Archive for January, 2011

Dan Calabrese

Holy crap! U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson has just ruled in favor of 26 state attorneys general that ObamaCare in its entirety is unconstitutional. The law does remain in effect until all appears are exhausted, but since the real meat doesn’t take effect until 2014 anyway, that’s essentially irrelevant. (The ruling is embedded in full at the end of this column.)

Granted, this fight is far from over. Everyone expects this question to end up before the Supreme Court. But it’s much more plausible to envision the high court’s 5-4 conservative majority (or at least swing vote Justice Kennedy) to uphold a lower court ruling that the law unconstitutional than it is to imagine them offering that ruling when no lower court had done so.

The key fact is this: As of this moment, the position of the judicial branch of the federal government is that ObamaCare is unconstitutional, and unless that changes, it is not going to be the law of the land. Maybe the GOP won’t have to repeal it after all. Wow.

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Bob Maistros

So whose fault was the 2008 financial crisis?

According to the Democratic-appointed majority of a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Congress, blame those lax regulators and greedy bankers.

Hearings but never understanding.

One Republican-selected dissenter says it was too long a leash for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And three other Republican panel members insist that’s all too simplistic, and it was like ten different factors, some of which involve broad global trends.  I might be somewhat convinced by their argument if I could understand it.

In any event, as Richard Nixon used to say – or at least as Tricky Dick imitators used to say that he said – let me say this about that.  Actually, three “this-es.”

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Dacia Nichol

In a pathetic attempt to paint Congressman Paul Ryan as someone who’s a hypocrite, there’s been some pretty disgraceful rhetoric and accusations swirling around the blogosphere and Twitterville regarding some dug up news about his personal history.

So here’s the deal. A Wisconsin-based think tank called The Wisconsin Interest did a very nice write up on Ryan in July of last year. I’m assuming that this has just now been dug up due to Ryan’s State of the Union Response. In it, the story of Ryan finding his father dead when Ryan was only 16 is described, an event which was followed by his family receiving social security money to aid them in their father’s absence. Ryan received money until he turned 18.

Hypocrite!

Here’s where the spin starts. Ryan put the money he received away in savings to be later used toward his college education. So in effect, a government entitlement program gave him a “hand up” to pursue a better life.

I know. The nerve! It’s like that was what entitlement programs were made for.

Why is this trumped as a big deal? Because Paul Ryan preaches about how our entitlement programs have gone beyond the “safety net” that they’re supposed to provide and turned them into a “hammock”, making people essentially lazy and complacent. Except none of the articles screaming about Ryan’s hypocrisy talk about his support for a “social safety net”, even though he mentions it every time he talks about entitlement reform. To break it down: Read the rest of this entry »

Herman Cain

Now that the mainstream media is hopefully done swooning over President Obama’s State of the Union Speech, some of us are more concerned about the real State of the Union, by the numbers. It’s not what he said or did not say, nor is it how he said it. It should be about our national security and our national economic health.

The day after the president’s State of the Union speech, an appliance installation and repair man was installing some new appliances in our home. Unsolicited, he said he had a hard time sleeping last night after hearing the president’s speech. When I asked why, he said he did not hear anything in the speech that made him feel that America is safer as a nation, nor did he hear anything that would really help grow the economy.

No wonder the man doesn't sleep.

I told him I agreed with him, and that he expressed the feelings of probably most of us who are not intoxicated by the president’s words and his delivery. Many people are, but most of us are not.

Maybe there are some provisions in the START Treaty that regular folk like the repair man and I don’t know about. But it appears as if the Russians got a better deal by limiting our ability to deploy missile defense systems in other parts of the world, where a lot of our enemies are located. For example, cancellation of the missile defense system being built in Turkey does not seem like a good idea. The world is not safer! And we have reduced our ability to help keep it safe.

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A character clearly nourished on "home cookin'." (Photo by John H. Kim)

Bob Maistros

One luxury of working on Capitol Hill or in a big PR firm, as I used to,  is receiving a daily compendium of important and interesting news clips.  Today, my friends on Facebook provide much the same service.  And two seemingly unrelated articles separately by online acquaintances the other day presented a fascinating, and in equal parts troubling and triumphant, study in contrasts.

The two clips showed two very different takes on a question:  How do you respond when you are a relatively young man showered with riches and success?

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Liz Carter

Some claim it was only an outage, others know the Internet went dead. Shortly after midnight on January 27, Internet providers turned the Internet lines leading into and out of Egypt off. It can be, and was, done.

iovation, an Internet Security company here in the United States that helps secure Internet transactions from every country in the world, has just shared the following graph. Typically seeing up to 1000 transactions per hour from Egypt, iovation saw traffic literally disappear from every Egyptian ISP other than one. It is very clear that the  graph shows that this is not an outage. The Internet was turned off.

Just like that.

It’s news that should be receiving a larger echo of concern, as a simple call from the government can force Internet providers to shut down the Internet. Too many people have glanced over this and said, “no way, you can’t shut off the Internet” or “that’s Egypt, it can’t happen here”, but they are wrong.

When a government has the power to stop or restrict the information flow into and out of a country, the people have lost their freedom.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

Greyscale version for newspaper publication.

Dan Calabrese

One word sticks in my mind from President Obama’s State of the Union address, and it sure as hell isn’t Sputnik. In fact, it’s not really a word at all. It’s a number.

Specifically: 400 billion.

After going through a series of measures he put under the category of freezing or limiting domestic discretionary spending, Obama told us with great enthusiasm that these measures would trim $400 billion off the deficit over the next 10 years.

Ridiculous.

Dude.

Do you know how much the deficit is this year alone? I’ll tell you. It’s $1.5 trillion. Even if Obama found a way to reduce the deficit by $400 billion all in one year, it still would leave us with a deficit nearly three times as massive as anything we ever saw before Obama took office.

Now I realize he acknowledged this on some level. He admitted that the spending areas he mentioned are not the key drivers of the deficit, and asked Congress to come up with “bipartisan solutions” to the things that are, which in case you don’t know, means entitlement spending and defense spending.

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Liz Carter

Hospira has decided to shut down production of the drug used for lethal injection, because they and the Italian government oppose the death penalty. Today, 35 states use lethal injection as the only or primary execution method to carry out the death penalty. Hospira doesn’t seem to care about the simple fact that the drug is also used and often required to save lives in high-risk surgical situations. So Hospira, I say to you, leave and know there are alternatives for execution.

Hang 'em high.

Interestingly enough, our regulations won’t allow the pharmaceutical industry to purchase anesthetic thiopental sodium, the drug used for lethal injections and anesthesia, from overseas sources, as they have not been FDA-approved. The FDA does allow prisons to purchase the unapproved overseas versions for the purpose of lethal injection, so they should.

Hospira and crying activists who are attempting to block executions need to get over it. In fact, lethal injection has been deemed the more “humane” way to end a life of one that deserves to be ended, so get over it and move on. I say if Hospira wants to move the production of the drug to Italy, let them with the guarantee that the drug won’t be used for lethal injection. At the same time, the United States needs to allow another drug manufacturer to create the drug and have it be FDA approved.

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Dan Calabrese

In the exchange below, Rep. John Campbell (R-California) gets Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to acknowledge that the so-called $500 billion “savings” ObamaCare is supposed to generate from Medicare is concocted with smoke and mirrors.

Watch the whole thing, but it comes down to this: Obama claims that the new law makes Medicare more economically sound. He also claims that it will reduce the deficit by reining in costs. Leaving aside the implausibility of the cost-reductions, which is a subject for another column, Obama is trying to count the same money twice.

Foster admits that it could reduce the deficit, and it could make Medicare more stable, but it isn’t going to do both with the same pot of money, which is what Obama claims it will. The CBO score that Obama cites to this day was predicated on the double-counting of this money.

It won’t reduce the deficit at all, for a whole host of reasons, which start with the fraudulent double-counting of this money.

Watch: