Something HUGE happened Tuesday…

No, not the shift in power in the House or the Republican gains in the Senate, this wasn’t done be the voters. No, the big story is…

…San Francisco banned the Happy Meal.

The new law takes effect on December 1 and bans the practice of giving away toys with kids meals unless the meal tastes like cardboard and is something no kid wants to eat has under 600 calories,  and includes fruits and veggies. Oh, and no excessive fat or sugar in the drink.

So, brussel sprouts, spinach leaves, a soy burger and water? Mmmmmm! Come on, kids, let’s go to McAwful’s!

The “do-gooders” on the S.F. Board of Supervisors know what’s best for you and your children. Just ask them.

“Our children are sick. Rates of obesity in San Francisco are disturbingly high, especially among children of color,” said San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar, who sponsored the measure.

Ronald McDonald, you are a red haired clown monster. You’re killing our children and you seem to take great pleasure in harming our “children of color.” How do you sleep at night, sir?

“This is a challenge to the restaurant industry to think about children’s health first and join the wide range of local restaurants that have already made this commitment,” Mar said.

This is exactly the type of government overreaching that was rejected on Tuesday. It’s the parents’ job to decide what to feed their children, not the government’s. Leave. Us. Alone.

(more…)

The media wants to know why tea partiers seem so angry. Here’s a clue: It’s the spending, stupid! And it’s HOW the money is being spent.

Let’s go to New Jersey .(Yes, we have to. It’s nicer than what you’ve seen on TV. Really.) While tolls were going up, the NJ Turnpike Authority was throwing money around like Nancy Pelosi at a botox party.

Auditors say the New Jersey Turnpike Authority wasted $43 million on unneeded perks and bonuses. In one case, an employee with a base salary of $73,469 earned $321,985 when all payouts and bonuses were included…

41.8 million Americans are now on food stamps. The details don’t look good for our country.

Recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program subsidies for food purchases jumped 18 percent from a year earlier and increased 1.4 percent from June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a statement on its website. Participation has set records for 20 straight months.

An average of 43.3 million people, more than an eighth of the population, will get food stamps each month in the year that began Oct. 1, according to White House estimates.

You might think this is bad news. But, according to House Majority Leader (until 11/2) Nancy Pelosi, this is good news – no, it’s GREAT news! We have found the way to get out of our economic malaise.

At a press conference in her home town of San Francisco, Pelosi explained that the program’s multiplier effect –the amount of money generated in the local economy as the result of the subsidy– far exceeds the nearly $60 billion spent this year by the federal government and is a sure-fire way to stimulate the economy. For every dollar a person receives in food stamps, Pelosi said that $1.79 is put back into the economy. The U.S. Department of Agriculture cites an even higher figure of $1.84.

“It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance. The biggest bang for the buck,” she said.

New Obama/Pelosi plan for our economy: Put EVERYONE on food stamps and unemployment and watch the multiplier effect turn this thing around.

(more…)

We are a selfish nation and treating our neighbor to the south horribly. It’s our fault that border violence is up.

From Fox News:

A coalition of Mexican mayors has asked the United States to stop deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S. to Mexican border cities, saying the deportations are contributing to Mexican border violence.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes blamed U.S. deportation policy for contributing to his city’s violence, saying that of the 80,000 people deported to Juarez in the past three years, 28,000 had U.S. criminal records — including 7,000 convicted rapists and 2,000 convicted murderers.

Wait a second. This can’t be true. Everyone knows that all the illegal aliens in America are law abiding people (except for that coming into the country illegally part) who just want to do the jobs Americans won’t do. Hey, don’t we have American rapists and murderers to do these “jobs”? Maybe these guys will do it for less.

(more…)

I don’t know why presidents agree to interviews with Rolling Stone. The mag is biased against presidents and you never come off well. Remember how it treated Bush?

Bush Apologizes: The Farewell Interview We Wish He’d Give -W. comes clean – on his dad, Condi’s farts and the time Dick waterboarded the house boy

That is some high class comedy. No wonder Rolling Stone does so well in the “teenage boys who can burp the A-B-Cs demo.”

Then there was the cover photo showing Bush as a dunce. Ha! I get it! Bush is dumb. Hilarious. Never heard that one.

With that history, Obama had to be ready for a grilling. Here are some of the bare knuckles, no holds barred questions The One had to face:

When you came into office, you felt you would be able to work with the other side. When did you realize that the Republicans had abandoned any real effort to work with you and create bipartisan policy?

How do you feel about the fact that day after day, there’s this really destructive attack on whatever you propose? Does that bother you? Has it shocked you?

What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?

(more…)

We’ve reached a new low. A high school disciplined students for wearing American flag t-shirts to school because they did so on Cinco de Mayo. As some of the students of Mexican descent explained – “That’s ‘our’ day.”

“We knew it was Cinco de Mayo. But we just came to show our flag,” said student Dominic Maciel. “We didn’t mean anything by it. We didn’t want to start anything. Nothing like that.”

We obviously aren’t teaching our kids well. They should know that the American flag is offensive in America! I blame the parents.

Student Anthony Caravalho was also sent home for not turning his shirt inside out. “They said we had to wear our t-shirts inside out and then we could go back to class and we said no,” said Caravalho. “It would be disrespectful to the flag by hiding it.”

It’s our flag that’s disrespectful. They could have avoided trouble and been hailed as tolerant if they’d burned the American flag t-shirts.

(more…)

President Obama gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan over the weekend and instead of encouraging and challenging the graduates to be the next Bill Gates or Carly Fiorina, he gave a self serving, political speech chastising Americans who disagree with his ideas and policies that are leading us to even bigger government. The recent Pew poll that showed 4 out of 5 Americans don’t trust the federal government didn’t cool his rhetoric a bit. From the transcript:

But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad…

Straw man alert! The One loves to do this. Set up an argument no one makes and then knock it down. No one in this debate is saying ALL government is bad. We are calling for the government to actually live up to the limits set for it by our constitution. The problem is Barry thinks the more government, the better.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us. We, the people–[Applause.] We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws, and shape our own destiny.

See, you’re so dumb that you don’t understand your anger at government is really self hate. Oy.

Does he really not understand this? We know the government is supposed to be us, that’s why we’re so upset. We see our government as not representing us anymore. We are frustrated because we feel we’re losing the power to shape our destiny. (Funny how when Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink we’re screaming about our horrible government under Bush, they weren’t confused about the government being them.)

(more…)

After the divisive debate over health care “reform” and the problems that are already emerging from it (see young people, the states, AT&T, Verizon, John Deere, Caterpillar, etc.) you would think The One and Congress would take a breather. Wrongo! Here comes another hard left. A new “bipartisan” Cap and Tax bill is on the way.

Three senior US lawmakers are piecing together a sweeping bipartisan energy and climate bill, which looks set to include sweeteners to galvanize support among Republicans and industry groups…

The senators have hosted meetings with industry groups over the past two weeks, revealing details about their plan that would cap carbon emissions while expanding offshore oil drilling and nuclear power generation.

We definitely need to expand offshore drilling and remove some of the regulations that make it so hard to build a nuclear power plant, but it’s not worth the unnecessary increase in cost every American will pay for our energy (and everything that uses energy) that will come with the rest of this bill.

Will these “sweeteners” to get industry to go along include corporate welfare?

(more…)

I am an optimist. I see the glass as half full (preferably with beer). So I am keeping hope alive!

There are a couple of ways this can still be stopped. The first is that numerous state attorneys are going to sue.

Virginia will file suit against the federal government charging that the health-care reform legislation is unconstitutional, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office confirmed last night.

Cuccinelli is expected to argue that the bill, with its mandate that requires nearly every American to be insured by 2014, violates the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

There is a good chance that the Supreme Court will rule the bill unconstitutional based on the mandate for all Americans to buy insurance even if they don’t want it and that some of the bill only helps specific states at the expense of the rest. When it is declared unconstitutional, the Democrats will try to fix it with a new bill. By then we will have had another election. Even without a Republican takeover in the House and the Senate, there will be enough new Republicans to stop Obamacare.

Of course, the Supreme Court could find a way to stay out of the fight and let the bill stand. Then, we’re screwed.

(more…)

All the lies about the Social Security “lock box” are now on full display. This is the year we will start paying out more from the SS program than we took in. We’ve gotten here even earlier than predicted. This wasn’t supposed to happen until 2017. Whoops…

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds— which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

But, wait!  We have $2.5 trillion in there and it’s earning interest. It’s real money. We’re fine, right? Right. Pull this leg and it plays “Jingle Bells.” This is the mess conservatives have warned about for so long. The lock box hoax is nothing but a promise from the government (us)  to pay us. Yes, the bonds will be paid, but that shouldn’t ease your anxiety. The money has to come from somewhere. Government only has two choices to get it:

(more…)

All this talk about reconciliation is a distraction from the bigger picture: In one year Obama has lost his own party. He can’t get them to pass his signature bill. And now he has lost their trust. (Even though the media rarely mentions it, he had a filibuster proof majority in the senate and a super majority in the house and he STILL couldn’t get it done.)

The WSJ has a great piece on this

The cleanest option for Democrats would be for the House to pass the Senate’s Christmas Eve bill word for word, thereby bypassing a Senate filibuster under the normal rules and forwarding ObamaCare directly to the Rose Garden signing ceremony. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said the votes simply don’t exist for the Senate bill as is…

Thus the convoluted scheme the White House has mapped out. The House would first pass the Senate bill, and then pass a reconciliation bill that addresses these objections—in effect converting the process into a makeshift and unprecedented vehicle for amendments…

Iron-clad promise—or double-cross? After all, the White House would much prefer the Senate bill, because by its lights the cost-control programs are tougher than what the House prefers…

In other words, perhaps Mr. Obama has embraced this reconciliation two-step only to renege as soon as the House gives him what he wants.

Add in Rep. Massa’s (D-NY) accusations that Obama’s boys booted him out because he voted against the “health care” bill and the allegations that Obama gave away a judicial appointment to Congressman Matheson (D-Utah) to get his vote for health care and the unbelievable has occurred. The bill looks sleazier than it did after the Cornhusker Kickback, The Louisiana Purchase and the Gator Aid.

Moderate Democrats can’t trust their own president. Getting ANY health care bill passed is now Obama’s top priority. He has convinced himself that it will be his legacy. He knows it’s very unpopular with the American people. (Even SNL knows that). But he believes the people just don’t know what’s good for them and they will eventually thank him for it. The lefties think you are too stupid to handle your own affairs – watch Robert Reich.

(more…)

It’s time to stop playing along with this ridiculous game called, “The government says the health care bill will cost…” It’s always wrong. And it’s always wrong by underestimating the cost. Why don’t the Republicans point this out? (Probably because they’ve been big government spenders, too.)

Look back at when Medicare was first created:

At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly “conservative” estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.

In 2007, total Medicare spending was $431 billion! That isn’t even close to the costs predicted in 1965. Why do we act like the numbers coming out of Congress and the CBO have any basis in reality?

The predictions for Medicaid were just as wrong:

(more…)

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay.

– Milton Friedman

How dare you save and invest your hard earned money while other people waste it can’t afford to. It’s just not fair that you’re making “unearned” income and we need to take more of that from you to pay for our big government programs.

Terrence Jeffrey has the details from Obamascare 2.0:

“Under current law, workers who earn a salary pay a flat tax of 1.45 percent of their wages to support the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, but those who have substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness,” says the summary.

Fairness?! The Redistributor in Chief wants to go there? Seriously?

Right now, the people who earn very little, or nothing, get way more back in Medicare than they’ve ever paid in and there is no income cap on the Medicare tax. The rich are already paying more than their “fair share.” In addition the money being used to make unearned income has already been taxed at least once.

The Wall Street Journal points out the unprecedented nature of the taxes and how anti-growth it is:

This new ObamaCare bargain would for the first time apply the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to “interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents,” so-called passive income that we are told includes capital gains, though the latter wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the proposal. This antigrowth investment tax would apply to singles earning more than $200,000 and joint filers over $250,000 and comes on top of the Senate’s 0.9-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax, which would bring the combined employee-employer share to 3.8%

Hey, wait a second, didn’t Obama say he wouldn’t raise any tax on families making less than $250k/year?

(more…)

No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

– Mark Twain

The Obama peeps are actually trying to celebrate the one year anniversary of the $862 billion “drive us into perpetual debt” bill. Biden repeatedly told an audience in Saginaw, MI -unemployment 14% – that the “stimulus” is working.

Thanks, Joe! Hey, maybe that’s the next great achievement of The One. Back in the real world people are finally starting to notice that all this debt we’re racking up could lead to inflation, kill your savings and wages, and make it harder for you and businesses to borrow money.

Over the past year alone, the amount the U.S. government owes its lenders has grown to more than half the country’s entire economic output, or gross domestic product.

Even more alarming, experts say, is that those figures will climb to an unprecedented 200 percent of GDP by 2038 without a dramatic shift in course.

“Within 12 years&the largest item in the federal budget will be interest payments on the national debt,” said former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. “[They are] payments for which we get nothing.”

There’s no getting around the fact that eventually we have to pay this back and the interest payments are killing us.

(more…)

Where to cut the spending? Obama has told us we have to make some tough choices. Yup, it wasn’t easy, but they decided to keep in the $2.5 million for a Census ad during the Super Bowl. That’s just a part of the $132 million we will spend to tell people to fill out and mail in their census forms.

We’d get a better bang for our buck by gambling it in Vegas. No matter what Obama says about the town, at least there we would have a chance to win big.

I understand that our constitution requires a census every ten years, but it does not require we waste our money advertising for it.  You don’t turn it in – you’re not counted. Next!

Here are some of the proposed cuts listed on the White House blog as  ”tough choices” for 2011:

(more…)

Don’t you hate it when you go to a 50% off sale and then realize the store marked up all the prices in order to offer the big savings? Welcome to President Barack Obama’s spending freeze.

It’s hard to keep up with the shocking numbers under Obama. Federal spending was up 18% in his first year and the deficit was $1.4 trillion, almost three times greater than it was the previous year. That’s 9.9% of 2009’s GDP, more than three times the post World War II average. (Sorry, Barry, but you can’t blame it all on Bush. That budget was done under a Democrat House and Senate and signed by you. ) Depending on whose numbers you believe federal nondefense discretionary spending will increase another 7-10% for 2010.

The Congressional Budget Office says we’ll run at least another $1.35 trillion deficit. The average deficit for 2011-2020 will be around $600 billion per year. Even in Washington that’s a lot of money.

(more…)

A new poll by CNN, shows that almost 75% of Americans believe the “stimulus” wasted most of our money. There’s more:

• 63% of public thinks projects in plan were included for purely political reasons.
• 21% of people in poll say nearly all the money in the stimulus has been wasted.
• Only 4% think that no stimulus dollars have been wasted.
• 56% of the public opposes the stimulus

Joe Klein says if you think like this you’re just Too Dumb to Thrive. Klein believes we should be thanking The One for our big tax cut. Hey, I’m always in favor of letting people keep more of their own money, but if you’re looking to stimulate the economy we are doing the wrong kinds of tax cuts. Klein also ignores all the tax increases The Big O has planned.

Maybe people are a little ticked over how some of the “stimulus” money has been spent.

(more…)

Take a listen to Barney Frank saying “God didn’t invent the filibuster.”

Remember way back in 2003 when the Republicans were looking to rewrite the senate rules so the Dems couldn’t filibuster judicial nominees?

Partisan disagreement over judicial nominations is so intense that senators couldn’t even agree on the title of Mr. Cornyn’s hearing: “Judicial Nominations, Filibusters and the Constitution: When a majority is denied its right to consent.”"The title suggests that [the hearing] may be intended to turn up the heat rather than cool things down,” said Sen. Russell D. Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, who warned that any effort to change Senate rules “will be met with stiff resistance.”As with the country’s actual nuclear arsenal, there is a form of mutually assured destruction here, too.The only thing holding Republicans back from breaking the filibuster this way is knowing that the same weapon will be used against them someday in the future when the roles are reversed. “The old bears in the Senate want to preserve their ability to filibuster the Democrats in the future,” said one key Senate aide, who also stressed that such a maneuver would only be used to break filibusters involving executive nominees.”If the Democrats take back the Senate — God forbid — the first 10 things they bring up will be anathema to us but they’ll say [forget] you, we have our 51 votes.”

(more…)

The voters are getting angry at The One. A majority disapprove of how he’s handling health care “reform” AND the economy. The AP reports that the billions spent on road construction has done nothing to lower unemployment. The “most popular government program” in years, Cash-4 -Clunkers was actually, predictably, a flop. Unemployment is way higher than they said it would be if we didn’t rush through the borrow and spend porkulus bill.

So, what to do to keep the rabble from voicing their displeasure? Blame someone else! Obama wants to tax the big bad banks. He says it’s to get our TARP money back and to reduce undue risks by the greedy bankers. The One wants you to believe that the big banks are the kind of guys who would take the last piece of pizza from the birthday boy at Chuck-E-Cheese (see above photo).

Obama has been strident in his criticism of bankers, calling them “fat cats” last month in an interview that aired on the eve of their visit to the White House. With public anger over the bailout still strong, Obama has embraced populist rhetoric in an effort to shame bank executives into paying back the government more quickly and their executives less lavishly.

At the White House on Monday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs jabbed at the perceived disconnect between Wall Street executives and their customers. The spokesman said the disparity angered his boss.

(more…)

If you needed another reason to be against trying KSM and his band of merry maniacal Islamists in NYC, here it is.

New York City projects it will cost more than $400 million to provide security if the pre-trial preparation and trial of the suspects in the Sept. 11 terror attackstakes two years, which insiders say is virtually certain, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It will cost another $206 million annually if the trial runs beyond two years, which some fear is possible, the mayor’s office estimates.

There may be some who think this is a great way to make the liberal elites on the upper west side put their money where their mouth is when it comes to giving terrorists the same rights guaranteed to American citizens under the U.S. constitution, but, of course, we will ALL have to pay for this.

(more…)