of course.

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Thank You M'Lord

You know what a sad state this country has come to when we have to thank a British Lord (not the one who rules us mind you) for alerting us to the latest totalitarian travesty O Duce and his minions have in store for us. Bill has the link up to the "Instrument Of Repudiation" which you can sign to make your position known.

For the impatient, here is the short video of Monckton's ending call to action:

And here's the whole speech. This is one you really don't want to miss:

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A Debt We'll Never Repay

I haven't been paying enough attention to Klavan. Silly me.

And one of the commenters at Moonbattery has this little gem that will make you spit up your beverage:

Yeah, but unlike Resident Obama, Jesus Christ still loves those that persecute disagree with Him.

Other differences:

Jesus: walks on water
Obama: walks on the beach

Jesus: fed 5,000 people with three loaves and two fishes
Obama: taxed 5,000,000 (more or less) citizens and gave the $ to three friends and two corrupt organizations

Jesus: Son of God
Obama: S.O.B.

Jesus: born in a manger, in what is present-day Jerusalem
Obama: born in...?

Jesus: died for your sins
Obama: makes everyone else pay for his own sins

Jesus: rose from the dead after three days
Obama: buried America in three years or less

Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

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A Pair O Preposterously Porky Pelosi

Wow. Just Wow.

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Which Obama Did You Vote For?

And while we're on the subject of the badly behaved, there's the issue of what their Messiah behaves like. It won't seem like 10 minutes when you're done. It will seem like an eternity:

It seems almost beyond belief that we could have elected a shameless bull artist like this doesn't it?

Who done it? Here are your fellow A.D.D. riddled geniuses that made it so:

Actually, I don't mean to insult those with A.D.D. by association. Sorry about that...

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Yes Massa

So here's "Representative" Massa of New York explaining during a brainstorming session on how the nutroots can astroturf his town meetings (that he's actually not holding) that it doesn't matter what his constituents want, he's going to vote for single payer.

As QandO comments:

Folks it doesn’t get any clearer than that. Mr. Massa isn’t there to “represent” anyone. He’s made it clear that his agenda and his party’s agenda take precedence over anything his constituency wants.

Kind of puts George Washington's warnings about the evils of political party (and foreign influence!) from his farewell address in a whole new light, doesn't it?

Speaking of astroturf, check out what went down at Obama's "town hall" in Montana as reported by a Tea Party sympathizer:

So we had Montana folks from ALL OVER the state with their homemade signs and their DOGS with homemade signs. We had cowboys, nurses, doctors you name it. There was even a guy from Texas who had been driving through. He found out about the occasion, went to the store, made a sign, and came to protest.

If you are wondering about the press…..Well, all of the major networks were over by that remote hangar I mentioned. They were conveniently parked on the other side of the buildings FAR away. None of these crowds were even visible to them. I have my doubts that they knew anything about the crowds.

We did have some local news media around us from this state and Idaho. Speaking of the local media…they were invited. However, all questions were to be turned into the White House in advance of the event. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to think off the top of their head.

It was very obvious that it was meant to be totally controlled by the White House. Everything was orchestrated down to the last detail to make it appear that Montana is just crazy for Obama and government healthcare. Even those people that talked about their insurance woes, the White House called our local HRDC (Human Resource and Development Committee) and asked for names. Then the White House asked those folks to come. Smoke and mirrors…EVERYTHING was staged!!!!!!!!!!!

I am very dismayed about what I learned about our current White House. The amount of control and manipulation was unbelievable. I felt I was not living in the United States of America, more like the USSR!! I was physically nauseous. Joe and I have been around when Presidents or Heads of State visit. It has NEVER been like this. I am truly very frightened for our country. America needs your prayers and your voices. If you care about our country please get involved. Know the issues. And let Congress hear your voices again and again!! If they are willing to put forth so much effort to BULLY a small town one can only imagine what is going on in Washington DC. Scary!!”

Imagine my surprise.

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The Real Idiot Practices Alinsky: What You Knew Already About The 'Debate' Expressed Concisely

Instapundit nails the idiocy that pervades Obama's health "care" obfuscations to the wall using the context of the most recent Robert Reich column's unwitting admission of incompetence:

... Mainly because there’s still no healthcare plan. All we have are some initial markups from several congressional committees, which differ from one another in significant ways. The White House’s is waiting to see what emerges from the House and Senate before insisting on what it wants, maybe in conference committee.

But that’s the problem: It’s always easier to stir up fear and anger against something that’s amorphous than to stir up enthusiasm for it.

Hmm. So it’s like this:

Obama: I’m going to turn healthcare upside down. Not sure how.

People: I don’t think I’ll like this.

Obama: Haters!

Remember how Bush was supposed to be the idiot who went into Iraq without a plan, while Obama was supposed to be the cool methodical one? But Reich is admitting that despite all the Administration hoopla, there’s still no plan. Or, possibly, that the White House has a plan, but won’t tell us what it is. And yet the people who don’t want to see a bill — some bill, doing who-knows-what — rammed through in the dead of night are somehow the ones who are ignorant and being manipulated. Right.

A concise jewel of evisceration, no? RTWT.

The bottom line is that it's all Saul Alinsky all the time with our good friend the Manchurian Candidate. He's going to hide the salami from you in all cases. And when you're gullible enough to wonder where the transparency is that he promised -- never mind the moderation and conciliation -- well the problem is with you my friend. You're a hater and a racist!

And if you're a black or person of color who complains then you're an Uncle Tom just in case you think appearances might cause him any embarrassment. Oh, and by the way, some people of color don't count. Lord knows Americans of Japanese and Chinese ancestry have never suffered any persecution in this country so they don't get any ranking on the race-baiter totem pole.

Hmmmmm, and what was the party affiliation of that president who incarcerated the Japanese again? And did I forget to mention that Asians have higher average incomes than whites in this country? Whoops! Down the memory hole with that inconvenient fact...

Anyway, the two Alinsky rules you must never forget:

RULE 5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. ...

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Just in case you were surprised about what was happening to Sarah Palin.

And you.

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Dean Kamen Destroys Obama's Ignorant Healthcare Alarmism

This is a long excerpt of an interview that Popular Mechanics has up with Dean Kamen (H/T Glenn). I strongly recommend that you just click over and RTWT but this is important enough that I'm putting up the conclusion excerpt without hiding it behind a "Read More" jump so you have no excuses.

If you're a free market advocate, you know what Dean's saying in your bones but you maybe haven't heard anyone pull it together into this kind of a concise and devastating argument with market sizes, impacts and comparisons.

And, BTW, Kamen is far from a right wing ideologue. Along with his long list of medical inventions, he's also the inventor of the Segue scooter, which is almost a liberal religious shibboleth! He doesn't flesh this out in Hayekian free market terms because that's not his educational background but you can see there's no fundamental contradiction with his argument and free markets at all. In fact, he's one of the world's pre-eminent medical entrepreneurs. (And ironically, he's one of the founders of the First Lego League robotics competition for elementary and junior high students which I am involved in and find to be heavily staffed with liberal global warming alarmist parents, etc.)

Anyway, here it is:

Kamen: We spent on all pharmaceuticals in the United States last year $260 billion. That means all those vaccinations to prevent diseases, all those pills to treat diseases, all those pills to cure them so we don't have to treat them anymore. We spent in all branches of all our pharmaceutical suppliers, $260 billion.

That's certainly way up from what it was in the early days of the world, but we also spent way more money on computers and other things that didn't exist back then, either, and we don't claim we have a computer crisis. We spent more money on our iPhones last year than we did ten years ago cause there were no iPhones. But let me compare $260 billion to other things. How much did we spend in the United States last year on tobacco? $88 billion. That's a significant piece of 260. It's the reason we spent some of that 260. How much did we spend last year on alcohol? The government doesn't subsidize that, you don't have a right to it, it's discretionary spending and if you were really in trouble you would probably spend a little less on alcohol. We spent $90 billion.

Last year what did we spend in the United States on soft drinks? $121 billion. Nearly half of what we spend on all of our pharmaceuticals, on soft drinks. I'm not against soft drinks—I think you ought to buy all the soft drinks you want.

Last year what did we spend supporting professional sports? $409 billion.

Now if somebody in this country wants to explain to me that we ought to be spending about twice as much supporting sports as on all of our pharmaceuticals, then stop spending. You don't like that drug? You don't want to cure this disease? Don't buy it. But don't make villains out of people so that we can turn what is a real social responsibility issue into a political debate.

PM: Yet health-care costs do keep rising. Is there a point at which we simply can't afford the most advanced treatments?

Kamen: Diabetes alone, if you include all of the long-term, insidious consequences of a lifetime of diabetes, is responsible for about 30 percent of the federal reimbursement for healthcare. Taking care of the diabetic every day is a small piece of it. But what if tomorrow we could wipe out diabetes, suddenly everybody takes a pill and it cures the people that have it, and it inoculates the other people so they'll never have it? Forgetting what a great life that would give people and their families, you take care of 30 percent of what now we project as this insurmountable problem of healthcare, which they project is going to kill us.

Well, it would kill us if we look at the 30-year actuarial data based on our 19th century confidence in technology. But I'm sure in 1920 if you asked actuaries to say what percentage of our GDP are we going to spend taking care of people with polio, they'd say: "They get polio, it goes to their lungs, they sit in iron lung machines, they could live a whole lifetime with three people watching over them. We can't support them all."

But what did it cost to deal with everybody with polio? Oh, $2 apiece. We gave them the Salk vaccine. But in the 1920s Salk wasn't around yet.

PM: In other words, R&D spending now may save money later?

Kamen: If you project forward these horrific costs of treating everybody and you want to assume we are not going to respond to that by making the therapies better, simpler and cheaper and in some cases completely wiping out the [diseases], well you know what? We might actually get to that situation—if we stop investing in technology, if we stop believing that the future ought to be better than the past.

If we want to sit here and keep assuming we should be fighting, and that we should be striving to spend less of our intellectual power and our money on great achievements to come in healthcare—that we should be fighting to make it a smaller piece of our economy—I want to know what you want to make a bigger piece of our economy. What do you want to see the future look like?

I think this debate shows a fundamental lack of vision, a lack of confidence, a lack of understanding of what's possible. And it's being fueled and fed by vested interests of people that have something to gain by making the general public, frankly, afraid of all sorts of things.

Note his perhaps unconscious reference to the liberal healthcare alarmism in similar terms to free market advocate's notice of how the AGW advocates use alarmism. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Get this in the hands of everyone you know who's falling for the collectivist healthcare lunacy. Now.

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Trojan Horse

Red State has the goods on what's really going on with the mad rush into the health "care" abyss.

Obama (D-IL): “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potentially some transition process” (3/24/07, at SEIU “Universal Health Care Forum”); “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care system” (2003 at AFL-CIO event)

Frank (D-MA): “I think if we get a good public option, it could lead to single-payer; that’s the best way to reach single-payer” (7/27/09)

Schakowsky (D-IL): “And next to me was a guy from the insurance company, who then argued against the public health insurance option, saying ‘it wouldn’t let private insurance compete’ — that ‘a public option will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer.’ He was right! The man was right!” (4/18/09)

Any more questions?

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What's Really Going On -- A Cram Course

O Duce is cramming us into slavery. If you want to get the "cram course" on the mechanics of what he's doing, here it is:

Getting it yet?

What's that you say? You feel used like a dirty rug? That would be correct. (H/T Newsbusters)

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The Hill Commenters Take On Health Care

Wow. What are they smoking over at the The Hill site today? Perhaps you missed the provision for euthanasia counseling for instance? Check out this excellent sampling of commenters on what a farce the health care "debate" is (Read More to continue):

13: Perhaps JoeP doesn't know about the provision requiring counseling the aged on euthanasia at least every 5 years (more frequently if they are sick) and therefore doesn't get Linda's reference to President Kevorkian.

Maybe a few of O's defenders are unaware that O openly lied when he said you could keep your plan and your doctor (refer to page 16).

And yes, Pelosi, Reid and O constantly lie to the American people. When the government creates 31+ agencies to control health care, can anyone believe this would be deficit neutral?

When a government can only get $0.35 of every dollar spent for welfare to the actual intended recipients, can anyone believe the government can efficiently administer health care control?

Can a government who has stolen from the social security fund for years to the point of bankrupting it, manage your health care?

Look at any and every government program you know. Is it run well? Does it serve Americans well? Or is it ripe with fraud, inefficiency, bureaucracy, and surly "customer service"?

Lastly - time is not the problem with Congress actually reading bills. I submit they can't stand the stench within these bills and therefore delegate their sworn duties to their underlings. In addition, they want to ram a lot of things through that they will later claim they knew nothing about.

Time is only an issue because they want to make sure the American people don't have long enough to digest the legislation and organize dissent.

Comment by katablog.com — July 19, 2009 @ 9:32 am

18. We should all oppose ANY health care legislation that does not also cover members of Congress and ALL public sector employees, federal, state and local! "OBAMACARE, If It Ain't Good Enough For My Congressman, It Ain't Good Enough For Me!"

Comment by NCBob — July 19, 2009 @ 10:39 am

20: This raises a question in my mind about one of the premises of the whole effort — the need to cover the uninsured. The Census Bureau's raw number of 47 million uninsured is thrown around a lot, but a surprisingly large proportion of these are not too badly off — only 25% are below the poverty line, and fully 47% are at 200% of the poverty line or better. (21% are not citizens, but that is a different issue.) 63% are under age 34.

So, given that dependent children can be covered by Medicaid, there seems to be a strong implication that many of the uninsured are healthy young adults who have made the rational decision not to pay for insurance. And it is rational — in the event of a health catastrophe, the system will not let them die in the street, and health premiums are designed to make them pay for the more intensive older users.

So here is my question — is this whole thing a scam directed at getting the young and healthy into the system to force them to subsidize: (1) Geezers, and (2) Every treatment that can lobby legislatures for mandatory inclusion?

Health care is not my area, except for an interest in innovation, but why wouldn't the whole problem be solved by equalizing the tax treatment of employer and private insurance plans, ensuring the availability of catastrophe insurance, encouraging innovation and the free market, and sending Congress home?

Comment by JVDeLong — July 19, 2009 @ 10:50 am

21. Washington is basically out of it's collective mind. Rep or Dem, no matter. They scurry around, a mass of frenetic energy, while exacerbating the problems that we face.

The biggest favour that they could do for the American people is dismantle a large part of themselves. We don't need new programs, we need them to get out of our lives.

Everything that they touch, goes south, costs insane amounts of money, produces nothing positive and erodes the quality of our lives.

I have never been more unimpressed in my entire adult life than with the bunch that is currently in office.

Comment by JR — July 19, 2009 @ 11:09 am

22. If the administration and Congress are so certain this is the best plan for all us peasants out here (4 out of 5 whom can and have been figuring out how to insure ourselves without government intervention), let them all be required to go on the plan they're proposing.

They won't. It's garbage, and they know it. Obama has said that he wouldn't put his own kids on ObamaCare.

Hypocrites - every last one. Throw the bums out in 2010.

Comment by Good Lt. — July 19, 2009 @ 11:24 am

26. Reform health care ? Why ? The always expanding list of "rights" of Americans is unmatched by responsibility. Reforming the legal profession would be money better spent, since much of the health care cost of this country goes to trial lawyers. Government is less efficient than the private sector. Period. Most Americans can't name any government run programs which they are happy with - or very few anyway.

Americans trust of Congress is at an all time low - so we're going to turn to them for the answers ? And every single time the words "rush" or "hurry" are used to describe the legislative process, you can bet that the legislation is filled with something the politicians don't want us to know about(if they even bothered to read the bill before they voted on it).

Comment by DaveinPhoenix — July 19, 2009 @ 12:05 pm

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