Showing posts from November, 2009

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Son of Stimulus Set to Attack American Economy

Even as the health care debate continues to rage, Democrats have their hearts set on countering their disastrous ratings and the loss of the independent voter by rolling out a job creation package, or Son of Stimulus Plan. There are no clear plans yet, but the ones floating around as preliminary ideas are bad enough on their own. With price tags going as high as 1.2 trillion dollars and various gimmicks being trotted out to hide their cost and avoid blame for inflating the already massive deficit further, the Son of Stimulus is likely to be as big a disaster as its parent. Take House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer's plan to pay for a job creation plan with a financial transactions tax . Not only would this plan help push investors out of the US stock market, at a time when the market is already in bad shape, but it would weigh down the stock market thereby preventing companies from expanding and going public. Which naturally would crush the very same job creation congressional De

Democracy vs the Muslim Bayonet

The media is filled with outrage today at the decision by Swiss voters to ban the construction of new minarets by the growing number of Muslims living in Switzerland. The vote which has been opposed by the Swiss government and both the Catholic and the Protestant churches once again demonstrates that populist democracy is the only real barrier to an Islamist takeover. But at the same time the reaction to it betrays a great deal of hypocrisy. Going by the outrage at this ill treatment of Muslims, one might assume that Muslim countries are a haven of religious freedom. But in fact one of the codes of the Dhimmi prohibited building Synagogues and Churches taller in height than Mosques. This can be seen even in churches in Europe that were once located in Muslim ruled territories, such as the Church of Sveti Spas in Macedonia which was built mostly underground to avoid falling afoul of Muslim rules while still allowing for a high interior space. The same phenomenon can be seen in the m

Taxed for Living

Forget taxes on income or consumption, the ultimate in regressive taxation is a tax simply for living. ObamaCare's mandatory health insurance or fine helps pioneer the notion that people should be taxed just for being alive. In his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Obama called his health care tax a fine. Which would then mean that the United States government is now fining people for living. Democratic politicians from Obama on down have used the trite metaphor of a driver's license. But a driver's license is based on a choice. You can choose to buy a car or not. You can't however choose to be alive, or rather you can but the only alternative is death. That essentially makes ObamaCare a tax or a fine just for living. Which can't help but seem like a gateway arch to euthanasia, expressing a value system that sees human life itself as an unwanted nuisance at best and an offense at worst. The stated rationale that people have to be fined ahead of time for the cost

Friday Afternoon Roundup - An Unprecedented Mountain of Debt

Since Obama is rather attached to describing everything he does as " unprecedented ", "I have achieved an unprecedented level of transparency", "I played an unprecedented amount of golf this year" and "I just wasted an unprecedented amount of money"... in honor of the Liar in Chief, we can make "unprecedented" the word of the day. First up is Obama's unprecedented deficit. The current real cost of ObamaCare is up to 2.5 Trillion dollars and rising. The Senate Republicans' chart demonstrates that the total for all of these costs -- based on CBO projections for the bill's true first 10 years -- is $2.5 trillion. And costs would only skyrocket from there, as the chart's trajectory suggests. In the 5 years to follow (2024-28), spending on "expansions in insurance coverage" alone would be $1.7 trillion, making the bill's total costs in its real first 15 years well over $4 trillion -- based on CBO project

The Dead End Quest for Peace

Peace, peace. Everyone wants peace. Or so we would like to think. Chamberlain and a sizable portion of the English electorate were certain that Hitler wanted peace and all that was needed was for everyone to sit down around a table, make some compromises (at someone else's expense if possible) and everyone could go back to buying their biscuits, playing cricket and generally enjoying life. What did not occur to them was the possibility that Hitler did not want peace. What did not occur to them was that by constantly talking about peace, they were only bridging the gap to war with their own naivete and conspicuous weakness. A year into Obama's first term dedicated to multilateralism and soft power, the world is more unstable than ever. Iran is openly pursuing nuclear weapons and regional domination. North Korea is firing on South Korean ships. The Chavez Marxist axis in Latin America has become more ambitious. Russia is amping up the rhetoric against the Ukraine and George a

Why Global Warming is Not Science

The leaked email correspondence from the University of East Anglia, whose Climatic Research Unit is a key element in the push toward blaming humankind for the earth's natural global and cooling cycles, only graphically revealed what was known all along, that the supposedly scientifically proven conclusions of global warming science were a political fortress guarding a scientific house of cards built on manipulated data and an aggressive campaign of silencing critics and dissenters. The Global Warming boom is big business for Green Companies and certain liberal politicians who have jumped on their bandwagon, such as Al Gore who went from a few million to a hundred million, and is likely to become a billionaire if cap and trade becomes a reality. But it is not science, not simply because it is wrong, but because it is a case of scientific conclusions being powered by political ideas, rather than the other way around. Using the scientific method to form questions, test them and emer

Where Are All the Jobs?

These days even Saturday Night Live is mocking Obama's failed job creation programs, mainly because the stench of Barry's economic failure has become a little too pungent to ignore. But then again Obama's programs were never designed to create jobs in the first place. As far back as 2008, I pointed out that Obama's proposal put the environment first and jobs a distance third if at all, emphasizing environment efficiency and infrastructure programs, neither of which had any serious likelihood of creating permanent jobs. And unsurprisingly they didn't. Obama has inflated the bureaucracy at taxpayer expense, but he has not actually created jobs. Had he cut taxes by the same amount that he spent or just outright put the money to granting tax breaks to companies willing to move jobs to the United States, he could have boasted some actual job creation numbers. But Obama has no interest in creating jobs. As a former Community Organizer, read Poverty Pimp, Obama is not

Toward a Sustainable Immigration Policy

While the rising threat of terrorism, violence and honor killings produced by Muslim immigration tends to be in the news lately, the problems produced by immigration are not limited solely to Islam. The problem of Muslim immigration was created by a larger trend in First World immigration policies that favors bringing in cheap labor for short term commercial and political gain. Such immigration policies however are seriously damaging to the nations that utilize them and cannot be sustained. So what we must do is look for a sustainable immigration policy. The first principle we need to begin with is that immigration should be in a nation's interest. While this seems self-evident, it is a principle that has gone by the wayside. For a clear example of what that leads to, consider Obama's move to allow people infected with AIDS to freely enter the United States. Clearly the entry of people with a deadly communicable disease for which there is no cure into the United States is n

No Room in Obama's Jerusalem for the Jew

The same media which can't be bothered to notice that there is a proxy war going on between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, with Saudi jets bombing civilian targets. Who have paid no attention whatsoever to a week of violence between Algerians and Egyptians that included stonings and death threats, are up in arms over the building of 900 housing units in the Gilo neighborhood in Jerusalem. The Obama Administration and the media are naturally not upset by the Jerusalem municipality's decision to build 500 housing units for Arabs in Jerusalem. No they're upset by a private Jewish housing project built on privately owned land. And that double standard aptly conveys their premise that a Jewish house in Jerusalem is a "settlement", while an Arab house in Jerusalem is just a house. A Jewish home violates the "status quo" and is "unhelpful for peace", while an Arab home is just a home. There is of course a name for that sort of policy, it's one