Sock it to 'em, sock it to 'em. Then tell 'em how you are helping them.
More Obama flim flam thinking and acting. (See 1 below.)
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Worst of 'Obamascare's' impact yet to come.
Worst of 'Obamascare's' impact yet to come.
You may think my constant harping and warnings are simply sour grapes. However, when you send an arrogant know it all to fix something that worked but needed some tweaking on the cost and efficiency side and add to it demands that will overwhelm the system with bureaucratic red tape and costs you will soon find out what I have been warning about and it is probably going to be even worse.
Obama's job approval remains above 50% but has dropped. People continue to like him personally because they they find him charismatic and have yet to connect him to why they overwhelmingly believe the nation is going in the wrong direction.
I attribute this to the fact that the press and media continue to be unwilling to report and connect. They are more engaged in protecting and circling the wagons.
It will be interesting to see can they continue this ruse.(See 2 below.)
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Finally, he is writing a new book which shouldbe out next year. It will be about one of Obama's high profile cabinet people and should be a great read.
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Hagel just can't seem to show intelligent judgement so why not make him Sec. of Defense. (See 3 below.)
Graham and McCain relent. (See 3a below.)
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No apologies due. (See 4 below.)
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Rock: We have a father in Obama! (See See 5 below.)
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I have spent the last day bumming around with John Fund who is speaking tonight at the SIRC President's Day annual fund raiser.
I will report on his comments in a subsequent memo but it has been interesting chatting with him. We have a bet .He insisted give him two to one odds. He takes the position Hillary will not run and even should she , will not be elected.
He also is of the view that Obama's policies will not work and the 2014 election will thus,be a wash out for Democrats.
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Dick
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1)The Minority Youth Unemployment Act
A higher minimum wage will hurt Obama's most loyal supporters.
One paradox of the Obama Presidency is how it has retained the support of young people and minorities despite the damage its policies have done to their economic prospects. In his latest attempt to increase the minority youth jobless rate, President Obama is proposing to raise the minimum wage.
In his State of the Union address, Mr. Obama proposed an increase to $9 an hour by 2015 from $7.25, and then indexing the minimum to inflation. "Employers may get a more stable workforce due to reduced turnover and increased productivity," the White House says. No doubt employers are slamming their foreheads wondering why they didn't think of that.
And don't worry about lost jobs. "A range of economic studies," a White House memo assures, "show that modestly raising the minimum wage increases earnings and reduces poverty without measurably reducing employment." Note the shifty adverbs, "modestly" and "measurably," which can paper over a lot of economic damage.
In the real world, setting a floor under the price of labor creates winners and losers. Some workers will get a $1.75 raise. Great. But others—typically the least educated and skilled—will be priced out of the job market and their pay won't rise to $9. It will be zero.
University of California at Irvine economist David Neumark has looked at more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage, and he says the White House claim of de minimis job losses "grossly misstates the weight of the evidence." About 85% of the studies "find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers."
The minimum wage is also an ineffective way to reduce poverty. Most families in poverty don't have someone who works, so making it more difficult to get a job exacerbates poverty. Mr. Obama says that a "family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty level. That is wrong."
He left out that most minimum-wage earners are not the primary bread winner. Nearly 40% live with a parent or relative. The average family income of a household with a minimum-wage worker is about $47,023—which is far above the poverty line of $23,550 for a family of four.
Mr. Obama didn't even tell the whole story about parents raising a family on a minimum-wage income. A full-time minimum-wage worker earns roughly $15,000 a year. But that worker also receives a cash supplement from the earned income tax credit of roughly $5,000, and many states provide benefits on top of that to reward working. That doesn't count government benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, child care and more. According to data from the Employment Policies Institute, about two of every three minimum-wage workers also get a raise within one year.
The damage from a minimum wage hike depends on the overall labor market. If the job market is buoyant, as it is in the fracking boomtown of Williston, N.D., fast-food workers may already make more than $9 an hour. But when the jobless rate is high, as it still is in California and New York, the increase punishes minority youth in particular.
That is what happened during the last series of wage hikes to $7.25 from $5.15 that started in July 2007 as the economy was headed toward recession. The last increase hit in July 2009 just after the recession ended, and as the nearby chart shows, the jobless rate jumped for teens and black teens especially. For black teens, the rate has remained close to 40% and was still 37.8% in January.
A study by economists William Even of Miami University and David Macpherson of Trinity University concludes that in the 21 states where the full 40% wage increase took effect, "the consequences of the minimum wage for black young adults without a diploma were actually worse than the consequences of the Great Recession."
William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, says that after the July 2009 increase 600,000 teen jobs disappeared in the next six months even as GDP expanded. In the previous six months, when the economy was still shrinking, half as many teen jobs were lost. The overall teen jobless rate was still 23.4% last month, which means demand for unskilled workers is low even at $7.25 an hour. Demand will be lower at $9.
Mr. Obama's economists know all this, but then the minimum wage has nothing to do with poverty or unemployment. It's a political play to reward unions and box in Republicans. The minimum wage polls well because Americans naturally want everyone to make more money, and the damage in forgone jobs isn't obvious.
It'd be nice to think that some Republicans, even one, would make the moral case that the minimum wage hurts the poorest workers. But both Presidents Bush, 41 and 43, went along with increases and so did the Newt Gingrich Congress in 1996. Mr. Obama knows that history. Republicans may fold again to take the issue off the table in 2014, but it's a tragedy that those who will suffer the most are Mr. Obama's most ardent supporters.
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2)The Unsung, But Massive Obamacare Sales Tax Increase That Is On the Way
Today, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) President Karen Ignagni issued a press release in support of bipartisan legislation (H.R. 1370, S.1880) co-sponsored by Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Jim Matheson (D-UT) to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance tax. While much of the dialogue on healthcare reform centers on the federal mandate of health coverage for all Americans – which many conservatives call the largest tax increase in U.S history – less attention is being given to the massive sales tax increase on the purchase of health insurance also implicit within the legislation that will dramatically escalate costs for employers and consumers.
In 2014, Obamacare will take effect, with many of the changes set to roll out over the next six months. The U.S Supreme Court narrowly upheld the legislation in a 5-4 ruling in June of last year, with Chief Justice John Roberts controversially justifying his affirmative decision by claiming that the federal mandate is a form of a federal tax, which the government is within its rights to enact. Indeed, there are a number of new taxes that the ACA will bring- twenty one to be exact- but the sales tax on the purchase of health insurance is by far the largest.
The Joint Committee on Taxation released a reportto Committee of Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp shortly after the Supreme Court ruling thatrecalculates the costs to insurers, consumers and businesses under the new plan. According to their report – which does not include updated scores for the individual mandate, the employer mandate, or certain other revenue effects – the tax increases that remain on the books will cost taxpayers more than $675 billion over the next ten years. Chief among these will be the sales tax on the purchase of health insurance, totaling $101.7 billion, and making it larger than all the other industry-specific taxes combined.
“The health insurance tax will add a financial burden on families and small businesses at a time when they can least afford it, and it should be repealed, ” says AHIP, a trade association representing health insurance industry providers, in today’s call for the repeal of the health insurance tax before it can take affect. As they report,
· Starting next year the ACA imposes a new $100 billion tax on health insurance. The tax will start at $8 billion in 2014, increasing to $14.3 billion in 2018, and will continue to increase each year.
· The health insurance tax is larger than the device tax and the prescription drug tax combined.
· The health insurance tax will increase costs for individuals and families purchasing coverage on their own, small businesses, seniors and people with disabilities enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, and state Medicaid managed care plans.
· The health insurance tax is far greater than the minimum penalty for those who choose not to buy health insurance – further incentivizing young, healthy people to forgo purchasing insurance until they need medical care.
President Obama views the tax revenue generated by the health insurance sales tax and the twenty one other tax hikes in the ACA as essential to fund the his expensive Obamacare reform. John C. Goodman, author of Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis (Independent Institute, 2012) and President of the National Center for Policy Analysis, joins AHIP’s Ignani in his dissention of Obama’s costly healthcare tax increases, claiming they are for American families already wrought with worry amidst an economic recession.
“The ObamaCare health insurance tax hits some of the most vulnerable people in our society, including poor people in Medicaid managed care plans and seniors in Medicaid advantage plans. It is also a tax on middle-income families who were promised by this administration that taxes would never rise.”
In fact, Medicare Advantage beneficiaries will see costs rise from $16 to $20 per member per month in 2014 – increasing to between $32 and $42 by 2023. The costs for Medicare Advantage coverage over the next ten years is expected to reach $3,590. Individuals on Medicaid managed care will see increase costs on an average of $1,530 per enrollee between 2014 and 2023.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) supports Ignagni and Goodman’s warnings, stating that the health insurance sales tax will be “largely passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums.” Unfortunately, as Goodman predicts, “this is only one example of many middle income taxes buried in ObamaCare.” The time to repeal and replace is narrowing, with just months now separating us from another massive tax hike that Americans cannot afford.
Lindsay Boyd is Communications Director at the Independent Institute in Oakland, CA.
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3)
4)
According to Cal Thomas, well-known nationally syndicated columnist, Dr. Ben Carson owes President Obama an apology.
3)
A pro-Hezbollah, pro-Hamas candidate for the Iranian presidency, a man linked to Iranian-controlled front groups, brought former Republican Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel to speak at Rutgers University in 2007, according to another professor on campus
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Hooshang Amirahmadi, who led Rutgers’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies when Hagel came to campus, is the founder and president of the American-Iranian Council. He arranged for Hagel’s speech on March 2, 2007, the faculty source told The Daily Caller. (RELATED OPINION — Chuck Hagel: the darling of Tehran)
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Hooshang Amirahmadi, who led Rutgers’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies when Hagel came to campus, is the founder and president of the American-Iranian Council. He arranged for Hagel’s speech on March 2, 2007, the faculty source told The Daily Caller. (RELATED OPINION — Chuck Hagel: the darling of Tehran)
Iran’s Guardian Council cleared Amirahmadi to run for the presidency in 2013. Approval of the regime is required before candidates’ names can appear on the ballot. To be approved, candidates must be Shia, male, and committed to the Islamic revolution.
3a)2 Senate Opponents Vow to End Bid to Block Hagel
By RAVI SOMAIYA
Two of the most outspoken Republican critics of Chuck Hagel’s nomination as secretary of defense indicated Sunday that they would no longer hold up his Senate confirmation.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News Sunday that he would stand aside because Mr. Hagel had disavowed comments that he was said to have made during a talk at Rutgers University in 2007 that the State Department was an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Minister’s office.
“I got a letter back from Senator Hagel in response to my question, ‘Did you say that, and do you believe that?’ And the letter said he did not recall saying that,” Mr. Graham said. “He disavows that statement.”
Mr. Graham, one of the most vociferous and persistent critics of Mr. Hagel’s nomination, added, “I’ll just take him at his word unless something new comes along.”
Although Mr. Graham said he would no longer try to block the nomination, he was far from giving it an emphatic endorsement, calling Mr. Hagel “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time.”
Those comments were echoed, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, a close friend of Mr. Graham and a public opponent of Mr. Hagel’s nomination.
“I don’t believe he is qualified,” Mr. McCain said. “But I don’t believe that we should hold up his nomination any further because I think it’s a reasonable amount of time to have questions answered.”
Mr. Graham and Mr. McCain were among a majority of Republicans in the Senate who backed a filibuster on Thursday when Mr. Hagel’s nomination came to a vote. Despite four Republicans’ crossing over to vote with the majority Democrats, the nomination fell one vote short of passing an up-or-down floor vote.
That unprecedented move forced the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, to set up another vote on Feb. 26. With Democratic control of the Senate, Mr. Hagel is expected to win confirmation whenever his nomination comes up for a vote.
Mr. Hagel, a Republican former senator from Nebraska, has been broadly criticized by his former colleagues over his positions on Iran, Iraq and Israel, and faced a nomination process rocky even by recent fractious standards.
President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, appearing Sunday on the ABC News program “This Week,” said that the White House had “grave concern” that national security was at stake, given the Senate Republicans’ delaying tactics in confirming both a new Pentagon chief and a director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“If you look at Chuck Hagel — decorated war veteran himself, war hero, Republican senator, somebody who over the course of the last many years, either as a Republican senator or as a chairman of the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, I’ve worked with very closely,” he said. “This guy has one thing in mind — how to protect the country.”
Mr. McDonough, who was formerly Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, working under John O. Brennan, the president’s choice for C.I.A. director, added that “between John Brennan as the C.I.A. director and Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense, we want to make sure that we have those guys sitting in the chairs working. Because I don’t want there to have been something missed because of this hangup here in Washington.”
The White House and Senate Democrats have continued to express confidence that both men will be confirmed. Democrats have enough votes to approve both nominees, but they do not have the 60 votes necessary to overcome any filibuster.
After Thursday’s vote, outside groups campaigning against Mr. Hagel’s nomination said they would step up efforts to find damaging information and to pressure senators to vote against him.
4)
Ben Carson Owes No Apologies
According to Cal Thomas, well-known nationally syndicated columnist, Dr. Ben Carson owes President Obama an apology.
Carson spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC this past week – a bi-partisan annual event held since 1953, attended by members of Congress and usually the President.
President and Mrs. Obama were present this year and Thomas feels that Dr. Carson was out of line for including in his remarks comments about areas considered public policy – our national debt, our tax system, our publics schools, and health care.
According to Thomas: “Our politics have become so polarized and corrupted that a president of the United States cannot even attend an event devoted to drawing people closer to God and bridge partisan and cultural divides without being lectured about his policies.”
Dr. Carson is an African American physician, Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who rose out of poverty in a ghetto in Detroit. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in 2008 and is a role model for every American of every background.
I’m also proud that he serves on the national advisory board of my organization, CURE.
Although Carson did mention these various aspects of how we manage – or mismanage – our national affairs, he never once referred to the president or associated his comments on these issues with any political party.
To the extent to which President Obama might have taken Dr. Carson’s remarks as personal criticism, it would only be in the sense of “If the shoe fits, wear it.”
To the contrary, Dr. Carson began his remarks with citations from Proverbs and Chronicles, and tied the issues he spoke about to his broader theme about the moral crisis of our nation today. He talked about the moral decay of ancient Rome and how “they destroyed themselves from within.”
And he then expressed optimism about Americans being able to solve our problems because “we are smart” and that “we have some of the most intellectually gifted people leading our nation.”
No, if President Obama was offended by Dr. Carson’s penetrating remarks, it is because the president had to be the one losing perspective of the moral tone of the event and Dr. Carson’s observations.
What seems to offend Cal Thomas is that Dr. Carson has not fallen victim to the Washington disease that Thomas himself seems to have contracted as result of too many years in our nation’s capital.
Carson noted the vital importance of freedom of expression in America and how “political correctness keeps people from talking about important issues while the fabric of the society is being changed.” He warned that “we can’t fall for this trick.”
What, after all, is the point of a National Prayer Breakfast, “devoted to drawing people closer to God,” if the core issue now dividing us is whether we are indeed a “nation under God” and whether this means that His Word, as revealed in scripture, is even relevant to our national life and how we conduct our affairs.
This Word has already been banished from our public schools and increasingly from all our public spaces. Now apparently it’s even off limits at the National Prayer Breakfast.
If anything, Dr. Carson was forgiving to not mention the moral disaster of abortion legal under any circumstances and 55 million murdered unborn children -supported by our president. Nor did he mention our president’s endorsement of same sex marriage and today’s collapse of the American family.
The prophet Isaiah admonished, “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to me? says the Lord…..even when you make many prayers I will not hear: your hands are full of blood….cease to do evil, learn to do good…”
Religious ritual devoid of content is pointless and destructive. This was Isaiah’s message 2800 years ago.
This is Dr. Ben Carson’s critical message for America today. Certainly nothing to apologize about.
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5)A Black Father in the House
By Kevin Jackson
Thought the Founding Fathers had many flaws, they were smart enough to eliminate the self-indulgent institution of slavery from America's future. Further, they crafted the Constitution to help posterity avoid mistakes like Obama, so America could avoid having a "baby daddy" rather than a real father.
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5)A Black Father in the House
By Kevin Jackson
By now you likely have heard that Chris Rock considers Barack Obama America's father. If that is true, then would somebody call Child Protective Services and find us foster parents!
For Chris Rock, America's true Founding Fathers were disappointingly white. I suspect that whatever the color of America's Founding Fathers might have been, they would not have approved of having a failure like Obama among their esteemed membership.
Thought the Founding Fathers had many flaws, they were smart enough to eliminate the self-indulgent institution of slavery from America's future. Further, they crafted the Constitution to help posterity avoid mistakes like Obama, so America could avoid having a "baby daddy" rather than a real father.
Obama reminds me of my father. And like my father, Obama uses anybody and everything at his disposal for his own personal exploitation. I thought it was detestable, that my father stole Christmas presents from the family one year. However when you consider that Obama not only steals Christmas, he steals our children's futures, my deadbeat, drug-addicted murdering father doesn't seem quite so bad.
My father and Obama do have one difference. My father was convicted of his crimes and served many years in San Quentin, while Obama's crimes gained him the presidency.
Chris Rock wants a daddy who has spent the family's mortgage money, and can't keep food in the fridge. He wants a father who has gambled away the kids' college fund, and made us believe he "invested" our money. All that is left for Obama to do is to kill mother for the insurance.
In Rock's press conference he wanted to convey his respect for the office of the presidency, which is why he wanted to show public support for Obama. However when asked in 2007 about the possibility of a black Commander-in-Chief, Rock had this to say in reference to George Bush:
"It's [America] ready for a retarded president, why wouldn't it be ready for an African American president?"
There was no talk then of how citizens needed to shut up and do whatever Bush wanted without question. Chris Rock will step and fetch for Hollywood white men, but there was no way he would do so for a white president. I suspect Rock would rather get that bite in the ass he referenced, than kowtow to a white president.
Rock was dying for a reason to showcase his abject hatred of whites, something he and other Liberal blacks have been taught for decades, people angry without even knowing why. Obama is the manifest destiny of the pent up hatred. Obama represents payback; misplaced payback.
Instead of celebrating Obama's achievement as the first recognizable black president, Rock denigrates that milestone in America's evolution. Chris Rock is a creation of the guilty white Leftists, and he is unquestionably a modern-day racist. Guilty white Leftists have given Chris Rock and all racist blacks permission to be racists.
In some twisted way, these Liberal white elitists feel good being "accepted" by people like Rock, while actually holding dominion over them. Liberal elitists make sure that racist like Chris Rock keeps his day job. They support his movies and his twisted ideology, while knowing they still hold the puppet strings.
It's sad that somebody convinced Chris Rock that there would never be a black president in his lifetime. So when he got one, Rock simply reverted back to his reptilian brain, which is to support the man based solely on his color. It's tribal for him.
If Obama's white heritage were more prominent, Rock would dedicate entire comedy routine on the destruction Obama has caused in the black community. But Obama proclaims blackness, so tribalism won't allow Chris Rock to use sanity or logic in his evaluation of Obama. He must blindly support the man who is destroying blacks.
Such is the plight of the liberal black community, and the reason there are so many bad black leaders. So what your daddy can't keep the lights on and he beats your mom? Who cares the family's credit is in the toilet, and daddy spends money like a pimp. Chris Rock is just glad to have his black father in the home.
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