What’s New Today
Story #1
looks at what a second Obama term would be like. #2 looks at taxmageddon and what happens
early next year. #3 lays out Obama’s
campaign strategy for 2012. #4 looks at
the Democrats and meaningful work. Isn’t
all work meaningful? #5 Van Jones sees the Tea Party was wanting to destroy America.
Today’s Thought
Mitt
Romney has clinched the nomination
for the Republican Party.
It appears using ultra sounds to identify girls to be aborted has come to the
USA. I guess there is a war on women.
Before being elected in 2008, Barack
Obama said: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the
United States of America." That belief has turned out to be wholly
accurate. America has been greatly
transformed by all areas of this administration's policy goals and actions.
The most significant policy change
during President Obama's first term was his health-care "reform," the
movement of 17% of our economy from the marketplace of ideas and
physician-patient decision-making to control and management by the federal
government. The Supreme Court is now considering ObamaCare are constitutional,
and is expected to decide by the end of June.
ObamaCare is a huge governmental mandate, the impact of
which we are just beginning to feel.
If the Supreme Court upholds the law, full government control of health care
will start next year, with the new
ObamaCare taxes on investment income. The
individual mandates and other rules and regulations will begin in 2014. If
the court upholds ObamaCare and Mr. Obama is re-elected in November, the scope
and size of our government's control over health care will increase dramatically.
A second Obama term would guarantee
no repeal or significant repair of ObamaCare for at least four more years,
allowing it to push its tentacles into every aspect of our health care. It will
give the health and human services
secretary free rein in her decisions about new mandates and about which
organizations or entities can be granted exemptions from them. This would give
her and the president a new way to reward favored special interests.
The second negative policy impact of
the president's first term is the large and unsustainable increase in federal
spending and debt. Annual spending increased from $3 trillion in 2008 to $3.5
trillion in 2010, and the Obama plan is to grow it to $5.5 trillion a year less
than a decade from now. Deficits averaging $1.3 trillion a year have been the
rule so far, and that thinking—and perhaps worse—would be with us for a second
Obama term.
Mr. Obama's first term commenced with an $800 billion
"stimulus" giveaway to the favored constituencies of the liberal left. Then the excessive spending that created the deficits
continued. The president's recent budgets have been so far from the mainstream
that Congress, including Democrats, has had little interest in supporting them.
If Mr. Obama is re-elected and no longer constrained in his policy proposals by
the need to keep independents in his camp, there will be continued squandering
of the nation's fiscal resources. All of this will lead to even more burdens on
individuals, families and businesses, not to mention future generations….
Everything is there for a huge defeat for Obama and the
Democrats, but we can’t be complacent because the cost is too dear.
2. Obama brings on 'Taxmageddon'
'Taxmageddon' isn't only about the
half-trillion-dollar blow to the economy that arrives in 2013 on the end of the
Bush-Obama tax rates. Several of the
Affordable Care Act's worst tax increases kick in too, such as the new excise
tax on medical devices.
The
2.3% levy applies to the sale of everything from cardiac defibrillators to
artificial joints to MRI scanners. The device tax is supposed to raise $28.5
billion from 2013 to 2022, and it is
especially harmful because it applies to gross sales, not profits. Companies at
make-or-break margins could be taxed out of existence, especially in an
intensely competitive industry where four of five businesses are start-ups or
midsized.
As
even the liberal papoose Elizabeth Warren recently put it, the device tax
"disproportionately impacts the small companies with the narrowest
financial margins and the broadest innovative potential."…
Obama promised he would fundamentally change America and
this is just one of the ways he will do
it.
3. What Negative will look like this year
But if the Obama 2012 strategy in
this regard is all about the amplification of 2008, in terms of message it will
represent a striking deviation. Though
the Obamans certainly hit John McCain hard four years ago—running more negative
ads than any campaign in history—what they intend to do to Romney is more
savage. They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain
Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of
Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s
Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of
Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep
chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains.
“Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive
services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the
Constitution to ban gay marriage.”
The Obama effort at disqualifying
Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of
revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,”
says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young,
or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This fucking guy is
gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been
part of that.’ ”…
Makes you understand why he chose “Forward” as his campaign
slogan. And this strategy might work
except for one thing. Reality. This isn’t 2008 and a negative campaign like
this is going to turn voters off and he will lose ground, not gain it.
4. Meaningful work and other Educational Deadends
“Education” is a word that covers a
lot of very different things, from vital, life-saving medical skills to
frivolous courses to absolutely counterproductive courses that fill people with
a sense of grievance and entitlement, without giving them either the skills to
earn a living or a realistic understanding of the world required for a citizen
in a free society.
The lack of realism among many highly educated people has
been demonstrated in many ways.
When I saw signs in Yellowstone
National Park warning visitors not to get too close to a buffalo, I realized
that this was a warning that no illiterate farmer of a bygone century would
have needed. No one would have had to tell him not to mess with a huge animal
that literally weighs a ton, and can charge at you at 30 miles an hour.
No one would have had to tell that
illiterate farmer’s daughter not to stand by the side of a highway, trying to
hitch a ride with strangers, as too many college girls have done, sometimes
with results that ranged all the way up to their death.
The dangers that a lack of realism can bring to many
educated people are completely overshadowed by the dangers to a whole society
created by the unrealistic views of the world promoted in many educational
institutions.
It was painful, for example, to see an internationally
renowned scholar say that what low-income young people needed was “meaningful
work.” But this is a notion common among
educated elites, regardless of how counterproductive its consequences may be
for society at large, and for low-income youngsters especially.
What is “meaningful work”?...
What young people need is work. There is meaning in all work not the least being independence and a sense of accomplishment.
5. Van Jones says TEA Party wants to destroy America
President Obama's former green czar, Van Jones, described the Tea Party as a group of "so-called patriots" who are trying to destroy America last weekend at a campaign on behalf of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the Wisconsin recall election.
"At this point in this struggle, it's the so-called patriots who are the ones who are smashing down every American institution," Jones said last weekend in Milwaukee. "It's the so-called patriots, the ones who come out here with their Tea Party and the flags and call themselves patriots -- they're the ones that are smashing down our unions, smashing down public education, smashing down every American institution that we built, and our parents built, and our grandparents built to make this country great."
Jones added that the Tea Party is trying to "take a wrecking ball -- and paint it red, white, and blue -- and smash down all the things our parents did for us."…
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/van-jonestea-party-full-so-called-patriots/563496
Extremism is in the eye of the beholder. Van Jones is an extremist.
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