Sunday's Quote: Confidence, despite the insolvency

c/o Business Insider (via David Silver)

You know the overall political climate is in rough shape when people suddenly become nostalgic for the good ol' days of Clinton – who, like it or not, was the last to balance the budget – when the federal deficit was about $9 trillion less than it is now.  In fact Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) was on the Congressional floor last Friday night begging his Democrat counterparts for a course of action to bring the practically endless spending debate to a beneficial close.

Instead, 10-term Rep. James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) was busy goading President Obama to invoke an obscure clause from the Constitution stating that the government's debt "shall not be questioned."  Never mind that Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, on which Clyburn hopelessly camped, was a Civil War measure that retains no bearing on the current debt.  Implying otherwise, of course, would be racist.

Appearing all but deadlocked on a bevy of issues, the two warring factions – Donkeys and Elephants – arrived at an 11th hour agreement just as I was arranging to publish this post.  While both sides will claim victory, it's clear that Obama needed this settlement to curtail his diminishing approval rating among the electorate, which was in danger of dropping into the high 30s – once unthinkable – for the first time.

That's Bush country.

Although our current President is struggling, his defeat in 2012 is not imminent.  At present, conflicting poll data shows Obama losing to a "generic" GOP contender, but edging past all presently declared candidates, the latter of which appears to assert that many voters are longing for a certain kind of challenger who has yet to make himself known.

Whatever the next 12 months may bring, we can be certain the nauseam of sociopolitical partisanship will reach a fever pitch that is likely stretch far beyond the coming election season.  Indeed the drama that culminated with tonight's budget deal is only the tip of the iceberg.

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"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
– Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), French general and statesman

"Truth is not determined by majority vote."
– spoken by many; most recently attributed to Douglas Gwyn, a Quaker pastor and author

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
– Sir Ernest Benn (1875-1954), British writer and political publicist

"If God had been a liberal, we wouldn't have had the Ten Commandments; we'd have the Ten Suggestions."
– Sir Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000), English author and academic

Sunday's Quote: When conspiracy theories cease being theoretical

Whether it's through a picture, a quote, or an audio/video clip of some kind, I sometimes find it better to have the pros do the talking for me.  So for today's Quote, I have radio host Michael Savage offer a quick four-minute lecture about one of the more unexpected elements in Obama's massive heath care overhaul (with evidence).  You just might be shocked:

Vegas gets it

Steve Wynn has some words for the bureaucrats in Washington, DC.  Have a listen:

Maxine sums up the health care bill

"Let me get this straight.  We're going to be gifted with a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a president who also hasn't read it and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke.

What the hell could possibly go wrong?"

CNN's Cafferty says it all

This clip has been making the usual Internet/Facebook rounds for a couple of months, but I feel it's worth sharing just in case someone locked into the infallibility of "The Chosen One" earnestly (and blindly) believed the hype like so many others.

America's financial future in the balance

Originally introduced in the House of Representatives by Charles Rangel (D-NY) last September as the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 {H.R. 3590}, the Senate passed what became known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on Christmas Eve by a 60-39 vote.  After agreeing on the "motion to concur Senate amendments," the House passed the bill on March 21 by a 219-212 vote (which included 34 Democrats siding with the Republican minority).  Two days later, President Barack Obama signed the bill, officially making the Left's brand of health care reform Public Law 111-148.

Here's the issue.

Despite 200 Republican amendments in the 2,000-page bill, along with assurances from Democrats that taxpayers will save $1.3 trillion, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the resulting "gross debt" will reach 100.6% of the our national GDP by 2012, a 30% rise from just two years ago.  And by 2014, the total national debt could top $18 trillion.

Additionally, former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin wondered recently in an op-ed for The New York Times how entitlement legislation that is expected to cost $950 billion over the next 10 years could lower deficits by $138 billion.  The answer, he says, is that "...the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed.  So fantasy in, fantasy out."

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer echoed Holtz-Eakin's sentiment, adding that a national sales tax is the only way to generate the revenue needed to sustain this latest government takeover.  He concluded that "Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks... is at minimum a $2 trillion new entitlement."

How Democrats will fare in the November elections as a result of this bill remains debatable.  But it seems that Obama, who evidently believes in the government's responsibility to impose "social justice," and whose approval rating dropped faster than any President before him, needed this victory for his redistribution-based agenda.  And that, all by itself, could define his legacy.

Andrew Jackson was the last President to pay off the national debt, doing so 175 years ago in 1835.  Since then, and especially over the past 30+ years, the seemingly deliberate misappropriation of taxpayer money has resulted in an insurmountably astronomical debt, not the least of which centers upon China and Japan, who now own a combined $1.66 trillion (45.1%) of U.S. Treasury Securities.  And this comes on the recent the news that Moody's could drop America's triple-A credit rating for the first time ever.

Though such irresponsibility practically begs for the secession debate, the advances of 21st century warfare all but guarantees the suppression of any such uprising, even if a grouping were to number in the tens of millions.  Only an act of God would assure anything better than a Pyrrhic victory.

There appears to be no happy ending in the long run.  In fact, I think we're officially f--ked.  I hope beyond hope to be wrong.

Sunday's Quote(s): The politics of protests

It wasn't long after CNN and TV One contributor Roland Martin compared those who questioned the legitimacy of President Obama's citizenship to Holocaust deniers that his like-minded counterparts on Capital Hill launched similar denigrations against the Tea Party movement.

Regardless of your position on the Obama administration's universal health care proposal, the tactics used to demonize those who merely object upon the basis of an economic crisis that becomes exceedingly worse by the day deserve better than the following remarks:

"They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care."

-- Nancy Pelosi (D-California, 8th Congressional District), Speaker of the House of Representatives

"The last time I had to confront something like this was when I voted for the civil rights bill and my opponent voted against it.  At that time, we had a lot of Ku Klux Klan folks and white supremacists and folks in white sheets and other things running around causing trouble."

-- Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan, 15th Congressional District)

"What we’re seeing right now is close to Brown Shirt tactics."

-- Rep. Brian Baird (D-Washington, 3rd Congressional District)

"Republicans and their allied groups -- desperate after losing two consecutive elections and every major policy fight on Capitol Hill -- are inciting angry mobs of a small number of rabid right-wing extremists funded by K Street lobbyists to disrupt thoughtful discussions about the future of healthcare in America taking place in congressional districts across the country."

-- Democratic National Committee communications director Brad Woodhouse, who has a history of verbal bomb-throwing

She saw it coming

There's been a great deal of debate about our national health care dilemma, so check this out --

By chance, about a year ago, I landed on Katie Couric's YouTube page when I came across her encounter with a group of Ole Miss Tri-Delts just prior to the first McCain-Obama debate, which was held at the Ford Center on the University of Mississippi campus (September 26, 2008).

The point of interest to watch for is a 15-second portion from 1:30-1:45 in which a pharmacy major declares why she had already decided to vote for John McCain.  Her words, thus far, have proven most prophetic.