It's on

What’s new Today 

Story #1 tells of how the American public is not looking with favor on the Obama’s and their many vacations.  #2 looks specifically at the cost of the First Lady’s trip to Spain in August of 2010.  #3 explains why Republicans should be happy.  #4 looks at the Democratic Party and wonders where the moderates have gone.  #5 is an excellent look at the recall election in Wisconsin and what it means.  #6 is a hard to believe account of what a Michigan School Teacher finds as inhumane treatment.  #7 looks at why the Democrats will never exploit the one resource that could pull the country out of the economic doldrums we are in.

Today’s thoughts

Paul Ryan said this:  “If you believe in freedom, liberty, self-determination, free enterprise, I don’t care if you’re a Muslim, Jewish, Agnostic, Christian, gay, straight, Latino, black, white, Irish, whatever. Join us.”

Unexpectedly (plan to hear the word a lot in the next six months), GDP grew at a disappointing 2.2% in the first quarter down from the fourth quarter’s 3.0%. 

1.  Obama’s politics of Envy spreads to the First Family

Blue collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing “staycations” because they can’t afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family’s 17 lavish vacations around the world and don’t want their tax dollars paying for the Obamas’ holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters.

“They view everything through
their own personal situation and if they can’t afford to do it, they can’t
enjoy it, they don’t like Obama using
their tax dollars to benefit himself,” said pollster John McLaughlin. “In
this case, they see him as out of touch.
While they are struggling he’s not sharing in that struggle and he’s basically
doing what they can’t do on their tax dollars,” added the GOP pollster.

He and several other top-tier
Republican pollsters, organized by Resurgent Republic, traveled to 11
battleground states to host focus groups of independent and swing voters,
mostly Democrats, who voted for President Obama in 2008 but who are now on the
fence.

McLaughlin handled blue collar
and Catholic voters in Pittsburgh on April 3 and Cleveland on March 20. He
found that they are very depressed about
the economy and feel that their tax dollars are being sucked up by both the
rich and those living on government assistance…

http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/washington-secrets/2012/04/vacation-backlash-blue-collar-dems-jealous-angry-obamas/538141

Envy is like fire.  Once you start to play with it you frequently find yourself getting burned. 

2.   Michelle’s 2010 trip to Spain cost the Taxpayers $470,000.

First lady Michelle Obama's 2010 trip to Spain cost taxpayers nearly $470,000, according to a conservative watchdog group that obtained Secret Service records from the overseas excursion.

That trip, which the first lady took with her younger daughter Sasha, drew widespread criticism at the time -- as the visuals of the first lady in an elegant Mediterranean setting clashed with the still-struggling U.S. economy.

Judicial Watch, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request, claimed Thursday that documents show the trip cost at least $467,585.

Those costs are split between Secret Service expenses and expenses for the flight and flight crew.

Secret Service costs totaled nearly $255,000, according to Judicial Watch...

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/04/26/michelle-obama-spain-vacation-cost-taxpayers-nearly-470g-watchdog-group-claims/?test=latestnews#ixzz1tBgLO8oE

I don’t think Americans begrudge the Obama’s vacation time, but Hawaii, Spain, Martha Vineyard, etc. seems to be over the top. Add to this the trip by Malia to Mexico, taking a plane to the Vineyard to arrive 4 hours earlier than the President and you have a case for resentment.   The message is “we aren’t really all in this together.” 

3.  Obama looks Bush League

… Maybe the 2012 election is simpler than we think.

It will be about Mr. Obama.

Did you like the past four years? Good, you can get four more.

Do the president and his people strike you as competent? If so, you can renew his contract, and he will renew theirs.

If you don't want to rehire him, you will look at the other guy. Does he strike you as credible, a possible president? Then you can hire him.

Republicans should cheer up.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vRyJ9rRDnsUJ:online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html+peggy+noonan&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

 Peggy Noonan has it again.  It’s really very simple and that is why I’m confident that Obama will be a one term president.

4.  Are there any moderate Democrats?

The defeat of two conservative House Democrats by more liberal opponents in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary illustrates the strong hold the new health care law still has over committed Democratic voters and foreshadows an even more polarized Congress next year in the aftermath of the latest round of redistricting . . . .

Representatives Jason Altmire and Tim Holden both lost in primaries to opponents who joined together with activist groups to pummel the veteran lawmakers over the opposition to the new health care law and climate change legislation — positions they had used to their advantage in the past to show their independence from President Obama and the Democratic Party.

“A lot of us thought of his record as his strength,” said Hugh M. Reiley, the chairman of the Schuylkill County Democratic Party, referring to Mr. Holden. “He was not falling prey to all that party bickering. He was able to reach across the aisle.”

“Last night, the Democratic Party became more liberal,” he added.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/us/politics/2-house-democrats-defeated-after-opposing-health-law.html?_r=1

The Democrats keep saying the Republicans aren’t the party it used to be.  It appears neither are the Democrats.  Their leadership certainly is much more extreme than is the Republicans.

5.  What the Wisconsin Recall Election is all about

…A recall election for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is scheduled for June 5. But on the ballot that day will effectively be whether we should establish in law after all these years a new aristocracy in America, not subject to the democratic will of the people like everyone else, with special legal privileges, including the right to plunder the taxpayers with virtual impunity. That new aristocracy is state and local government public employee unions.

Nationwide, these public employee unions plunder taxpayers for pay for state and local government workers that is on average 45% more than the taxpayers paying those salaries make in the private sector. The bill to taxpayers for each of these workers includes an average hourly wage of $26.25, plus another $13.56 in hourly costs for benefits, for total hourly costs of $39.81, or $80,000 per year on average. This is true in Wisconsin as well. Indeed, the Manhattan Institute’s E.J. McMahon reports that for public school teachers in Milwaukee, the annual cost of family health coverage is $26,844, for which the teachers were paying nothing.

State and local government workers today are not exploited in sweat shop conditions for poverty wages as the workers in union lore of old. Today it is taxpayers who are the ones being exploited….

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2012/04/26/wisconsins-new-aristocracy-is-on-the-ballot/

This is an important election.  The Unions are putting everything they can into it and it appears they will spend $60 million there.  If they win they hope to roll back the conservative tide that is flowing in.  If they fail, they will be under attack in many more states. 

6.  Unfair in Michigan to State Workers?

Terry List, a teacher in Saginaw Township, Mich., has a depressing lesson for her students: “I would not recommend to my pupils to become a teacher in Michigan.”

What’s discouraging her? A proposed pension-reform bill in Michigan would derail her plans to retire — at age 47.

After these rapacious reforms, List would have to work another 16 years, to age 63, in order to earn her retiree health-care benefits. “I understand we have to tighten our belts,” she laments, “but we don’t have to use a tourniquet and cut off the blood supply entirely.” Under the reforms, such a tourniquet means she could still retire now and have a guaranteed income for the rest of her life, but she’d have to pay for her own health care until age 65 — like, you know, most Americans…

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/297094/public-employee-unions-gone-wild-patrick-brennan

This is very much the issue that people are beginning to understand.  While the private unions have driven jobs out of the Country, the public sector unions are driving our country into the poor house. 

7.  The Left’s Oil Blindness

…In 2010, America’s proved oil reserves stood at 31 billion barrels, just slightly below the 33.8 billion barrels of proved reserves the United States had in 1990. But over that two-decade period, the domestic oil sector produced about 52 billion barrels of oil. In other words, between 1990 and 2010, the United States produced nearly twice as much oil as we believed the whole country had in 1990, and yet at the end of that period, we still had about the same amount in proven reserves. What’s going on? In a word: innovation. And few industries on the planet have been as innovative as the American oil and gas sector.

It’s not the size of your reserves that counts, it’s what you do with them. And the U.S. oil and gas sector has been remarkably proficient at exploiting this country’s vast mineral wealth. Over the past century or so, oil and gas drilling has gone from a business dominated by wildcatters armed mainly with a hunch and a prayer to one where the latest seismic and “geosteering” technologies allow drillers to steer their bits so accurately that they can arrive within inches of their target zone two miles (or more) beneath the Earth’s surface.

Add in ongoing improvements in horizontal drilling—and yes, in hydraulic fracturing, the bugaboo of many environmental groups—and the changes are easily seen. For instance, over the last five years, Southwestern Energy, a Houston-based company drilling in the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas, has halved the number of days it takes to drill an average well while nearly tripling the amount of gas it gets during the initial phase of production. Southwestern has done it by tweaking the fracturing process while more than doubling the length of the horizontal segments, so that more of the well is in contact with the source rock….

… Obama has repeatedly made the claim that “clean” energy is the way of the future. But the president dares not admit the obvious: Over the past few years, the oil and gas sector has out-innovated the political darlings of the moment: solar and wind energy. Four years ago this month, natural gas prices were over $10. Today, the price is about $2. Despite all of the hype—and billions of dollars in subsidies doled out to solar and wind energy projects over the past few years—the clear reality is that horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing and the incremental production gains that have resulted from them, have resulted in a tidal wave of new natural-gas production that is pricing wind and solar energy out of the market…

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/04/oil_reserves_fracking_and_obama_the_president_doesn_t_appreciate_the_innovativeness_of_the_oil_and_gas_industry_.single.html

If you read the last bolded words I’ve posted you will realize why the left is so upset by hydraulic fracturing.  It has made their dreams of sunlight and windmills seem even more preposterous than they were before. 

Don't look behind the curtain

What’s new Today 

Story #1 tells of Obama’s campaign strategy.  #2 looks at the Democrats war on stay at home moms.  #3 looks at the question would Reagan have supported Obama’s Buffet Rule?  #4 is Obamacare “fair”?  #5 tells us of George Lucas vs the environmental fanatics.  #6 looks at how the rest of the world looks at oil and how we do. 

Today’s thoughts

Was the indictment of George Zimmerman for the Second Degree Murder of Treyvon Martin a careful judgment of the Special Prosecutor or was it a bone thrown to the angry mob?

It appears Obama is now going after Romney’s wife for staying at home to raise her family, deal with her MS and beat cancer.  So who is really got a war on women going?  And why are leftists so mean spirited? 

Mitt Romney was not my first choice for the Republican nomination, but he is miles ahead in the presidential race. 

The left’s hatred of Fox News isn’t due to bias in their reporting.  It due to them covering issues the left wing media wouldn’t if it weren’t for Fox.  Reporting bias shows up as sins of omission.

1.  Obama’s 2012 Campaign

In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of "hope and change." That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal health care, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.

Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 re-election campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy.

Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear the new norm, when 5 percent in the past was dubbed a "jobless recovery."

From the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the world seems on the brink. Modern racial relations are at a new low.

If borrowing $4 trillion in eight years was "unpatriotic," as Obama once labeled George W. Bush, no one quite knows how to term the addition of $5 trillion in new debt in less than four years. ObamaCare is unpopular with the public. Its constitutionality now rests with the Supreme Court.

After four years, the claims of "Bush did it" and "It might have been worse" grow stale. So re-election will rest not on a new agenda, or an explanation of what happened, but on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Translated, that means Obama will find fissures in the voting public over fairness, expand them, and then cobble together various angry partisans in hopes of achieving a bare majority. Such an us/them strategy is not new in American history…

http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2012/04/12/enemies_of_the_people

It will be nasty, but that only works for a limited time.  Obama is starting already and his charges will begin to seem trite by the conventions and will be recognized as nonsense by the election. 

2.  The Democrat’s woman misstep

…By last Friday, it was already apparent that the only thing stopping Mitt Romney from becoming the GOP presidential nominee were mere formalities, and talk had already begun among Obama's media allies that Ann Romney, the wife of our likely nominee, was going to be a huge asset for the Republican ticket. Attractive, charismatic, warm, well-spoken, intelligent, and likable on sight, she would do much to not only soften her husband's edges but also to help shore up the so-called gender gap.

As we've all seen since President Obama stabbed the Catholic Church in the back a couple of months ago, Obama is cynically plotting a path to re-election through a phony "war on women." Because he can't run on a failed record, the White House and the media are hoping this divisive tactic will scare enough women into voting against Romney.

When that's your sinister plot, a woman like Ann Romney is a serious problem.

So last night on CNN, Hilary Rosen attacked Ms. Romney. But almost immediately afterwards, the Obama campaign assured us Rosen doesn’t speak for them.

Baloney.

Obama might suck as a president but when it comes to campaigning and message discipline, this White House knows what it's doing (it doesn’t hurt to have the MSM carrying your water, either). Speaking of his wife Michelle just a few days prior to Rosen's attack, President Obama launched a little theme that should sound familiar after last night's fireworks:

"And once Michelle and I had our girls, she gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career--and something that could be very difficult on her, because I was gone a lot….

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/12/Obama-Started-Attack-On-Ann-Romney

I’m surprised it took as long as it did for Hilary Rosen to apologize.  It was a stupid mistake and when she doubled down it was even worse. 

3.   Would Reagan have support Obama’s “Buffet Rule?”

The world has gone topsy-turvy when a Democratic president approvingly cites Ronald Reagan on tax policy — and even suggests naming his legislative proposal after the Republican icon, since, as Obama put it, he “traveled across the country pushing for the same concept.”

Obama is talking about the so-called “Buffett Rule,” which seeks to raise the taxes of the super wealthy so they don’t pay less than middle-class Americans…

… YouTube clips of Reagan complaining about corporate executives paying less than secretaries or bus drivers have circulated on the Internet for a while. But are Reagan and Obama really talking about the same thing when they used similar anecdotes? As always, context is important…

… Why did Reagan give those speeches? Contrary to Obama’s suggestion that he was specifically arguing for a new tax provision aimed at the superwealthy, Reagan was barnstorming the country in an effort to reduce taxes for all Americans, mainly by cutting rates, simplifying the tax system and eliminating tax shelters that allowed some people to avoid paying any taxes at all.

In other words, Reagan was pushing for a tax cut for everyone, not just an increase on a few. (The highest tax bracket at the time was 50 percent.) He even wanted to cut the tax rate on capital gains from 20 percent to 17.5 percent…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/president-obama-quoting-reagan-out-of-context/2012/04/11/gIQAaOsZBT_blog.html

 Once again we see that truth and our current  President are strangers to one another. 

4.  Obamacare and Young Adults

…Among the flaws that I identified with this purportedly narrow defense of the mandate is that it is factually inaccurate: Obamacare does not simply make people buy catastrophic coverage that would cover their own unaffordable risks at a price that reflects their actuarial risk; instead, as several of the Justices recognized, it makes them buy comprehensive policies for a wide range of services they don’t need in order to subsidize the law’s other costly requirements, at a price in excess of the actuarial risk that they pose to the system. Rather than being a scheme to insure against the risk posed by younger persons, the Affordable Care Act creates a system of a government-mandated privately-administered redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to older baby boomers.

An AP reporter, however, recently suggested otherwise, cobbling together several comments from “insurance experts” under the provocative headline “Supreme Court misunderstanding on health overhaul?”  According to the story, whereas the Justices “seemed to be under the impression that the law does not allow most consumers to buy low-cost, stripped-down insurance to satisfy its controversial coverage requirement[,]” “[i]n fact, the law provides for a cheaper ‘bronze’ plan that is broadly similar to today’s so-called catastrophic coverage policies for individuals.”

This story might be used by those desperately seeking a limiting principle for the mandate, but the story’s key factual contention is flatly false. As Chief Justice Roberts and Mike Carvin both correctly pointed out during oral argument, even a “bronze” plan must cover a wide array of costly “essential health benefits”—including contraceptives, maternity and newborn care, counseling, physical therapy, preventive services and pediatric oral and vision care—that drastically exceed the types of unpredictable and unaffordable costs covered by normal catastrophic plans (and which might potentially result in cost-shifting). As the article admits:

The health care law does impose a minimum set of “essential health benefits” for most insurance plans. Those benefits have yet to be specified, but are expected to reflect what a typical small-business plan now offers, with added preventive, mental health and other services.

That is precisely why premiums for bronze plans would cost between $4,500 and $5,000 per year under the Act (as estimated by the CBO), whereas true catastrophic plans are currently available for around $420 per year (as quoted online for a policy that covers a thirty-year-old nonsmoker, doesn’t cover preventative and other non-essential services, and carries a $10,000 deductible)….

http://volokh.com/2012/04/12/the-myth-that-the-individual-mandate-addresses-cost-shifting-by-the-uninsured-part-2-bronze-plans-are-not-the-same-as-catastrophic-coverage/

The reason the mandate is so important is because it is a shift of cost from older bigger users of healthcare to younger nonusers.  And the reason it will balloon costs is that these young people will use the services more because they have to pay for them whether they use them or not.   

5.  Dealing with Fanatics

George Lucas is the newest victim of the green religion to recognize that there is no reasoning with religious fanatics intent on saving the world (and you), no matter what you want. The film maker has been trying to build a new movie making facility in Marin County for 25 years, bending over backward to be a good neighbor, dedicating enormous amounts of money to satisfy every demand.

But the green fanatics would have none of it, and have endlessly stymied the development, which would be invisible from the highway, and would provide many high paying jobs and substantial tax revenue. Just last week, they convinced the Marin Country Board of Supervisors to delay the project once again for even more studies…

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/myth-spinning_greenies_alienate_the_greatest_myth-maker_of_our_time.html#ixzz1row1eNPS

The green Luddites strike again.

6.   Obama and energy suicide

Energy Policy: A Chinese oil company is now the world's top producer. While we sleep and watch pump prices rise, China, India and even Cuba seek supplies the world over, including drilling off the Florida coast.

Global demand for oil is rising, as is its global price, as energy-hungry economies such as China, India and Brazil scour the earth for oil they know will be the energy of the present for some time to come.

Even those lacking their own technology are asking others to help them get more. For them, there is no such thing as "peak oil."

The U.S., however, stands alone as the only major country not actively seeking new supplies…

http://news.investors.com/article/607461/201204111839/china-seeks-canadian-cuban-oil.htm

I’m not sure if it is ideology or stupidity that is driving the left in this country when it comes to energy.  Their green initiatives don’t seem to be working very well.

Fairness: Going bankrupt fairly

What’s new Today 

Stories #1and #2 relates Obama’s focus on equity trumps jobs, deficit reduction and just about anything else that logic says we should be paying attention to.  #3 in the meantime gives us five reasons to worry about the economy.  #4 and #5 give us dueling stories about Obamacare’s effect on the deficit.  The first one claims a savings of $460,000,000 per year which the second one give us a deficit of $34,000,000,000 per year.   #6 is a look at the oil boom that appears to be starting in Kansas.  #7 tries to set the record straight that America is one of the least racist countries in the world, while #8 gives us a look at the Democrats racist history.  #9 is about Barbara Walters and her claim not one can tell if the press is left or right.  #10 is a PR disaster for United Airlines. 

1.   Income Equity vs. Jobs and Opportunity

Democrats in Congress and President Obama are ratcheting up their efforts to cast Republicans as out-of-touch elitists by championing the "Buffett Rule" – a proposed bill that would require Americans making more than $1 million in income to pay a minimum 30 percent federal income tax.

Democrats will put the measure to a vote in the Senate next week in a move timed roughly to coincide with the April 15 deadline to file federal income taxes. It is intended to turn the screws not only on Senate Republicans in tight reelection contests but also on Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama’s all-but-certain GOP challenger, who earned $20.9 million in 2011 but paid federal taxes at only a 15 percent rate.

The Buffett campaign has one simple mission – “embarrass Republicans”….

…Yet polling suggests that taxing the rich might not be a winning issue for Obama in November….

Among voters without a strongly held opinion of either Mr. Romney or Obama, 80 percent said they’d be more likely to support a candidate focused on economic growth and opportunity, while 15 percent said they would choose one emphasizing income inequality, according to a poll released Monday by the centrist Democratic group Third Way….

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2012/0409/Buffett-Rule-Could-it-backfire-on-Democrats

I think Romney should come out and say President Obama wants to raise my taxes while I want to raise the economy for everyone. 

2.   Fairness not deficit reduction

The Obama administration is emphasizing “fairness” over deficit reduction in its renewed pitch for the “Buffett rule” ahead of next week’s scheduled Senate vote.

Introducing a minimum 30 percent income tax on millionaires “was never our plan to bring the deficit down and get the debt under control,” Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters on a conference call Monday afternoon. “This is not the president’s entire tax plan. We’re not trying to say this solves all our economic problems, all our budget problems.”…

…Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) slammed the bill late last month, after the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the rule would generate $46.7 billion in revenues over the next decade...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/74975.html#ixzz1reCPoshQ

Well 46 billion is more than 7 times the savings from Obamacare.  The Democrats and Obama are doing the equivalent of looking for change under the sofa cushions to pay the house payment coming do.  There are more productive things they should look at. 

3.  Five Reasons to worry about the Economy

…Sluggish economic growth.

The economy hasn't been growing fast enough to sustain the level of job growth the United States enjoyed from December through February -- an average of 246,000 jobs a month.

The economy is expected grow around 2.5 percent this year. Economists say that's consistent with monthly job growth of around 140,000.

Some economists fear that March's weaker numbers are just a return to the normal link between economic growth and job growth -- and that hiring won't pick up until the economy accelerates.

Higher gasoline prices.

U.S. gasoline prices have risen 65 cents this year to a national average of $3.93 gallon, according to the AAA Daily Fuel Gauge. Economists had expected consumers to keep spending at a healthy pace in the face of higher prices at the pump…

http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2012/04/09/20120409reasons-job-market-may-weakening.html#ixzz1rdW6VHeM

It’s beginning to look bad.  I think gas prices are the cause of it and it will destroy Obama’s chance to be reelected. 

4.  Sebelius: Obamacare saves 0.023%

One thing about unconstitutional laws is that they invariably fail to do what they set out to do. Homicides rose after D.C. passed its unconstitutional gun law in 1976 — and fell to their lowest level in 43 years after the Supreme Court repealed the law. And so it goes with Obamacare, which will drive health insurance prices up as it mandates near universal coverage. That is good for insurance executives like Warren Buffett, but bad for consumers. Nonetheless Kathleen Sebelius, head of DHHS, is touting all the savings Obamacare will bring — $460 million a year to the $2 trillion a year health industry.

That’s 0.023% — 23 one-thousandths of 1%.

Pardon my laughter.

As you read the press release, remember $4.6 billion over 10 years is just $460 million a year. Given the history of blue-skying savings, odds are this will increase costs, but even accepting The Man’s numbers, it is a pitifully small saving.

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/53979

When I first saw this, I thought well over 10 years it could be a lot, and then I realized over 10 years we are talking about $4.6 billion.  That’s a rounding error in the age of Obama. Read the next story for a dose of reality. 

5.   Obamacare and the Deficit: Loses $340 billion

Over the past two years, Obamacare’s champions have often claimed that the new law would actually save the government money and reduce the deficit. Early on, they argued that it would do this in part by reducing health-care costs, but no one really makes that case anymore. Rather, they argue that Obamacare offers a version of today’s preferred liberal approach to deficit reduction: it increased taxes by even more than the immense amount by which it increases spending. That’s not exactly a recipe for fiscal responsibility or a means of addressing the underlying problem of costs, but on the face of it perhaps it should allow them to claim that Obamacare reduces the deficit.

Except that it doesn’t. From the very beginning, critics of Obamacare have pointed out that, even if you accept all of the implausible claims of cost savings in the law, the CBO score of the legislation double-counted the effects of the enormous Medicare cuts scheduled to occur in the next few years… The Medicare actuary (who works for Barack Obama) has been very clear on this point, writing in 2010 that the Medicare cuts in the law were unlikely to actually occur but that even if they did: “In practice, the improved [Medicare trust fund] financing cannot be simultaneously used to finance other Federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions) and to extend the trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.” CBO has acknowledged that, although it is bound by those accounting conventions and so must double count the proposed cuts, it is true that doing so does not offer a true picture of the law’s effect on the deficit.

Working out exactly what the effect of avoiding this double counting would be, and more broadly what the actual effect of Obamacare on the deficit is likely to be, is no easy feat. It basically requires re-scoring the law using the data available to CBO, but avoiding the misleading conventions forced upon the agency. In an important new paper  out today from the Mercatus Center, Charles Blahous has done just that….

…Regarding the overall effect of the law on the deficit, his conclusion is clear:

Taken as a whole, the enactment of the ACA has substantially worsened a dire federal fiscal outlook. The ACA both increases a federal commitment to health care spending that was already unsustainable under prior law and would exacerbate projected federal deficits relative to prior law. This is an unambiguous conclusion, as it would result regardless of the degree of future success attained in upholding various cost-saving provisions now embedded in the law.

Blahous’s paper is both an exceptionally lucid guided tour of what is actually in Obamacare and a bracing overview of its likely effects on federal finances.

Obamacare’s worsening of the deficit is hardly its worst feature, of course. If it is not repealed, the law will be an utter disaster...

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295626/obamacare-and-deficit-yuval-levin

Accounting gimmicks let the Democrats claim they would save money on the deficit.  Almost no one was fooled except those who wanted to be fooled. 

6.    What is the Matter with Kansas? If You Like Oil, Nothing

Black gold might soon be gushing from the Kansas soil, according to AP. Drilling has only just started but the oil is attracting speculators from all over. Ancient land records are being pulled off of courthouse shelves in a frenzy; land that cost $30 an acre is now fetching $3000.

The familiar signs of an oil boom are everywhere: restaurants busier than ever, rental prices shooting up, hotels booked solid. Kansas has more undrilled acreage than most states. Each horizontal well costs about $3 million and is expected to deliver a 90 percent return on investment, paying for itself after 18 months of production. High oil prices are an extra impetus to drill, baby, drill — and to keep the new jobs sprouting from the Kansas ground. The boom “is going to change things forever in this part of the world,” says one local prospector.

Kansas’ oil boom is important for two reasons. Firstly, here we have another example of the incredible job-producing abilities of brown industry. Compare the furor over Kansas’ oil and gas explosion with the unfulfilled and overhyped “green” jobs, which have yet to materialize. And while green jobs will require subsidies for years, brown jobs don’t require federal upfront money — and will deliver taxes to the Treasury right from the start…

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/04/09/brown-jobs-gush-from-kansas-soil/

The oil boom in this country is just starting while the Obama Administration does everything it can to stop it.  High unemployment, stupid investments in green energy, huge deficits are hallmarks of progressive politics.  It’s time for a change.

7.  Racism and America

In light of the tragic killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin — and the manufactured hysteria surrounding it — one thing needs to be stated as clearly and as often as possible: The United States is the least racist and least xenophobic country in the world. Foreigners of every race, ethnicity, and religion know this. Most Americans suspect this. Most black Americans and the entire left deny this.

Black Africans know this. That is why so many seek to live in the United States. Decades ago, the number of black Africans who had immigrated to the United States had already surpassed the number of black Africans who were forcibly shipped to America as slaves.

And members of other races and nationalities know this. Even Muslim and Arab writers have noted that nowhere in the Arab or larger Muslim world does an Arab or any other Muslim have the individual rights, liberty, and dignity that a Muslim living in America has. As for Latinos and Asians, vast numbers of them from El Salvador to Korea regard America as the land of opportunity.

And when any of these people come here – from anywhere, speaking any language, looking like a member of any race — they are accepted as Americans the moment they identify as such. He or she will be regarded as fully American. This is not true elsewhere. A third-generation Turkish-German, whose German is indistinguishable from the German spoken by an indigenous German, will still be regarded by most Germans as a Turk. The same holds true elsewhere in Europe…

http://rightwingnews.com/column-2/still-the-least-racist-country-in-the-world/

America is the least racists’ country in the world despite what the race baiters try to portray.  Is there racism in America?  Of course there is.  Is it simply accepted?  No, and that is what makes us different. 

8.  Racism and the Democrats

…Democrats through Eisenhower

Wilson was a nightmare for blacks. After he took office, there were mass firings of black federal employees. The new Democrat Congress passed laws barring interracial marriages in the District of Columbia. "Whites Only" and "Blacks Only" began appearing on drinking fountains and in toilets in Washington. President Wilson broke the tradition of appointing American Negroes as consuls to Haiti and Santo Domingo. He rejected a proposal for a National Race Commission to study the status of blacks in the U.S., and he began segregating blacks and whites in the civil service.

FDR was a hero to black America, but one must ask why. He won the 1932 Democrat nomination by collecting all of the convention votes in 9 of the 11 states of the old Confederacy. Only Virginia and Texas, which had "favorite son" candidates, did not give every single delegate to FDR, although by the fourth ballot, every single delegate in all eleven states voted for FDR.

President Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black, a former Klansman, and although later this was downplayed, Black was elected to the Senate from Alabama with the backing of the Klan. Roosevelt appointed another Klansman, Tom Clark, as attorney general of the United States. Paul Robeson called the appointment of Clark as attorney general by FDR "a gratuitous and outrageous insult to my people." Black leaders despised FDR. Roy Wilkins accused FDR of "expedient cowardice."

Were Democrat leaders after FDR better? Harry Truman applied to join the Klan (but stopped when he found out that the Klan hated Catholics.) Harry Truman had said that one man is as good as another "so long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman," and he referred to Martin Luther King as a "troublemaker." When asked about racial integration, he asked a reporter: "Would you want your daughter to marry one of them?"

Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat nominee in 1952 and 1956, selected as his running mate John Sparkman of Alabama, a segregationist. As a congressman, LBJ opposed civil rights legislation, opposed anti-lynching legislation, and opposed legislation to end the poll tax and end employment discrimination.

JFK, too, was a bigot. In 1960, when Time Magazine interviewed John Kennedy, he said: "It was so hot that even niggers went to the beach." During the 1960 election campaign, John Kennedy had breakfast in Alabama with the White Citizen's Council in Alabama, a fact that Jackie Robinson noted in expressing frustration at the indifference to racism in the Kennedy campaign.

It is a testament to the racism pandemic in the Democrat Party that when Hubert Humphrey courageously spoke up against "white only" primaries in the South at the 1948 Democrat Convention, that was recognized as a breakthrough for civil rights -- but Republicans, of course, had accepted blacks in their primaries and caucuses all along, and blacks from the South had been delegates at Republican conventions since the end of the Civil War. Humphrey was asking Democrats to move up to where Republicans had been since 1868….

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/race_republicans_and_democrats.html#ixzz1rdOFME7W

This is an interesting history of racism and the Democrats. 

9.  Barbara Walter’s must think Americans are idiots!

What world does she live in? According to veteran journalist Barbara Walters on Monday, the American public doesn't know whether "most" reporters are "Republicans or Democrats." The unbelievable claim came during a View segment on the passing of 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace.

Walters, who once recoiled at the prospect of the "scary" Sarah Palin becoming President, insisted, "But, most of us...you don't know whether we're Republicans or Democrats or exhibitionists." (Exhibitionists?) The comment came after comedienne Whoopi Goldberg insisted, "And also, the journalists today don't do what journalists did, which was keep their opinions to ourselves."

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2012/04/09/barbara-walters-journalists-you-dont-know-whether-were-republicans-o#ixzz1rbTqcunJ

I’m afraid Barbara is losing it.  Not only are there studies that show us the media is overwhelmingly liberal, but reporters haven’t even tried to be unbiased for decades.   

10.                   UA PR Disaster

“Flight attendants are on this aircraft to save your rear end, not kiss it!"

That's the warm and fuzzy "Welcome aboard" with which passengers were greeted on a recent United Airlines flight from Phoenix to Houston.

A sticker with that wording was attached to a United Airlines flight attendant's bag that was placed in the overhead luggage bin near the front of the plane, according to the businessman/frequent flier who took the photo at right. The passenger assures that it was not a hoax from an angry Alec Baldwin- type….

http://houston.culturemap.com/newsdetail/04-10-12-united-airlines-flight-attendants-rear-end-sticker-reinforces-new-unfriendly-skies-reality/

I know the Flight Attendant probably thought this was clever.  It wasn’t and UA needs to take action with whoever this person is.