Making Believe; Or, What if You Suddenly Became President?

That interesting thought occurred to me this weekend as I sat on my back patio watching my English Setter make the rounds in the yard. What if an ordinary person suddenly became Presdident of the United States? What would ordinary folks want to do policy wise if they had the power?

So I thought I would ask on this blog: what policies would you pursue if you had the power? So, post yours here in the comments if you wish. I will share this on FB, so one can post in the comments there as well. Please be serious; if there is a demand for a similar, unserious, exercise, I will do a blog on that later.

In that spirit, I will post my first thoughts on policies to pursue below:

1. The first thing I would do is propose to Congress a Constitutional Amendment requiring that the Federal budget be balanced except in times of national emergency declared by the President, and approved by two thirds of the House and Senate. Such an amendment would need to include:

a. A time limit to bring the budget into balance upon passage of no more than 5 years;
b. A requirement that the budget and accounting therefore be according to generally accepted accounting priciples required of taxpaying businesses;
c. A requiremnt that entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare be budgeted separately from the general budget, and require that they be maintained in a solvent situation according to actuarial standards required of the private sector;
d. Some reasonable method of enforcement.....I would deprive any Congressman or Senator who voted for an unbalanced budget of their right to hold Federal office, and cancel their retirements and benefits (LOL).

Getting this through the absolutely corrupt Congress would be a problem, I recognize.

2. I would propose legislation, including a Constitutional Amendment if necessary, to require full disclosure on a publicly available website within 3 days of all political contributions from whatever source and in any amount. Such legislation should also include:
a. A requirement that any organization that substantially engages in efforts to influence elections or legislation be included. That would include the large organizations that are tax exempt and free from any reporting now.
b. The legislation should also require prompt disclosure by elected officials and staff of contacts by lobbyists or campaign donors or their agents made with intent to affect legislation or actions by the executive.
c. Presence of lobbyists when legislation is being marked up, or rulings of the executive are being written, should be prohibited. Let the dang folks we elected write it all up. Keep the big money out of it.

Repeat comment about corruption in Congress (which also extends to the executive branch as well. Please note that aside from prohibiting lobbyists from writing their own bills or rulings as they do now, this only requires disclosure of there the money comes from.

3. I would order, or request legislation to require that before any Federal rule or regulation is adopted, that a thorough cost/benefit study be done, and that nothing can be adopted unless the benefits outweigh the costs.

4. Abolish, or drastically reorganze the following federal departments and agencies:
a. The Department of Homeland Security. This has become an abomination. The few useful functions that it serves can be put under other departments;
b. The Department of Energy. This organization hinders energy development, and has never been useful for much of anything. What it does that needs to be done can be done with a much smaller agency;
c. The Department of Education. This department has done irreparable harm to education. Matters of education, including the financing thereof should be left to the states and local governments. Most of them are hooked on the federal money, so that should be made to the states in block grants without strings, and phased out over 7 to 10 years.
d. The Federal Reserve should be abolished. It is a privately owned organization that was given total power over our money in 1913. It has used that power solely for the benefit of its owners. Functions of the Federal Reserve, including the Federal Open Market Committee should be moved to the Treasury, with strict prohibitions against the "revolving door" we see now between the big banks, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. It is time to bring control over our money back to the people and to their elected government.

Repeat comment about corruption. It is endless.

5. It has to go somewhere: bring the boys and girls (ground troops) home from overseas. Now. We should only have ground troops out of the country where they are required by treaty obligations, or are necessary to protect our diplomatic missions or existing air and naval bases. We need a strong Navy to protect our maritime interests and a strong Air Force to protect the homeland. We also need a good and mobile Army just in case, but they should not be deployed constantly like they have been.

6. The Drug War. This has to be discussed. I have been in the law business for 49 years. Have been a judge and before that a prosecutor. The one conclusion that I have come to is that what we are doing about drugs does not work. I have come to believe that it is counter productive is some ways. I would propose that a thorough study be done of very aspect of the drug situation, from enforcement to treatment. A thorough cost/benefit analysis has to be done. Drugs are a scourge upon our society, but so is the "war." Our policies on drugs, like before with alcohol, have created massive criminal organizations that are beyond our control. We have to reconsider what we are doing. If I had an answer, I would post it, but I do not. As a partial solution we might consider with marijuana what we finally, and sensibly, did with alcohol....legalize it, regulate its sale, tax the hell out of it, and prohibit driving and similar activities while using it. This is a terribly difficult area to deal with but we must find some answers somehow. We will need a lot of luck.

OK. I am going to stop. Criticism and comments are welcome. Feel free to disagree....I may end up disagreeing with myself. Just no personal attacks. That will not be tolerated.

On Eating Our Seed Corn; Or, Why Gross Domestic Product Measures May be Deceiving

Those raised around farms will probably know what eating one's seed corn means, but what does that have to do with Gross Domestic Product? Read on, and I will try to make the point.

Back in the 1970s on the campaign trail with my good friend Bob Krueger (former Democratic Congressman and US Senator) Bob would often use the term "we are eating our seed corn" in discussing government budgets and deficits. (Yes, Democrats, or some of them, were concerned about that in those days.) Bob was one of those rare politicians who would tell the truth, even when many people didn't want to hear it.

Of course we know that if you eat your seed corn, you have no seed to plant to get next year's crop. You would then be broke, or would starve to death. Not a good outcome.

This brings us to the current debate over the huge and growing deficits and national debt. Borrowing against the future to pay for the present is just like eating your seed corn. Our people, many businesses, and almost all of our governments have been doing this for years. The party is just about over. The train that is our economy is about to come to the abyss.

So what does this have to do with Gross Domestic Product, and how it is measured. Read on.

GDP is measured by adding Consumption (both private and business) plus Investment plus Government Spending plus Net Exports (exports - imports).

Those are the constituent parts of GDP. Note that the only net figure is the import/export number, and for over 40 years that has been a negative number.

Right now, GDP as thus measured is positive, and we are in a "recovery." Does it feel like a recovery to you? Ask the record number of long term unemployed.

Why do not we measure the net domestic product, whereby all of the spending would be reduced by the amount of borrowing that supports it? NDP has a good ring.

I am not an economist, so I cannot give any expert opinion on why the gross figure is considered better than a net figure, but I do know that relying on the gross figure has to distort the view of what is really happening in the economy.

Consider that government spending is all included although at least 44% of it is borrowed money. Is that why politicians always want to do a big stimulous when we hit a recession? It certainly makes it statistically look like a recovery. That is why we had a "recovery" this past year, and now that the stimulous is running out the "recovery" is faltering.

Back out the deficit spending and a clearer  image of the real economy emerges.

Also consider that private (consumer) spending is also a gross figure, when by all reports, much of it is again being done on credit cards. This, of course, is one reason why the Federal Reserve always wants to force interest rates down during a recession. They want to encourage the consumer to borrow and spend.(Another is to allow the banks to borrow at low rates and lend at higher rates, helping their profits.) That is a lot of what got us into this problem.

The last decades were spent on a big joyride, with consumers being encouraged to buy things (houses among them) that they could not afford. A lot of people maxed out their credit, then borrowed their home equities to buy the tickets for that ride.

The fact that the measured GDP was good enabled the politicians---of all stripes--- to get elected and reelected because times appeared to be better than they were. And they sold it as such.

Here is where the measure of GDP deceives us: the last forty years we have been eating our seed corn, and the economic measure the government statisticians, the economic statitisticians, and the politicians have been using to tell us where we are has hidden the facts. Of course, we all know about liars, damned liars, statisticians, and politicians.

What is all this about? It is very simple. Over 30 years ago, Bob was right. We were eating our seed corn then, and that has continued to this day. And many want to continue.

That train I wrote about six months ago when I last posted speeds on nearer the abyss. At some point it will get too late to stop it in time.

Somebody needs to get serious about this, or we need to throw them out.

The State of the United States

No, not the speech, although I will get to it later, perhaps.

The state of our country is not good. We are mired in a deep recession with high and growing unemployent, and only the huge institutions that were bailed out by the government are showing profits. Main Street still suffers.

We are in a situation caused by a huge expansion of credit wherein large financial institutions, both private and semi-public engaged in wild speculation, creating a bubble in real estate, and then the bubble popped.

This had the effect of destroying much of the capital of the financial institutions, but also the capital of the general public.

With the bubble gone, the US Government under George W. Bush stepped in to socialize the huge losses of the financial institutions, but not, of course, the huge losses that had been imposed upon the general public. (I call this the Golden Rule) In fact, the general public will end up paying for the financial institutions' losses as well as their own.

Hope and Change gets elected and promptly nationalizes General Motors and to some extent, Chrysler.

Relief for the general public? Hardly.

Next is a huge "stimulous" bill that goes primarily to large Democratic political constituencies, adds nearly a trillion to the deficit, and accomplishes nothing but add further burdens on the general public.

We then get a Cap and Trade Bill that is rushed through the House without being read. This bill would add hundreds of billions to the costs of energy....to be ultimately paid by whom? You got it. The general public.

With the first of these matters a movement began to form: The Tea Parties. The public was awakening. But the politicians ignored them or put them down as extremists. Who were the partiers? The general public.

After Cap and Trade passed the House, the Pelosi crowd began to attempt to socialize our country's medical care. Behind closed doors.

It was if the Iron Curtain was rebuilt right there in Washington, D.C. Everything was done behind closed doors. In secrecy. Few know what kind of deals were made to buy "support" for the bill, but what is known is that it was terribly unfair to.........the general public.

A similar bill is now pending in the Senate, where the majority party is still trying to push it through, in spite of the opposition of....the general public.

So here we are after one year of Hope and Change. We have no hope, and only a change for the worse.

Elections in Virginia and Massachusetts have given the general public a chance to be heard, but from the State of the Union speech last night, it is clear that the lessons have been lost by the politicians in our government.

Maybe they should all watch and listen to the ad that newly elected Senator Scott Brown ran during the campaign in Massachusetts. It is one of the very best I have heard in my over fifty years in politics.

You can find it here. If you do nothing else, go to this ad.

The public will get little, if any, relief from the policies spoken of by the President last night.

But we can get relief in November when we have the opportunity to throw all the rascals out. There is Hope, after all.

Who will lead the revolution?

What About Social Security?

With all the heat over the health care issues, the issue of Social Security is being ignored. That is a shame, because Social Security presents us with a far more pressing problem than health care.

Because of the current recession, it now appears that the point at which SS revenues become less than its benefit payments has advanced from 2017 as reported by the Government Accountability Office to 2012 or sooner. That means that SS is basically broke, because there is no money in the SS Trust Fund.

Benefits will have to be paid out of general revenue after that. Congress has spent the Trust Fund on other things. And there is no fiduciary responsibility for the Trust Fund as there would be for private ones. How clever.

According to the GAO in 2005( go there, it is a great report), it would take $12 Trillion dollars paid in now to fully fund future SS benefits at current levels. Try that on for size.

As a result, Social Security needs some real change, not talk. There are several ways to cure the problem and make sure that our children have some semblance of retirement security.

We could do what most private companies have done, and what most state and local governments are going to have to do. That is, go to a defined contribution plan, as opposed to the current defined benefit plan we have.

I suspect that will be a non-starter for Democrats, because the defined benefit plan has a large amount of wealth redistribution in it. That was why they were so adamantly opposed to Bush's partial privatization, which was really making part of SS a defined contribution plan.

On to other possibilities.

We could raise the tax on wages. An increase of 15% in payroll taxes today would do it. If we wait until 2041, it would have to be 41%. Of course, with the latter date, general revenue (with its tax stream) would have to finance it until then. I do not favor this. I think it would be unfair to our young people.

We could raise the cap on wages taxed. This would require those with a higher income to pay much higher taxes, but get higher benefits, though far from dollar for dollar because of the redistributionist benefit schedule. Now the maximum wage taxed is $102,000 per year.

We could change the benefits, either by reducing them significantly or by delaying the payment of them.

Both of those benefit changes would have to be phased in over a decently long period for it to be fair to those already receiving SS or nearing eligibility. Probably the way they extended the eligibility date to age 67 may be appropriate.

Delaying the benefits may be the best way. When SS was set up, the age of 65 was very old. The primary reason SS is broke is that people receiving benefits are living much longer than we used to, and so each person receives far more in benefits than planned.

The quite simple way to solve this problem is to extend the eligibility date as the life expectancy increases.

It is imperative that Congress addresses this issue. It is extremely difficult politically to do so, but there is also not much time. Support for Social Security is beginning to evaporate as more and more young people become politically active. Few of them believe that they will ever receive SS, but realize that it is they who are paying for what their elders are getting.

They understand that this is terribly unfair....and it is.

This week, in a poll done by Rasmussen, he found the following:

"Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S. voters say working Americans should be allowed to opt out of Social Security and provide for their own retirement planning."

In addition:

"Sixty percent (60%) of voters are not confident that the Social Security system will pay them all promised benefits during their lifetime, with 36% not very confident and 24% not at all confident."

This does not bode well for the future of Social Security, and may be signalling a widening generational dispute.

If support is to be maintained for SS, then it must be made fair to everyone, and that includes sacrifices from us all.

This is a very emotional subject, and has been the source of a lot of demagoguing by politicians on both sides of the issues. It is time for that to stop. There has to be room for responsible compromise on the various choices. Some combination of the above will probably do the job.

Both sides of the issues need to sit down and work something out. The hyperpartisanship we have seen in Washington the last few years is not getting the job done, and will not.

Both sides had better realize that the folks back home are getting impatient. We want a government that works for all of us. But not one that is intrusive into our private lives.

That means that the "my way or the highway" attitudes by our political class has to be discarded, and the pols need to get to work.

Or else.

Obamacare and the Constitution

Someone is finally raising a very valid point about the attempt at a Federal takeover of health care.

Is is Constitutional?

That is a complex question, because the Supreme Court has over the years seriously broadened the powers of the government beyond those contemplated by the Framers, and expressly stated in the Constitution itself.

So, although I do not believe that the Constitution permits it, there is the potential that the Supreme Court might find otherwise.

Rob Natelson, over at Electric City Weblog, writes a bit about the question today, stating:

"Enumerated powers. The Constitution grants the federal government about thirty-five specific powers – eighteen in Article I, Section 8, and the rest scattered throughout the document. (The exact number depends on how you count.) None of those powers seems to authorize control of the health care system outside the District of Columbia and the federal territories."

The catch, however is:

"To be sure, since the late 1930s, the Supreme Court has been tolerant of the federal welfare state, usually justifying federal ad hoc programs under specious interpretations of the congressional Commerce Power. "

Thanfully, there is a "but":


"But, except in wartime, the Court has never authorized an expansion of the federal scope quite as large as what is being proposed now. And in recent years, both the Court and individual justices – even “liberal” justices – have said repeatedly that there are boundaries beyond which Congress may not go."

My view is that if it is not a power ennumerated in the Constitution, then it is governed by the Tenth Amendment:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Sounds pretty clear, doesn't it.

Questions like these are what Supreme Court selection is all about. The left wants appointees who will ignore the Constitution and approve every harebrained idea they have, while the right wants appointees who will preserve the Constitution.

Roosevelt, when he was President, forced the Supreme Court to back off the concept of due process with regard to the taking of property, by threatening to "pack" the Court by expanding the number of justices above the traditional nine.

That caused a lot of very questionable legislation to be passed and approved by the Court

Will Obama and the Democrats do that again? Or will the present Court just let them have what they want? What will Justice Kennedy do?

Perhaps the bill can be defeated and then we won't have to worry.

The Real Problem With the Health Care Debate

The real problem with health care is that they have done it in a way that nobody can really be informed. Clearly the Congress is not, and clearly the folks on both sides are not.


This is the crux of the matter: the whole issue has been presented in such a poor way that nobody really knows or appreciates what is actually in the various bills, and the attempt to rush it through with no debate, like the stimulus and the cap and trade bill, leaves the public to assume that the health care bill is as bad as the others.

This is just real poor politics by Obama and the Congressional leaders. Camille Paglia had it right.

People fear the unknown. The bill's provisions are unknown....deliberately. The Democrats are losing the fight for that reason, and should.

What needs to be done is that Obama needs to lay out the bill he wants, and then the various committees in Congress should hold public hearings and hear everyone's views.

After hearings and a fair markup debate, what comes out should be freely debated on the House floor (or the Senate, as the case may be) and voted up or down after any amendments. In other words, they should follow their own procedures.

Instead, the Democrat leadership in the House tried to rush something through without debate and without really informing the public what was in it.

This is not how a Democratic Republic like ours is supposed to work. It is a violation of all the tenets of fairness.

For that reason all of the bills should be voted down, and a new start made.

We were promised bi-partisanship by Obama. Instead, we have gotten worse partisanship than even Tom DeLay caused.

Shame on them all.

Good Enough For Us, But Not For Them

The Great, Fabulous health care bill that will have deep and lasting effects upon all of us, has been determined by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to be not good enough for the President and the Congress.

I see this over at Redstate in a post by Jeff Emmanuel.

The committee site is here, but it is not functioning because of the high traffic, and has not kept up with the voting.

The first vote was on an amendment to permit all Americans to share the same medical plan that Congress has. That was voted down by the Democrats by 31-28.

The second would have required all Members of Congress and Federal public officials to be automatically enrolled in the so-called public plan.

This was ruled not germane by Democratic Chairman Waxman, saving the Democrats from having to vote on it.

Surprise, surprise.

Who would have thought that we would see Congress feeling that their plan was too good for us peons, and their plan for us was not good enough for them?

That is precisely what they have done.

Outrageous.

But what can we expect from that den of thieves?

Will Rogers was right:

"The only native criminal class in America is Congress."

And the worst are Democrats.

Big Bankers Legally Steal Public Funds

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, doing a job that apparently nobody else wants, has blown the whistle on the Treasury and the large financial institutions that the Treasury has been bailing out.

Nine big banks which received $175 Billion in TARP funds from the Treasury paid a total of $32.6 Billion in bonuses to their employees.

Anyone that is not outraged at this must be living in a cave in Afghanistan.

These people steered their companies into the greatest bust since the Great Depression, and they get bonuses like that for their performance? With our tax money?

Something is very rotten here.

And why are not the politicians that supposedly are representing the people not doing something?

Follow the money.

Lots of campaign contributions, and lots of lobbyist money.

Stories on this are here, and here.

The Pelosi Payroll Tax; UPDATE:Demo says even they don't understand the bill

The Wall Street Journal today points out that there is more than one tax in the proposed health care reform bill.

Its an up to 10% payroll tax on workers whose employers don't provide health insurance. Now it is in the bill as a tax on employers, but it is no secret that such taxes will result in lower pay and benefits for the workers.

"To put this in actual dollars, a worker earning, say, $70,000 a year could lose some $5,600 in take home pay to cover the costs of ObamaCare. And, by the way, this is in addition to the 2.5% tax that the individual worker would have to pay on gross income, if he doesn’t buy the high-priced health insurance that the government will mandate. In sum, that’s a near 10-percentage point tax on wages and salaries on top of the 15% that already hits workers to finance Medicare and Social Security."

This is just one of the things that would not be discussed if the bill had been hurried through like she tried to do.

The four Blue Dogs who caved in yesterday at least give us some time to carefully go through this bill, something we were not able to do with the cap and trade bill.

It will be interesting to discover what else is hidden in the legislation.

Isn't it nice to have such open and transparent processes in the Democrat Congress?

Criminal, at best.

UPDATE: According to Politico, even Democrats in Congress don't understand the health care reform:

"A Democratic lawmaker, Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, agrees. “The members don’t even understand what’s in it,” he confessed of the legislation. As for his constituents? They are “not exactly sure what this is about, and they’re not really sure whether they like it or not.” "

What does that say about them and their haste to rush it through? Transparency? Hope and change? Tyranny of the majority?

Blue Dogs Cave on Health Care Reform; Updated: No vote until late September or later: Obama

There are reports out this afternoon that the Blue Dog Democrats have compromised with the "yellow dog" Democrats, and have agreed on an outline of a bill that would radically change health care in the United States.

Given that the Congressional Budget Office has cited the huge costs of the bill...over one trillion dollars..... the Blue Dogs could be said to have caved in by agreeing to reduce the costs by only an estimated one hundred billion dollars. That is a lot of money, but only a drop in the bucket.

So, what else did they get? Well, they didn't get the national insurance out of the provisions, but they did require that government insurance company negotiate fees with doctors rather than unilaterally set them like it does with Medicare. But that still gets the government's nose under the tent, and we all know where that will go.

They did get a increase in the ceiling for mandatory insurance, doubling it to payrolls of $500,000 or less. That is still too low by far.

There is no mention of Medicare.

It seems a lot of the savings will come from two places, as reported by the New York Times:

"¶ Medicaid would be expanded, as under the original bill, but states would have to pay a small share of the additional costs, perhaps 7 percent. The federal government would have paid the entire cost under the original bill.

"¶ Workers would have to pay slightly more of their income on premiums for employer-sponsored insurance — 12 percent, rather than 11 percent — before they could qualify for federal subsidies."

So savings would come from charging workers more money, and putting additional costs on the states. Isn't that nice? Guess who still pays?

What do we have at the end of the day? The best part of it is that they delayed the bill from coming up for a vote until after Labor Day.

That will at least mean that someone will have a chance to read the bill after it is marked up in committee, and before it is presented to the House for a vote.

That is a change. Celebrate the small things.

They won't be able to change that sow's ear into a silk purse during the recess. But they will try to sell it as one.

And the so-called "conservative" Democrats, the Blue Dogs, showed their true colors once again.

The term "conservative" Democrat is an oxymoron, by the way. If they were conservative, they would not be Democrats. It has been thirty years since there was a real live conservative in the Democratic Party. We all left back then.

UPDATE: Obama is quoted this evening as saying there will not be a vote on the Health Care Reform Bill until late September or mid-October.

This is a major defeat for Obama and Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership.

"End of Life" Counselling

There was too much work yesterday to post, but here goes one for today.

At the beginning, please understand that I am opposed to the health care reform being proposed in Congress. There are many, many aspects of it that I find deeply troubling.

There is one that is being used by opponents to scare senior citizens in the same way the Democrats have always done on Social Security reform. That strategy has been very effective for the Democrats, of course, but that doesn't make it right.

There is a provision in the bill that amends the Social Security Act (the part that applies to Medicare reimbursements) to provide for payment for end of life counselling for seniors every five years, and more frequently if the senior has a terminal illness.

I have read the two bills, and there is no requirement that anyone have the counselling as the fearmongers say. It just permits them to have it, and be covered by Medicare.

My view is that every senior should have the counselling provided for in the bill whether or not the bill is passed with that in it. The last couple of times I have gone to the hospital, I have been asked if I had a directive to physicians and a medical power of attorney. I have, and so should everyone if you want your wishes to be honored.

There is, in fact, another provision that provides for such counselling already in the Medicare Act.

There are a lot of reasons to oppose the bills before Congress, but this is not one of them.

You may find the provision at issue here.

The part of the Social Security Act being amended is here.

Defend Your Health Care

In trying to research the health care matters before Congress one particular website stands out. Its called Defend Your Health Care. It is run by Betsy McCaughey, PhD, a former Lt. Governor of the State of New York.

You can hear an interview with her at this site.

Everyone should go to the web site and check it out. The first thing you will see is something I have also pointed out in an earlier post:

"Whatever health insurance bill is passed in Congress MUST apply to members of Congress and other federal employees. No Exceptions.

If it isn't good enough for them, it isn't good enough for us.

We are calling on members of Congress to propose an amendment to the Kennedy Health Bill requiring all federal employees to enroll in a "qualified" health plan just like the rest of us. "

The only way for us to get the scheming politicians in DC to pass anything reasonably fair is to require that they be subject to the same provisions.

The fact that they choose to exempt themselves is certain evidence that they know its a bad bill.

This whole matter is outrageous.

The politicians, particularly those on the left, are trying to steal our country.

Between the health "reform," the cap and trade bill, the huge deficit spending, and a whole big bunch of other things, they will destroy our freedom if we permit them to do it.

A political revolution is needed.

Who will lead it?

Memo to the President and Congress re: Health Care

Mr. President and Congress, you are presently trying to pass a health care reform bill. You have exempted yourselves and all Federal employees from the provisions thereof.

You need to pardon me for shouting, but:

I WILL ACCEPT ANY REFORM OF MEDICAL CARE THAT YOU AND ALL FEDERAL EMPLOYEES WILL BE SUBJECT TO, AND NONE OTHER.

PERIOD.

I do not know why you believe that you have some kind of superior rights to the rest of us, but rest assured, you do not.

The South Plainsman

Bored?

Last night's press conference shows that Americans are becoming bored with Obama. It was the lowest rated yet in terms of viewers.

It was also the lowest rated in terms of substance.

Called to help bolster the sagging health care agenda, the presser demonstrated that Obama does not have a clue about the subject matter.

Even with the adoring White House press corps asking softer than goose down questions, Obama couldn't get into the swing of things. From the first question until the last, he gave circuitous, meaningless answers to the easy questions.

The last, of course, was the doozy about racial profiling, where he took a stand before he even had heard the evidence.

If everyone keeps the heat on their Congressmen and Senators, ObamaCare should be defeated.

Hopefully the same for the cap and tax, er, trade, bill.

Meantime, at the stock markets, Obama's lackluster performance gave it a boost above $9,000 on the Dow Jones Average today.

So perhaps he did accomplish something.

Birth Certificate Issue Makes it to Congress

It seems that those who question Obama's natural born citizen status have gotten some Congressmen to jump on the bandwagon.

There is a bill co-sponsored by 9 Congressmen, including our own Randy Neugebauer, that would require any candidate for President to produce his or her birth certificate.

John Avlon, writing over at The Daily Beast, thinks that is rather silly, and it certainly may well be.

"All this might be laughable, if there weren’t deadly serious hyper-partisan hatred behind it all. There is plenty to debate over the administration’s policies, but Obama Derangement Syndrome is not healthy for our democracy—it is pathological hatred of the president posing as patriotism."

Those are pretty harsh words for what might seem a reasonable sort of request. Reminds me of the Bush Derangement Syndrome we saw for 8 years.

My view is that Obama should release his birth certificate. If he is who he says he is, and I have no reason to doubt it, then he could put this business to rest very quickly, and send the "birthers" running with their tails between their legs.

The only thing that gives this life is Obama's strenuous efforts to hide the birth certificate and other records that most Presidents release.

Is he trying to hide something?

Health care on the front burner

William Katz over at Urgent Agenda calls our attention to something in the New York Daily News writtten by one Kristen Lopez Eastlick about a study done by her organization for the Congressional Budget Office. The subject was the nation's folks that are not insured for health care. Who are the 47 million uninsured, really? is part of the title of the article.

It seems that the study found that 43% of them are voluntarily uninsured, in that they make an average of $65,000 per year, and can therefore afford the coverage, but for their own reasons, choose not to buy it. I can see why we don't hear that from the pols in DC.

She goes on to point out that 13% of the uninsured are illegal aliens. In addition, 40 % of the uninsured are unemployed, and if they could find suitable employment or were trained so they could, many of them could get insurance from their employers.

As a result, she questions why we should do such a radical overhaul of our entire system, when lesser approaches would solve the problem. That is a good question.

Mr. Katz has a comment of his own:

"Congress is about to enact a hugely expensive solution to a problem it doesn't even understand. Indeed, the lack of interest in facts is stunning. It's especially stunning when you look at the media, which is always whining about "the people's right to know." Apparently, there are many things the people don't have a right to know, like the real nature of the health-care "crisis.""

Why the hurry? Why such drastic measures? Why such high costs?

Only The Shadow knows.

The Only Thing Stimulated In a Government Stimulus

Ed Morrissey has an article over at AIP that discusses what the "stimulus" bill stimulates:

"A new GAO review of the $787 billion stimulus package tells us what we should have known all along. When government spends money themselves to stimulate the economy rather than let citizens have their own money to spend, the only part of the economy that gets stimulated is government itself. " (My emphasis)

Who would have guessed? The liberals in Congress rushed this bill through with anyone even having a chance to read it, without any input, and without letting the public in on any of it.

This is the kind of hope and change we can expect from the Democrats, and probabaly from a lot of the Republicans as well. Over three quarters of a trillion dollars, which is equal to about $100,000 per household of four, is blown proping up government programs that need to be pared back.

What could your family have done with that money? Better than the government, I would bet.

Read the whole article.

And think about getting a new bunch of politicians.

Wondering if.....

Starting the blogging day wondering if the clowns in our Congress ever intend to start actually reading and understanding the important legislation they hurriedly pass.

The stimulus bill and now the disastrous "cap and trade" bill were rushed through the House before anyone had even a chance to read them. Is somebody trying to sneak something through?

Hope and change at work.

We need to throw them all out.

Our Congress(ional staff) at work

Seems like the computers at the Congress got slowed down because so many staffers were watching the MJ funeral on the web.

According to Politico:

"Another staffer tells Shenan that everyone in Cannon is watching the memorial. "All the offices have closed their doors" and "literally the halls are empty." Plus, there was a sighting of a teary-eyed intern. "Thank God we have late votes today," added the staffer, "I would body-check anyone who tried to change the channel to CSPAN right now.""

Doesn't it make every one of you warm and fuzzy to think that these are the people making laws for us?

Congress and medicine

Starting the blogging day wondering why, if socialized medicine is so good for us, Congress is exempting itself from the rules.

Of course, Congress is very good at exempting itself from onerous rules it passes for those of us in the hinterland.

We need to throw all the bums out and start over.