Great company

The Communist Party USA has already announced that they are endorsing President Obama for reelection in 2012, despite their stated bitter disappointment in his not pushing harder in his first term for such promised goodies as single-payer government-controlled health care and "card-check" legislation designed to eliminate the secret ballot when workers are voting whether or not to unionize:

"Wrote [CPUSA Chairman Sam] Webb: 'Neither party is anti-capitalist, but they aren't identical either. Differences exist at the levels of policy and social composition. And despite the many frustrations of the past two years, the election of Barack Obama was historic and gave space to struggle for a people's agenda.'"

Chairman Mao himself couldn't have come up with more flowery propaganda.

The Commies are clearly salivating at the prospect of an Obama second term, one in which the president would no longer have to care about winning elections or pacifying moderate voters but instead would be free to fully advocate for advancing the Great Leap Forward agenda of such mentors of his as Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers.

Remember the people who desperately need the current president to remain in office when contemplating your own ballot.

What a coincidence

Naked favoritism such as this is precisely why placing everyone's health care under the direct control of partisan politicians is such a bad idea: 

"Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers."

Orwell was correct - some animals are indeed more equal than others, especially when it comes to back-scratching cronyism amongst the pigs who currently run things in Washington.

Where are the howls of outrage from the usual suspects?

But remember, it's conservatives who are consistently labeled by the mainstream media (as well as various and sundry advocacy groups) as insensitive and hateful cretins when they make statements that are perceived by these self-appointed censors as being even remotely un-PC. 

We'll see if those organizations demonstrate the same mercilessness towards the buffoonish Mr. Gage, now that he's been caught on tape using a term considered by the lefties to be a slur against the mentally challenged to describe in a derogatory fashion those who simply desire financial restraint from their government.


(Boortz link)

Quite the dichotomy

USA Today has an article out which highlights the unfortunate effects of the current housing bust in Merced County, California.  That state, of course, is the poster child for the deleterious effects caused by high taxes, bad government decisions, a stranglehold on the local economy by thuggish public sector unions and greed by homeowners who leveraged themselves into untenable situations.

We found it quite enlightening that of the four families interviewed for the piece, the one person who waited to buy something he could afford, willingly commutes a long distance to work and is basically making lemonade out of his situation isn't a government worker but rather a maintenance supervisor for a private garbage company:

"'I feel like I won the lottery,' [Ray Ortiz] says."

Well done, sir.

"Ruling" by favoritism and fiat

First we had Dear Leader ram his socialized medicine plan (that was supposed to apply equally to everyone) through Congress by using dead-of-the-night trickery, then he turned right around and exempted many of his friends and supporters (most notably Andy Stern and his union thugs at the SEIU, who donated $28 million to his campaign) from the Ponzi scheme's many onerous (and expensive) requirements. 

Next, despite having the entire Obamacare law thrown out as unconstitutional by a federal judge, the Department of Health and Human Services announced its plan to continue implementing the legislation (under some kind of authority as yet unrevealed to us).

Now we find out that the very first project to be exempted from Obama's brand new end-run-around-Congress-imposed EPA mandates on "greenhouse gas" emissions will be a power plant that is purchasing two expensive gas-turbines from G.E., and by extension his good friend (and major campaign supporter and financial donor) Jeffrey Immelt, who is coincidentally Obama's new "jobs czar".

Tim Carney has the details on that one.

And, of course, we would be remiss if we didn't mention that Dear Leader's Department of the Interior has just been hit with a contempt of court citation for blatantly violating the law by continuing to block deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico despite a federal judge's specifically ordering them to not do so. We broke taxpayers now have to pay the legal fees for the oil companies because of that sanction.  Thanks, Mr. President!

Isn't this sort of crass political cronyism and cherry-picking of winners and losers, along with the unilateral imposition of one's political will on the peasants regardless of what the other two branches of government have to say about it, the very hallmarks of a dictatorship?

Hope and change, indeed.  "Change" into an authoritarian regime that the minor despots of the world can only marvel at with envy.

2012 simply can't get here soon enough.  We only hope it's not too late for our republic.

A fictional war

An unfortunate recent uptick of police officers being injured or killed on the job has occurred in the last few days, and now some in law enforcement who should definitely know better are apparently attempting to further their own political agendas by cynically using these incidents (as well as the recent Tucson shooting) to try and convince the public that there's some kind of coordinated attack on police officers happening:

"A spate of shooting attacks on law enforcement officers has authorities concerned about a war on cops."

These disingenuous advocates are attempting to make this argument even though the two highest profile incidents marking this very tragic toll involved cops trying to serve high-risk arrest warrants on known dangerous felony suspects.  Not exactly the "random hunting of people who wear a badge" scenario that's being put forth as fact:

'"It's not a fluke,' said Richard Roberts, spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations", describing the fluke.

"'The bad guys are not afraid of cops,' Roberts said. 'They’re rarely rational. You get that combination, when you ID yourself as a cop, it does not scare them away; it makes it more dangerous for you.'"

Based on the above statement, it appears that Roberts believes that rational, law-abiding people by default are supposed to be afraid of cops, and the fact that the bad guys aren't humbled by their arrival is what makes them so dangerous.  Incorrect.  We are perfectly rational and law-abiding, yet we don't fear cops.  Are we somehow a threat to them?  Of course not.

Violent criminals are contemptuous of all laws and mores, including those against assault, rape and murder.  That's what makes them so dangerous to everyone, not just police officers.  The rate of crimes committed against cops, although admittedly much too high, is insignificant when compared against the rate of crimes committed against other law-abiding citizens.  Why, then, should the police rate some kind of special treatment just because of a random spike in tragedies suffered by them?

Mr. Roberts is a former Maryland police officer, which to us obviously explains his "us against them" mindset, his insistence on having the general public fear cops instead of respecting them and his probable upcoming argument about the necessity of further curbs on the lawful owning and carrying of firearms by the law-abiding public.

One commenter to the article provided a compelling example of this very kind of straw-man argument being similarly used in the past to justify unilaterally taking away freedoms from those who weren't in any way responsible for the incidents that precipitated those opportunistic actions.  We felt it important enough to reprint here:

"When Hitler, upset at being forced to accept a position in a coalition government, decided that he needed to do something drastic to get the control he wanted, the Communists conveniently burned the Reichstag. Within a week, all freedoms were subject to government control and Hitler was now "Der Fuhrer". As a certain White House adviser observed, it's a crime to waste a good crisis.

Jump ahead 77 years and a US Representative gets shot by a guy so crazy that he spent the two hours before the shooting taking pics of himself posing with his gun while wearing nothing but a red G-string, and the first thing the government and media do is try to restrict the 1st Amendment, citing "political rhetoric" as the cause of the shooting. When that backfired, they predictably turned on the 2nd Amendment, as tho' the gun caused the crime. So, naturally, we should expect expanded media coverage of any gun related crime and isolated shootings suddenly become a concerted "war on the police". What can I say? We don't have a Reichstag to burn, so that's what will have to do, I suppose."

Well stated.

You pay and then you get permission to not play, even though you wanted the game

Three locals of the SEIU (including the one from Dear Leader's power base of Chicago), whose members wanted socialized medicine so badly the union donated 28 million dollars to Obama's 2008 campaign for president, have applied for and been granted waivers from the health care Ponzi scheme:

"In September, HHS announced it would grant waivers to employers to prevent some workers from losing their benefits if the insurer could not meet new health care law’s requirements on annual limits."

In fact, of the 222 waivers granted by the Obama Administration to date, 45 (a full 20%) have been labor organizations, according to the article.

Why should these entities qualify for an exemption?  They're the ones who wanted this noxious legislation in the first place, and now they want to opt out because it's going to cost them more money, just as the opponents of Obamacare predicted?  More importantly, just what have those unlucky workers been receiving all along for their union dues besides insurance coverage crappy enough to require begging for a waiver to avoid losing even those small benefits?

Tough noogies.  Let those unions suffer the pocket-draining effects, just like everyone else has to, at least until this unconstitutional law is nullified by the Supreme Court.

Amusing

The leftist publisher of Harper's magazine spends years extolling the virtues of unions in general (and the United Auto Workers in particular), then gets all bent out of shape when his staff signs up to join that very same UAW:

"[John "Rick"] MacArthur contested the entire staff's right to unionize, arguing that editors and assistant editors who make up about half of the editorial team were management and thus did not qualify. Staffers couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony: The staunch defender of unions, who in a 2009 Harper's piece called the UAW 'the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization,' was now on the other side of the table as the 'worst kind of factory owner,' as one staffer put it to me." 

Poetic justice indeed.

"MacArthur recently told me in an e-mail: 'I was taken by surprise and I thought it was rude that they didn't schedule a meeting to discuss it.'"

We hate to have to break this obvious news to Mr. MacArthur, but disgruntled workers don't usually "schedule meetings" with management to announce to them their upcoming plans to certify union representation.

This incident sounds uncannily like what apparently happened some years ago when the writing staff working on liberal activist (and similar champion of unions) Michael Moore's The Awful Truth television show similarly tried to obtain union representation:

"When two of the show’s young writers, who had been given the title Associate Producer, took steps to join the Writers Guild (the powerful union for movie and TV writers), Moore took them aside. 'I’m getting a lot of heat from the union to call you guys writers and pay you under the union rules,' Eric Zicklin recounted Moore’s words for MacFarquhar. 'I don’t have the budget for that,' Moore threatened them, 'But if they keep coming down on me that’ll mean I’ll only be able to afford one of you and the other one’s gotta go.'"

How quickly these hard-line socialist media barons' warm and fuzzy feelings regarding unions change once it's their own money that's threatening to be siphoned out of their deep pockets in order to finance those lucrative union benefits, pension plans and other perks.