Archive for March, 2010

Brett Noel

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Bob Maistros

(Sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”)

AT&T’s going to write off a billion;
Cat, Deere and 3M all hundreds of billions.
Verizon may cut the bennies they bring
What do I care?  It’s just corporate bling.

What, me worry?

Firms big and small from Kansas to Manhattan
Will find I fudged when I said costs would flatten.
We’ll tie up health packages with red tape and strings
What do I care?  It’s just corporate bling.

Mandates that cut into corporate cash stashes,
Fines collected under IRS lashes.
Shareholders cry as their payouts are dinged.
What do I care?  It’s just corporate bling.

When the costs bite,
When the fees sting,
More than they can bear,
They’ll ask me to spare all their corporate bling
And we’ll soon be single payer!

Herman Cain

Now that the shock of passing the Health Care Deform bill against the will of the American people has settled in a bit, the people’s sentiment has gone from mad to fighting mad. President Obama and the Democrats are probably not aware of that fact, because they simply don’t care!

As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in a statement released last Friday, President Obama and the Democrats are looking back and saying, “We don’t care how mad you are, we got what we wanted.”

Think what you want.

They wanted Obama-Reid-Pelosi care and they got it using consistent talking points that did not always match with reality, gimmicky accounting, factual distortions and bribes to Congressional Democrats to secure their votes. They wanted the American people to know that their political agenda will not be stopped by Republicans, public opinion, e-mails and phone calls, rallies or even a huge potential voter backlash in November 2010.

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Gregory D. Lee

If enacting a $ 2 trillion health care entitlement “reform” bill this week wasn’t enough bad news, now the Congressional Budget Office reports that, in 2010, the government for the first time will pay more in Social Security benefits than it takes in from taxes. This is six years before this giant Ponzi scheme was expected to go belly up. Most economists believe the Social Security shortfall stems from the large number of unemployed who don’t have a paycheck to be taxed.

As if.

National security is directly tied to the economy. A weak economy means less tax revenues to fund the armed forces, especially with a liberal Congress hell bent on expanding social programs. With less federal revenue, Congress will likely re-examine defense priorities such as troop deployments in Japan, South Korea, Bosnia and NATO. Roughly 10 percent of the U.S. defense budget is spent on the security of these nations.

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Lawrence J. Haas

Item: While lawmakers receive threatening phone calls and their offices are vandalized in the aftermath of this week’s votes on health reform, Democrats and Republicans blame one another for the mayhem.

Endangered.

Item: The Republican-leaning American Enterprise Institute fires David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, for suggesting that Republicans should have worked with President Obama to improve health reform rather than unalterably oppose him.

Threats to lawmakers and Frum’s firing, each of which took center stage in political circles yesterday, may appear unrelated, but they each reflect a troubling trend in American politics – rising intolerance within and between our two political parties and among grassroots activists of the right and left.

Rising intolerance does more than further diminish any chance of bipartisan cooperation on the serious domestic and foreign challenges that America faces. It also threatens the nation’s social cohesion – our sense of ourselves as Americans first, partisans second – and we ignore the problem at our peril.

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Bob Franken

This is what is so ignorant about the claim health care reform represents a government takeover of private enterprise and by extension the United States’ way of life: It is actually the opposite.

What just passed was a victory for corporate America, in this case the insurance companies, and by extension the free market system. That is, if you mean free to continue their cheating, profiteering ways.

It's not as bad as all that.

Primarily we should be furious about their collusion with the pathetic politicians who do their bidding. They thwart effective change for small change and do the bidding of their wealthy patrons. What survives is meaningless mush.

By rejecting any effective public option, we are still at the medical mercy of the greedy ones. They get to set almost all the rules and cleverly sidestep the few new ones a writhing Congress did pass. All they did was to gloss over the reality we’re still at the mercy of bottom line feeding corporations.

They literally couldn’t care less if we live or die, or are healthy, as long as they have great quarterly reports.

Nevertheless, let’s repeat loud and clear: Violence is wrong. And it is stupid. People who resort to it have ignorance as a pre-existing condition.

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Ashley Stinnett

Apparently a group of Virginia Democrats believe that anyone who does not support the recent government takeover of health care is in the same camp as individuals who opposed desegregation over 50 years ago. Will someone please explain how this is somehow a legitimate argument? So, why is it that whenever the Democratic Party plays the race card, nobody in the media seems to ask any questions? As if somehow it is a justifiable argument grounded in facts?

Come on, really?

It is remarkable what the far-left can get away with.

I’m not much of a gambler but I would bet an entire year’s salary that, as shocking as it may seem, there are actually black people who oppose the government running their health care. So, what does opposing government-run health care have to do with segregation?

Not a damn thing.

Of course the New York Times feels it’s necessary to give these bomb-throwers a platform in order to legitimize their argument. The strategy behind these vitriolic attacks is not to actually come up with a valid argument but to deflect what is really happening in America. The left knows that it cannot win based on facts alone; therefore the end game is ad hominem attacks. Do not think for a minute these are off-the cuff remarks. No, any vicious attacks from the far-left are contrived and well thought out. They realize the polls have not given Obama and congressional Democrats a bounce after the bill’s passage. In fact, they are continuing to go in the opposite direction.

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Steven Hutson

Two stories appeared today in my local newspaper, both courtesy of the Associated Press.  That they appeared on the same day is probably no more than a freak accident, yet I can’t help but think that this coincidence is a sign of the state of our modern society.

I'm a rebel, man. Got any Doritos?

Story #1: The government of France may soon legalize prostitution.

Sacre bleu! Chantal Brunel, a Member of Parliament representing President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party, has called for a study on the possibility of decriminalizing the world’s oldest profession.

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Bob Maistros

Counselor:  “Hello, and welcome to couples counseling.  Why don’t we start with you both telling me something about yourselves, and why you believe you’re here?”

Can this relationship be saved?

Nancy P:  “I work my fingers to the bone ramming historic legislation through on his behalf, and do you think I get any appreciation?  Of course not.  It’s all accusations, name-calling, astro-turfing …”

John Q:  “You lie!”

Nancy P:  “See what I mean?  See what I have to put up with?  How can I work with this?  It all comes from him sitting on the sofa with a beer in his hand watching Beck and Hannity, and hanging out with those Tea Party types.”

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Bob Franken

I have always believed when someone hits you or spits on you, you should turn the other cheek. That will fake out the assailant and then you beat him to a pulp.

But that’s me. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver believes otherwise. He didn’t hit back. More power to him. But he also didn’t have the crazed Tea Party guy who spat on him arrested and charged to the full extent of the law.

Sometimes you gotta fight back.

Assaulting a House member is probably good for about five years in the slammer and good for society. Instead, because of misguided magnanimity on Rep. Cleaver’s part, his assailant was allowed to go scott-free.

That lack of common sense is now reverberating across the country. It has emboldened the pathetic punks who are resorting to vandalism and anonymous threats.

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